last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again (or in this case, Aurimere)
In the past year or so I've followed links to a number of excellent blog posts from author Sarah Rees Brennan, so I thought I'd finally get to trying her books. Picked up Unspoken, hoping to love it, and actually did. It's possibly the only Gothic novel I've read that I liked, and only because she tackles head-on many of my problems with the genre and interacts with the tropes in new ways. I've read several glowing reviews across the web, but so far all of them have failed to mention one thing I particularly liked, and I find the omission telling.
The main character, Kami Glass, is biracial (white and Japanese). Unlike the idiots who missed the description of the Hunger Games black characters, Unspoken fans seem perfectly cognizant of Kami's ethnic background. (Rees Brennan also calls attention to it multiple times throughout the novel.) Yet none of the reviews I've seen have mentioned it. Several of them have commented on the book's excellent handling of gender issues, so it's not as if they're purely focused on plot and technique and blind to these kinds of issues. I love SF/F, but characters of colour are still the exception. Main characters of colour are rarer still. It's well worth celebrating books and authors that don't just default to white. So why is no one mentioning it? Why is gender worth raising but race isn't? How far does this genre, this sub-culture, still have to go? Right now, I'm not feeling optimistic about the answer to that.
Interesting that the cover of the British edition clearly shows an Asian girl, while the US version only has a silhouette. The US cover is beautiful and appropriate to the work, but especially after the Silver Phoenix cover controversy it's something I notice.
As to why I liked a Gothic novel and the sky didn't fall: The young maiden who just moved to the big creepy house, inhabited by creepy people who may or may not be responsible for acts of gore, and could seriously use a rescue, is a boy. Additionally, much of the staple-hand-to-forehead tone and canned scary music moments have been removed, and humour has been injected instead. The heroine is quite sensible. Northanger Abbey has no traction on this novel. I eagerly await the next installment. And because no one else is saying it, there will be two more books centered around a woc, and that's awesome.
The main character, Kami Glass, is biracial (white and Japanese). Unlike the idiots who missed the description of the Hunger Games black characters, Unspoken fans seem perfectly cognizant of Kami's ethnic background. (Rees Brennan also calls attention to it multiple times throughout the novel.) Yet none of the reviews I've seen have mentioned it. Several of them have commented on the book's excellent handling of gender issues, so it's not as if they're purely focused on plot and technique and blind to these kinds of issues. I love SF/F, but characters of colour are still the exception. Main characters of colour are rarer still. It's well worth celebrating books and authors that don't just default to white. So why is no one mentioning it? Why is gender worth raising but race isn't? How far does this genre, this sub-culture, still have to go? Right now, I'm not feeling optimistic about the answer to that.
Interesting that the cover of the British edition clearly shows an Asian girl, while the US version only has a silhouette. The US cover is beautiful and appropriate to the work, but especially after the Silver Phoenix cover controversy it's something I notice.
As to why I liked a Gothic novel and the sky didn't fall: The young maiden who just moved to the big creepy house, inhabited by creepy people who may or may not be responsible for acts of gore, and could seriously use a rescue, is a boy. Additionally, much of the staple-hand-to-forehead tone and canned scary music moments have been removed, and humour has been injected instead. The heroine is quite sensible. Northanger Abbey has no traction on this novel. I eagerly await the next installment. And because no one else is saying it, there will be two more books centered around a woc, and that's awesome.