After Tupac and D Foster

[owlectomy]

Brain and fingers are still runing at half speed, but for IBARW I wanted to write about some books by and about people of color -- especially in the wake of the controversy about the US cover to Justine Larbalestier's book Liar.

After Tupac and D Foster, by Jacqueline Woodson, is one of those quiet quiet books where almost nothing happens, and then suddenly I find myself in tears in the laundromat. Neeka and the unnamed narrator are best friends, eleven years old, living in Queens -- not allowed to go past the end of the block on their own. And then D shows up in their lives: D, a foster kid with an unpredictable, alcoholic mother. D never had what both Neeka and the narrator have: security, a stable and loving home. But what she does have -- the freedom to roam around the city -- seems more alluring to a girl on the cusp of adolescence. The girls want to find their purpose, to make a difference in the world. But the dangers of the world outside seem about to burst in: Tupac, who the girls adore, is shot; Neeka's gay older brother Tash is in jail for a crime he didn't commit. Their mothers aren't paranoid or overprotective. They're dealing with the realities of a world that an eleven-year-old girl should be spared from. They live in a dangerous world, dangerous despite their caring families, just because they are black.

And yet, there's this one beautifully transcendent moment when D sneaks the girls off their block and onto a bus, and they go to the park at night, in the snow, and make snow angels.

I've seen a number of op-eds lately about how we used to let kids run around catching frogs and getting muddy, and now we don't. Sure, there's truth in that. But there's some privilege in it too.

I want these girls to keep on taking steps away from their block. I want them to make snow angels in the dark, and to grow up and find their purpose. And at the same time I wish they could just stay in that bubble of time before D's mother comes back, before Tupac gets killed.

The loveliness and the sadness of the book is that you can't have both.

Comments

[jinian.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the lovely review. I've added it on the IBARW Delicious account.

[diceytillerman.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the tip. I've not read this one yet but I love Jacqueline Woodson. (as obvs from icon)

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

Well, my basic thinking with regards to the marketing stuff is that, it's my job to write the book. That's what they hired me to do. They hire cover design people and marketing people because those people, IN THEORY, know more about those things than I do. I could not sell popsicles in summer during a heat wave. Let other people do it.

I think that authors can be REALLY off the mark sometimes when it comes to the iconography and visual language of covers.

I also think that the job of a book cover is to tell you what kind of book it is and to catch your eye in the store, not to accurately represent any one specific thing about the book. Oh, it's a literary-ish YA novel, or an angsty fantasy, or the kind of book that would go over well at book club. Authors can overlook that at times.

But that can't be an excuse for being discriminatory about what publishers think will and won't sell. Because even if they are right, they're reinforcing a bad system.

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

It would be great if I were a big enough name that I could have veto power over that kind of stuff, sure. Larbalestier doesn't, and Liar will be her sixth book, If I'm not mistaken. I'm lucky that I have an editor who's been very receptive to what I hsve to say, but that didn't add up to being able to keep the title --

And it's not that I'm desperate and willing to get screwed over. It's that I trust that I have good people behind me and I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

By the way: I have heard some pretty magnificent stories of authorial ego. I could understand the publisher saying, no! Don't let them near the cover again!