Dangerous Jam

I am currently enrolled in an expensive graduate program at Antioch University, to get an MA in clinical psychology with a specialty in Trauma. I intend to become a psychotherapist specializing in survivors of trauma, such as child abuse, domestic violence, war, serious accidents or illness, secondary trauma (such as police, war reporters, even trauma therapists), and so forth.

This degree will enable me to help others, and have a satisfying career for myself. It may enable me to write books on the subject. While I am in school, I have been honing my skills and amusing you by diagnosing fictional characters.

If you would like to help support me in all or any of those endeavors, I have put up this "donate" button.

Note: This is a list of all novels which fit the criteria listed below. It does not express opinions on the quality, authenticity, or positivity of the portrayals of the characters in the books. Please use your own judgment in deciding which books you wish to read or buy.

I have not read all these books! My commentary on the ones I have read reflects my opinions on the books as literature. Title links go to Amazon, and some descriptions were taken from Amazon.

These were the criteria used to compile the list: 1) The book must be science fiction or fantasy or otherwise not realism, and must have been published, either originally or in reprint, as YA in the USA, 2) The character of color/non-white character must either be the protagonist, if it’s a book with a solo protagonist, or one of an ensemble, if it’s a book with multiple protagonists.

This is not an exhaustive list! It is still being added to, and will continue to be as new books come out. Please let me know if I missed something. Also see Stacy Whitman's list, which includes more middle-grade books (for younger children) than I did. (I’ve included a few MG books I thought were edging into YA territory – subjective, I know!)

I have not always specified the protagonist's race. In some cases, the book was suggested by someone else and I don't know; in others, the characters are described in ways which would be considered non-white on our world, but come from a world in which our racial categories don't apply. I have generally not specified the race of the authors, because this list focuses on characters. Also, in many cases, I don't know how the authors identify. This list is intended merely as a starting point. If you wish to have more information before reading a book, further research should turn it up.

( Click to read the list! )

Sort of. I still have a paper and a half left to write. And I won't officially graduate (and so have to continue paying fees) for another six months, during which I have to attend one hour every other week of case discussion, due to the traineeship situation.

But in terms of classes, as of yesterday at 10:00 PM, I am officially DONE!

Kindle is having a huge book sale, with many tempting items at $1.99 - $2.99. This includes multiple books by specific authors, like Barbara Hambly, Elizabeth Wein, Octavia Butler, Virginia Hamilton, Kate Elliott, Jonathan Carroll, and Mary Renault.

A few obscure books I wanted to mention are...

The Winter Prince, by Elizabeth Wein, one of my two favorite King Arthur novels. (The other is The Once and Future King.) Wein's is short and intense, narrated by Medraut (Mordred). In this version, there is no Lancelot and Arthur has two legitimate children, a son and a daughter; this makes it read very differently from other versions.

Dragonsbane, by Barbara Hambly. Beautiful fantasy novel about a middle-aged woman who once slew a dragon, who gets called out of retirement. Great concept, great characterization. This is a stand-alone novel with a terrific ending. Many years later, Hambly wrote some sequels. DO NOT READ THEM.

The Darwath Series: The Time of the Dark, The Walls of Air, and The Armies of Daylight, by Barbara Hambly. Portal fantasy! Very good portal fantasy, with vivid characters, excellent martial arts sequences, and a heroine whose research skills, learned while she was getting a degree in medieval history, come surprisingly in handy. This trilogy is complete in itself. There are sequels but I don't really recommend them.

A number of Hambly's books are on sale today, and I rec them all with the caveat to avoid belated sequels to stand-alones and trilogies. I especially adore The Ladies of Mandrigyn (the sequels are OK but not as good) and The Silent Tower/The Silicon Mage (ditto).

The Velvet Room, by Zilpha Keatley Snyder. A children's book in the "secret garden" mold, about a lonely girl who finds a secret room in a big house. Not fantasy, but definitely has a numinous feel. A number of her books are on sale today. I snapped up one I never even heard of before, Season of Ponies
, in which a girl gets a magical amulet which summons a herd of rainbow-colored ponies. All I can say is, my inner eleven-year-old is still alive and well and wants a herd of rainbow-colored ponies. Also a fire lizard.

Several good and obscure Jane Yolen books are on sale for $1.99. Cards of Grief is a poetic science fantasy novel about a planet whose art and culture revolves around grieving, seen partly through the perspective of its inhabitants and partly through the eyes of a perplexed space explorer. It's strange in a good way. Also Dragonfield: and Other Stories, short stories, mostly excellent.

Sorcery & Cecelia: or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot (The Cecelia and Kate Novels) and sequels, charming epistolatory Regency romance with magic.

Wild Seed , by Octavia Butler. Stand-alone fantasy/sf set in Africa, my favorite (and least depressing) of her novels. Two immortal mutants match wits through the years, a woman shapeshifter and a man who jumps into a new body when his old one dies, killing his host whether he wants to or not.

A Passage of Stars (The Highroad Trilogy). Space opera by Kate Elliott, whose existence I somehow failed to know of before.

I have never read anything by Mary Renault, though I keep meaning to. If you could rec one or two of her books to me, which should it be and why?

This is the sequel to Malinda Lo’s Adaptation. The entire premise of Inheritance is a spoiler for Adaptation, so all I will say outside of the cut is that I enjoyed the sequel. Below the cut are huge spoilers for both books.

( Read more... )

Inheritance

In a post-apocalyptic Brazil ruled by a council of Aunties, a teenage Summer King is elected once a year. For one year, he is famous, feted, and given anything he wants, not to mention having a limited amount of actual power. At the end of the year, he is ceremonially executed.

There is an in-story reason for this which readers may or may not find plausible, but I do find it completely believable that a fair number of teenagers would compete to be king for a year: live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse. In fact, one of the most notable aspects of the novel was how convincingly teenage the teenagers are: idealistic and self-centered, impulsive and passionate, equally and alternately obsessed with sex and death, fashion trends and the meaning of art, hot celebrities and best friends.

June is a teenage graffiti artist whose best friend, Gil, falls for Enki, the glamorous, newly elected Summer King. Reluctantly, because she doesn’t want to screw up her friendship, she also develops a crush on the beautiful and doomed Enki. It turns out that June and Enki have quite a bit in common, and begin collaborating on dangerous, radical, guerilla art projects!

This novel has gotten a lot of positive press, but the rave reviews I read for it actually put me off reading it. The book was so highly praised for its politics that I got the impression that it was nothing but politics: worthy but dull, as if it should be consumed solely for its nutritional value. I didn’t read it until I was on the plane for Sirens, where Alaya was a Guest of Honor. So I was pleasantly surprised by how completely enthralled I was — and by how fun and even id-tastic it was!

Regarding id-tastic, let’s start with Enki, the object of desire. He is beautiful and doomed. He’s self-destructive, hot, a revolutionary, a dancer, and a king. He has connected himself to the city via illegal nanotech, so if something goes wrong with the city, he feels its pain and dramatically faints. If this is the sort of thing you like – and I am not ashamed to say that is the sort of thing I like – you will like this book.

The future!Brazil setting is vivid, the science fiction details are cool, there’s lots of sense of wonder, the love triangle didn’t make me want to tear my hair out, the plot moves fast, the characters are genuinely diverse, the hero has his nervous system wired into the city, and the heroine is a guerilla graffiti artist.

It’s got dark and serious aspects, but overall, it’s fun to read. This is not an “eat your broccoli” book. It’s a fruit tart with real fruit (so you’ll get your vitamin C) but the crust is made with butter, and there’s whipped cream on top.

The Summer Prince

It's my birthday! I expect next year to be great. Especially since I will be done with school (well, at least done with classes - I can't technically graduate for another six months) in December.

My 20s were a big improvement on my teens, and my 30s were a HUGE improvement on my 20s. I hope and expect my 40s to be even more awesome.

One friend gave me a box of assorted macaroons, and another took to me the Lazy Ox Canteen, where we split a bottle of white house wine, an appetizer of caramelized cauliflower with lime and pine nuts (I'm not usually that big on cauliflower, but we'd had that before there and it was great), and the two best desserts in LA: Lazy Ox rice pudding with whipped cream and no raisins (the Devil's work) and butterscotch pudding with caramel sauce and sea salt. For an entree, she had pumpkin gnocchi with asparagus. I had suckling pig with barbecue sauce, rice pilaf, mashed potatoes, and cole slaw. The pig came with a giant sheet of crispy crackling.

Today I'm on crisis call and also have a paper to write, but I mean to take at least a little time to curl up with my macaroons and The House of Hades (Heroes of Olympus, Book 4). I will also be doing catch-up celebrations intermittently all week.

For a birthday gift, please comment with something you think I'd enjoy: a snarky review, a recommendation, a description of a delicious meal or cooking disaster, a pretty picture, a poem, an amusing anecdote, etc.

Sherwood and I were invited to write a short story for the anthology Kaleidoscope, which is having a kickstarter. It will be an anthology of fantasy stories with diverse protagonists - fun ones, not Very Special Episodes solely about how much it sucks to be oppressed.

Here's the kickstarter!

We were also invited to write a post on an issue of diversity in fiction. Here it is! I have reprinted it below. Please comment here or there.

If you recall my post on genre novels with Jewish protagonists which are in some sense escapist or fun, and not about being oppressed, it got a large number of comments. However, most comments either recced the same books over and over, or else recced works which did not meet the qualifications I originally set out. The number of fun books with Jewish protagonists is, in fact, extremely small. That and related issues inspired our post below.

Who Gets To Escape?

by Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith

I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories . . . Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using Escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter.

J. R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories,” from The Tolkien Reader, Ballantine Books, 1966.

Escapist storytelling has been with us even before Homer and his audience sat around the fire spinning tales. The human soul needs both serious works and books that are purely intended to entertain. But even nowadays, escapism is allowed only to certain groups.

While it is not difficult to find excellent novels about homophobia and coming out, it is much harder to find books in which, for example, a teenage, Hispanic lesbian discovers that she has inherited magical powers—a plot trope for which hundreds, if not thousands, of books exist for straight, white heroines. You can substitute any social minority in American society, and similar issues apply. If you’re not part of the ruling class, you don’t get to escape. (This essay focuses primarily on American books because that is what we’re most familiar with.)

Serious literature focusing on social and individual problems is good and necessary. But it should not be the only type of reading that’s available.

* * *

Rachel: I’m Jewish. It is almost impossible to find Jewish protagonists in my favorite escapist genres. I can literally name to you the titles of every book ever published by a major publisher in America, with a Jewish protagonist, in the genres of fantasy, science fiction, adventure, and romance. Those are all genres which are commonly considered escapist. In young adult, children’s, and adult mainstream fiction—all genres which are not inherently “escapist”—there are far more Jews, but, almost inevitably, they only inhabit novels on serious subjects like anti-Semitism or the Holocaust.

When the only fiction you can read about people like yourself is exclusively concerned with how hard it is to be an oppressed minority, it sends a number of subtly toxic messages: you don’t belong here; people like you are not allowed to have fun; if you want to escape, you can only do it by imagining yourself into a gentile identity.

Sherwood: When I was a kid in the 50s and 60s, it was very difficult to find stories whose kid heroes did not reinforce the majority status quo. I didn’t think about that. I just accepted that adventuring kids were pretty much like me. The first heroine not like me that I recollect loving passionately was Mara in Mara, Daughter of the Nile. Now there was a heroine to root for! She didn’t look like me, but I wanted to be like her.

The only way to find stories about people who were not me was in travel books or historical novels, like Mara. But when it came to cool adventures and magic, everybody was literally, or at least implied, a WASP. People who didn’t fit that mold were either caricatures, or singled out to stand on the sidelines cheering. Sometimes both.

Now, there are wonderful choices to be found for young readers, which please the kid in me, but you know what I can’t find? Escapism for old women. When they show up in stories, they are figures of derision, helpless, boring, unsexed.

* * *

Now that both of us have discussed our individual identities, we’d like to talk about one we have in common. We are both women. There have been many arguments about the tendency of women in epic fantasy novels to be portrayed solely as powerless victims, to be raped and sometimes murdered to motivate the hero or demonstrate to the reader that the world of the book is gritty and “real.” Those in favor of such portrayals argue that such portrayals are realistic—in medieval times, the average woman was powerless and often raped and murdered—and that realism is a literary virtue.

Leaving aside the dubious historicity of such arguments, it is only female characters whose portrayals must be “realistic” and must reflect the experiences of an average woman. The average man in a medieval setting would have been a powerless peasant or craftsman who never left his village or had adventures.

But the male heroes of fantasy novels are not average people, and do not have average lives. They are not merely the heroes of the genre of fantasy, but heroes of fantasies—heroes of escapist imagination. They have special powers, secret royal heritage, astounding fighting skills, or magical talent. If they truly are ordinary in themselves, they are thrust into extraordinary circumstances and rise to the occasion.

Aragorn, Kvothe, and Jon Snow are not representative of the average straight white man. They are intended as fantasy figures. But in countries where straight white men hold the power, only their fantasy figures are common, respected, and hold iconic status.

These male heroes were not written to be average examples of their demographic, and we’ve never seen anyone make the argument that they should be. But that argument is applied to female characters constantly, to make the case that they should be average and demographically representative. It is a case for denying women escapism while lavishing it on men.

I had a lovely time at Sirens, and will try to get up a few more sets of panel notes. I hope that anyone who attended will also write panel notes, trip reports, etc.

I had a room with a gorgeous view of fields and trees and mountains and clouds caught on the mountain slopes, which I shared with Shveta Thakrar, K. Tempest Bradford, and Rosamond Hodge. Thanks to my roomies for making the whole experience even more awesome! I even got to snag an ARC of Rosamond's first novel, Cruel Beauty, which I am excited to read.

Probably my biggest "crossing the streams" experience was when I fangirled over Sara Empress of the World Ryan, and she said that she knew who I was. I assumed she'd either come across Yes Gay YA or my blog. Instead, she said, "You wrote "No Reservations: Narnia!""

Shveta and I did a presentation with slides and stories on the heroines of Indian comic books, and raffled off a comic, which was won by Joy Kim. It has a flying warrior with exploding feet on the cover.

There were great panels and discussions. In the guest of honor keynotes, Ellen Kushner sang traditional ballads, Alaya Dawn Johnson rhapsodized over hot springs, Robin LaFevers gave a fiery feminist speech, and Guadalupe Garcia McCall had the room alternating between howls of laughter and tears. (She also accidentally said "thirty sweaty balls," when she meant "thirty sweaty boys," which was definitely my favorite malaprop of the weekend.)

...and then my flight got delayed for five hours, and I caught a cold. But it's OK: I took the time to catch up on all my school reading. Why did I get stuck with all the psychoanalytic classes in my last quarter?

Gwyniera reports on the Georgette Heyer panel.

Sara Ryan reports on the whole experience.

The theme for next year is "hauntings." Who's coming?

I'm thinking of proposing panels on sex scenes in fantasy (probably not actually titled "I Tripped and Fell on his Dick") and portal fantasy (probably not actually titled "Surprisingly Controversial!"). If Guadalupe can come back, I'd also like to do something on fantasy/sf in the southwest.

I am attending Sirens, a conference on women in fantasy. For the benefit of anyone who wishes they were there or just is curious, I'm trying to write up some panel notes.

Cora Anderson did a presentation on Robin McKinley's use of "Beauty and the Beast," most obviously in her straight-up retellings Beauty and Rose Daughter, but also in Chalice, "Touk's House," "Buttercups," and arguably Sunshine.

She said that many similar tales, of women promised to monsters and animals, exist in many cultures, but she's primarily discussing the European versions which McKinley was drawing on. Earlier precursors include "Cupid and Psyche" and "East of the Sun, West of the Moon," in which a girl is wedded to a polar bear!

She discussed and showed slides from various versions of the original fairy-tale, depicting the Beast as everything from a ridiculous-looking sad boxer dog to a giant clothed badger to Disney and Cocteau's sexy beast. The original fairy-tail "Beauty and the Beast," by Madame Villeneuve, has a beast who was cursed to not only be ugly, but also stupid and mean. Halfway through the story, the curse breaks and he is transformed... but then the story continues, featuring a fairy war, a country of shepherds, and Beauty discovering that she was switched at birth! I am now curious to read this.

In subsequent versions, only the first part of the Villeneuve story was picked up. They tend to either have Beauty be shallow and the Beast be a decent person, so the story is about Beauty needing to change and learn to see past surface appearances, or else Beauty is great and the Beast is a jerk (or feral, or crude, etc) and the story is about him changing.

Robin McKinley doesn't take either route. Her characters are usually good people from the get-go, and her Beauty retellings (especially the first) have very little overt conflict. And yet they're enthralling (especially the first). They often have a lot of focus on mundane details, like gardening or baking. Cora said that they are not about individuals changing and learning to be better people, but about the process of falling in love and creating a relationship. Growing a garden or tending a beehive is a metaphor for that process: something new and beautiful is being made.

I suggested that stories don't necessarily need conflict, and that process - showing something being made - can be substituted. Nonfiction is often about process rather than conflict.

I also suggested that the reason Sunshine feels odd in this context is that both Con and Sunshine embody both Beauty and Beast. Con is the Beast because he's inhuman and frightening. But Sunshine is also the Beast because she think's she a monster, (in Cora's words) an unexploded thermonuclear device that could kill everyone she loves at any moment. She takes the role of the Beast dying and being healed by Beauty's love when Con saves her from dying of a poisoned wound by giving her some of his blood.

There was then some ribald discussion of the fact that while it's a joke to say, "I tripped while I was naked and fell on his dick," this literally happens in Sunshine.

Andrea Horbinsky, in a more serious context, then mentioned that Chalice is "the first honey chalice." I womanfully refrained from saying, "That's a nice euphemism!"

Cora said that McKinley really downplays the lack of consent/forced marriage, and dispenses with it altogether in several stories.

Shveta Thakrar said she'd like to see a story which explores the darker aspect of the fairy tale - the Stockholm syndrome and kidnapping - where Beauty does not get together with the Beast.

I suggested that people who wanted to tell that story typically use "Bluebeard," which is a very similar story in which the Beast really is a monster, and his wife either dies at his hand, kills him, or escapes him.

Another audience member mentioned that in Beauty, the country and castle are a place where people can be free from stifling social norms and express their true selves.

Discussion of how many readers like the Beast as a Beast, and are disappointed when he turns into a bland prince. The Beast was the one they fell in love with. Possibly apocryphal tale of Marlene Dietrich crying out at a showing of the Cocteau film, "Give me back my Beast!"