Wednesday Book News: 5 Links for Your Morning Coffee Break (Blog edition!)
Good morning, book people! I’m in a rush this morning – critique group meeting starting any minute (yay!) – so just a quick roundup. I’ll be back with another edition of the Coffee Break on Friday!
The Happy Book Blog has a long but hopeful post about the survival of books in a digital age. It’s not pro e-book, but rather pro-reading/books/classics, a paean to stories well worth reading.
Over at The Book Smugglers, a review of the YA fantasy, The False Princess, by Eilis O’Neal. Go read it, though this sums it up nicely: “…although Eilis O’Neal’s debut novel plays with well-worn tropes, The False Princess is a delightful and engrossing story that executes these familiar elements beautifully.”
At The Shatzkin Files, Mike Shatzkin has an excellent post on Random House adopting the agency model (Random House UK, however, is not) and what that could mean. And here’s the WSJ‘s Jeffrey Trachtenberg with more, including a couple of comments from RH.
Cory Doctorow has a fan written alternate ending for his YA, Little Brother, up on Craphound. I love the idea of not just writing a new ending, but having an excerpt featured by the author, too! This might be great competition fodder when my novel gets published!
A little old in internet time, but YA Highway has a guest post by Nicola K. Richardson, on writing race in YA. This is an Excellent Post. Everyone–regardless of whether you write about race or not–should read it. To finish up, here’s a quote, the kind that should be plastered in writing centers and above desks and across hearts:
When writing characters of a different race than your own, readers can tell the real from the racist, okay? We know. Some may say that you cannot feel racism. When you’ve spent a lifetime dealing with it, you can most certainly detect it. Your personal beliefs and thoughts almost always bleed into your writing and if you have any misconceptions or stereotypes about any race, don’t write about them, because it will seen. Instead,t hink about why you feel or think that way. Work through it. Take a hard look at yourself and ask some very tough questions. If you can’t do this, leave diversity alone.
For me, writing about other races and culture is always about the two R’s: Respect and Research. That applies for me as a black woman writing about a Russian character just as much as it does for a white person writing about an Asian character. No, you can’t just assemble a character of color and toss them in a book. They aren’t white and their cultural experiences are vastly different.
I’ll be back later with thoughts on the YA I’m reading right now, Beautiful Creatures.
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