Samira Ahmed’s Mad, Bad, and Dangerous To Know (Soho Teen, April 7) draws readers in with a dual timeline: In the present day, we follow Chicago teen Khayyam, spending the summer in Paris with her academic parents, and in the 19th century, we learn tantalizing details about Leila, a concubine hiding a dangerous secret. Khayyam meets Alexandre, a descendant of novelist Alexandre Dumas, and they soon dive into the mystery of Leila’s identity and a Delacroix painting that may have been owned by Dumas. Ahmed and I met over a video call to discuss the book; the conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

How would you describe the novel and its origins?

I love to straddle genres, and I think this book does that. I’ve been calling it my smash-the-patriarchy, eat-all-the-pastries history mystery. It actually came out of my bachelor’s thesis about Byron, specifically how Napoleon’s conquest in Egypt influenced Byron’s writing. Napoleon obviously had an interest in Egypt—because he wanted to conquer it. And the same with Byron—they were Orientalists. Dumas, Delacroix, Hugo, and Baudelaire would take hash, they would dress in Orientalist, Arab garb, meet at the Hôtel de Lauzun on the Île Saint-Louis [in Paris] and take hash. Even Dumas, who [was biracial and] faced pretty ferocious racism in his time, was participating in this Orientalist activity.

How did you manage to evoke the sense of place so vividly?

Paris is the city I’ve spent more time in than any other except for New York and Chicago, where I live. America kind of romanticizes Paris. I wanted to present Paris as it is; there’s a danger in romanticizing things too much. I try to hit on places that aren’t the major tourist attractions, those tiny pockets of life that you don’t quite get if you’re just a tourist. And you can tell that I totally have a sweet tooth because I talk about pastries a lot!

I did ask French friends for help, but a lot of the geography I knew just because I’ve been there so much. I started with [Khayyam’s] stepping in dog poop because the very first time I went to Paris, when I was maybe 22 or 23, that was one of my early experiences too. French friends were like, we have this radar—it’s really just tourists who step in it!

Could you elaborate on the “history mystery” aspect of the story?

When I read “The Giaour” in college, I remember thinking, this is [Byron’s] grand epic poem. And it was all ostensibly about this woman—men battling to the death over her. But she literally has no voice in the story at all. And then in the series of Delacroix paintings that were inspired by Byron’s poem, her presence doesn’t exist at all; she’s erased, and I was thinking, I want to give her a voice. That’s something that we can do with so many things have been lost in history. That’s why Khayyam certainly exists, that’s kind of her purpose and what she struggles with.

I also was interested in my family’s history because we were immigrants; I was learning little dribs and drabs about what happened to India during Partition. A lot of things are lost during colonialism: Records are lost, histories are lost. I remember at a pretty young age thinking, well if you are a black American and your family [members] were enslaved persons, how would you even know your last name? That’s referenced in the book: Dumas’ last name actually comes not from his patrilineal line but matrilineal. Dumas’ dad was rejecting Dumas’ grandfather; when he went into the infantry his dad didn’t want him to shame the name de la Pailleterie. We don’t even know if that was [Dumas’ grandmother’s] real name. Her son was the highest ranking black general ever in Europe—even to this day—and her grandson one of the greatest French writers, her great-grandson another, and we don’t know her at all.

How did you come to create Khayyam as a biracial French/Indian American Muslim?

I was a high school teacher in Skokie, Illinois, an extremely diverse place. Early on, one thing I was really noticing with some of my biracial students was this thing of, “Well, I’m half this and half that. And I’m not totally one and I’m not totally the other.” But we don’t have fractured selves. I just felt so much for Khayyam and for kids who are experiencing this, that they are really whole people. She is French and she is American and she is Indian. She can be all of those things, and how she decides to navigate the world with those pieces of herself as a whole, it’s really for her to decide. The whole #WriteHerStory concept is not just about Leila’s story, it’s also because Khayyam is trying to create the space for herself that she deserves.

One hot topic when we talk about history, especially personal family history, is how to deal with “problematic” ancestors and events. Khayyam and Alexandre handle this with great maturity.

I had to have Alexandre speak to this: His eight-times great-grandma was an enslaved person from Haiti. He literally said, “I’m related to a rapist.” So I do think that it’s really important to, at the very least, acknowledge it, because even if we’re not present at the time to bear witness, we have to bear witness to the wrongs of history today. That’s really the only way you can address institutionalized prejudice. I obviously have privilege and benefit from privilege. Asian Americans in this country have benefited from anti-blackness, from the whole model minority concept. This is a country literally founded on genocide and built on slavery. The least we can do as people living now is to acknowledge the wrongs of history because that’s the only way to really dismantle the structures that persist because of those things that happened in the past.

Laura Simeon is a young readers’ editor.