Tag: biracial characters

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book reviews

Book Review: ‘Colored Television’ by Danzy Senna

Colored Television by Danzy Senna ventures into the touchy subject of biracial identity through a protagonist desperate to share her story but finds it is considered indigestible in book form to a screen-obsessed society, which she figures would rather consume her story through TV. 

Jane, a biracial woman proud of her ethnicities, is a literature professor at a liberal arts college who can’t wait for her sabbatical. She plans to spend it finishing her epic novel that spans generations, decades, and centuries. It centers on biracial identity politics in the U.S. and is told through various characters. She feels her powerful novel will change America so much that it will become a classic. If she gets this sophomore novel published, then she will be granted tenure. But one of her female colleagues returned to campus without tenure because her epic novel was rejected. She pushes those negative thoughts as she submits her long-awaited book to her agent and editor. The book has to work for her as she and her family house-sit for her uber-successful TV producer friend in a Los Angeles mansion. They don’t have permanent housing, and she feels her talent should bring her a mansion as well. 

Weeks later, Jane learns that her agent and editor could barely read her work. It’s considered a complete labyrinthine mess. They drop her since they waited a decade for just the rough draft. The explanatory rejection authors fear when the publishing middlemen are unable to decipher your story is described on page 79 in the hardcover edition:

Later, Jane would only remember certain phrases. Josiah felt the book was “Frankensteinian.” Like the monster, he said, her book was an ungainly mishmash— and like the monster, it felt sloppily constructed, the stitches and scars showing. He said it was sarcastic, bracing and cruel at times, mawkish and purple at others. It bewildered him. He had no idea why she was cramming all these figures together. What did Zoe Kravitz have to do with the Melungeon people in nineteenth-century Tennessee? How did any of it connect to Sydney and Justin, O.J. and Nicole’s kids, or to Jane’s own creature — this fragile, trembling 1950s film actress who roamed the book in her negligee, barefoot and suicidal, worrying about the color of the baby growing inside of her. Josiah didn’t understand what Jane was attempting to do here, but he cared about Jane and felt that publishing this novel would be a kind of career suicide.

Not only are Jane’s literary dreams shattered, but her economic stability is uncertain. Her husband, Lenny, is a struggling artist obsessed with learning Japanese to have an exhibit in Japan. Their daughter, Ruby, would rather play with the White dolls as she makes more White friends in their temporary living status. Their son, Finn, is on the autism spectrum as they seek to understand his needs. Jane realizes that no book means no tenure. Out of desperation, she goes through her friend’s desk to find contacts in the television industry. She ends up meeting mega-producer Hampton Ford, who seems interested in her work. His assistants, Layla, the “Nigerian Valley Girl,” and Topher, the “perennially lost white boy,” are pathetic at pitching premises for shows. But Hampton likes Jane’s idea of having a biracial family sitcom akin to Black-ish, so he asks Jane to join the team. 

After pitching contemporary episodes, Jane feels proud about this new phase in her creative career. Except Hampton is not feeling any of the finessed ideas. Then, Jane tells him about her epic novel about biracial identity. Hampton is so intrigued that he offers to read her manuscript. Jane feels her fortune is finally changing, so she looks for a house in her ideal neighborhood she nicknamed Multicultural Mayberry. She prepares for a high-earning career like the friend who allowed her to house-sit. As she realizes all her dreams may not come true the way she hoped, she wonders if her stories will ever see the light of day. 

The story shows one’s racial and ethnic identities through stereotypical lenses. And these lenses are developed from stories by writers who do not have a connection to the said group or groups they are writing about. Jane and Lenny have thoughtful conversations on racial and biracial identities constantly throughout the story as they try to figure out how best to tell stories about the biracial experience. Lenny is Black, but because of this, he feels he understands the complexity of the conversation, while Jane wants to share her stories centered on biracial characters, real-life figures, and pointed moments in history. When she receives the opportunity to work with a powerhouse like Hampton Ford, she applies her deep intelligence and subject expertise to construct everyday sitcom episodes that will impact audiences of all backgrounds. She is so hungry to share her perspectives, outside of her pillow talk with her husband. This eagerness, which can also be interpreted as desperation, eventually harms her in the end. 

Another subject woven through the story is the high rate of rejection in creative industries. Jane is a debut novelist who hasn’t delivered her sophomore success. She feels the pressure to secure a book deal to secure her tenure as a professor and home as a mother. She appears lost in the mix, trying to take care of her children and support her husband’s art while looking for an avenue for her story to live. Her mind races back to a time when she chose her husband, moved from New York City to Los Angeles for a new creative start, and started having kids to understand her current situation. 

Overall, the book details the ups and downs of a creative career when someone feels ready for the next stage, and the stage keeps moving. It also dives deep into biracial ethnic studies. The main character struggles to share her lived experience as a biracial woman when her intellectual approach is dismissed. The question of how to bring her art forth to the public lingers throughout Jane’s story. 

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book reviews

Book Review: ‘Nigeria Jones’ by Ibi Zoboi

*Given an advanced reading copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review*

Nigeria Jones by Ibi Zoboi follows the daughter of a Black revolutionary in Philadelphia trying to fulfill her mother’s wish for her to have a normal life.

Sixteen-year-old Nigeria is the daughter of Kofi Sankofa, an activist who has built his identity and his community around uplifting people in the African diaspora with his pro-African beliefs. Nigeria has always been in his shadow as his warrior princess who can practice shooting guns under the protection of the Second Amendment and organize the youth who seek guidance in their community household. She also takes care of her 1-year-old brother Freedom.

With her mother missing, Nigeria takes it upon herself to be that motherly figure to Freedom while trying to find answers of why her mother is no longer around. Her mother’s friend KD, a White woman, tells Nigeria that her mother wanted her to attend the Philadelphia Friends School, a Quaker high school. It’s the same school KD’s daughter Sage, who is biracial, attends. And Sage and Nigeria used to be close, but Kofi has driven a wedge between the families, not wanting someone White in his circle who could allegedly taint his daughter’s mind. Nigeria has been homeschooled her whole life with her education focusing on the African diaspora rather than European history taught in American schools. But if Nigeria’s mother wanted her daughter to go to school, then what is the problem?

While still upholding her responsibilities, Nigeria wanders into the high school her mother had hopes she would attend. At Philly Friends, she follows Sage and her cousin, Kamau, through hallways and in classrooms struggling to find the balance between her tailored education at home and the one presented to her at a predominantly White school. Her new environment welcomes new opportunities, like getting involved in the diversity, equity, and inclusion club and practicing for debate club with a White boy named Liam, who seems to understand Nigeria better than she thought he would. As she battles her father in attending the school, she finds herself tracing the events that led to her mother’s disappearance. Since it was her mother who registered her for the previous school year before she faded out of the picture, Nigeria feels she needs to better understand her mother’s whereabouts in order to accept the new life she envisions for herself.

The story touches on eldest daughter syndrome, a branch of the birth order theory that has taken over the internet. The eldest daughters are usually the ones with the most responsibility and the ones who receive the most blame. Nigeria is experiencing this phenomenon while also coming out of being the only child for 15 years. Though her father treats her as his version of the apple of his eye, Kofi smothers any chance for Nigeria to find her own path under his roof. She supports his teachings while not quite understanding the world outside her home. The father-daughter dynamic pushes Nigeria to seek her own world because her mother is no longer there to soften the blow of any tension between her and her father. Most teenagers are finding themselves around 16, but Nigeria’s journey feels more complicated without her mother and knowing that her mother had other plans for their lives.

Overall, the conflict between Nigeria and the Movement she grew up in makes this young adult novel more layered. The main character is a teenager who really hasn’t experienced the real world with being tied to a community house where she is homeschooled. She is striving to do something most kids her age already do: attend school, especially attend an excellent high school in order to attend an excellent university. But we see all these factors at home weighing her down to the point she doesn’t know how to escape, or she escapes with guilt. It’s a heavier read with the blend of racial and social justice elements that come up throughout the story, but it speaks to the teenage girl who feels like she is unable to think for herself because her life is being controlled at every turn.

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what's lit

Jenny Han Talks Asian Representation in Books on ‘The Summer I Turned Pretty’ Tour

Lola Tung as Belly in 'The Summer I Turned Pretty'

Best-selling young adult novelist Jenny Han has another series in the book-to-TV limelight. After finding success on Netflix with the three film adaptations of her To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before series, she now has her first YA series The Summer I Turned Pretty getting the screen treatment with its recent premiere on Amazon Prime Video.

Not new to advocacy for having more Asian and Asian American stories represented in books, Jenny spoke about the issue on her press tour while a mention made an appearance on the new TV show.

On CBS Mornings this week, anchor Gayle King asked if Jenny was hurt when she wasn’t able to sell her early works featuring an Asian character. Jenny says her feelings weren’t hurt “because it was so matter-of-fact.”

To be able to sell her first YA novel, she made her main character Belly Conklin, played by Lola Tung onscreen, appear White.

Jenny Han in ‘The Summer I Turned Pretty’ (Peter Taylor/Prime Video)

“I had tried to sell a book with an Asian main character before this one, and people weren’t really interested in it,” says Jenny, who’s also the executive producer of the show. “The thing I would hear is we already have a book with an Asian. I thought with The Summer I Turned Pretty, it was a story I hoped would kind of have an effervescence to it that people can lock onto. After that, I wrote To All the Boys, and I was able to write my own ticket once I had garnered trust from an audience that might not pick up a book with a cover with someone who didn’t look like them.”

The character of Belly became half-Asian, half-White, and is now depicted as biracial on the updated media tie-in cover issued by Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers.

To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before was the first best-seller to have an Asian girl on the cover, according to the author. The fight for representation even spilled onto the choice to have her headshot on the back cover.

“Even with my first book, it was important to me to put a picture on the back of it because at first they were like, ‘Hmm, we don’t really need it.’ It wasn’t really done at the time,” she says. “I want other young Asian women to see that and think it’s possible.”

The Summer I Turned Pretty follows Isabel “Belly” Conklin who’s on the verge of turning 16 when she heads off to Cousins Beach in Massachusetts with her mother and older brother for another summer with the Fishers, her mother’s best friend and two sons.

The foursome who grew up together every summer are now teenagers, and Belly feels the energy shift between her and the oldest Fisher son Conrad, played by Christopher Briney, and the younger Fisher son Jeremiah, played by Gavin Casalegno. Belly always had a crush on Conrad when she was considered too young and nerdy. Now that she’s blossoming into womanhood, heightened by a debutante ball, she becomes entangled in a love triangle that stretches beyond her and the two brothers.

In one scene in the fourth episode “Summer Heat,” after a conflict reaches a fever pitch in the Fisher summer home, Belly’s author mother, Laurel, played by Jackie Chung, heads to a bar to cool off. There, she sees the local author she’s been competing with in the beach town’s bookstore. Once they start chatting, the state of their careers comes up.

“When we went out with my first novel, everyone said, ‘Uhhh, there is no market for a book about a Filipino main character, and now it’s all they want from me,” says author Cleveland, played by Alfredo Narciso, about his treatment in the beginning of his fictional publishing career.

The show also stars Rachel Blanchard as Susannah Fisher, the mother of Conrad and Jeremiah. Rachel starred as the ’90s TV version of Cher Horowitz, the main character of Clueless loosely based on Jane Austen’s classic Emma.

The second season of the series has already received the green light for production.