I started off with CB Lee's Not Your Sidekick, and it got me thinking about #ownvoices a lot. The main character, Jess, is of Vietnamese and Chinese heritage; how she relates to that heritage, as an Asian-American in a post-apocalyptic setting where neither Vietnam nor China still exists as such, is not a major focus of the story but clearly plays a part in her character. It really made me stop to consider how much trickier a subject like that would likely be for a white author writing an Asian-American character in a similar setting. I've seen a lot of people dismiss -- or at least overlook -- the importance of #ownvoices in SFF, specifically, with words to the effect of, "but it's speculative, you can make stuff up." This completely disregards and disrespects the extent to which creating an imaginary world requires drawing on one's personal experience and knowledge -- which is one of those things I knew on a surface level, but I hadn't really stopped and thought about it before.At the same time, I really want to give this book a shoutout for one of the side characters, for whom the story is not #ownvoices, but who is nonetheless wonderful: Bells. 💙💚💜 Bells is awesome, and Bells is a trans boy, and Dear Cis Writers: This is how you do it. The respectful, smart, sensitive way in which his character is written gives me -- as a trans reader and writer -- a lot of hope for the future of trans representation in YA lit.
Also, while reading Not Your Sidekick, it really hit home for me just how much power there is in seeing underrepresented characters written well in starring roles. I've got to be honest, the book's plot was predictable and kinda cliché and verged on cheesy at times, and I just didn't even care because I loved it so much. Was it a story I'd heard or seen or read before? Yes, in a lot of ways. But not starring LGBT characters (I mentioned Bells already, but Jess is openly and unstereotypically bi with a female love interest), and that made a big difference. 💖
I moved on to Daniel José Older's Shadowshaper next, which kept me continuing along similar lines of thought. In terms of its very general plot it's not earthshatteringly new: teenage girl meets mysterious cute boy, develops secret-society-related superpowers, runs around NYC fighting baddies and trading sharp, snappy, funny dialogue with her friends, while also dealing with family tensions at home. My brain's frame of reference tends to liken it to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, if Buffy were a black Puerto Rican girl who channeled ghosts into paintings instead of staking vampires. But of course Buffy wasn't, and the characters and culture and language make the story at least as much as that loose skeleton of a plot does, and those aspects here are rich and vivid and thoroughly worth spending time with.Also, the dialogue really is wonderful. I laughed a lot more than I was expecting to.
Reading Not Your Sidekick and Shadowshaper prompted me take a long, careful look at my Kindle library, upon which I realized that although I've read a lot of SFF books starring characters of color, the vast majority of those books have been by white authors. Changing that is one of my major reading goals for the year ahead.
It's a book with a lot of important things to say. In particular, for me, it made me realize that I know very little about how much education teens in the system are likely to have access to, and the additional barriers they face to any level of academic success. As I've very recently taken a fulltime job in academic support at my local community college, this is something I should learn more about, and I'm really glad I read this book just for how clearly it highlighted my own ignorance for me.
It's also -- and here's where a lot of my more complicated thoughts come in -- a book that I think could easily be read as problematic in terms of the way its mentally ill characters are portrayed, and in terms of the casual and usually unchecked bigotry (sexism, racism, ableism, fatphobia) spouted by multiple characters, the narrator included. I've got to be honest, had this stuff appeared in a story about a lighter subject matter, I probably would have DNFed it. Here -- as I read it -- it came across to me as a conscious choice by the author, painting a picture of a group of teenagers who are every inch the product of a system that has utterly failed them. As such, I think it felt to me like those aspects of the book were one more tacit indictment of that system. But it's something I'm still thinking about, and I could certainly see others reading it differently, and as such I'd be cautious about who I recommended it to. In those aspects and many others, it's a book that puts a lot of weight back on the reader when it comes to making moral judgments, and it's not at all a light read.
And that's that. This was my first time taking part in Diverse-A-Thon, and I'm really glad I did. I didn't join in the Twitter chats as much as I would have liked to -- partly because of work, partly because I'm just very slow at putting together coherent responses to things, and slow doesn't work too well on Twitter -- but I managed to speak up some, which I was proud of myself for, and the chats were great to read even when I couldn't contribute. This week has also been valuable for me in proving to myself that I[m in a place where I can carve out time to read things I think are important, and to be mindful and deliberate about that reading, even when I have a lot of other things going on.
Big thanks to Christina Marie, Joce, Monica, and Simon for hosting the event. I had a great time this week and I look forward to the next one. 😊
