B.B. Swann's Blog

Why I read (& Write) Young Adult Books

If you’re anything like me, you know that the world of books is a magical place where you can escape, learn, and sometimes even find a...

One Book, Two Books, A Racist Few Books

I read an article about the recent controversy over the family of Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, and their recent decision to stop production of six titles from the beloved author. The article wasn't favorable about the decision, and though the author definitely has a right to their opinion, so do I. And since this is my blog, here it is.

The author focused on the claim that Dr. Seuss is the latest victim of the cancel culture that has taken the world by storm. Yes, I agree that cancel culture is a problem today sometimes and we can get carried away in the wave of self-righteous anger and desire for much needed change. But in the case of Dr. Seuss, it wasn't the so-called liberal snowflake fanatics who targeted Dr. Seuss. It was his own family that decided to stop production of 6 books (some of which haven't sold a copy in years) that they felt had racist tendencies. And racist they are. They need to go. The author failed to mention this in their article (which prompted my response because I am a snowflake who seeks to point out misinformation) and instead blamed a nameless "leftist" for the action. Let's get the truth out there from the start. K? Thanks.

Was Theo racist? That's not for me to decide, but you can do plenty of research to find his own confessions of mistakes made in the past. Here and here are just two examples of some places to start looking. Dr. Seuss himself apologized for some of his early political cartoons that were obviously racist and blamed his use of stereotypes against marginalized people on the "views of the times". After drawing many cartoons that portrayed the anti-Japanese propaganda and perpetuating hate for an entire group of fellow humans, Seuss visited a war-torn Japan. He saw for himself the devastation caused by our attack on Hiroshima and that made an impression. He did something almost unheard of today... he admitted he was wrong. He made up for his mistake by writing Horton Hears a Who, a children's book that promotes equality and acceptance instead of the bigotry and hatred of his political cartoons. So, was he racist? Seems like it, but that doesn't mean he stayed that way.

As for this comment in the original article...

[Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it prompts us to become suspicious of ourselves. “I grew up loving Dr. Seuss,” you might think. “How did I overlook this racism? What else am I not seeing now?”]

YES! That is the point. This is white privilege. As a white person, I can look at my past growing up and not see the racism that surrounded me because I'm not marginalized. To me, the "views of the time" were a reflection of a society that favored white people. I don't get to decide what is offensive to a black or Asian or Latinx or any other person of color because I'm not one of them. All I can do is respect their feelings and do better myself. As an author, if I write something and am told it is offensive or racist, it's my job to change it and learn from my mistake. Not defend myself and say I didn't MEAN to be racist. And trust me, I don't, but the path to Hell is paved... well you know the saying. If I accidentally step onto that path, I WANT to be deterred by a well-timed slap on the face telling me to wake up.

I think Geisel's family has taken a moment to stop and look around, realizing their product went in the wrong direction. They should be commended for their sensitivity and willingness to take that hard step toward healing. There are so many other great Dr. Seuss books out there and as a teacher, I will continue to read them to my class, but we all need to make a conscious effort to do better in the future so we don't repeat the mistakes of the past. If we want people to change their views and make better choices, when they do, as is the case here with the Geisel family, we can't condemn their actions. If we do, that's not much incentive for people to change, is it?

READ THIS BOOK NOW!

Wow! What a great fast read! If you're looking for a fun story with lots of action, this is it!

Case is a woman who knows she's freakily different but still has a sense of humor about it. Her unusual powers to literally shake the world around result in a dysfunctional relationship with her estranged mother, a slew of foster homes, and eventually a job working at an underground haunt for the supernatural world... only she doesn't know it yet.

Her co-worker Ash is not your typical swoon worthy love interest. He's filled with quirks and imperfections that make him fell real (and okay, maybe a tad swoon worthy!) Together they make a great team from the start, but none of that insta-love stuff, just good old fashioned boy-meets-girl attraction that could lead to something bigger down the road. Though there are a few good kisses in there!

There's a host of side characters each with their own backstories that will make for some interesting upcoming installments so I can't wait for those! (Ahem... Max!)

The villains are villany and the plot is tight and I really enjoyed this book. Being a sucker for romance, I would have liked a little more heat from the couple, but that wasn't the focus of the story so that's just a me-thing. If you're looking for that factor though, don't be disappointed when you don't get it.

Overall I would highly recommend if you are looking for a fun series with quirky supernatural characters with more unique personalities and abilities who really know how to throw a good punch.

GOODBYE 2020!

WE MADE IT!

It's been a wild and bumpy year with plenty of bad vibes and even worse experiences. Part of me just wants to curl under the covers with a book and go sleep early so I can wake up in 2021. Surely next year won't be this bad, right?

2020 has been awful. For lots of people. But there's been a lot of good too and tonight, as I kick this year out the door (with a steel-toed boot), I will try to focus on the positive.

My family is safe and mostly healthy,
I still have a roof over my head and food to eat,
I'm able to teach remotely from home to protect my health (for now)
My oldest son recently got engaged to the love of his life
My middle son graduated from college
My daughter is the last left in school (easier on the bank account!) and still testing negative
I turned fifty in October and haven't fallen apart (at least not completely)
Writing has brought me plenty of joy and sharing it with all of you makes me smile

This year has aged us all in dog years and I'm glad I got to celebrate its demise, but I have a lot to look forward to in the future. And I'll get there. And so will you. No matter how you ring in 2021, be safe and remember to take a moment and find your positive. It's out there somewhere.

Happy New Year!

BB.

REVIEW! REBEL PRINCESS by Lynn Stevens

,A great take on Beauty and the Beast and The Hunchback of Notre Dame! Emerald is a college student majoring in dance but thriving in her role as a journalist for the college paper, trying to uncover a cheating scandal at the school involving her ex, Colin, and the championship winning la cross team. One night Collin confronts her, hitting her and in comes Phillip Quinn to run Collin off. Quinn, a former service member disfigured from battle, is a gentle soul, volunteering at the local homeless shelter that helped him out and working for a church close to campus. They have an instant connection and it's perfect!

,Emerald faces challenges with both her dancing and reporting. With the admin censoring the truth and even threatening to expel her, she decides to quit the paper and take her story into the real world. Needless to say, chaos ensues and she's in for a wild ride. But Quinn is there to help and even with a few minor setbacks (because that's life) their relationship burns on to the fiery conclusion.

,Lynn Stevens does a great job of putting you inside the character's head. She touches on a few of the hot-spot issues of today (prejudice and privilege) but in an insightful way where good wins in the end. (Because who doesn't want that?!) The romance was sweet then hot then scorching and the plot kept me wondering what would happen next. A great story and I highly recommend if you are looking for a quick,

, fun read.

Coronavirus Times: Top 10 Things that Disturb Me

Top 10 things I find disturbing in these current times: (In no particular order.) The greed and frenzy associated with buying unnecessary amounts of paper products. Did we all forget about the environmental crisis? The dismissal of the seriousness of the situation by friends, family, and people in leadership roles. The attack on media for covering the news. The LACK of covering the news on a certain network. The blame game going on from both sides of the political wall that has been built in our country over the last 3 1/2 years.(or maybe longer) Germs are germs. They do what they do. Nobody started it on purpose and it will spread as it likes. Let's just deal with it now and protect those we can. Don't use the lives and deaths of Americans for political gain. The reaction of parents to the school closures and their lamenting of how will they teach their child? Parents are a child's MOST IMPORTANT teacher. They learn more from parents than they will at school. Pick up a book and read to them, talk to them, play with them, and if they are older children, middle school or teens, THE SAME RULES APPLY! Do what you can with algebra or English, but don't freak out. School will be back in session and the teachers will continue to teach. But take advantage of the time you are given and use it to let your child know how much you love them. Hell, they need to know that you like them, too. The misconception that it is okay to target a person with racial slurs and shunning simply because their ethnic background happens to match one of the countries most affected by this virus, even when that person has never been to the country. Racism of any form is wrong and has no place in modern society. The people who will argue about #7. The blatant greed from our administration in refusing test kits from another country in order to wait for a company here to make them. A company in which the man sitting in the white house owns stock. The fact that people are seriously concerned with what they will do with their time now that they're forced to stay home. Read a book or two. Take a walk. Clean out a closet. Look at old photographs. Call a friend. Use the extra time you are given to do something special for someone or to simply breathe. Our lives have become a non-stop race for the next-best-thing or the chance to one-up those around us. Here's your opportunity to take a step back and reflect on your purpose, your goals. And if reflection is a scary thing, maybe it means you NEED it. We often run away from the truths that scare us because they are too close for comfort.

Review: Ghost Academy by E.C. Farrell

Can I be a ghost? That's how I feel after reading this book. Farrell does such a fabulous job of creating a world in between life a death that the reader can't help but want to join it. Billie is dead and can't remember a thing about it or her life. She finds herself at (of all places) a school for the dead. Their main assignment is to discover and complete their unfinished business--and not let their remains get burned by the Xers in the process. Getting burned turns them into a screaming tornado-like poltergeist that sucks up other ghosts in their path. Billie's problem? she has no idea where her body is. Enter Rafe, a fox shifter (excuse me while I pant for a second!) He's dead, too, but at least he finds his remains. He and Billie have a chemistry that sparks from the start. Their quirky voices, their identical curiosity and mischievous natures, and their growing attraction keeps things interesting! They work together to discover their unfinished business and to solve the growing mystery of the Xers and their connections to the school. Farrell has well developed characters, a solid plot that keeps you guessing, and lots of good old fashioned teenaged angst and sexual tension, all wrapped up in a setting that is realistic, despite being filled with ghosts. If you've ever wondered what happened to your favorite characters who met unfortunate deaths, this is it. I highly recommend! Can't wait for book two! #TEAMRAFE forever!

Failure is Fun!

FAILURE IS FUN For twenty-five years I’ve been an Early Childhood teacher, teaching children from pre-k to third grade in the public schools of Illinois. Having only worked with socio-economically challenged and at-risk students and families, some years were definitely longer than others. Through no fault of their own, most of my students face challenges that would test even the strongest willed adult’s ability to retain hope and faith for a good future. Poverty, hunger, incarcerated/addicted/absentee parents, homelessness, even parents who’ve committed murder are some of the challenges my three to nine-year-olds have had to deal with over the years. I’m often asked, “How do you keep doing this every year?” The answer is easy: I do it for them, for my kids. I may be the only positive influence in their lives, and I want to make it count. Every day. So what does this have to do with writing, specifically with writing my debut picture book, KATIE COMMA? Well, as writers, we face struggles—writer’s block, self-doubt, rejections from agents and publishers—a far cry from what I’ve listed above, but no less valid of reasons to want to give up hope of becoming a published author. Everyone needs to learn methods for coping with hard times. Life is hard. There’s no way around that. The wise words of Westley in the movie The Princess Bride say it best. “Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.” When I set out to write KATIE COMMA, I wrote it with my students and teachers like me in mind. Those who work tirelessly to be the light for their students. To show them that there is another way of life. That sometimes the world can be great. That it’s not only ok, but necessary to have hope that you will find your place in the world. In my book, Katie Comma gets blown from her story. She travels through the classroom from book to book and sentence to sentence trying to find her home, the place where she belongs. She struggles, she searches, she almost gives up hope but eventually her determination pays off. That determination is what I strive to encourage in the children I am trusted to teach. My students deal with a lot, as you’ve read, and sometimes the personal issues overshadow and affect their struggles in the classroom. Learning to read is difficult when you don’t have the support or role models at home. Completing homework and bedtime stories take a back seat to a single mom having to get the kids to a sitter as she rushes out to work the night shift at her second job. Children don’t have the benefit of understanding though. Developmentally egocentric, they blame themselves. When a child feels like they can’t do anything right, they sometimes cause disruptions and lash out verbally or physically at other students or me, or completely shut down and quit trying. Imagine, as a writer, you go through rounds of edits and polishing and betas and edits and more polishing until you finally get that nod from an agent or publisher to “take a look” at your story. In the middle of your high and daydreams of bestseller lists, the rejection comes. The dreaded form letter. Maybe you cry. Maybe you drink. Maybe you throw your computer out the window and swear off writing for good. (I don’t recommend the last one.) Now imagine that you have never heard the word subjective and you think the rejection is your fault because you can’t write. That’s how some kids feel, and it carries over into their adult lives. Quitting is the easy way out. And I’ve never taken the easy way, nor do I allow my students to choose that path. From day one in my classroom, I tell my students that it’s okay to fail. In fact, it’s the best and sometimes only way to learn. We have a saying for this; When you struggle, it means your brain is growing. I tell my class that to learn they have to try and that failing is only bad if you give up. This year at our meet-the-teacher night, a mother told me that her son couldn’t read, and he didn’t like school because of it. He’d refused to read at home, and she had never heard him read a single word. I knelt down and met him eye to eye. When I asked if he wanted to learn how to read, he nodded yes. I promised that I would teach him how to read, but he had to promise to try even if it was hard because that was the only way it would work. He again nodded and I moved on to the next parent. Later that night, I got an email from the mother saying her son had gone home that night and read to her for the first time ever. Just a few heartfelt words were all it took for that young child to have faith in himself. The hope I have for my book is that KATIE COMMA can plant that seed of hope in other children who hear it. Yes, I want them to learn about punctuation and where a comma is used. I wrote it because I couldn’t find a book that outlined the basic use of commas for a younger audience. But there is so much more to the story and it’s the theme of perseverance that makes my book special, I think. After all, who couldn’t use a little pat on the back every now and then? I think Katie makes a perfect role model for that.

FED UP WITH THE BULLSHIT

I love my country. It's not perfect, but no place is. Negative people can find faults and problems wherever they look. It takes a much BETTER person, a person with an open-mind, a person with INTEGRITY to see the good in their fellow humans. The emotions of CNN news anchor, Victor Blackwell, as he recounts D. Trump's tweet attack on the community of Baltimore, demonstrate that he is one of those better people. The hurt he feels for his home community, and the attack of it from our NEGATIVE, racist, self-serving president, is genuine and heartfelt and tore me up as I watched. I can't stay silent on this. We are ALL Americans. Even the ones who live in the "infested" areas with little or no resources. We all love our families. We all want what's best for them. Does everyone do the right thing? No. Is there crime? Yes. Are there people who work the system who need to do better? Of course. But we as a country can't ignore the needs of those who are trying and brush them off as part of the "infestation" because we think our lives have more value. And I don't think this is completely about race. If you think the current admin thinks those of you white folk living paycheck to paycheck are equally important and valued, then you've definitely swallowed the Kool-Aid and are part of the problem. The admin isn't fighting for you either. It's that 1% that is their goal to protect and help prosper, they just know they need your vote to do it so they keep feeding you the bullshit. Be smarter than them. Educate yourself on issues and don't just take some player's tweets as the only truth. Discover for yourself what is real and what is "alternative". Trust me, he knows what he's doing and how to make his followers jump through the right hoops. I know some of you who read this think I'm just a liberal. You think I'm just mad my party didn't win the last election. That I don't know what I'm talking about because I'm just a woman. Well, I am a liberal, and I am mad about the last election. And yes, I am PROUD to be a woman. But none of that has a thing to do with my opinion of the current president. I have heard too much from his mouth, seen too much in his tweets, read too much about the proven uptick in hate based crimes since 2016 because of the seeming acceptance of bigotry and racism from our "leader". THAT is why I'm angry. Maybe these problems have always been there, but what alarms me most is the fact that some people feel they now have the freedom to say and do hateful things because we are being de-sensitized to it by the very person who is supposed to protect the American people. I refuse to be de-sensitized. I refuse to be forced to choose a side. I refuse to allow my country to continue to become the laughingstock of the world and regress by repeating the mistakes of our past that others fought and DIED to change. Badmouth me if you want. Call me a "snowflake". Whatever. But JOIN ME IF YOU DARE and PAY ATTENTION! Learn for yourself and then go out and make a difference https://www.thedailybeast.com/cnn-anc...

TAKE A TRIP TO MARS!

Ever had the feeling you don't belong? Has the thought "What the hell was I thinking?" ever crossed your mind? Well, New Jersey chef, Dix Jenner did the moment the colony he joined (the first human outpost on Mars) exploded, leaving him alone on a foreign planet with nothing but his space suit, limited oxygen, and two weed-filled brownies. What ensues is a hilarious "rescue" mission by a local Martian couple, Bleeker and Seepa. They bring Dix into their underground home (which has oxygen thank goodness) and try to help him assimilate into their society. But Dix is no NASA trained astronaut, he's just a homesick chef. He struggles to fit in and decides to share a little bit of his Earth home with Mars. He finds success he never could have gotten on Earth, and maybe even a little extra something with a friendly, seductive neighbor. Handler's crisp, direct writing and sarcastic humor makes this a fun read. The characters are so real, you'll want to make a trip to Mars and meet up for a game or two of Sling. (Don't forget your helmet!) The parallels to the political and societal systems here on Earth poke great satirical fun at our failures and stereotypes and at the same time, make you think of ways we can--and should-- do better. I highly recommend picking up a copy when it is released on August 14th from Kyanite Publishing. I definitely will be!