lost heroes

For class on Tuesday I asked my BookUP kids to read half of The Lost Hero by Rick Riordan. I’ve never read anything by Riordan, but I know of the Percy Jackson films and my students were very excited by his Heroes of Olympus book covers. In The Lost Hero there are several characters of color and as I read, I’m thinking of how to continue our discussion of stereotypes, hybridity, and non-Western mythologies. A friend posted a provocative article on Facebook yesterday about the problem of “relatability;” there was no mention of race but the author suspects that more consumers are rejecting art that does not mirror their exact experience. Of course, this rejection is a function of privilege; people of color (and other marginalized groups) have always had to learn how to identify with white protagonists whose experiences rarely mirror our own. If, as a child, I had insisted on reading only books about Black girls, I would have had no books to read. And if I insisted the protagonist was mixed-race or Canadian—forget about it. There were no movies, no plays, no television shows that exactly mirrored my life. So I made do, and it was hard sometimes (and damaging), but ultimately I learned to look for similarities between myself and people who didn’t live or look like me.

The crisis in Gaza is never far from my mind these days and I talked a little bit about Islamophobia with my students last week. Can you eliminate prejudice by writing a novel that exposes its roots and consequences? Maybe. But nothing is possible if a reader won’t even pick up the book because they want a mirror instead of a window…

I hope to address some of these issues when I present at KidlitCon in October. The registration form asked, “What do you hope to learn at the conference?” I should have taken more time to think about that. I feel like I withdrew from the kidlit blogosphere a while back because I found it too insular. No one in my community here in Brooklyn reads book blogs—maybe the occasional parent or librarian tunes in, but talking about kids books online isn’t a top priority for most. I look at the news these days—the murder of Eric Garner by NYPD officers, in particular—and I wonder how we get past the idea that literacy is a luxury, or less of a priority than the battle against gun violence, and police brutality, and Nicki Minaj. Looking forward to a day of silence as I try to think these things through…