“And then he runs away to the circus, and there’s an old woman who can turn into a dragon, and then they all get on a train to Russia with some immortal dude. And then a mummy attacks.”
This-- this is quite possibly the most succinct description of her plots I've ever seen.
The romances are frequently interracial, though so far I think they’ve all been person of color/white person.
The one with the merman perhaps gets partial credit -- the heroine is biracial (black mom from New Orleans and white dad from Appalachia), while the merman hero isn't entirely human -- dad was human and white IIRC, mom was mer, and from what little we see of mer society it seems like their equivalent of "racial" categories might run on rather different lines from human ones.
Considering how consistently the cover art on this series has downplayed the existence of the POC characters -- I think Red Heart of Jade was the only one so far that clearly conveyed that at least one of the protagonists wasn't white -- and how inevitably interracial romance novels in general seem to be POC/white rather than two POC from different cultures, I really wonder if there might not be a bit of editorial pressure going on there. I have seen at least one shorter non-Dirk-and-Steele Liu piece that didn't follow the formula so strictly (Chinese
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I know Liu was pressured to write under a white-sounding pseudonym early on, but she refused. It would not surprise me if there's some "One POC romantic lead is okay if you insist, but the world will perish if you have two of different races!"
Yep, or perhaps even more like "You have to have at least one white character so the audience can identify with someone!" *sighs*The merman book was the first Liu I read -- I'd picked it up rather randomly, not knowing anything about the series or author, but the cover art and blurbs made it sound astonishingly similar to a cracktastically so-bad-it's-almost-good Gena Showalter that came out at much the same time, and I was curious to see if one was ripping off the other. So I was very, very pleasantly surprised to find that this was rather fun and decently written, and was rather happily startled to find that it contained things like a biracial heroine who did not look white-with-a-touch-of-exotica and even better yet was NOT all endless hand-wringing "oh woe is me, I'm trapped between two worlds and don't know where I belong!!1!" angst, various minor characters that actually seemed like a pretty decent representation of the demographics of the city it was set in (including an Asian female cop who was not an elite martial artist, a
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The copy of The Last Twilight I have has, if you squint, off to the side, a back of a man who's black, if you're paying attention. And then the cover's all the white lady's face. Of course.
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This-- this is quite possibly the most succinct description of her plots I've ever seen.
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:O!! Which one's that?
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ETA: http://meganbmoore.livejournal.com/914767.html
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The one with the merman perhaps gets partial credit -- the heroine is biracial (black mom from New Orleans and white dad from Appalachia), while the merman hero isn't entirely human -- dad was human and white IIRC, mom was mer, and from what little we see of mer society it seems like their equivalent of "racial" categories might run on rather different lines from human ones.
Considering how consistently the cover art on this series has downplayed the existence of the POC characters -- I think Red Heart of Jade was the only one so far that clearly conveyed that at least one of the protagonists wasn't white -- and how inevitably interracial romance novels in general seem to be POC/white rather than two POC from different cultures, I really wonder if there might not be a bit of editorial pressure going on there. I have seen at least one shorter non-Dirk-and-Steele Liu piece that didn't follow the formula so strictly (Chinese ( ... )
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