Teen Writers Bloc

A few years ago, when my sister Meena and I first started writing screenplays, we pondered this: do we make our protagonist a brown girl like us? Or a white girl like most of the members of some vague future audience for our films?

At first, it was a bit of a no-brainer. Did we want to actually sell a script? Why yes, we did. So we wrote about a white girl. Relatable. Fun. And still, deep down, a bit like us. Did she not suffer from frizzy, uncontrollable hair? Did she not have a bitchy boss from hell who made her life miserable? Did she not lust after the exact wrong guy? See?

But we weren’t satisfied with just that. So we made sure we put a brown character into the script, albeit in a small role. Then a funny thing happened when we were taking pitch meetings in big, bad Hollywood. When they inevitably asked what else we were working on (they always ask that, by the way), we told them about this little project I’d been developing for my thesis script at NYU, you know, the back pocket one that you’ll eventually have to make yourself because it’s so specific. It was about another floundering twenty-something (our specialty!) in the city who fell for the wrong guy, had the bitchy boss, and was essentially just a hot mess.

But this feisty chick — well, she was brown. Like us. There was something about her, though, that made her relatable to all those aforementioned potential white girls in that imaginary audience. And so that ended up being the script that everyone wanted to talk about, that everyone wanted to work with us on. It didn’t hurt, also, that Bend It Like Beckham was a surprise hit, and Monsoon Wedding had done well right before that. But of course, by the time we’d worked out all the kinks with our would-be producers, another flick with subcontinental flavor had TANKED, and so we lost our shot.

Writing fiction has been an interesting journey for me in this regard, especially when compared to the previously ethnically barren landscape of Hollywood. (Now, there’s a requisite brown sidekick on every hit sitcom or drama. I’m not kidding. I could make a whole slideshow full. Maybe I will, in fact.) (Anyway, I digress.) Given the healthy interest in South Asian Diaspora fiction the past decade, I didn’t feel nearly as intimidated writing an ethnic character as I had in the past. There’s room in publishing for brown folks like me, at least to a certain degree — and in a certain market. (Mostly literary fiction.) But! And you knew there was a but!

There are still some stories that I want to write that don’t really have anything at all to do with being a brown girl. Case in point? My first YA project, which is about as high concept as they come. If I made one of the two protagonists an Indian girl, it would leave readers scratching their heads. Why did the author make that choice? What does it bring to the text? In that novel, it really wouldn’t bring a whole lot to the text. But, as always, I want to represent. So I did put an Indian girl into the book — in a bit of an unexpected way. And there’s a black character in it, too, but not just to make it uber-diverse. It’s in a way that makes sense for the story and the character. The book isn’t about race, really. But the diversity adds a layer to the text. It works in the novel without overtaking the novel.

My second work-in-progress — my thesis project — is a whole ‘nother story. Ethnic identity is one of the key components in this book. It has a flavor to it, if you will. One of the biggest challenges I’m facing in working on my thesis project is that I’m writing three narrators — and they’re all brown girls, all from New Jersey, all Upper Middle class. All too easily, these three voices could meld together and sound the same, given their shared history and ethnicity, their shared community. But you see, that’s where the other components of storytelling come into play here. These are three very different characters — each has a different want, a different way of achieving it or expressing it, a different take on the world. Or at least I hope they will. The key for me in telling this story is to not just make them three brown girls. It’s the universality of the situations they face — the heart of the novel is about the implosion of a friendship, something that’s relatable to most readers. The setting and culture is specific — and therefore, I’m hoping, interesting in its own right — but the conflict is universal, graspable by a wider audience. Essentially, what I’m trying to say is that I’m not just writing a book about brown girls for brown girls, but rather a book about these girls, who happen to be brown, but they’re also very much just…girls.

That’s kind of how I view writing ethnicity. Do I always write what I know? Not exactly. But there’s usually some intrinsic part of the character that I can relate to, something that makes the character universal in some way. The angst of the character, their hovering mother, their bond with a sibling, the way they tie their shoes or hate their job or eat breakfast for dinner. My characters tend to be human, after all. (No sci-fi here.) With all my writing, it seems, I’m trying to tell an everygirl story in a specific and interesting way. Kind of like with that script that was a hot property for ten Hollywood seconds.

And that script, by the way? The story’s still in my back pocket. Maybe you’ll read it one day — in novel form.

Photo Courtesy Mirabai Films

Popularity: 8%

My stance on writing race and ethnicity has always been the same. If cultural elements and racial identity are important to the story you’re telling and the character at the heart of your piece, you should make those things apparent in your work. However, if you’re not writing a story specifically about a Black/Hispanic/Asian/White/Arab/Indian/etc. individual and how s/he experiences life, and instead you’re writing a story about family/love/friendship/loss or whatever with a protagonist that just happens to be of a certain race, I don’t think that such information needs to be heavily focused on in the text.

It’s true that if it’s not spelled out for the reader, most people will assume that a narrator is white, because that’s what we’ve been conditioned to see as the norm. And it’s true that some distinguishing characteristics about a character’s appearance should be included for readers so that they can have a fuller picture of who that character is. Naturally, readers bring their own preconceived notions taken from their personal experiences and apply them to whatever text they’re reading, helping them to relate to a character or situation. But with that said, what pushes me to keep reading a novel is not a character’s race necessarily, but his or her voice, motivation, personality, point of view, and most importantly, his or her personal journey or struggle. In my opinion, if those are clear and specific in a narrative, the appearance of a character is almost irrelevant with regard to level of importance.

Now, this belief of mine has garnered some criticism during workshops because I don’t always describe a character’s appearance in the first chapter. I may say brown hair or brown eyes, but I don’t make it glaringly obvious that it’s a person of color until the third paragraph in chapter two. Sometimes I wonder why this is an issue. When I read a book about a white protagonist there doesn’t always seem to be a need to discuss cultural or racial particularities. If my story is mainly about a girl struggling with her parents’ divorce, does it matter what race she is necessarily? So much so that it must be clarified on the first page? But then I think about when I was a teenager and I wanted to read about someone who looked like me going through the same ‘normal’ things that other teens in YA novels went through. That reminds me that the distinction does matter, and always will, to an extent.

Many of my favorite books, like Danzy Senna’s Caucasia, are written by black or mixed authors about black protagonists, and I do admit that I seek out such works so that I can try to find a character who understands some aspect of my experience. Many people do this, I feel, especially since a character’s identity is often important to a story. Yet, a fair amount of my favorite books are also written by authors of other races about white protagonists or protagonists of other ethnic origins, like with Jenny Han’s novel, The Summer I Turned Pretty. Do I relate any less to those characters? Not really. Their experiences and viewpoints, spelled out richly on the page, cause me to yearn to know what will happen to them on their journeys as well.

Still, regardless of what race a protagonist is, sometimes when reading I don’t relate at all to an emotion or feeling or incident that the character experiences. For instance, I can read a book about a black girl and not be able to fully relate to that character because of our different backgrounds and struggles. Every person, no matter what ethnicity or race, is unique in experience and thought. A character’s differing decisions and outlooks and a reader’s ability to understand and/or be intrigued by them account for a novel’s strength in some regard.

Overall, I believe that writing race is difficult. Will what you write affect people’s perception of your people as a whole? Or is it just a part of that particular character’s experience? Will people read your work as widely if you focus on a character considered to be an ‘other’ in society? Will you be pigeon-holed into only writing about a certain type of person? These are all questions that a writer might consider before beginning a story. But a better question is perhaps this: what is necessary for you to include in order for you to tell the story you want to tell in the best way possible? It’s a question that only you can answer. For YA readers in particular, finding a character that speaks to them and their personal struggle is crucial. But the way such characters are written depends on authors and their conscious and deliberate decisions about how to best tell the stories they were meant to tell.

Image Courtesy of Penguin Group, Inc.

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During my first semester at The New School, I found out that there would be no young adult or children’s literature class offered in the spring semester. Of my first year. My reaction: “Uhh … what?!” Being that I was going for my masters in Writing for Children, I kinda, sorta, maybe figured that the program would offer us, oh, I don’t know, enough courses for us to be properly educated in the world of children’s lit.

Nope. I was thrust into a shark tank of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction writers. The snobbiest of writers exist within those three disciplines. So how was I going to pick which literature course to take? They all sounded like snoozefests. Until I saw the “Writing in Vernacular” (I think that’s what the course was called) description. The booklist was intriguing and exciting. I figured, “Hey, if I have to take a course outside of my discipline, I guess this will have to do.”

I’m glad I did.

One of the main lessons we were taught was the notion of “authenticity.” What makes you believe the words on the page? If you were reading a book like Push by Sapphire and you found out at the end that Sapphire was a sixty-year-old white man who grew up in Beverly Hills, would that make you question the voice and, ultimately, the raw believability of the entire novel?

We see a lot of white characters written by black writers, but somehow we never question when that happens. One immediate example that comes to mind is fellow New School alum Nick Burd’s The Vast Fields of Ordinary. Protagonist Dade Hamilton is white. Author Nick Burd is not. Yet, there is not one moment in that book where I question the authenticity of Burd’s writing. Not one. Why is this? I often seek the answer to this, but I can’t seem to figure it out. Is it because “white culture” is oversaturated in our popular culture, from musicians on the radio to certain “spotlight” actors and Hollywood plotlines, to billboards and commercials and more? Had the roles been switched and a white author was writing about the experience of a black character, well, I don’t know; I’d be hesitant to believe it.

Maybe it’s because, as showed to us in that class on vernacular, there really aren’t books out there where the main character is black and the author is white. Not any good books, anyway.

I could ponder this and question the motives of publishing houses everywhere, but I still don’t have an agent or an editor, and I’d like to not alienate them quite yet. But I want to know: why do so many black writers write white? Is it because publishers think that only books with white protagonists sell? Is there less of a market for the Coe Booths of the world? I don’t know. I can only explain my attitude towards writing about an ethnicity that’s not my own.

My thoughts: I can’t possibly describe something that I haven’t lived. Sure, I’ve never lived in a fairy tale-esque world, nor have I lived in space, but neither has anyone else, so there’s nothing to compare my words to that exists in the tangible real world. I would feel like I’m assuming, based on what I know from my friends, what being a part of a black/Hispanic/Arabic/Asian/etc. family is like. And that’s not good enough for me.

The professor of my class, Bob Antoni, generally writes his books from the perspectives of black women from Trinidad. He’s white. But what made the difference for me, what made me cross the line from questioning his authenticity to believing him as someone who could genuinely depict an accurate portrayal of the life of a Trinny woman, was hearing his life story. He grew up in Trinidad. He knows that culture like—wait for the cliché—the back of his hand. When he read his writing, he spoke in a Trinidadian accent. When I closed my eyes, I never would have thought the man sitting feet away from me was white.

So what are “black” and “white”? I’ve always said that neither matters. Like the incomparable MJ once said, “If you’re thinkin’ about my baby/It don’t matter if you’re black or white.” And skin color has never meant anything more to me then just that: skin. But when I think about writing from the point of view of a black character, it’s not that simple. I think: “I can’t possibly write an accurate portrayal.” Would a book with a black protagonist be a beacon of truth to the black community? I’m going to say no. Maybe I’m just operating with preconceived notions of what “authentic” means. I don’t know.

Ultimately, I do believe it’s an authenticity issue. For me, at least, it is. But then again, I’m only generalizing white authors. What about all of the black authors? Where are all the books with black protagonists? That’s what I’d love to see. I think that for writers to accurately write about black characters there needs to first be an increase in black writers writing about black characters.

What do you all think?

Photo Credit: BaazarVoice.com

Popularity: 6%

I have started and deleted this post four times, five times, six times…I’m determined to write something about this topic, but, it seems like….It feels as if….It’s just that, well–

I keep getting stuck.  What do I have to contribute?  I’m worried that anything I say will come off as insincere, insensitive, offensive.

Why?

Because it’s FLIPPIN’ HARD to talk about race when you were a privileged white kid. (That’s me.)

(Note: I did not say that it is hardEST or hardER than if you were any other kind of kid. My guess is that it’s hard for everybody. But, for now, I’m speaking for myself.)

And it’s equally hard to write about race in fiction. But I do it anyway. The truth is that I spent my childhood in mostly-white schools in mostly-white towns, and basically comfortable. But the other truth is that in my adulthood I have become quite accustomed to being the only white person riding on a city bus, walking down a street, or sitting in a room. I have often said that while I’ve always wanted to be a writer, it is my students — their passions for reading, their raw emotions, their openness, their enthusiasm — that inspired me to write for teens.

And, well, those students don’t look anything like me. They aren’t white. Or privileged. Or female. (Yep, most of them are boys.)

So, naturally, in the two books I’ve worked on at The New School the main characters both are upper-class white girls. Ha. But I do strive to at least touch on race in each of my books. Because, contrary to popular practice, white kids are not immune to race. Even white kids who grow up in all-white towns with all-white friends are not immune to race.

So, yes, in Me, Him, Them and It (my debut, to be published in 2013 by Bloomsbury), pregnant Evelyn deals with race (and stuff). She figures out that it actually means something that her adoptive aunt and hero is Chinese, and a lesbian. She faces being the only white kid in a room of Latina students. And when she finally makes a pregnant friend, she has to face the fact that life could be worse, a lot worse, if she was also broke.

But my books are not about race. Or religion or sexual orientation or social class or any of those issues. Race simply happens in the story and so does everything else. Evelyn doesn’t come to any conclusions so that these human differences make any sense. Of course she doesn’t. She couldn’t do that unless I could do that, and I know I can’t.

I’m not saying that this is the only or the best or even a good way to write race as a white author. I won’t pretend to be able to opine on how it should be done. But I do know that, while simply writing all-white, straight, same-class characters who don’t need to deal with these spit-fire political issues might be less controversial, for me it would break the Golden Rule of fiction–write what you want to.

The truth is that I’d love to write a book that actually tackles race head-on, one that features girls of totally different backgrounds learning how to communicate and respect each other. And have fun.  In fact, I’ve been working on that book for years now. It features a black MC who is from the neighborhood where I worked in Chicago. But I keep putting it away. I keep switching the voice and the narrators. I keep wondering whether I’m really qualified to tackle the huge issues of race and class, even though issues might be why I picked up the pen and started writing for teens.

Hopefully, one day I’ll get the guts.  For now this white girl is too chicken.

Photo credit: Image Vision

Popularity: 10%

It is the sad truth that, unless a character is very specifically described otherwise, the majority of readers will assume he or she is white. It’s our default setting. And sometimes, even when a character’s ethnicity is described, we can skip over it, creating our own image. I remember when the cast list for The Hunger Games was released — I immediately called up Jess and asked, “Rue is black? I always pictured her as blond.” To which Jess replied, “I thought she was a redhead.” We both dived into our copies of the book and found that Rue is described as having “satiny brown skin.” Suzanne Collins couldn’t have made it clearer, and still, Jess and I came up with two very distinct, and incorrect, images of her.

It’s sometimes difficult, in writing fantasy, to distinguish races and ethnicities —and often, I’m simply making up my own. My current work-in-progress takes place in an unspecified city in an unspecified place. I have to find other ways to describe a character who, say, I envision as Asian, because Asia doesn’t exist in this world. I want to give the reader a very clear picture of the person I can see in my head, because it’s important to me that this city be multicultural when culture has blended together — skin color has no bearing on a person’s status in this world. I’m not always successful; there’s a lot of trial and error. When I ask one of my friends, “Did you get that the Duke is supposed to look Indian?” and get a, “Oh, I thought he was white,” then I have to go back and see how I can make the character’s identity clearer. It’s a tricky line to walk but a necessary one — because who wants to read about a world where everyone looks the same?

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For a long time, writing, for me, was a way to regurgitate my own experiences, work through them, and share with the world what it meant to be Corey. I was endlessly fascinated by my own life: why did I ever love that one guy with the funny hair? Was the end of that friendship my fault? How fabulous is living in the East Village? When did my parents become real, fallible people and not just authority figures? In my early twenties, I was able to be satisfied by mining those and other fascinating, navel-gazing questions. And I’m sure I will return to some of those stories, or the book of essays about spending a decade being neurotic in NYC that I daydream about. But a few years ago, I lost interest in my EXACT experience, and started wondering how I could write about other experiences, with the same accuracy and emotional resonance that I aspired to in my personal-experience-driven writing.

I’ve found that what works for me is finding an entry point. I have never been Amish (or, really any religion), but I know what it feels like to question something that you once believed to be true. I have never been a racial minority, but I understand what it is like to have a set of qualities assumed because of the way you look, and I have never gone through treatment for OCD, but I know what it is like to have anxiety control your life. (Oh, do I!)
Does this make me an expert on other races, religions, or genders? Absolutely not. My imagination is not big enough to comprehend ALL the struggles and joys of being part of a community or identity that is not my own. And I will probably never write a book that deals exclusively with that experience. I’m simply not qualified. But with a healthy dose of compassion, some serious research, and the correct entry point, I think it’s possible to write a character that is NOT tiny and blonde and riddled with anxiety.

Well, maybe not that last part. I’m pretty sure I could never write a character who doesn’t exhibit some serious neurosis. That is just too far of a stretch.

Photo: Wine Press of Words

Popularity: 6%

I can’t understand why I’m not yet famous. It’s a phenomenon that I can’t quite wrap my head around. I mean, I should be famous.

I’m relatively attractive (I mean, I’m not heinous looking, and, with a little photoshopping, I could look damn good), my personality is Grade A, I’m hysterical (as if this delicious post isn’t proof enough), and I write well. I think.

I should be famous. Well, maybe not famous. But I should at least be published.

Plus, my version of “fame” is different probably different from yours. For me, fame and fortune is seeing my book up on shelves and getting a royalty check of $20 every six months. Seeing my name on a dusty shelf in Barnes & Noble is my equivalent to shaving my head and attacking some poor car full of paparazzi with an umbrella. (Yes, that was a shameless Britney Spears reference. You want a piece of me?)

Alas, I am not famous. Nor am I Britney Spears. Life isn’t fair.

Then again, I haven’t done anything to further my status. I haven’t finished my Star Search audition tape, nor have I quite figured out how to resurrect Star Search. In other words — let’s leave this Britney Spears metaphor. It’s becoming quite toxic. Oops…I did it again –I haven’t really written anything in a couple of months. Okay, now I’m being modest, and by modest, I mean I’m lying. I haven’t written anything substantial since September.

Insert scream track here.

That isn’t to say I don’t have ideas. Because I have so many ideas. I’m literally dying because ideas are oozing out of every orifice of my body. Literally. Yesterday, a string of words just fell out of my nostrils. It was weird.

Ideas aren’t my issue. My issue is time. Balancing life is tough. Cue the tiny violins. Since graduating from The New School, I’ve had to balance a bunch of new jobs, a wonky schedule that’s ever-changing, and trying to process the endless rejection emails from potential literary agents. That’s been, like, the funnest part EVER.

Believe me, I’ve tried not to let the rejection seep into my soul and turn my heart a wretched, oily black. But it’s been hard. Still, I know I need to get back on my metaphorical, clichéd horse and keep trying. (I’m sure Dhonielle is somewhere reading this yelling at me to shut up and write!)

These are all reasons why I’m not yet famous. I’m not going to say that I’ve given up, because I haven’t. Not by a long-shot. Here is what I’m going to do about my teeny failure to be the writer that I long to be.

1. I’m not going to be so hard on myself. Sure, I feel guilty that I haven’t written or tried harder to get an agent. I know what I need to do. Now it’s time to just do it. I’m not going to slap my wrists anymore…all of that slapping just made my skin irritated and solved nothing.

2. WRITE. I’m going to write. No more excuses. No, I’m not going to set ridiculous goals for myself, like I did for National Novel Writing Month. I just can’t write a whole novel in one month, so I can’t expect myself to do that. But I can do 25 pages a week.

3. Try to get an agent. I’m going to start submitting my manuscript and query letter to more agents. I haven’t done a round of this since September, so it’s time. I got discouraged, so no more of that.

4. WRITE. Write, write, write. (self explanatory)

These are my goals now.

I will be famous. Soon. One day. Eventually. At some point in the future.

Mark my words.

Popularity: 14%

Here’s some food for thought: Why are all book characters automatically white, unless specifically specified otherwise? It’s something I never really thought about until we discussed it in our writing workshop. When a character is described as having “dark hair and dark eyes,” most readers will envision a white person with dark hair and dark eyes. It’s only when the character’s skin color is described that the picture in our head changes.

Here’s another question: What is “white?” I’ve always thought about race somewhat differently than most people, because I don’t know where I fit in. According to the United States Census forms, I’m white. Or “Caucasian.” Whatever. But I’m half-Italian, half-Armenian. Armenia is technically in the Middle East, but “Middle Eastern” is not a box on most forms. And from the way I look, most people assume I am Hispanic/Latina. I get spoken to in Spanish on the subway and NYC streets nearly every day. I only wish I knew enough Spanish to respond!

My point is, even though I’m “white,” I don’t look it. So if I were a character in a book, how would I be described? Dark hair and dark eyes, but with caramel-ish/olive-ish skin? Maybe. But I guarantee you that upon reading that description, the reader wouldn’t picture a “white” person. It’s a weird, weird, weird thing.

Because I have such confused feelings on the whole race thing, I like to write characters of all different ethnicities – especially mixed ethnicities. Racial ambiguity is something I can relate to, so I feel I have something to say there. Last week, film critic and awesomesauce Tweeter Roger Ebert tweeted: “In auditioning for TV commercials, it’s a seller’s market for the ‘ethnically ambiguous’” and included a link to a commercial casting call where they specifically stated that all actors must be ethnically ambiguous. If you think about it, it makes sense. Rather than alienating entire groups of people who look at a person in a commercial and think, “Oh, they’re not like me, so this product isn’t for me,” it’s a lot smarter to cast people who look a little bit like everyone, and therefore you reach everyone.

Last March, Upfront, the the New York Times magazine for teens, printed a story called “The New Face of America,” which discusses the very issue of mixed-race and ethnically-ambiguous teens. The article reads: “The crop of students moving through college right now includes the largest group of mixed-race people ever to come of age in the United States, and they are only the vanguard: The country is in the midst of a demographic shift driven by both immigration and intermarriage.”

And way back in 1993, Time Magazine featured a cover with a computer-generated face of a woman — a face that was created using images of people of several different races (see photo). Like the Upfront article, the Time piece was also titled, “The New Face of America,” and talked about how the blurring of races is the future of America.

Well, people, the future is now. And I truly hope that more authors and publishers and whoever-it-is-who-decides-on-book-cover-images will start getting on board. Because just like advertising, if you include all sorts of people in your books, you will reach all sorts of readers.

Image credit: Time Magazine

Popularity: 12%

In honor of Black History Month this year, we’ve decided to discuss the topic of writing ethnicity. How do writers successfully or unsuccessfully write race or ethnicity in their works of fiction? How do we, personally, accomplish it as writers? Or do we avoid it?

This topic came up in workshop several times — the Korean character didn’t quite feel Korean enough, the black character didn’t feel black at all and just was housed in skin described as mocha brown, the white characters feel like cardboard characters, etc. We’d bring this point to the writer’s attention but have no real ways to help them fix it, except to say, “Why don’t you just make the character white?” or “Why don’t you use your racial or ethnic experience and write from that instead of writing white characters?”

The solutions to their problems never really solved the issue: How do you write a character that is outside your own ethnicity, racial group, religious affiliation, etc..? And more importantly, how do you do it well?

As an “ethnic” person, writing about “ethnicity” and “race” comes easy to me, I’d say (and pat myself on the back). Well, at least, writing from within my own racial and class identity and writing about the “majority” culture. Being a minority, I am well-versed in Euro-American popular culture, so I feel I can confidently write characters with this background. I was the smudge in every class from kindergarten through my first grad school program and it has given me knowledge and access to cultural information (I am happy to have lots of smudges in the New School Writing for Children program .

If I’m going to write something that touches on race, I start by mining my own experiences for kernels of truth and center my characters around those larger ideas/experiences. It’s my touchpoint from which I begin to give them their own identities separate from my own. With the legacy of people of color being invisible from the children’s book and teen book world, and white authors writing their stories, I can see how there is anxiety around this topic. Can writers successfully write outside of their own racial identity?

My answer is YES!

With the caveat that one has some sort of relationship with the group/ethnicity, and some sort of lens into it. If I want to write a book about a young girl from Papua New Guinea, I need to have some connection to the culture and the “ethnic sphere” the little girl would live in. You have to get it “right”, otherwise you’re not doing justice to the character or the group from which the character originates. As a person of color, there is nothing more irritating than seeing your experience on the page and the author not “getting it right”. Already there isn’t enough variety on the shelves, so for one of the few books featuring a minority character to not get it right, is deeply disappointing and enough to make one mad.

I hope writers continue to push themselves to write outside of their own cultural and religious background. It’s hard to get it right — but why not give it a chance? There are kids whose stories are never told, and that hardly seems fair.

If you always write the same types of characters — white, black, Asian, Hispanic, Arab, Jewish, Indian — is that all you can do? Do you have any other characters in your imagination?

A recent book that I discovered that accomplishes this well is Crow by Barbara Wright. Our friends at Amazon summarize it as, “The summer of 1898 is filled with ups and downs for 11-year-old Moses. He’s growing apart from his best friend, his superstitious Boo-Nanny butts heads constantly with his pragmatic, educated father, and his mother is reeling from the discovery of a family secret. Yet there are good times, too. He’s teaching his grandmother how to read. For the first time she’s sharing stories about her life as a slave.

And his father and his friends are finally getting the respect and positions of power they’ve earned in the Wilmington, North Carolina, community. But not everyone is happy with the political changes at play and some will do anything, including a violent plot against the government, to maintain the status quo.

One generation away from slavery, a thriving African American community—enfranchised and emancipated—suddenly and violently loses its freedom in turn of the century North Carolina when a group of local politicians stages the only successful coup d’etat in US history.”

After tearing through the wonderful book, I researched the author and discovered she was a white American lady who grew up in North Carolina (Well, perhaps I shouldn’t racialize her from her pictures alone since I have family members that look just like her but are black Americans). Anyways, check out the book. She writes ethnicity well — like she was some spy in my grandmother’s kitchen or something.

Photo Credit: Random House Books for Young Readers, Blue Mountain

Popularity: 21%

I meant to review this book back in October when it came out, but I got busy reading books for school and didn’t get around to reading it. So now it happens that it’s Black History Month! Score one for procrastination, because this is the perfect book to read this February.

Caleb’s Wars takes place during World War II, an era in African American history that I hadn’t read a lot about. It’s 1944, and fifteen-year-old Caleb lives in rural Georgia with his parents, a devoutly religious mother and a father who whips him. All his life, Caleb’s been taught that you can never say no to a white person. You have to pretend to be stupid, pretend to agree with everything they say, take any abuse, and never question the strict system of segregation and degradation. As summer begins, Caleb expresses his anger with acts of petty vandalism and fistfights. But there’s more going on in Caleb’s town than his own struggles. His brother is in the army and is about to be shipped out to Europe. Meanwhile, German prisoners of war are being kept in a nearby camp. When Caleb’s fights with his father lead him to take a job where he works side by side with a German prisoner, he begins to see that the prisoner may not be one of the Nazis he’s heard about. In fact, the prisoner is the only white person to respect Caleb’s humanity. Over the summer, Caleb grows in his views of the world around him and navigates relationships with his family and the white people who run the town.

Caleb’s Wars is a thoughtful exploration of the social dynamics of a segregated Southern town. It also explores the depths of the kind of racism that would cause white Americans to give more respect to German prisoners than to their own African American soldiers. That Dudley manages to do all this through the eyes of one teenager and without detracting from Caleb’s personal story is something special. I was right there with Caleb the whole time, and I never felt like I was being lectured to or told what to think. In fact, Dudley’s nuanced consideration of these issues was a big plus for me. My only criticism is that the book contains a religion-is-real subplot that detracts from the otherwise stellar historical journey. All in all, I highly recommend Caleb’s Wars for anyone interested in WWII or African American history.

Image courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

Popularity: 11%