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I love that TWITTER cut your post so that I thought it read, at the end, "trying to disco"???

Which I would love to read your advice about, too...

Thanks, meanwhile for these great links!

Love,
Rachel Vail

Yes, I thought there was going to be something about the disconnect between up-to-date lists and a YA novel titled "Trying to disco." (lol)

Ooh, great links. Thank you!

I love your blog, by the way. I don't think I've ever said that yet.

Good grief--Katherine Paterson's still writing? She must be close to 80 by now. What's she like? Did she speak?
If so, did she address any concerns she had about being KNP writing about Albanian Muslims?

I'd be interested to hear what you have to say about the book--but if you don't want to go public with an opinion that's fine!

Very cool ... what a memorable day. The weather looks pretty fab, too!

Au contraire, Anne, that's Katherine in the photo to the far left of Roger Sutton, and she's hale, hearty, and full of creativity and joy. Will be reading the book shortly. Thanks for stopping by, and a warm welcome also to ReadingTub.

Wow -- I wouldn't be asking why I was invited either! (Although now that I've said that, I wonder if someone equated South Asian with Muslim... okay, forget I said that.) Looking forward to your review.

Very well said, Mitali.

Oh, Mitali. I love reading your stuff. What a great brain you have (and heart). Please excuse the gushing.

That's a tricky question for an individual author, isn't it, because "going against the tide" is a good thing or perhaps not such a good thing depending on the tide. One materialistic novel (or one novel with only poor white characters, or only boys, or only anything) is just one, and might be what the author is good at writing about. Is it the author's responsibility to respond/react to what other authors are publishing?

Not that I disagree with you in the least. This is a huge issue with my preteen son, who has just started at a private school and is confronted with an even higher level of "stuff" (iPod, iPhone, laptop) he doesn't have (and isn't getting).

I hope more readers and authors will consider the question of stuff -- do their characters have to have it in order to be both contemporary AND authentic?

Excellent post, and definitely a subject that has been on my mind.

Stand for something or fall for anything.

I sometimes feel for my sibs, whose friends have iPhones and iPods and Xboxes and Wii -- and they don't. And yet, it's not the end of the world if you don't have these things, and I'd love for YA fiction to be able to readily acknowledge that, instead of dropping jeans brands and cars and makeup into casual storytelling.

At the same time, TV gives a very distorted view; it only shows one segment of society. Sometimes I see a fad or celebrity or product mentioned a zillion times on TV and online, but when I mention it to a real live 3-D person, they've never heard of it. Not everyone is plugged in, and even if they are, they might only visit a couple of websites or watch one or two channels.

We have so many subcultures: Kids who are training to be dancers or athletes and spend most of their time in the gym. Kids who live on farms. Kids who live in very religious communities and spend much of their time at church or with church friends. Kids who go camping and hiking and fishing. Kids who live near the ocean and whose reality is heavily scented with the sea. Etc.

My husband and I met a teenage girl waiting tables in a small town in Utah whose cherished dream was to go to a folk-music festival. (It came up b/c my husband was wearing a souvenir T-shirt from one.) Her love was not a fancy car or designer clothes, but folk music.

Great interview. And those are some serious words of wisdom, indeed! Glad that Paula leads by example.

Great interview. Congrats, Paula!

Good words of advice about not allowing anyone to box you in. Paula sounds like a flexible writer who will continue to write intriguing novels by allowing her characters to just be who they are.

Thanks for the kind words everyone.

@Tanita: Even though it scares me sometimes, when the voices aren't speaking loud enough, I find the only way I can write is when I'm writing from within. I used to worry that one day they'd stop talking but now I realize some days I'm simply more receptive to hearing them than other days.

Oh, I really wish I could go!! I'm a little far away here on the West coast. :) But I've got Skunk Girl on request at the library, at least.

I wish I could ake it!! It's so close yet so far!! Ugh. That's so sad. :-(

I wanted to let you know that I'm with your agency, Mitali! I hope for good stuff in the future. :-)

<3Nisha

Shine Coconut Moon and Skunk Girl are great books. Only $5, that is a serious bargain.

What a great experience! And I love that a book can inspire someone to do that. thanks for the book list; I'll have to check some of those out.

Your blog inspired my blog today, which I linked back to you here. |:~)
Thanks.

Great list! Thanks.

That's so wonderful! Talk about the best impromptu bake sale stop ever!!

That's so great! It's awesome to hear when the work you do makes a difference in someone's life, especially when it'll cascade into making a difference for more people.

Yes, that never happens to me, so it was a delicious suprise (in more ways than one :)) Very touching experience, and meant more to me than professional reviews, Amazon sales rankings, etc. etc.

What a great story. Thanks for the titles.

what a cool experience! and fantastic list, thank you

The character also talks about having close-cropped hair. Liz has a theory that almost everything the girl says is a lie, including her appearance - in which case the cover would be a tip-off. If it's not part of the ruse, than it is a truly wrong cover. It's lovely, but wrong.

Weird--to me the cover model looks part Asian. Still not even close, though, eh? :)

I'm actually really sick of the trend of using random stock photos of teens for just about every YA book cover--especially facial close-ups. What happened to using artists??

And how many readers are going to respond that they are colorblind, made no connection to race whatsoever? ((sigh))

I loved your question yesterday & went back to the book to think about how race & class were portrayed. Your posts - this one and so many others - have made me a more mindful writer when it comes to race. Thanks for that, Mitali!

Let's go! I'll play Kat, you consult, and we'll make everything spot-on to match the book AND make readers/viewers more aware. :)

I haven't read it yet (I know! It sits on my shelf, taunting me), but I have little faith in film makers when it comes to casting. Remember SciFi channel's recent remake of A Wizard of Earthsea? And the casting of Avatar: The Last Airbender just infuriates me. Here we have an awesome, popular cartoon that kids all over the nation (and in other countries) love, with an Inuit-looking brother and sister, an Asian-looking firebending family, and I'm not sure what Aang's background might correlate to--and all the kids cast as the four main characters are white. One kid (the one playing Zuko) said he'll "have to get a tan." I was really looking forward to the live-action movie; guess I'll just rewatch the anime.

But all this talk of the Hunger Games movie and Catching Fire has got me thinking maybe that should move to the top of the TBR pile!

Interesting. I read it quite a while ago and didn't remember specific descriptions of character (and the book is ALWAYS out of the library so no hope of re-reading), though vaguely remember liking that Katniss wasn't pale & blond. I'm wondering how Collins described the powerful people in the capital region? Were they homogeonous or a mix? Gah. My memory has completely failed me.

this is SO fascinating. i haven't read HUNGER GAMES, so i'm not commenting on that specific book. but one of my biggest problems with mainstream YA right now is how fall-back white it is, and i think it's really important that authors (and editors!!!!) think a little bit more about innocently intended coloring decisions.

I would love a map of Panem and the districts. My reading is that this is the US way, way in the future so the question arises, which districts are which parts of the US? Katniss's district is coal, so that could be Apppalachia. Where is the capital? And then how does that affect the questions you raise?

Appreciate your comments. We could have an entirely different discussion about gender, romance, and sex in fantasy and dystopian novels. Don't get me started.

Mitali,

Have you read any Octavia Butler? She's does an excellent job of tossing gender, sex and races and moral on their heads. She wrote speculative fiction/science fiction. Adult but her Parable series is read by many YA readers.

The issues you raise are obvious to you when you read because they are important to you as they are too me. I think many readers have no sense of what it means to be marginalized and invisible to the society-at-large.

This may ruffle a few feathers but there's the saying, "When you're white, you don't think about it. When you're black, you never forget it."

I never watched the show Friends. How the heck do you have a show set in New York, the mostly densely, multi-ethnic city in the US and not have any brown people? As a diversity advocate, I can't not be aware of the absence of color in literature, film or media- any public medium that is suppose to reflect society as a whole.

I didn't pick up on the race cues as much as the area cues. Liz, the books says specifically it's Appalacia. So my daughter and I started thinking of the different districts and where they might fall - and then how would that effect race. I thought of District 11 in the South, with maybe an African American heritage. We know that the train ride to the Capital took a long time, so I'm thinking Califonia? (Fits in with the weird changing looks thing.) I didn't think about it being divided by race.

It has been awhile since I read Hunger Games, but I think the capitol is somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. I believe it was mentioned.

I was very aware of race and class while reading HG, I think Collins intensified the racial and class struggle in Catching Fire. It has been a long time since reading Gregor the Overlander, but I think she did something similar there in the struggles in the Underland and the relationship of the Overland and the Underland.

Casting for the movie will be very interesting, indeed.

For some reason I was certain that the Capital was in Colorado, but I haven't got the book in front of me to see why.

When I was reading, I was sort of intrigued by my own frustration at being unable to place characters as being particular races. I don't know how I would have pictured them if there had been no physical descriptions. I think I felt like Collins might be giving me clues about the backgrounds of these characters that I wasn't quite picking up on. I also feel like my eventual reading of Thresh as African American might have influenced the way I responded to him. (I'd have to reread the book to expand on that.)

Along with my mild discomfort (which I think was good for me), I think I was intrigued about the race question because that has always been SUCH a big deal on reality TV, and I was sure Collins wouldn't leave out something so important. I'm just not sure yet what kind of commentary she might be making.

Mhm. I haven't read this one yet only because it gives me the heebie jeebies thinking about it, but now I might pick it up just to check out the references to race etc.

Thanks, Mitali!

<3Nisha

Hi Mitali,

Great post. As an Asian American, I'm always interested in how race, caste, and class are explored and used in literature. I've recently been in discussion with several minority YA authors about wanting more minority characters in the still heavily white YA lit world whose race or ethnicity doesn't completely define them. We find many books about how minority characters try to overcome their difficult racial position, but why is it that we don't have more characters who simply have a race, have an ethnicity, or any other important characteristic, and whose story doesn't have to revolve around finding his or her identity?

One thing that comes to mind as an interesting use of race in a "non-issue" manner is Harry Potter. The Hogwarts students are of many different races and ethnicities, and yes, occasionally conflict occurs as a result of the color of the students' skin, but ultimately, Harry Potter is not about how these characters learn to carve an identity for themselves out of the minority and majority. I agree that racial diversity should be better integrated and, for lack of a better word, employed in YA literature. I'm hoping that the new wave of powerful authors will do so. After all, GLBT lit featuring GLBT protagonists are making a huge rise recently (Ash by Malinda Lo, Sprout by Dale Peck, The Vast Fields of Ordinary by Nick Burd, any of David Levithan's books), so I have hope for this yet.

You know, when I read the book I didn't think they were any special race. My daughter thinks that each district had separate races...

I know it's canon that Katniss and Gale have olive skin, dark hair and gray eyes, and that Peeta is blond (so he's probably white). It's also canon that people in the Capitol have a thing for changing the color of their skin and hair, so I don't know if they really have a concept of race. Everyone else I pictured as different colors and shapes and sizes. Rue, for example, appeared in my mind as Latina. But of course, all of this is assuming that there ARE distinct races in Panem...

I'm re-reading The Hunger Games right now so it's funny you mention this. In Chapter 5, Venia has dyed her skin "pea green" and others in the Capitol seem to also experiment with different colors. I only got that Rue and Thresh had brown skin. I just assumed by the descriptions that Katniss, Gale and others were not characters of color. Interested to see what others think.

Even if race is not specified, by your descriptions the reader gets a sense of a caste/class system.There are distinctions in characteristics and those characteristics correspond with a divison of caste by race. It is irrelevant if race mirrors our own hues. The fact is by characteristic, people are grouped.

When I read Brave New World the caste and race divisions were very clear, and I winced at the usage of the word savage. I wasn't taught this novel in school so I wondered if students are taught what the Savage represented and why a minority student would be offended. I had to consciously remind myself to put the novel in historical context. I wondered if student readers consciously pick up on the racism and classism in the novel. I wonder, too, if they question if Huxley agreed or was critiqing the social order.

A. I read a good amount of manga, so this pick may be cheating, but I just read Very Very Sweet vol. 1-2 by Ji-Sang Shin and Geo. It's a Korean comic (manhwa) about a spoiled young Japanese man who is forced by his grandfather to move to Korea to "get in touch with his roots." While it is full of silliness, the book does have a lot of cultural details which, not being of either Japanese or Korean ancestry, I found fascinating. I also liked that the creators wanted to do a comic about being a stranger in a strange land, even in a light, silly romance.

B. Claudette Colvin: Twice Towards Justice by Philip Hoose--Even though my grandfather helped work with the Civil Rights Movement in Georgia (he was friends with Dr. King's father), my relatives further back did own slaves and would have been shocked that I would want to read about such an admirable young woman. But they would have also been shocked by my co-workers, friends, and our current president, so that's good too.

A. I just read SECRET KEEPER ;). Though Asha and I share a cultural identity, she was born in India and I was born in the USA.

B. I also finished SKUNK GIRL, which features a Pakistani-American protagonist.

a) My YA reading has been very US-centric lately, so the most recent book about a protagonist from a different country is Sarah MacLean's The Season, which really doesn't count. I'll go for Donna Jo Napoli's Alligator Bayou, where the protagonist is a Sicilian immigrant.

b) Some of my relatives (and I don't have to go back a hundred years for this, sadly) would be pretty put out if I were to marry Sam from Kekla Magoon's The Rock and the River.

For A I'm going to go with a manga too, Fumiyo Kouno's Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms, which is set in Hiroshima in the 1950s, 1980s, and 2000s.

I thought B was harder, until I realized a hundred years ago my relatives would have been horrified, and maybe disowned me entirely, for marrying someone not Jewish--which like you for A, leaves open most but not quite all of the novels set in our world that I've read. (Come to think of it, maybe they'd have been horrified if I married non-Jews from other fantasy worlds, too, even if we were the only Jews in that entire world ...)

Mitali, have to write here because twitter won't let me direct message you if you aren't following me...and I just wanted to say this? Sometimes revisions are telling you something you need to know...but the timing can stink....! Try this: reread the "different direction" section and see if you think it is another, equally good or even better book trying to emerge too early....sometimes that happens to me. If so....promise the idea its own book...later...and revise this one first.

A- Gringolandia by Lyn Miller -Lachmann. I haven't read it yet but its high in the queue. The main character Daniel is from Chile.
B- Thats easy, any White Male lead. Since I just started reading Cabot's Being Nikki, I'll say Brandon Stark.

Well...I did read SECRET KEEPER lately. :)

And we are reading RED GLASS over at readergirlz. Beautiful book!

Then I went and married someone who might fit that ancestor-not-so-lovin' description (but then they'd meet him and fall head over heels, just like I did). Oh, books...how about PERSEPOLIS. Wonderful read!

I'll do 3 for A:
SASS: The Great Call of China, by Cynthea Liu
Does My Head Look Big in This?, by Randa Abdel-Fattah
Climbing the Stairs, by Padma Venkatraman

a) Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golder
b)She's So Money by Cherry Cheva

a) if grownups books don't count, then I have to go with Secret Keeper, too.

b) Luther from Bucking the Sarge. It's hard to say what my ancestors would have objected to (Serbs, probably), but I can't resist any opportunity to plug that book.

I love you guys.

a) It's not a novel, but I loved Afghan Dreams: Young Voices of Afghanistan by Tony O'Brien and Michael P. Sullivan.

b) I don't have to go back anywhere near 100 years, as the main character's best friend comes out to him: Two Parties, One Tux, and a Very Short Film about The Grapes of Wrath by Steven Goldman.

Thanks for posting these-very interesting!