Shadowshaper: A Slick Diss on Gentrification

Literature is one of the best ways for marginalized people to fight back against oppression.  It’s an unfortunate truth of the publishing world that many marginalized voices are smothered.  So that literary weapon can seem out of reach and hard to use.  I’m glad to say that Daniel Jose Older grabbed that weapon with SHADOWSHAPER and took a couple of necessary jabs along the way.  But like much good literature, he doesn’t have to tell you that’s what he doing.  He just walks you into the room and you figure out the decorating for yourself.

This Young Adult (though I find that label limiting here) novel is about a young girl named Sierra and her embracing her family legacy.  That legacy is held up in stark contrast against the gentrification going on in her community of Brooklyn.  I have a very good friend from that area who has more than made me aware of that insidious invasion going on in an area full of rich history.  So I had an idea of that going into the novel, but Older makes it real. He breathes life and circumstance into it.   He’s able to contrast the richness and depth of the Dominican culture against the blandness of rising coffee shops and suburban living trying to disguise itself in an urban setting.

The indictment of gentrification and how it drains on communities is ever in the background as Sierra is dealing with fading murals and the significant danger that represents.  I can’t help but to think of these fading murals as a symbol of the encroaching nature of gentrification and how it erases the character of a neighborhood with hipster barber shops and nauseating cafes.  Sierra is struggling to figure out exactly what is causing these murals to fade and why they seem to be alive in the first place.

There is also another angle in which the acidic nature of gentrification and how it destroys the foundation of a neighborhood is explored.  You see how it erodes history and makes people ashamed of it.  Sierra is in a constant struggle with her family and the elders of her community to discover the origins of shadowshaping and just how that flows into her family history.  It’s symbolic in a way of how the original residents in gentrified neighborhoods, if they survive the price hikes, are forced to alter themselves to survive in their new surroundings.  They have to become something acceptable to the new white infrastructure.

Sierra’s character is a loud middle finger to such a system.  She is unapologetically her ethnicity, embracing every aspect of it without doubt or shame.  You can’t help but to love her because of it.  I look at Sierra and hope that my two nieces are so in tune with themselves like this young woman is.  That’s what makes her important in the YA field.  She’s a female character of color who isn’t going through existential angst about her gender or color.  It’s not some source of boogeyman drama.  No, it’s her identity and it serves the story without having to be the story.

I look at Sierra and hope she is the future of Young Adult characters for POC audiences.  We want to see ourselves represented but not have our identities dragged out for white audience torture porn.  We want to be the heroes, the warriors, the people flying starships and to paraphrase another remarkable YA series; we too want our girls to be on fire!  Loved this book from top to bottom and it has solidly made me a Daniel Jose Older groupie (and if I ever get to meet him I’m sure that’ll be amazingly awkward…)

Black Speculative Fiction Month: Day Twelve

Title: The Other Lands

Author: David Anthony Durham

Where you can find it: http://www.amazon.com/The-Other-Lands-Acacia-Trilogy/dp/0307386767

Why you should get it: Remember how I gushed about the book ACACIA on my birthday?  Well, this is the sequel to that book and it’s just as strong.  This book sees one of my favorite fictional characters, Corrin, fleshed out even more and given a nuance and depth that many characters in her role ever find themselves having.  The artwork of what he does with this woman alone is enough to want to pick up the book.

Black Speculative Fiction Month: Day Six

Title: Acacia

Author: David Anthony Durham

Where to Find it: http://www.amazon.com/Acacia-War-Mein-Book-Trilogy-ebook/dp/B001EUGCSO/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1443400161&sr=1-1&keywords=acacia

Why You Should Get it: This guy is the writer I most want to be like.  Is that a reason to be it?  Maybe…if you love me *wink*.   But seriously, this guy writes an epic the likes of which I still remained floored by.  I rarely reread books.  It’s just my thing that I want to look for more to consume, but this trilogy is one I can read again with pleasure.  In fact, I plan to soon enough.  I’m going to cover all three books this month, but this one…

Do you like the intricacies of war history?  This book has it.

Do you like books that examine systems of oppression?  This book has it.

Do you like books where characters kick ass and take names?  This book has it.

Do you like books where you feel something for every, single character?  This book has that.

I could go on, but the point is plain.  This is a bomb ass book.  So check it out.  And besides, it’s my birthday…

Book Bars: The Fifth Season (Part Three)

Chapter Eight- The End

So I got a little hype with the book and had some free time on my hands so I carried my reading all the way through to the end.   I felt like as I was reading this story, I had certain suspicions about the timelines of the different narratives and they ended up being true.  I won’t spoil anything, but you will end up being satisfied once it call connects

For me, I think that is Jemisin’s greatest strength.  She knows how to pull all the different plot threads together and kick you in the teeth at the end.  You walk away from the book feeling satisfied with how everything comes together and she leaves you with quite an interesting prelude to the next book.  Though I’m starting to think she has a thing with moons, which is perfectly cool with me.   All us writers have those themes and imagery we gravitate to.

I wish we would have gotten a little more action in this novel.  There were parts that I felt things dragged and I waited for something to come along to really pick up the pace.  Part of me thinks that may be in part to Jemisin wanting to harp on the depression and the sickness of the world she took us through.  This place isn’t at all somewhere I’d ever want to go.   Constant earthquakes, an oppressed minority that has horrible things done to them and they’re filled with this looming self-hate.  Yea it’s just too much to take in at times in the amount of bad things happening here.  There really are no happy endings here.

It could just be the focus was taken away from the potential bits of action because the emotional weight of the story already put such a heavy loaded on the reader.  Even as I write this, some of that depression from the story lingers.  I’m playing music to kind of lift the dark cloud that story left around my essence.  Don’t get me wrong because these darker moments are necessary but this novel rubs it into your skin like dirt you can’t get rid of without a couple of showers.  So just be prepared for it.

Will I get the next book?  Yea and I’ll tell you why.  Given how bleak things are at the end of the book, I’m honestly not sure where Jemisin can go with the story now.  The world is pretty much gone for by the end of the book so I’m interested to see how she decides to up the ante.

Prophecy by Ellen Oh

Prophecy by Ellen Oh

Korean-based young adult fantasy featuring a female character not constricted to gender roles.  What’s not to love here?  I picked up the book solely on it being Korean-based in my effort to actively avoid fantasies based on a European-Medieval model.  I’ve grown tired of that particular setting and I’m so glad to see that there are writers actively working against that typical backdrop.  Now I’ll freely admit this up front; I’m ignorant about Korean culture and thus during much of my time reading this book I was looking up images to match with words I didn’t know.  A great learning experience for me and I’d do it again honestly.  But with that said, you don’t need to have an in-depth understanding of Korean culture to get into this book.

At its core this is a great action adventure.  The main character, Kira, consistently kicks butt throughout the story and one of the strengths of it is that the author knows how to write action.  I didn’t have any issues visualizing the movements of Kira and her supporting cast as they battled their way through their foes.  So don’t buy into the sexism and think boys couldn’t get into this story because it stars a girl.  Of course, the very idea of blood and gore being primarily the interests of boys is sexist in itself…but we won’t go there.

So Kira is our guide through this story, but she’s surrounded by some great characters.  Her older brother, Kwan, is an excellent companion and serves a bit as her anchor, keeping her steady.  Then there’s Taejo, a young prince and her cousin that she has been sworn to protect since childhood.  Along the way they meet Jaewon and Seung, a comedic duo that adds so much life into the story.  I love them the most, especially Seung who is so genuinely innocent and seems to be the light of the story.  Some of the minor characters have bigger moments as well that really stood out.  The role of King Eojin, their uncle, played against my expectations a number of times and his sister pulled out quite the moment towards the end of the story.

There are some typical elements to the plot such as the fulfillment of a prophecy and the idea of the “one” but Ellen does succeed in turning that a bit on its head.  Honestly, I could have done without so much focus on that, but it does sort of serve as the axis of the story so my gripe is perhaps a bit much.  Also, I would have liked to have actually seen the demons instead of their possessions.  But I have a feeling that might be rooted in some part of Korean culture I’m unfamiliar with.

Overall, this is a quick, fun read.  You’ll like the characters and will root for them throughout the story.  Don’t look for a lot of emotional heft and some of the heavier bits we’ve seen lately from fantasy.  This book knows its audience and perfectly zooms in on that.  There’s nothing wrong with that and in fact, it gave me a nice breather from some of the heavier books I’ve been reading as of late.  That alone allows me to see the appeal and boom in YA among older readers.  Prophecy can consider itself a part of that boom and I think its greatest contribution is diversity.  For a Korean teen who’s never seen themselves in a fantasy book before, I’m sure this felt like absolute gold.  And that’s why books like Prophecy have to exist.