A programmer burying her grief in code wakes up to her house floating above the city — and the only way down is through the annoyingly kind girl dismantling her firewalls, and what’s taking root beneath her floorboards.

THE ROOT CAUSE is a standalone YA graphic novel that explores the systems we build to survive parental emotional abandonment, how they shape identity, and what happens when a system built to keep us functional becomes too rigid to serve us.

Threaded through this is a generational idea: harm passed down isn’t always intentional — parents submerged in their own unresolved damage, without the tools to break a pattern that was never given the chance to heal.

Synopsis

Work is the only fail-safe in Bali‘s life. A programmer, she fixes broken code without allowing herself to stop — work and isolation the only things keeping her grief contained.

So when a girl named Alita appears in her foyer refusing to leave, Bali tries to force her out, only to discover the house is floating above the city.

With no way to remove her, Bali puts her firewalls up, determined to endure her presence without engaging. But Alita starts to  wear down her defenses, and as work grows harder under the strain, the system that kept Bali functional begins to break down.

As hurtful letters arrive from an unknown sender and a well-meaning therapist urges Bali to let her emotions surface, the control she relies on grows harder to maintain. Alita meets it with a disarming kindness that exposes the belief Bali has built her isolation around: that she is too broken to be loved.

And when it becomes clear that the house can only descend by growing the dry roots beneath the floorboards, Bali will have to risk grounding more than its foundations, at the cost of the self she programmed to survive.

*The Root Cause is currently in preparation for publisher submission under the representation of Rob Broder at Martin-Newens Literary Management.