Sisters of Twelve follows a woman known as the final Custodian who must determine if the world is prepared for what the Voynich Manuscript contains. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

The story really began with the Voynich Manuscript itself. Like many people, I became fascinated by the fact that it has resisted explanation for centuries. But instead of focusing only on how to decode it, I found myself asking different questions: Who could have created something like this, and more importantly, what was it actually for?

I wanted to approach the manuscript not simply as a puzzle, but as part of a larger system. From there, I became interested in the kinds of people history tends to overlook, especially those who preserve knowledge quietly in the background while others receive recognition for it. I began imagining a lineage of women whose role was not just to protect information, but to determine when humanity was ready to receive it.

In many ways, the novel also became an homage to the strong women in my own life and to the countless individuals throughout history whose contributions were never fully acknowledged. Many of them were not seeking recognition at all, yet their work became part of the invisible foundation upon which later discoveries and institutions were built. That idea stayed with me throughout the writing of the book.

The novel treats knowledge as a burden as much as power. Was that one of the central ideas you wanted to explore?

Yes, absolutely. Knowledge is power, but power without wisdom or timing can become dangerous very quickly. One of the central ideas I wanted to explore in Sisters of Twelve is that possessing knowledge is only part of the burden. The greater burden is deciding when, how, and even if it should be shared.

For generations, the Custodians of the Sisterhood preserved accumulated discoveries and systems of knowledge, but Gia is the first to fully realize that time itself is running out. Previous Custodians had the luxury of patience. Gia does not. She understands that revealing certain discoveries too early could destabilize civilizations in ways history has repeatedly shown us, while withholding them for too long could deny humanity gifts that might alleviate suffering or fundamentally improve the world.

That tension becomes deeply personal for her. At times, the responsibility of deciding what humanity is ready to receive becomes almost suffocating.

The novel argues that women have often preserved culture, memory, and knowledge without recognition. What historical examples most influenced that idea?

As a college student, I remember first hearing the idea that much of history is really “His Story,” not “Her Story.” That concept stayed with me. History is often written by the winners, and historically, those winners were usually men whose names filled textbooks, monuments, and institutions.

But the survival of knowledge has rarely depended only on the visible people history remembers.

Across centuries, there were always others working quietly in the background. Archivists preserving fragile documents, translators carrying ideas across languages, assistants organizing the work of scholars, daughters inheriting memory when no formal record remained. Many of these people, especially women, lived and died without recognition, even though the ideas they protected survived because of them.

That became one of the emotional foundations of Sisters of Twelve. The book is fiction, but the spirit behind it comes from a very real truth: if knowledge from the past has reached us at all, it is because someone chose to carry it forward, often quietly, often without credit, and sometimes without anyone ever knowing they had done so.

In many ways, the novel is dedicated to those unseen custodians of knowledge.

Did you want readers to leave the novel feeling hopeful, unsettled, or intellectually uncertain?

At times, it feels like we are constantly being conditioned to believe the world is always on the verge of collapse. Maybe it is, or maybe it only feels that way because uncertainty has become such a constant part of modern life. I didn’t want Sisters of Twelve to reinforce the idea that humanity is doomed or incapable of growth.

I wanted to tell a story that acknowledges the world will probably never be perfect, but that does not mean it cannot become better. The ending is meant to leave readers with a sense of cautious hope. Not the kind that arrives overnight or solves everything at once, but the belief that people are still capable of learning, adapting, and choosing something better for the future.

If readers walk away from the novel feeling that maybe, just maybe, humanity still has the capacity to get things right, then I think the story succeeded.

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