50books_poc

This is another Magabala children's book, the first my nearly four year old identified as 'having brown skin'.

She was extremely interested in learning that the boy who wrote the story (featured on the back page) lives in the same country as her. She wants to visit him. Also, to go crab fishing which is what this story is about. Though also she is concerned about the possibility of the crabs nipping.

I continue to find the Magabala books good value for introducing the idea of race to very little people.

This book is really interesting - it considers the elision of visual culture in most histories of African American culture. There's plenty of emphasis on music, some on literature, but art is generally overlooked.

The book focuses on art echoing through time. The most interesting sections for me are the case studies which examine the reappropriation of an image. For instance, Louis Agassiz, the nineteenth-century evolutionary biologist, took photos of some slaves on a plantation which he used as 'evidence' for his theory of multiple strands of evolution. I was fascinated to learn that Carrie May Weems took these images and reworked them in the 1990s.

This is an interesting book - the only draw back is the really low quality of the reproductions, all black and white and not very many of them and not good quality. Frankly, I expect more in an art book.

This young adult novel won a Newberry Honor medal, the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction, was a finalist in the National Book Award and Coretta Scott King award. So, basically, a very good book.

It's a coming of age story set in the Black Panther movement in the 1960s, and it really did deserve all those awards.

Upon being horrified by how much French I've forgotten (my mom was a native speaker but she's been gone a while now), I'm trying to include more French-language books into my reading list. I would love to read a whole bunch by POC authors, but I'm not sure where to start looking.

I would especially appreciate any recs of YA or even children's books, which will likely be a lot easier for me to get through until I build up my vocabulary again. Comics and graphic novels would also be good, since pictures help with context.

Thanks!

I like long, in-depth book reviews. I like reading them. I like writing them. I think they're helpful. That said, I don't have a lot to say about Cast in Ruin. I adore the Elantra series, and this book didn't disappoint. Also, at this point, if you're not reading the series, a review of the seventh book probably isn't going to entice you to pick it up and read it from the beginning.

I will say that one of the things I've found interesting about Sagara's plots for the last two books is that each book dramatically ups the stakes. ( Spoilers ) I have read books where this leaves you excited for the next book only to have the next book do nothing with the change to the world. To Sagara's credit, this hasn't happened with the Elantra series. I'm excited to see what happens with the world in the next book, and I expect Sagara to provide me with an interesting answer.

FYI, there's a post for crowd-sourcing poc-created Hugo-Eligible works (and Hugo-eligible poc pros and fans) on the Dreamwidth side of the comm. If you'd like to make recommendations but don't want to deal with cross-platform commenting, you can drop the rec here and I'll add it to the list there.

Very loosely based on Michael Ondaatje's own life, The Cat's Table is a ficticious description of a journey he made as a child from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to England. The narrator (also named Michael) is an adult, reflecting on a three week period of time that took place in 1954 when he was eleven years old and as such the bulk of the novel is written in a hazy golden cloud of memory.

Traveling on the ocean liner the Oronsay, Michael's only guardian is an aunt in first class who can barely be bothered to keep an eye on her nephew. While his aunt Flavia and his beloved cousin Emily are also on deck, Michael has little interaction with them as at dinner he is seated at the cat's table, that being the table furthest away from the ship's captain where people of no-rank are seated. The novel takes not only its name from the table, but also a sort of structure from it as well. It is the odd assemblage of interesting characters that are seated beside him at dinner who are Michael's friends and teachers and also the focus of many small side stories.

The book has very little plot to speak of; the bulk of the novel is made up of small observations and rambling stories that go on for a page or a page and a half. But it is these fragments that prove to be the most memorable. A woman who reads crime mysteries by the deck pitches them head long into the ocean when she grows tired of reading them. An Australian girl taking a shower leaves wet footprints on the deck that evaporate with the rising morning sun. Hundreds of spoons are spilled into the ship's pool and the residents gather to cheer on two small boys who dive in again and again to retrieve them. Ondaatje creates so much wonder and brilliance in these small nothings, imbuing them with a touch of magic that makes us understand how they have lived on so long in Michael's memory.

2.43 Narelle McRobbie, Who's that Jumbum in the Log? (1996), illustrated by Grace Fielding

It's a Magabala Book, so you know it will be a good quality picture book. It is the story of a witchetty grub who has to move out of her log and find a new home.

I thought, frankly, my daughter might be a bit put off by the illustrations of the two central characters (both puffy white grubs) but she liked the book.

The book was written by Narelle McRobbie, who is of Pacific Island and Aboriginal descent and grew up in far north Queensland. It was illustrated by Grace Fielding who grew up at the Wandering Mission in Western Australia and whose artwork combines traditional dot art with contemporary images.

'Bloodstream' by Tess Gerritsen

You know, I'm sure I read this years ago, because the plot was really really familiar to me, but I have apparently forgotten it enough that I managed to not really work out what the ending was until the very end, which either seems to indicate that 'Bloodstream' was a bit on the formulaic side, if it echoed so many other thrillers, or a bit on the forgettable side if I read it and just couldn't remember a damn thing.

I have to admit, much as I love Tess Gerritsen, I felt it was a little bit of both. It was a fun read, but nowhere near Tess Gerritsen at her best. ( Spoilers beneath, click and then highlight to read )

Still, for all that it was good fun and a very comfortable read. It's on my kindle and I'll probably re-read it in the future, if I have a long train ride or something similar ahead of me.

'Butterfly Swords' by Jeannie Lin

What's this? I don't understand. A historical romance novel set outside of Europe? With a PoC heroine? One in which the balance of power between the hero and the heroine is not all one way? One with no implications of rape, and instead frank desire going both ways combined with a deep concern for the feelings of the other?

I'm sorry, I think you're losing me.

I am going to start this review by being honest. If you don't like romance novels, you probably won't like this. Jeannie Lin writes romance. This was originally a Harlequin Historical and really doesn't pretend to be much else. The plot, beyond the 'he is a hero. She is a heroine. They are going to fall in love and there will be a happy ending' is not that deep. There is a lovely background, in that it is set at the start of the Chinese Tang dynasty, and some interesting secondary characters (who are blatantly waiting their own love story) but it's really all about the romance.

Having said that, if you do like that kind of thing, then you will love this. I adored it, and finished it whilst locked in a toilet cubicle at my work, hoping no one was looking for me.

The heroine was awesome - tough but believably vulnerable in places, passionate and with some realistic flaws. The hero was a little more sketchy - it still bothers me, vaguely, that I don't know where he came from other than 'land of blonde barbarians', although I kind of like that they did that switch and left the western part of the couple as generically 'other' - but still was eminently loveable and I genuinely wanted to do a little happy dance at the end.

If you want a book to curl up by a fire with, and go misty eyed about the happy ever after, then I would recommend this entirely.

Thanks to those who gave input on how all y'all want the LJ and DW instances of the community to relate to each other; I'm interpreting the quietness of that discussion as a sign that most people are pretty okay with the thoughts already there.

Based on that, what we're going with for now is to run the two comms as sister communities under one management. We're going to strive for no duplication of new content between the two communities, so that members can follow both without being spammed with content they already saw. (Which we won't be able to pull off perfectly, because--) We're also going to have Dreamwidth act as a permanent archive of all activity at both platforms, by regularly importing the LiveJournal community into the Dreamwidth one.

So, the details:

• Mod-posts will be cross-posted.
  
  

• Do not cross-post book reviews, etc. Please presume that people who want to see the posts being made on the other site are either already subscribed on the other site or are following the RSS feed.
  
  

• Feeds of the Livejournal Community:
  http://community.livejournal.com/50books_poc/data/rss (for feedreaders)
  http://50books-poc-feed.dreamwidth.org/ (for dreamwidth users)
  
  

• Feeds of the Dreamwidth Community:
  http://50books-poc.dreamwidth.org/data/rss (for feedreaders)
  50bookspocdw (for livejournal users)
  
  Note concerning the feed of the Dreamwidth Community: the community importer retains the dates of the original posts when it runs an import; the RSS feed syndicates all recent-date posts, and does so as it comes to notice their existence. Thus, it appears that on days that we run the importer, the DW RSS feed will notice all recent originally-on-LJ posts, and publish them to the RSS feed. Which means that yes, on days that we run the importer, you'll see a 'burp' of recent-ish posts to the LJ community popping up in the feed of the DW community.
  
  We don't know how to make that not happen. We're hoping that, since the community importer is brand new and there are presumably other communities dealing with this, that there will be some demand for a technological tweak to make that not happen. We'll keep you updated. If it proves to be intolerable, let us know.
  
  

• Commenting on the other platform: Both Dreamwidth and Livejournal accept OpenID logins; both Dreamwidth and Livejournal logins act as OpenID logins. Which means you can use your LiveJournal ID to comment on Dreamwidth posts, and vice versa.
  
  LiveJournal's OpenID FAQ.
  Dreamwidth's OpenID FAQ.
  
  Notice that both sites will send you notifications of replies to your comments, if you give them an email address to send those replies to. They'll also let you have a few userpics, and some other "almost like having a username on that site" kinds of privileges.
  
  At the moment, Dreamwidth is also letting people create accounts without an invite code, if you'd rather just have a Dreamwidth account. You can also get invite codes at dw-codesharing. (Or ask me; I've got a handful I haven't used, and am happy to give them to 50books-poc folks.)
  
  

• Imported posts: LiveJournal posts imported to Dreamwidth are attributed to an OpenID account associated with your LiveJournal username. Dreamwidth is working on a way to let Dreamwidth users "claim" their OpenID Livejournal accounts, but that's not yet live.
  
  (More info about community importing: Happy Holidays, Have a Shiny Thing; Community Importing is Live; Community Import FAQ.)

As always, if anything above seems unclear, incorrect, unworkable, or a bad idea, please let us know. I'll be updating the FAQ and community sidebars a bit later.

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