fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #3848 ]

[ SECRET POST #3848 ]

⌈ Secret Post #3848 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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I saw a complaint this morning that this demographic is underrepresented in fiction. In the interests of sharing some love about what is there, here you go.

- Feel free to add more, the only criteria are that it features a prominent woman, or young girl, of colour, and is a good read. (And, preferably, that she gets a happy ending.)

- Some of these might be on the borderline (I’m not sure if an actress who hides her Jewish heritage in Bride of the Rat God counts for most readers, for example).

A Princess of the Chameln by Cherry Wilder. Kind of old; I loved it as a teenager. Princess Aidris is in her early teens when the country is invaded and has to go into exile. (For a coming-of-age, fighting-off-an-invasion story it’s oddly peaceful - lots of people making sensible, kind decisions, and exploring a colourful world.)

Miss Haroun Al-Raschid by Jessie Douglas Kerruish. Explicitly mix-raced young lady engages in bad-ass archaeology, dashes helter-skelter through Mesopotamia, falls in love, and works out some issues with her close relatives. (I mean, bad-ass archaeology, don’t-let-being-kidnapped-by-bandits-stop-you-from-getting-to-the-dig-first bad-ass archaeology.) Very woman-centred book; the prose is a bit old-fashioned (it was written in 1917).

On the Edge of Gone by Corinne Duyvis. There’s an asteroid about to hit the earth and some shelters or generation ships are better than others. Really digs into the ethics and calculus of desperation, the cost of kindness. Had me in tears a couple of times. (The heroine is also autistic. Reviews from people who identify as autistic tend to be pretty positive about her narrative voice.)

The Abyss Surrounds Us by Emily Skrutski. Kraken. Lesbian pirates. Do I need to tell you anything else?

The Homeward Bounders by Diana Wynne Jones. Strange and often sad YA about people forced into world-hopping by amoral, near-omniscient game-players, making the best of it, making friends, and, in time, waging rebellion. Helen is a glorious prickly bush of a girl.

Castle in the Air by Diana Wynne Jones. Lesser-known sequel to Howl’s Moving Castle. (Actually not sure if this counts - Flower-in-the-Night is very sweet, and gets a happy ending, but she isn’t on stage that much.)

(Am also not sure if The Spellcoats by Jones would qualify. Our main characters catch some crap in the story because they very clearly don’t look like most of the people around them, and do look like the invaders coming up-river but no-one living in the Western Hemisphere would blink an eye at them. Call it a teachable moment? Also, it’s really good: coming of age, travelogue, familial bickering, genuinely weird supernatural stuff bundled in with ‘never seen a tide before wtf is this?’ moments.)

Bride of the Rat God by Barbara Hambly - not sure if this counts (see introduction) but it’s a fun read - it takes an old, cheesy trope, a cursed necklace that marks a woman to be devoured by an ancient evil god, deconstructs it, adds in a lot of historical research, and stirs it back together in a glorious romp through 1920s Hollywood.

The Benjamin January/Free Man of Color series. Murder mysteries set in old New Orleans (mostly). They’re told from Benjamin January’s eyes, but they swarm, absolutely swarm with vivid, humanely written women. (Hambly has a great skill at combining painstaking historical research with a cracking good yarn.)

Nova by Sam Delany. Okay, so Tyy is, strictly speaking, a supporting character. But she’s a hell of a lot of fun. (Rag-tag bunch of misfits go on a quest to dive inside AN EXPLODING SUN.)

Earthrise by M C A Hogarth. Space opera, often tongue-in-cheek except when it’s suddenly digging very deeply in the ways human beings relate to each other. Very aware of romance novel tropes, and it plays with them affectionately.

Leeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet me guess: the complaint you saw this morning was in regards to the 13th Doctor being a basic white bitch.

Eh.

I can understand where the complaint is coming from.

But the demographic isn't like, a blank void in fiction either. So let's see if we can get a happy rec thread going. I'm always up for interesting fiction, yeah?

"Blonde whore" was the phrase I read. Did you know she did a nude scene in the past? I found that out from the SJW crowd who were complaining about it before it appeared anywhere else.

Oh dear. I am, unfortunately, not surprised.

Um, would you mind keeping that discussion in another thread? I'd like to keep this one focussed on recs.

Did u read it on the Daily Heil site, by chance?

Everything, Everything by Nicola Yoon. It's a YA novel about a girl who has an autoimmune disease and can't leave the house but she gets a new neighbor and discovers more about herself.

I thought it was a nice story and I loved the movie.

I bought the book and haven't read it yet, but the movie was so good.

The visuals were gorgeous, the color palette and the costuming. What a good.

Will look it up!

I found the movie to be a really good adaptation of the book, so if you enjoyed the movie, I think you'll like the book too.

I haven't finished it but I'm enjoying The House of Discarded Dreams by Ekaterina Sedia. I've been looking for some surreal books and this one definitely fits the bill, with a lot of the strange creatures from African legends being some of the more normal imagery in the book.

Thanks for all the links! I'm always looking for interesting new (to me) books. And i still have a balance on my Better World Books gift certificate. :)

Oh, the Royal Diaries series (the couple I've read were good).

Includes princesses from Korea, South China, Africa, Hawaii, Japan, Egypt (along with King Christine of Sweden and Victoria and that).

I remember finding the Nzinga of Ndongo and Matamba book a good read.

In SFF, Jemisin, Okorafor, and Karen Lord are worth reading. It's a rich area right now.

Everything, Everything's already been recommended, but so I'll recomend Nicola Yoon's second book, The Sun is Also a Star. It's told in a series of interconnected chapters and is about how a lot of small moments lead to certain events. The book follows Natasha's quest to meet an immigration lawyer who will help her family stay in the country and there's a really sweet whirlwind romance, but the ending made me cry myself to sleep.

Born Confused and its sequel, Bombay Blues, are written by Tanuja Desai Hidier and follow Dimple's journey of self-discovery as she tries to figure out where she fits in the world since she's "too Indian in America, but . . . In India, definitely not Indian enough."

Estrella's Quinceañera by Malin Alegria is a cute middle grade novel about a girl who doesn't want a quinceañera because it's "tacky" and worries that her white best friends will think less of her if they see the barrio where she lives. She struggles between feeling pride in her culture and family and shame because she's not well off like the kids at her school.

The Dear America books are of varying quality, but I Thought My Soul Would Rise and Fly by Joyce Hansen is one of the better ones. It's about a former slave named Patsy who learned to read and write by listening to the white children's lessons and she eventually becomes a teacher.

Most of the American Girl books are pretty well-written and deal with some heavy subjects. There's Kaya (Native American girl from 1764), Josefina (Mexican girl from 1824), Cecile (wealthy French-African-American girl from 1853), Addy (African-American girl from 1864), Melody Ellison (African-American girl from 1964), and Ivy Ling (Chinese-American girl from 1974). Most of their books are pretty solid with Cecile's and Ivy's being the weakest because Cecile shared a plot with her friend, Marie-Grace, which made the books a little repetitive, and Ivy's because she only had one book.

I always wished Ivy had been the main character and Julie the best-friend character instead of the other way around.

Same, anon, same. I do like Julie, but Ivy as the main character with a more complete collection would've been wonderful. Also, I think it's really weird that they gave Ivy the mini movie and not Julie. Maybe they'll bring her back? That'd be pretty sweet.

Saaame, Julie is boring as FUCK and they could have done a lot of interesting things with Ivy, especially if they had a story about her researching her immigrant ancestors or something

Weirdly enough, one of the mysteries is about Ivy's family and talks about how Ivy's grandmother came to the US. I think it's called The Puzzle of the Paper Daughter and, as I was reading it, I remember thinking it would've made way more sense for Ivy to solve the mystery, not Julie.

The Moon Sleeps by Patricia Grace. A young Maori woman in 1970s New Zealand falls in love with a Pakeha. Her family aren't too happy. A lot of it is very slice-of-lifey, with flashbacks to her childhood.

White Lies by Witi Ihimaera (formerly called The Medicine Woman). Haven't read the book, but the movie of it is quietly savage, intense, and beautiful. (I don't often see a movie that is almost entirely made of three women interacting with each other, without other characters or plot twists interupting.) Worth a look, but bring a hanky.

The Boatman sisters and Rosaleen in Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees are great characters, though I'll admit if you're looking strictly for WOC fiction, you'll be turned off the narrator or POV character is a young white girl, so this is a rec that should be taken with a grain of salt. YMMV and all that.

Lillith's Brood or The Xenogenesis Trilogy by Octavia Butler is amazing. It's all about how racial inequality and racism within the human race will be our downfall in the event of an alien invasion.

The Living Blood by Tananarive Due is the second in a trilogy (though as of yet it's the only one I've read) and (primarily) follows a black single mother raising a daughter with supernatural abilities that result from her father being part of a cult of immortal men who have the blood of Jesus in their veins.

Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor. It follows a group of four young girls in post-apocalyptic Sudan.

The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros is a collection of vignettes about a young Latina girl growing up in Chicago.

I really liked Wild Seed by Octavia Butler.

also, though I know you asked for books, the Niobe comic looks gorgeous.

Re the Spellcoats: no-one living in the Western Hemisphere would blink an eye at them.

Tanaqui and her siblings, and the "Heathens," are brown-skinned with curly/bushy blond hair (I generally assumed/pictured a hair type consistent with African ancestry; I think Tanaqui talks about how neatly Robin braids her hair, but she just wears hers out in a big bushy cloud). This appearance wouldn't go unnoticed in modern times, or at some point in our history/fantasy historical analogue with a fair degree of racial mixing (still uncommon and unusual in the West- eyes would bat). The cool thing about the Spellcoats, though, is that it's set in Dalemark's prehistory. It's a time when few people ever traveled more than 30 miles from their birthplace in their entire lives. So yeah, having one family in the village of a different race is very unusual (and with what we learn about their lineage: with good reason!)

Anyway, yes, Spellcoats good, everyone should read it. And the rest of the Dalemark quartet. I like Cart & Cwidder and Drowned Ammet (and part of Crown of Dalemark) because they feature a fantasy setting with roughly 17th/18th century level of technology! Fantasy is so often stodgily medieval/Renaissance. Dalemark has guns, and sailing ships, and industry! \o/ And then the other part of Crown of Dalemark is modern!! With electricity and bullet trains, and telephones, and maybe the internet iirc, and artifacts from the previous 3 novels being in museums.

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