by Writing Workshops Staff
An hour ago
Some debut novels are written from a single home. Drummers and Dreamers: Casablanca Rising was written from many places — France, London, Senegal, Morocco, and Dallas — by an author who brought them all to the page.
Laila Ouarrachy, a French Moroccan writer born and raised in Provence, spent years traveling and working across the world before turning that accumulated sense of place into fiction. The result, out now from Persimmon Publishing, is a sweeping coming-of-age story set in a city on the cusp of an uprising.
We've been lucky to know Laila since 2020, and we couldn't be prouder to celebrate this milestone.
A heroine who refuses to be steered
Drummers and Dreamers follows Tamo, a sharp, spirited teenager from a farm who is heartbroken by the sudden death of her father and sent to live with her uncle in 1960s Casablanca. The city is both intimidating and electric, and Tamo is determined to steer her own life through music. She bonds with a magnetic singer devoted to Moroccan folk traditions and becomes entangled with Youness, an idealist student activist whose hopes for his country feel dangerously contagious. When protests ignite and surveillance tightens, every connection she's made starts to carry consequences.
It's a genre-blending historical novel built for readers of Leïla Slimani's Watch Us Dance, Jane Green's Sister Stardust, and Mai Sennaar's They Dream in Gold — fiction that braids the personal with the political and gives an underrepresented setting its full dramatic weight.
Building the machinery of a novel
A book like this lives or dies on its architecture. A father's death has to detonate the plot; a coming-of-age arc has to run alongside a political one without either swallowing the other; and the tension has to keep climbing through a long middle as the stakes turn from romantic to genuinely dangerous. That's a tall order for any writer, let alone a debut novelist.
Laila built that machinery in part through her work here. She studied in our Plotting the Novel 10-Week Online Workshop, where novelist Ethan Chatagnier teaches writers to deconstruct plot down to its working parts — inciting incidents, reversals, the interplay of an A-story and a B-story, and the techniques for navigating what so many novelists dread: the murky middle. You can see those tools at work in Drummers and Dreamers, where Tamo's pursuit of music (the A-story) and her entanglement with a student activist (the B-story) tighten around each other as the political situation escalates.
She also worked one-on-one with novelist Seraphina Nova Glass through our IndieMFA program, a sustained mentorship designed for writers committed to a full-length project. Glass, a thriller writer with a gift for momentum and stakes, is exactly the kind of mentor a novel about surveillance and rising danger benefits from — and that pressure shows up on the page.
A book worth buying
Drummers and Dreamers: Casablanca Rising is available now, and the best way to celebrate Laila's achievement is to read it. You can order it from Bookshop.org, where every purchase supports independent bookstores. To learn more about Laila, her events, and what she's working on next, visit her author website.
For a writer who learned to surf, plays piano, and studies new languages for fun, the discipline of finishing a novel was clearly never going to be the obstacle. The freedom her heroine fights for — to steer her own life, on her own terms — is the same freedom Laila claimed by writing the book in the first place. We were a small stop on a long road she's been walking for years, and we can't wait to see where it leads.
Your story deserves the same care. At WritingWorkshops.com, you'll find a community of serious writers, expert instruction from award-winning authors, and a proven track record of students who've gone from the workshop to the bookshelf. Browse our online classes and mentorships, and take the next step toward telling the story only you can tell.
