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Reading Wednesday
Oct. 6th, 2021 06:56 amJust finished: Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi. I really did want to love this one! I'd heard really good things. But ALAS I finished it and it is exactly the same as every YA fantasy ever, but set in Fantasy Nigeria instead of Fantasy Europe. That might have even saved it if I had any sense of place-as-character, but that wasn't there either because someone, somewhere, has decreed that YA books must consist of precisely one sentence per paragraph and contain as little description as possible. Someone said that it was Avatar: The Last Airbender meets the Star Wars sequels written by a Reylo shipper and, yeah, I'd agree. (I haven't watched ATLA, by the way, but go on and tell me that it's the best thing ever and I shall continue to ignore you like I've ignored all the others).
Alas, it exemplifies the issues—particularly prevalent in Books For Young People but present across target market and genre—with assuming that Important Books are inherently Good Books. The thing is, Adeyemi's afterword, where she relates the events of the novel to real world murders of Black youth, was 1000x more powerful and better written than anything in the novel itself. Just because the book hints at some important social commentary, and just because Black authors are horrendously underrepresented in publishing, doesn't mean that we shouldn't engage with Own Voices books as critically as we would engage with any other books. A number of Nigerian readers have pointed out problems with the book's grasp of Yoruba cosmology and Nigerian geography, so I will take their word on it and not go there myself. Instead I'll just point out that it has the same conceptual thematic problem that X-Men and Legend of Korra have (I did see that one), which is that if you're using oppressed magical people as a one-to-one allegory for real-world racism, it's going to fall apart because Black people can't actually turn themselves into living fireballs or shoot lasers from their eyes, and there would likely be a lot less racism and oppression if they could.
That said, I am not the target audience, and were I 13, I would have absolutely loved this. The problems I had are the same problems I have with nearly every YA book I read.
Currently reading: Out of the Ruins, edited by Preston Grassman. What a generic title. I have to keep on going back to an earlier post I made about it on FB to remember what the book is called. That said, I'm enjoying the hell out of it. It's a collection of post-apocalyptic stories by some of my favourite authors, but with a twist: all of them share themes of survival and rebuilding rather than despair. Like any short story collection, there's certain unevenness of quality, but it's mostly very excellent and a cathartic read, given *gestures vaguely to the ongoing apocalypse around us*
Alas, it exemplifies the issues—particularly prevalent in Books For Young People but present across target market and genre—with assuming that Important Books are inherently Good Books. The thing is, Adeyemi's afterword, where she relates the events of the novel to real world murders of Black youth, was 1000x more powerful and better written than anything in the novel itself. Just because the book hints at some important social commentary, and just because Black authors are horrendously underrepresented in publishing, doesn't mean that we shouldn't engage with Own Voices books as critically as we would engage with any other books. A number of Nigerian readers have pointed out problems with the book's grasp of Yoruba cosmology and Nigerian geography, so I will take their word on it and not go there myself. Instead I'll just point out that it has the same conceptual thematic problem that X-Men and Legend of Korra have (I did see that one), which is that if you're using oppressed magical people as a one-to-one allegory for real-world racism, it's going to fall apart because Black people can't actually turn themselves into living fireballs or shoot lasers from their eyes, and there would likely be a lot less racism and oppression if they could.
That said, I am not the target audience, and were I 13, I would have absolutely loved this. The problems I had are the same problems I have with nearly every YA book I read.
Currently reading: Out of the Ruins, edited by Preston Grassman. What a generic title. I have to keep on going back to an earlier post I made about it on FB to remember what the book is called. That said, I'm enjoying the hell out of it. It's a collection of post-apocalyptic stories by some of my favourite authors, but with a twist: all of them share themes of survival and rebuilding rather than despair. Like any short story collection, there's certain unevenness of quality, but it's mostly very excellent and a cathartic read, given *gestures vaguely to the ongoing apocalypse around us*
