Recommendations: #WNDB Contemporaries

I don't know how everyone else is going with their #WNDBChallenge, but I've found searching for diverse books can be very time-consuming (even if it's lots of fun).  I wrote up some recommendations earlier in the year, but since then I've thought of many others, so I've listed a few contemporaries that would make very goods #WNDB reads, and are just good reads in general.

Party Lines by Emma Barry
Lydia Reales is many things: female, Latina, pro-choice and...a Republican.  Not just a Republican voter, but a Republican staffer.  For Michael Picetti, working on the opposing Democrat campaign, Lydia's completely off-limits and on the wrong side of the political spectrum, but he finds himself intrigued all the same.  Party Lines is a deft, honest and unbiased look at the way the way the US primaries and larger political system operate.  Lydia's position as a fish-out-of-water is handled beautifully; she tries to do her job and fight for what she believes in, even as she realises that, to those around her, she's merely a token, to be wheeled out when she's needed and be quiet when she's not.

Lighting the Flames by Sarah Wendell
Wendell wrote this book because she was dismayed that, despite a thriving sub-genre of Christmas romances, there were next to no romance novels set around Hanukkah.  Overall, it was a sweet, reasonably chaste novel about two long-time friends who serve as counsellors at a Jewish camp, and I found the hero particularly likeable and empathetic.

Just Not Mine by Rosalind James
Benched with a broken finger, rugby player Hugh Latimer suddenly finds himself the full-time carer for his small half-brother and sister.  He is forced to move in with them, and now spends most of his time trying not to notice the attractiveness of their next-door neighbour, Maori soap-actress Josie Pae Ata.  Several other of James' Escape to New Zealand books contain Maori protagonists, including Just for You and Just Good Friends, which I would also recommend.

The Year We Fell Down by Sarina Bowen
When Corey, left wheelchair-bound after an ice hockey accident in high school, meets Hartley, a broken-legged hockey player living across the hall, they bond instantly. But Hartley's got a girlfriend, and even if he didn't, Corey's convinced he'd never want the girl who can't even walk. The Year We Fell Down provided a raw look at the way we treat those with disabilities, without compromising the characters' relationship.   

Non-Fiction Review: Gloria Steinem: The Kindle Singles Interview

A few weeks ago, second-wave feminist Gloria Steinem made the news for a interview in which she spoke about the importance of early black feminists, saying: 

I thought they invented the feminist movement. I’ve learned feminism disproportionately from black women. I realize that things being what they are, the white middle-class part of the movement got reported more, but if you look at the numbers and the very first poll of women responding to feminist issues, African American women were twice as likely to support feminism and feminist issues than white women.

I've had Gloria Steinem: The Kindle Singles Interview sitting on my Kindle for several months now, but this statement pushed it back up to the top of my TBR pile.  It's a transcription of an interview with Steinem, in which she recounts her experiences growing up and her increasing consciousness of gender inequality, as well as touching on a range of modern-day social, cultural and political issues.  It's a quick and easy read, but none the less thought-provoking for it.

For me, a real lightbulb moment was her assertion that the fights for racial and gender equality are inherently linked, and treating them as entirely separate discourses is a conscious move of those with power to maintain the status quo.  It's something that I've never considered before, but now notice a lot.  If you are interested in feminist thought, or identify as a feminist, or even if you are on the fence, it's definitely worth the hour or so it takes to read it.  

And for anyone who hasn't come across Kindle Singles, they are short pieces of writing (both fiction and non-fiction) that you can buy pretty cheap on Amazon.  I find them really useful when I don't have the will, brain power or time to invest in something book-length but still want to read something meaty.  It's much easier than trying to learn about a particular topic by reading an in-depth, full-length non-fiction book cover to cover, and there is something there for everyone.    

Review: Indigo by Beverly Jenkins

4 stars 

Not being American, I've never known much about the Underground Railroad, which smuggled slaves from the South into the free states of the North and onto Canada in the 19th century.  As a child, I had a book entitled Life Stories of 100 Famous Women that had a chapter on Harriet Tubman, and I can sing that earworm of a song about Dinah blowing her horn as well as the next gal, but I've never had any grasp of the finer details.  But I didn't realise quite how much I didn't know until I read Indigo by Beverly Jenkins as the first diverse read of my #WNDBResolution.

Smuggled out of slavery as a child, Hester Wyatt now runs a 'station' in Whittaker, Michigan, where conductors and runaways using the Railroad can rest, eat and receive care before moving on.  When an infamous conductor, The Black Daniel, is brought badly beaten to her doorstep, she takes him in and nurses him back to health.  He's surly and forward, and she's half inclined to give up on him.  Meanwhile, Galen Vachon - as the Black Daniel is really called - is becoming increasingly fascinated by his earnest hostess as his wounds heal and his mood picks up.  But there's a price on his head, unscrupulous slave-catchers in the area, a traitor leaking details about the Road and, like a thundercloud hovering over everything, a war brewing over the South's use of slavery.

The plot was really well-developed, but I'll admit that it took me quite a while to embrace Jenkins' writing style.  In the first few chapters I found the writing abrupt and didactic, but somewhere along the way I ceased to notice it as much, probably around the same time that I became engaged in the story and its level of historical detail.

I found it darkly fascinating that, in the North where all African-Americans were free and slaves from the South were declared free on arrival, a law was passed whereby a judge was paid 10 dollars if the found in a slave-owner's favour, but only 5 dollars if he backed the African-American accused of being a runaway.  Though I knew that societal racism must have continued after the fall of slavery, I naively assumed that kind of institutionalised discrimination would have been largely confined to the South.  But I suppose - and this is a really stupid white girl realisation - that's the whole thing about being discriminated against; the system is stacked against you everywhere, not simply where it is most apparent.  Just because you don't live in Ferguson, where almost 90% of police violence is used against African-Americans, despite the fact they make up only 67% of the local population, doesn't mean you are not facing racial disadvantage and discrimination on a daily basis.

I did really enjoy Hester as a character.  She has the courage of her convictions, only consuming products made by free workers, helping others to freedom as she herself was helped and being a loyal friend and neighbour.  She doesn't pay any mind to those who say that, as a single woman, she should not be involved in the Road and refuses to give into some pretty malicious slut-shaming.  Galen, raised by his mother's prominent Louisianan Creole family, is also charming and - with one notable exception - respects Hester's equality and ability to make her own decisions.  As often occurs in romance novels set during adverse times, it was the minor characters who brought home the horror and difficulty of Black life in the mid-1800s, giving the story a realistic poignancy it would have lacked if it had had a comprehensive happily-ever-after.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book and I'm very glad to have had the chance to discover it.  Hopefully, the other 19 diverse novels I read this year will be just as enlightening.  Because, as Jenkins wrote in the Author's Note of Indigo, "knowledge is power, but shared knowledge empowers us all".  

Review: Trade Me by Courtney Milan (Or, Courtney Milan: Goddess of Intersectionality)

5 stars

Trade Me (released 19/1/15) represents Courtney Milan’s first foray into the ever-burgeoning subgenre of New Adult romance.  For those not familiar with her, Milan has previously written romances set during the Victorian era and is notable for writing outside-the-box stories.  Far from the idle-aristocrat-meets-woman formula, her heroes and heroines are as diverse as a barrister, suffragette newswoman, small-town doctor, fortune-teller and researcher of plant genetics.  Drawing on a wide spectrum of human experience has made her a stand-out amongst historical romance authors, but I was nonetheless apprehensive that a change in genre would signal the end of her position on my auto-buy list.  However, I shouldn’t have worried, because Trade Me blew my expectations out of the water. 

In many new adult novels, the protagonists’ search to ‘find themselves’ in the ‘real world’ of college is shallow and uninspiring, but Milan deftly avoids this trap.  In fact, it was the depth and breadth of her characters that made Trade Me exceptional.  The Chinese-American heroine, Tina, is not only putting herself through university, but has taken on financial responsibility for her family.  While Blake – the son of a billionaire technology magnate – might seem to have it easy, he too is dealing with an array of issues.  When Tina speaks up during a class discussion on food dockets, savaging Blake and daring anyone to maintain their opinion of the working class as ‘lazy’ after experiencing their lives, she never expects him to take her up on her offer to trade lives.  The complexities of swapping lives – and the problems each has retained from their own – is compassionate and nuanced in a way rarely seen in romance novels, and literature in general.  The world the characters inhabit is clearly our world, with all the imperfection that entails. 

When I was perusing other reviews before writing my own, I noticed that some readers felt Milan had tried to tackle too many social issues in one book, or that there was just “too much going on”.  Ironically, the reason they gave Trade Me two or three stars is the reason I found it so refreshingly compelling, and that was the intersectionality that Milan took the time to develop.   

Like Ryan says so succintly, Intersectionality is the study or observance of the ways in which forms or systems of oppression, domination or discrimination interact.  It works on the premise that biological, social and cultural factors such as race/ethnicity, gender, class, ability, sexual orientation, religion combine to define how a person or group is perceived and treated. In Trade Me, Tina’s life and personality are influenced by a web of factors – including her Chinese heritage, her lower-class background and her family’s position as members of the persecuted Falun Gong philosophy.  To a certain extent, when Blake takes on Tina’s life, he is also taking on an awareness of his privilege relative to hers.  The beauty of Milan’s writing is in the way in which this intersectionality permeates the characters, settings and plot of the novel, without ever having it define them. Too often factors such as race and class are used as window dressing for stock characters or as a one-trick pony plot device, but Tina and Blake remain people above and beyond their social demographics, and the plot remains separate as well.  Rather than trying to fit too much in, Milan has woven together the many strands that makes each person unique into solid, three-dimensional characters.  In doing so, she blends the best of the romance genre and the best of reality to create a complex, emotionally satisfying story, and who can ask for more than that?