International Friday: Sara Farizan's If You Could Be Mine

I'd been hearing a lot of buzz about Sara Farizan's If You Could Be Mine in the Twitterverse for awhile now. If You Could Be Mine is a YA novel about a seventeen-year-old girl Sahar, and how far she would go for the love of her best friend, Nasrin (also a girl, for those of you not familiar with Persian names)...in the Islamic Republic of Iran. *Cue dramatic music* And you thought you had problems!

I'll admit I was excited when I read blurbs about the book online, but I was also a little worried. As a person of color living in the United States, I am always conscious of media representations of non-Anglo cultures. Would this book resort to stereotyping? Tokenism? Preachiness about the evils of living in Iran?

Much to Ms. Farizan's credit, the answer to those questions is a resounding no. While some of the foods, culture, and words might be unfamiliar to some American readers, somehow, by using Sahar's voice to tell the story, it makes the story feel more immediate. It makes me feel like it is happening to a close friend, and not a random girl in a country I know nothing about.

I only read the first five chapters from the digital preview on Amazon, but I can't wait to see what happens next. The official release for the book is August 20, 2013. Pre-order it from your favorite bookseller today!

Check out morethanjustmagic's interview with Sara Farizan here.

Print Media Monday: Gay Characters in Middle Grade Fiction

Vikki Vansickle wrote this wonderful post on her blog a couple of weeks back about the scarcity of gay characters in middle grade fiction. It's too late to wait for YA to introduce this topic, she argues, and I wholeheartedly agree. She includes a list of middle grade books with gay characters, for those who are interested in exploring more. You can read the post here.

Pride Month is over, but let's keep the love and support in our hearts all year long!

Photo Credits

The lovely photo of the rainbow flag was taken from this site. Thanks!

ABC Family's The Fosters

Tonight I watched the pilot episode of ABC Family's new series, The Fosters. I will be honest with you. I really, really wanted to hate this show. ABC is owned by Disney, and Disney is evil, right? And somehow, after watching the trailers, I felt that the show was trying too hard to be diverse and interesting. It almost seemed like the casting directors had a checklist of races and ethnicities they needed to have in the show. There was Teri Polo playing the blonde police officer, Stef, with the heart of gold. Sheri Saum plays the African-American vice principal of a perfect charter school, and Stef's wife. She also has a heart of gold. Stef has one biological child from her previous marriage with her ex-husband, who happens to be Latino. They adopted a pair of fraternal twins, Mariana and Jesus, played by Cierra Ramirez and Jake T. Austin who used to be their foster kids. And our protagonist, Callie, played by Maia Mitchell rounds out the cast. Before I watched the show I wondered, could they really pull off all the roles without falling into tokenism?

Thankfully, I was pleassantly surprised. If you watch the show, you will see that there are so many layers to the characters that you really begin to feel for them and relate to them as human beings. The acting is superb overall, with each actor adding depth to the characters they portray. By the end of the hour (which flew by) I saw them as a regular family facing struggles like any other. If that is the message the show's creators were trying to send out, I would say they succeeded.

My only complaint would be (and this probably not a problem for anyone else but me) is the lack of chemistry between Stef (Teri Polo) and Lena (Sherri Saum). I wonder if they did this on purpose?

Please be advised, due to violent scenes, this show is for older children.

Photo Credits

The Fosters logo was taken from here.