Children who love to read will many times begin writing stories and creating fantasy worlds at a young age. This was the case for GAC junior Navya Sarikonda. As a child, she was a voracious reader, which her father credits to the Accelerated Reading Program beginning in Lower School. Her father recalls her in the first few years of elementary school consuming books faster than she could check them out from the Henderson Media Center. 

Mornings and afternoons, she was fused to a computer taking the infamous Accelerated Reader tests... after test after test. When limitations came on the number of books she could check out, she upped the anty by checking out books with double, triple the amount of pages and increasingly higher reading levels (all of which resulted in higher scores for the AR tests).

In December of 2018, GAC junior Navya Sarikonda crossed over from aspiring writer to author of her first novel. After four years of developing a fantasy story, Navya’s self-published novel The Enchanter’s Child boasts a full 280-pages now available in the Spartan Store and with online retailers.

Not only has the GAC community supported Navya from the beginning, but she has also sought out the mentorship and encouragement from seasoned authors like Anna Howard Creel who had this to say about her book:

"The Enchanters' Child is a great story with a strong premise. Navya has come up with a nice tone of mystery and introspection, and a totally new fantasy side of the world. It's an edgy and somewhat dark ride compelling readers to find out what is going to happen next...It wrenched many emotions out of me, including disbelief, sadness, tension, worry, hope, and too many others to list."
- Ann Howard Creel, author of The Magic of Ordinary Days and The Whiskey Sea.

http://www.khabar.com/magazine/community-newsmakers/budding-author-navya-sarikonda-shares-her-passion-for-writing