In Which I Tell You About a Really Awesome Book About Young Witches That You Need to Read

Okay, five or so faithful readers, I promised I would be back later to share some of my summer reads. Well, guess what, I'm back the very next day. Write this down, because it will probably never happen again. I'll write a post later this summer with a rundown of multiple books I've read, but for now I want to tell you about a book that everyone who likes middle grade fantasy should read, but you should especially read if you (or your kids) are a Harry Potter fan.

Just to be clear, I was a serious HP fan for many years. The books didn't come out until I was an adult, and I didn't discover them until book four came out when I was in graduate school. Despite this, I embraced the books and their world wholeheartedly. I got all the new books from #5 on on release day, read them within a couple days, and shared them with friends. I stood in line to see the first three movies the day they were released. I was all in.

Then I found out recently that the author is not a particularly nice person, to put it lightly. She is a vocal advocate against transgender rights in the UK. As if that wasn't bad enough, she has repeatedly told trans readers on Twitter that the message of belonging and acceptance that they found when they read her books as children was not meant for people like them. 

I believe it's possible to separate an artist's work from the artist and I have no plans to disown people who still enjoy the world. It really is an exceptionally cool and well-crafted world (though there are some problems and contradictions which, as my 17yo likes to say, produce plot holes big enough to drive a lorry through). However, after finding out this information about the writer I looked at the books with a more critical eye and realized there's prejudice baked into the books that I was blind to when I first read them. Just as one example, the books are rife with fatphobia. Can you name a single fat character from those books who is an admirable person? Ethnic and racial stereotypes that I didn't notice offhand as a white American reader are also all over the books. The author literally used two Chinese last names for Cho Chang's name. 

So I've stepped away from that world but I was longing to find another magical world that didn't have the same problems with either the author and the world. There's lots of great middle grade fantasy out there. I adore all of Rick Riordan's books as well as the books from his imprint that uplifts writers from marginalized cultures, Rick Riordan presents. Rick is pretty much the opposite of J.K. Rowling. He is actively trying to raise of the voices of cultural minorities and sexual and gender minorities and to do everything he can to make the books he writes as inclusive as possible. However, his books and the books from his imprint, while amazing and delightful, are a different type of fantasy from the Harry Potter books.

I'm happy to report that there's a recently released middle grade fantasy written by a nonbinary author of Dominican descent that is similar in vein to HP without all the negative elements above. The author, Claribel Ortega, was actively trying to create a world similar to the HP world in which people like her would feel welcome and see themselves. Claribel has succeeded admirably with Witchlings from Scholastic. 

The middle grade reader and HP fan at my house has not yet read this, but she was excited right away by a cover that showed that the main character and important supporting characters are girls. The cover really is delightful. I want to credit the artist Lissy Marlin and jacket designer Christopher Stengel.

The book is already an NY Times Bestseller, and I hope it finds its way into the hearts of countless MG readers and MG loving adults. There's lots of room left for multiple sequels and the story would make a great movie. Just like in the HP world, there's a magical world that lives alongside our modern world. One difference I love is that magical kids (witchlings) aren't shipped off the boarding school. There are schools within the magical towns that they attend during the day. There are whole witch families that are part of the plot, which I love. Claribel, by the way, circumvents that wizard/witch gender binary in HP by calling magical people of all genders witches. Boys and men are witches, girls and women are witches, and nonbinary people of all ages are witches (or witchlings if they haven't reached their full powers).

Kids are sorted in houses in a special ceremony at the age of 12. You can even find out which house/coven you would be sorted into by taking this quiz. The sorting kicks off the action when MC Seven Salazar isn't place in House Hyacinth with her best friend as she always dreamed but rather is one of three witches who are designated as "spares", an underclass within the magical community. Seven and her fellow spares turn out to be more formidable than anyone would have imagined. But I'll leave it to you to find out what else happens.

I recommend you run, not walk, to your nearest library or bookseller, to pick up this book. If buying a new book isn't in your budget and your library doesn't have the book, put in a request. I can't speak for all library systems, but our system is nearly always willing to buy my requests, especially if they're bestselling children's books.

In Which I Reflect on Books as Mirrors and Windows

 For a really long time, nearly all books were written by white men, or white women who were pretending to be white men. Eventually things opened up a bit and it became acceptable for women to write books, especially children's books. Still, the overwhelming majority of these writers were white.

Even now that publishing is making moves to put out more books by diverse writers, there's still pushback. Recently, Newbery Award winner Jerry Craft was uninvited from a school because someone decided that his book New Kid, which tells the story of a Black boy at a mostly white private school, teaches critical race theory. Think about that. The very fact that a book chronicles the experiences of a Black boy makes it offensive.

A library system is currently the subject of community protest and demands that its funding be revoked after it shared a Facebook post publicizing its LGBTQIA+ children's collection. If parents don't want their kids to read books with queer content that's one thing. I think it's unfortunate, but it's not my job to control the choices of other parents. But attempting to push their views on a library system and get its funding pulled is another thing altogether.

Even when there's no protest around books by BIPOC and queer writers and about BIPOC and queer kids, too many people often assume that those books are only for kids who identify with those groups. Librarians and teachers might recommend New Kid to Black students but not to white students. Or if they know one of their students identifies as nonbinary they might point them to a book about a nonbinary kid. But if a kid is cisgender, why would they need to read that book?

I'll tell you why. Because books don't need to only serve as mirrors. There still aren't nearly enough, but there are more and more books being published starring the kinds of kids who didn't see themselves in books for most of history. But even white, abled, cishet kids need to read books by kids who are different from them. Because the more we read about people different from us, the more likely we are to accept them.

I only lightly police what my 10yo daughter reads. She's not ready for heavy romance or violence, for instance, so I won't let her read The Hunger Games even though she has friends who has read it. But she's read a lot of books (including New Kid) that feature kids who are different from her. Black kids, queer kids, poor kids, immigrant kids. I could go on. This has given her an understanding that not everyone is like her and that's okay. When a teen from our church came out as nonbinary this year, my daughter didn't bat an eye. She doesn't have any peers that identify as nonbinary, but she was familiar with the concept because she'd read about it.

I'm excited about new books coming out that will continue to expand the number of kids who can see themselves in books as in a mirror and the number of kids who can look through a window at someone who's different from them and recognize that they might not be that different after all.

Just for fun, I'll end with a couple pictures. I recently rearranged my bookshelves. I'd been putting books in randomly wherever I could cram them in. The end result was that I might have to visit four different bookcases and two different floors of my house to find all the books in a single series. Now the books are categorized (but not alphabetized, that's way too much order for my ADHD brain) and all the series books are back with their friends.

I knew middle grade fantasy was my greatest love, but I didn't know just how much it outweighed all the other books I own. The two pictures below show my three shelves worth. Poor MG contemporary only takes up part of one shelf. And mystery is a lonely four book collection. All of middle grade fares better than adult, however. In all categories that takes up exactly two shelves. You might look at my shelves and think I'm a parent of voracious readers, but, no, I'm just a middle grade writer.

In Which I am a Majority Culture Author in a World in Which #WeNeedDiverseBooks

 As I mentioned in my first post, I was privileged as a child and still am as an adult to read books featuring main characters that are mostly like me. This is because I'm white, abled, cisgender, heterosexual, and upper middle class. I do not truly belong to any marginalized community. I know plenty of women who have experienced gender discrimination, but I have never personally felt it (though it may have happened to me without me knowing about it, of course). I identify with the neurodiverse community because I have ADHD, but I didn't even know this until I was in my 40's (I just though I was spacey and disorganized) and, because I've set up a lot of scaffolding for myself, I can "pass" as neurotypical in most situations. It's only behind the scenes that my ADHD tends to show itself.

Despite this, as I shared in my first post, I have a passion to create stories and characters to which a greater diversity of kids can relate. I love books that that portray diverse characters. I fell in love with Rick Riordan's mythology inspired books when my son was in elementary school, and I love how the Rick Riordan Presents imprint has allowed authors from diverse backgrounds to showcase stories inspired by myths and legends from their own underrepresented cultures. I also love the diverse cast of characters that Rick Riordan himself created. I've recently discovered some great series books featuring nonWhite girls as the stars. My 9 yo also loves these.

The question I face as a nonmarginalized author is, at what point does creating a carefully researched character from a culture that is not my own cross the line into cultural appropriation? Should I just err on the side of caution and only create characters who are like me as a child? I don't think so, but I do think I and other authors like me need to proceed with caution.

An example of this is Anna Ono, the 9yo protagonist from the book I'm currently querying, which I hope will be the first in a series. Anna is half Japanese and half Swedish. Her mother is an immigrant from Sweden and her father is Japanese American. Her multiethnicity first began as an accident. I wanted to create a character who was obsessed with palindromes due to both her first and last names being palindromes. Anna was easy to hit upon, but the only palindrome surname I could come up with that sounded at all reasonable with Anna was Ono, which would mean she had Japanese heritage.

I first reached out to a multiethnic friend to ask her opinion on whether it would be okay for me, as a white author, to create a multiethnic character. My friend's response was, "Maybe, if you approach it sensitively and do a lot of research." I decided to forge ahead and really own Anna Ono's multiethnic identity as a big part of the story. 

I think I succeeded. I hope I did. The friend I approached with the idea was one of my beta readers and approved of the way I approached the topic. Another friend who is a person of color and the child of immigrants said it was well done. If the book gets published I hope the readers, especially multiethnic readers, understand that I approached this character carefully and thoughtfully. I intended to create a unique character who will be loved by many and allow multiethnic kids who discover her to feel "seen" in a book, perhaps for the first time, and did not intend to imply that I know all there is to know about the multiethnic experience.

I am, of course, not the first white author to have created a nonwhite character. For a long time, nonwhite characters (the few there were) were only created by white authors. This is because white authors were the only ones being published. There's still a huge problem in the publishing industry with nonwhite authors not being represented or published at the rate they should be. There's a movement by some in the industry to begin to change that.

This is being partly addressed by the creation of a Twitter pitch party called #DVPit.  In case you don't know, Twitter pitch parties are events in which authors are invited to pitch their book in the form of a tweet during a certain timespan in a certain day using a certain set of hashtags. Agents (and some acquisitions editors) will peruse the feed. If a pitch intrigues them, they will like it, which is an invitation for the writer to submit more.

The original pitch party, as far as I know, is Pitch Madness, or #pitmad for short. This one is open to anyone. It's been followed by pitch events specific to picture books, faith based fiction, romance, and quite a few others. #DVPit is one of the newer pitch events and it's specifically for writers from marginalized communities. There's no policing. Any author who identifies with a marginalized community is invited to pitch.

There's been a controversy on Twitter recently involving a not at all marginalized author who pitched in DVPit despite not belonging to a marginalized community (and even justified it by stating on their blog that we're all marginalized in some way), got an agent through the event, and now has a book deal for a book representing a culture to which the writer doesn't belong and which presents a misrepresentation of that culture. 

I don't think I've done that with Anna Ono. I definitely did not and will not participate in a Twitter event that's not intended for me. I do feel I'm treading a fine line, however. And, no I don't share this to say "Woe is me." I enjoy a ton of advantages that are completely unrelated to anything I've done. I want to create books with characters that aren't all the suburban white kids I mostly read about during my childhood.  I hope I can do this thoughtfully and sensitively.