It's about time! This is a great initiative that is asking that people encourage female children's lit authors, and encourage women and men to write inclusive books with people of color and various genders in them, so that children don't just have a selection of books and fairy tales that are white and full of stereotypical male and female relationships and roles.
Kidlitwomen Initiative to Call Attention to Gender Inequality in Children's Literature.
In the early days
of 2018, children's author/illustrator Grace Lin
a group of women
colleagues and had a "conversation fueled by passion,
anger, and
heartbreak, but most of all by injustice." The concern was
about the industry
itself: "our children's literature community, a
community that
preaches to children about kindness and fairness, is
egregiously not
fair," she said in an open letter. Lin's letter asks,
"Have you
treated a male author as a 'rock star?' Have you declined a
'girl' book for
your son or ignored an older woman? Have you minimized
the concerns of a
woman of color? What have you done or encouraged or
defended that you
feel uncomfortable about?" These questions, she hopes,
will encourage
conversation. And to help this discussion along, she and
author Karen
Blumenthal
the #kidlitwomen
initiative on March 1, to coincide with Women's History
Month.
The intent is to
use social media as a public forum to call "attention
to the gender
inequities of the children's literature community,
uplifting those
who have not received their due, and finding solutions
to reach equality
for all." With more than 3,000 followers on their
consists of a
series of pieces by women in the children's literature
industry, all
posted either directly on the #kidlitwomen Facebook page
or to the author
and/or illustrator's own website and compiled on the
Facebook page.
RIP Stephen Hawking, who lived an extraordinary life, and a long life, despite having ALS, which was supposed to kill him after two years. He defied expectations and made the world a better place with his brilliant mind.
Obituary Note:
Stephen W. Hawking
Stephen W. Hawking
the Cambridge
University physicist and bestselling author "who roamed
the cosmos from a
wheelchair, pondering the nature of gravity and the
origin of the
universe and becoming an emblem of human determination and
curiosity,"
died early this morning, the New York Times reported. He was
76.
"What a
triumph his life has been," said Martin Rees, a Cambridge
University
cosmologist, the astronomer royal of Britain and Hawking's
longtime
colleague. "His name will live in the annals of science;
millions have had
their cosmic horizons widened by his bestselling
books; and even
more, around the world, have been inspired by a unique
example of
achievement against all the odds--a manifestation of amazing
willpower and
determination."
Hawking's landmark
book, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to
Black Holes
(1988), has sold more than 10 million copies, and inspired a
documentary film
by Errol Morris as well as the Oscar-winning movie The
Theory of
Everything.
"Scientifically,
Dr. Hawking will be best remembered for a discovery so
strange that it
might be expressed in the form of a Zen koan: When is a
black hole not
black? When it explodes," the Times wrote, adding that
his career defied
the odds in that as a graduate student in 1963, he
learned he had
amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and was given only a few
years to live.
Despite this, he "went on to become his generation's
leader in
exploring gravity and the properties of black holes, the
bottomless
gravitational pits so deep and dense that not even light can
escape them."
Dr. Hawking's
other books include The Grand Design (with Leonard
Mlodinow); The
Universe in a Nutshell; The Nature of Space and Time
(with Roger
Penrose); the George's Secret Key children's book series
(with Lucy
Hawking); Black Holes and Baby Universes; An Illustrated
Brief History of
Time; A Briefer History of Time (Bantam Press, 2005);
and his memoir, My
Brief History.
Larry Finlay,
managing director of Transworld, told the Bookseller
"It is truly
our privilege to have been Stephen Hawking's publisher for
the last three
decades. He has increased the popular understanding of
scientific theory
like no-one else since Einstein. Not only was he one
of the world's
greatest thinkers, he was also a man with an infectious
sense of mischief
and wit."
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid was a surprisingly delightful book that I read in one sitting. Though it's fiction, the main character reminded me of the scandalous marriages of the beautiful Elizabeth Taylor, and of so many of the other Hollywood stars of the "golden era" when studios created classic movies and starlets feared the gossip columnists of the day, who could make or break their careers. The story follows the movie career of actress Evelyn Hugo (whose real last name is Herrera, as she's Cuban, but can pass as white), who marries one man after another to gain influence and eventually to cover up her bisexuality and love of her fellow starlet Cecelia St James. Here's the blurb:
As a former veteran print journalist, I really empathized with Monique and her excitement in being granted access to this glamorous star and her exclusive story. The twist at the end (which I won't spoil for you) can be seen coming by a bit over halfway through the book, and yet it will still sent a shiver down my spine. This is a testament to Reid's finely honed prose and excellent plot, as well as her beautifully-drawn characters who lead readers to a satisfying conclusion. I'd give this page-turner an A, and recommend it to anyone who is interested in classic movies and movie stars.
An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine was a book that I picked up because it was about a bibliophile who loves to read and translate books from English and French into Arabic. Because Aaliya lives in war-torn Beirut, Lebanon, she has come to live the "life of the mind" where she withdraws from society and even the women in her building and focuses instead on the books that she reads and the characters inhabiting them. Though Aaliya is a sour, bitter and reclusive person who almost comes off as a misanthrope, I found her life and her discussions of books and authors to be fascinating, if more than a bit cynical and mean. For example, she dismisses nearly all of American literature written by women as whiny and vapid, with their characters only problems being "a malodorous vagina." This hasn't been even close to my experience of American women's lit, of course, but when Aaliya talks about the dull and horrid novels of Hemingway, and notes that Hills Like White Elephants (a short story) may be the only exception to that rule, I found myself nodding along and agreeing with her. I also agreed that Faulkner is by far the better writer of the two, though I also felt that Fitzgerald was a better writer as well. Here's the blurb: An Unnecessary Woman is a breathtaking portrait of one reclusive
woman’s late-life crisis, which garnered a wave of rave reviews and love
letters to Alameddine’s cranky yet charming septuagenarian protagonist,
Aaliya, a character you “can’t help but love” (NPR). Aaliya’s
insightful musings on literature, philosophy, and art are invaded by
memories of the Lebanese Civil War and her volatile past. As she tries
to overcome her aging body and spontaneous emotional upwellings, Aaliya
is faced with an unthinkable disaster that threatens to shatter the
little life she has left. Here, the gifted Rabih Alameddine has given us
a nuanced rendering of one woman's life in the Middle East and an
enduring ode to literature and its power to define who we are.
“[A] powerful intellectual portrait of a reader who is misread….a
meditation on being and literature, written by someone with a passionate
love of language and the power of words to compose interior worlds.
It’s about how, and by what means, we survive. About how, in the end,
what is hollow and unneeded becomes full, essential and enduring.”—Earl
Pike, Cleveland Plain Dealer
Though I found Aaliya to be nearly autistic in her fear of dealing with people, especially her horrible mother (who wanted nothing to do with her as a child, and then screams in fear/anger when Aaliya's greasy half brother try to drop her mother off for her to care for now that she's ancient, has dementia and is in failing heath) and it seemed ridiculous to me that a woman in her 70s is unable to even share coffee with her neighbors, let alone deal with her mother, I still couldn't wait to see what she did next, and what would happen to her bookstore coworkers or others from her past. The prose is somewhat uneven, but the plot is strong and well formed. I would give this book a B+, and recommend it to anyone who is interested in a middle eastern bibliophile's view of the world.
Ink, Iron and Glass by Gwendolyn Clare is a YA steampunk fantasy that has a very interesting science fiction premise of what would happen if you could write worlds (and people) into being a reality? I have to note that the main character is a person of color and an "Islander" and that people of different colors and sexual orientation are part of this book, which I think is wonderful. Intersectionality is long overdue in YA Literature. At any rate, I was fascinated by the books that allow you to 'script' a world into being, and the intricate worlds that were wrought by the main character's mother...it reminded me of computer program developers and game creators who write computer scripts that bring worlds into being on the computer screen. I often wonder how long it will be before we have an artificial intelligence who creates a world and people who can cross over into our reality and live a "real" life. Here's the blurb:
Can she write a world gone wrong?A certain pen, a certain book, and a certain person can craft entirely new worlds through a branch of science called scriptology. Elsa comes from one such world that was written into creation, where her mother—a noted scriptologist—constantly alters and expands their reality.
But when her home is attacked and her mother kidnapped, Elsa is forced to cross into the real world and use her own scriptology gifts to find her. In an alternative Victorian Italy, Elsa finds a secret society of young scientists with a gift for mechanics, alchemy, or scriptology—and meets Leo, a gorgeous mechanist with a smart mouth and tragic past. She recruits the help of these fellow geniuses just as an assassin arrives on their doorstep.
In debut author Gwendolyn Clare's thrilling Ink, Iron, and Glass, worlds collide as Elsa unveils a deep political conspiracy seeking to unlock the most dangerous weapon ever created—and only she can stop it. Kirkus Reviews: Elsa's homeland can't be located on a map: Veldana and its people exist as a result of scriptology, a craft whose practitioners can scribe new lands into existence. Veldana is the creation of a white Frenchman, but Elsa's mother, a Veldanese master scriptologist, advocated for her people's autonomy and is now the fabricated world's caretaker. (Among other colonialist acts, the creator scribed pregnancies against the brown-skinned Veldanese women's will.) The dark-skinned, green-eyed, 16-year-old Elsa, also a brilliant scriptologist, will one day proudly inherit the responsibility. When her mother is abducted, Elsa leaves Veldana for Earth—the real world—to find help. Events lead her to a yet-to-be-unified Italy, where she finds herself a resident of the Casa della Pazzia ("House of the Madness"), a sentient residence for orphan pazzerellone, or "mad scientists." Each student possesses one of three "madnesses": alchemy, mechanics, or scriptology. There, the fiercely independent Elsa reluctantly finds allies: olive-skinned Italians Leo and Porzia and brown-skinned Tunisian Faraz. As the four get closer to finding Elsa's mother and learning the reason for her capture, they discover an enemy who will stop at nothing to use scriptology as a weapon to "edit" the Earth. This debut novel is fully realized steampunk-fantasy, offering an alternate history that deftly and creatively adopts the politics of 19th-century Italy to create a compellingly unique world. Although the book uses the language of mental illness to describe its characters' specific magical talents, in this world "mad" seems to carry none of the baggage it does in ours. Exciting and original.
I agree that this book is exciting and original, however, I felt that Elsa was too easily cowed and fell in love with Leo, who is a loud, entitled and obnoxious jerk, when he and his fragile male ego should have been sent packing. Instead, all sorts of allowances are made for him because of his ego and macho attitude, which weakens the empowering of women/girls theme that the author sets up. Also, Leo's family are liars, traitors and assassins, so we are left with him betraying all the people who have loved and raised and helped him for a majority of his life. I couldn't feel any compassion for such a person, though I know as Elsa's love interest, we are supposed to believe that he did everything to protect her from his evil mafia family. I am sure more will come to light in the second book, which I plan on reading. The prose was good, if a tad syrupy, which lead to the plot being bogged down once or twice. Still, I'd give the book a B, and recommend it to anyone who likes YA Steampunk.
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