Recently Read: Naughts & Crosses

[trainwind]

Naughts & Crosses
Marjorie Blackman
Simon & Schuster, 2005
(Originally published as Noughts & Crosses by Random House UK in 2001)

Comments

[arysani]

I was just talking about this "issue book but not" thing the other day. Someone had made a derogatory comment that I felt needed to be responded to, and I used the author's own work to make comparisons. Charlaine Harris's Sookie Stackhouse books, even though they are no deep issue books, she does do a fair bit of subtle preaching about how unfair it is to judge a person on the basis of something they cannot change about themselves. She is constantly seen as a friend to the vampires (moments such as "you see us beyond the fangs" - of course, this isn't necessarily SMART of her, as they are more powerful and could snap her neck like a twig, but when they're being rude, she still calls them out about it, just as she defends them fiercely) and the shapeshifters in the face of the Big Bad of the human world, the Fellowship of the Sun, which is a religious fanatic group that thinks all vampires should "meet the sun" and all other "abominations" should be killed. I never realized how dominant a theme, yet subtle, it was until I was trying to

[trainwind]

Ooh, interesting example! I've never read the Sookie Stackhouse novels, but I do know that Alan Ball has stated explicitly that he sees True Blood as a metaphor for homosexuality -- True Blood allows vampires to "come out of the closet", the moral fanaticism of the Fellowship of the Sun... And at the same time, like you say about the books, I doubt that most viewers would perceive the show as preachy -- the message is definitely there, but not intrusively. Now I want to read the novels!

[sunni_sideup]

I felt the same way reading this book. I thought the characters were pretty lackluster, and I could never really understand where they were coming from. Probably because they only represented two viewpoints on The Issue.

[trainwind]

Ah, yes, I hadn't thought of it that way, but I think your observation is spot-on.