fortified with mapo!

By Cindy Pon

I am beyond thrilled to share the RUSE cover with you!! The cover art is by Jason Chan, and as much as I loved the WANT cover, I think my adoration of RUSE matches that!! Jason is an incredible artist, and I feel so lucky!! I think what I love most about the cover is that it features a bespectacled heroine!! :D WANT is currently $5.99 where ebooks are sold, so pick it up if you haven’t yet!! …

In near-future Shanghai, a group of teens have their world turned upside down when one of their own is kidnapped in this action-packed follow-up to the “positively chilling” (The New York Times) sci-fi thriller Want.

Jason Zhou, his friends, and Daiyu are still recovering from the aftermath of bombing Jin Corp headquarters. But Jin, the ruthless billionaire and Daiyu’s father, is out for blood. When Lingyi goes to Shanghai to help Jany Tsai, a childhood acquaintance in trouble, she doesn’t expect Jin to be involved. And when Jin has Jany murdered and steals the tech she had refused to sell him, Lingyi is the only one who has access to the encrypted info, putting her own life in jeopardy.

Zhou doesn’t hesitate to fly to China to help Iris find Lingyi, even though he’s been estranged from his friends for months. But when Iris tells him he can’t tell Daiyu or trust her, he balks. The reunited group play a treacherous cat and mouse game in the labyrinthine streets of Shanghai, determined on taking back what Jin had stolen.

When Daiyu appears in Shanghai, Zhou is uncertain if it’s to confront him or in support of her father. Jin has proudly announced Daiyu will be by his side for the opening ceremony of Jin Tower, his first “vertical city.” And as hard as Zhou and his friends fight, Jin always gains the upper hand. Is this a game they can survive, much less win?

ADD RUSE to your goodreads!

By Rin Chupeco

I was six years old when I learned that I had an older brother I would never meet. Growing up in a slightly traditional Chinese family, we’re not used to expressing emotions and feelings. But it was clear that my mother’s miscarriage had cast a pall over the family, even when it went unspoken. My parents had been looking forward to having a baby boy, and on the rare moments when that topic came up (often unexpectedly) in conversation, I could sense that quiet sadness that never went away.  

I was in my teens before I realized that I—or my father, or the both of us without either side acknowledging—might have started compensating for that absence. I was always tomboyish, and I gravitated to action figures, martial arts, and rough sports. I’d always been the daddy’s girl. My father was an award-winning basketball coach, and while basketball initially didn’t strike my fancy I joined basketball camps that he helped oversee and and practiced mainly to spend more time with him. We had similar interests in pop culture and the like, so we were quick to bond over them - he taught me how to speak Klingon, bought me my first light saber, played video games together.

It wasn’t until I was much older that I realized that these were easily things he could have done with my older brother or—what would probably have happened—things we both could have done with my older brother. I’ve heard of other Chinese parents, fathers in particular, who resent not having a son and often take that frustration out on their families. To his credit, my father never did any of that. But I could see his wistfulness when he played with some of my younger cousins, singling out one of them in particular to constantly tease and play pranks on (jokes and humor were his chosen method of expressing affection), or on those rare occasions when anyone ever alluded to my older brother. I saw it most clearly in his unabashed happiness when I told him he was going to have a grandson, and when he nearly broke down when Ezio was born.

It was when I was pregnant that I started thinking about that brother more often than I ever had in the past, (brought back to the fore most recently, since my little Ezio is about to have a new sibling as well). I had just finished The Suffering, the sequel to the Girl from the Well, and while I’d taken a few months off from writing to prepare for a toddler I’d also been at a loss over what to write next. Somewhere during those sleepless nights where I had to wake every couple of hours to feed my baby or pump, I started coming back to that. My brother didn’t even get to have a name, and it felt wrong for him not to have one. I thought about giving him one, thought about Chinese mythology where spirits could come back from the dead—not to haunt and terrorize like Western urban legends, but sometimes to comfort and impart knowledge.

In Chinese lore, they sometimes came back as fox spirits.

Chinese spirits were also transcendent, intelligent specters—in many stories they show themselves to philosophers while the latter meditate or study; sometimes they even take tea with them.

So I started writing about a girl named Tea and a brother she brought back from the dead, named Fox.  

The Bone Witch is a lot of things - a ghost story, a warning about how absolute power can go wrong, a coming of age story, a vengeance quest, a magic tale, a treatise about the patriarchy and how even well-meaning matriarchies can get things wrong.

But at its heart, in its truest, purest form of heartsglass, is just a story about a girl and her brother.

The Bone Witch is about learning to live together, about what it’s like to be family.

The Heart Forger is about learning to make choices beyond that family, to be independent while still learning to give each other space, about learning to maintain that love despite change.

And the Shadowglass, due out next year, will be about learning how to say goodbye.

And I think it’s the best eulogy about my brother that I’ve ever written.

Despite an unsettling resemblance to Japanese revenants, Rin always maintains her sense of hummus. Born and raised in Manila, Philippines, she keeps four pets: a dog, two birds, and a husband. Dances like the neighbors are watching. She is represented by Rebecca Podos of the Helen Rees Agency.  

my underrated lit shelf: 1/10 favorite underrated books: WANT by Cindy Pon

books read in 2017:  WANT by cindy pon

“Please lady!” she rasped. “Have mercy. I have done nothing wrong.”

Beautiful Venom

TODAY IS THE DAY! The YA world finally gets to have more Malinda Lo to read! I had the pleasure of beta reading this book, and this deliciously dark thriller is one of my favorites by Malinda. Just look at this stunning cover!

Jess Wong is Angie Redmond’s best friend. And that’s the most important thing, even if Angie can’t see how Jess truly feels. Being the girl no one quite notices is OK with Jess anyway. While nobody notices her, she’s free to watch everyone else. But when Angie begins to fall for Margot Adams, a girl from the nearby boarding school, Jess can see it coming a mile away. Suddenly her powers of observation are more curse than gift.

As Angie drags Jess further into Margot’s circle, Jess discovers more than her friend’s growing crush. Secrets and cruelty lie just beneath the carefree surface of this world of wealth and privilege, and when they come out, Jess knows Angie won’t be able to handle the consequences.

When the inevitable darkness finally descends, Angie will need her best friend.

“Lo has delivered an intricate tapestry of narrative, woven in a labyrinthine pattern of secrets and colored with intersecting hues of Chinese-American identity, the dark intensity of relationships, and telltale stains of blood.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“With an active focus on female friendships and relationships, A Line in the Dark is a twisty, dark psychological thriller that will leave you guessing til the very end. The story follows two friends down a path of dysfunction and murder as one of them, Chinese-American Jess tries to balance the expectations of her family, her fraught relationship with Angie, and her mounting sexual attraction for her. Lo offers some impressive storytelling, a chilling plot, and mean girls aplenty.”—Teen Vogue

We’re honored to host a cover reveal today for A THOUSAND BEGINNINGS AND ENDINGS, an anthology edited by WNDB’s own Ellen Oh and Elsie Chapman and featuring stories from a diverse group of talented authors. Congratulations!

More information from the publisher: 

Star crossed lovers, meddling immortals, feigned identities, battles of wits, and dire warnings. These are the stuff of fairy tale, myth, and folklore that have drawn us in for centuries.

Fifteen bestselling and acclaimed authors reimagine the folklore and mythology of East and South Asia in short stories that are by turns enchanting, heartbreaking, romantic, and passionate.

Compiled by We Need Diverse Books’s Ellen Oh and Elsie Chapman, the authors included in this exquisite collection are: Renee Ahdieh, Sona Charaipotra, Preeti Chhibber, Roshani Chokshi, Aliette de Bodard, Melissa de la Cruz, Julie Kagawa, Rahul Kanakia, Lori M. Lee, E. C. Myers, Cindy Pon, Aisha Saeed, Shveta Thakrar, and Alyssa Wong.                      

By F. C. Yee

THE EPIC CRUSH OF GENIE LO was definitely not the first book I’d ever written. Back when it only existed as a single chapter and some ideas about the characters, I was trying to get a completed middle grade book off the ground. I attended a writer’s workshop with a group critique session, hoping to get the insight I needed to finally make my MG work viable.

Once I arrived at the conference, however, I was told I’d been sorted into a YA critique group. This kind of thing tends to happen when your last name is at the end of the alphabet. Everyone gets sectioned off into the teams/groups/classes that are available in A to Z order, and as someone who arbitrarily fails to make the cutoff, you get to fill whatever’s left open.

So I pulled an audible. Instead of reading from my middle grade book, I read the opening pages of GENIE LO, which were pretty much unchanged from the published version, if you’ve seen those already. And to my surprise, the group liked it! They told me it was funny and attention-grabbing, which was exactly what I’d hoped for.

Then they asked me how the story and characters would develop. “What’s Genie like?” someone asked. “What’s her dominant emotion?”

“She’s angry,” I said.

The room kind of turned when I said that. I could see the hesitation in the group.

“Angry against injustice?” someone offered, trying to add a helpful qualifier to my description.

Well that too, I remember thinking.

I could have been reading too much into that moment. And I certainly am not denigrating critique groups at writers’ conferences; the very same people at the session helped me flesh out what THE EPIC CRUSH OF GENIE LO would eventually become. I owe them a great deal. But I do remember that one little hitch in time where it took a bit of mental effort for them to reconcile an angry protagonist with a sympathetic one.

Genie is overtly frustrated with what can be a dehumanizing process for many at her age—college applications. The idea that you can be denied opportunity and self-actualization by a gatekeeper who won’t even spend that much time judging you is maddening. I saw a fictional parallel where other creators have before, in Sun Wukong’s struggle to gain acceptance among the gods. But I also saw a personal one in the post-college career difficulties I was having at the time. The fight to be accepted as worthy never really ends. Or at least that’s how I felt about it.

Further complicating matters is when life doesn’t even let you focus on your own fight, and demands that you do some heavy lifting for others. In Genie’s case, she has to protect her town from an invasion of demons who won’t let well enough alone, simply because she happens to be the strongest one around. Important tasks often fall to the people who are already working the hardest, not to those with the most time and resources on their hands. I wanted to write about this in a way I hoped people would recognize, visible under the action and comedy and romance.

Anyway, if you want to see what happened when I doubled down on Genie being angry rather than back away from the characterization, you can check out THE EPIC CRUSH OF GENIE LO when it comes out on August 8th.

F. C. Yee grew up in New Jersey and went to school in New England, but has called the San Francisco Bay Area home ever since he beat a friend at a board game and shouted “That’s how we do it in NorCal, baby!” Outside of writing, he practices capoeira, a Brazilian form of martial arts, and has a day job mostly involving spreadsheets.

Book Aesthetics: Want by Cindy Pon (@cindypon)

“…the truth was a harsh and ugly one: in order to change the status quo, we had to be destructive. Seize control of the narrative. Redirect the plot.”

By Imani Josey

I don’t have a daughter yet, but if I did, I would have taken her to see Wonder Woman. And I’m sure she would have been enamored as much as I was. It’s also safe to assume she’d be a young black girl, and while enjoying the movie, she would instantly know Wonder Woman doesn’t look anything like her. She might even go so far as to ask, “Mommy, I like Wonder Woman, but can I be Wonder Woman?’

The movie was progressive and (for the first part) fun, but its lack of intersectionality made it like many other superhero and fantasy series, in that women of color can only enjoy it to an extent. Wonder Woman didn’t have the diversity I want for empowering my future children. It had the kind of diversity that plucks a few POC at random and throws them into an all-white world, that makes them sidekicks and tokens, that others them. Wonder Woman isn’t the only movie to do this, and plenty of YA fantasy book series do it, too. When I have children of color, I want to be able to give them a fantasy series where they don’t have to ponder why the heroes and heroines never look like them. I don’t want them to feel like they must blend into the mainstream, into whiteness, to be powerful and strong.

My debut novel, The Blazing Star, is about a sixteen-year-old black girl named Portia who travels back in time to ancient Egypt, kicks butt, and saves the world. She also takes her twin sister, Alexandria, and a classmate, Selene, on the journey with her. They, too, are women of color. And smack dab in the middle of The Blazing Star’s cover is Portia’s face looking off in the distance, ready to wield her #blackgirlmagic as she sees fit.

I’m not sure how many other black girls are on the cover of YA fantasy book series, and I’m not sure how many lead their own stories as protagonists. But judging by Lee & Low’s annual research, the number is incredibly low. I was hell-bent on my book series doing what traditional pub is dragging its feet to do—fixing the representation gap—a major component of why I went indie. I received the “can’t connect with the voice” rejections from agents over and over, but knew there was an audience for The Blazing Star. Sure enough, it sold out on release day.

What I love most about the series is that I know my future daughter will never have to ask if she can be Portia. She will just know she can by picking up The Blazing Star and seeing a black girl on the cover. And when the second book in the series, The Falling Star, releases in February 2018, there will be another beautiful black girl on the cover, and my future daughter will know she can be Alexandria, too.

My parents gave me a wonderful (no pun intended) gift thirty years ago. They surrounded me with black dolls and books with black protagonists, which permitted me to see myself not as the Other, but as normal. As a well-rounded, complex person with likes and dislikes and experiences that matter like anyone else’s, and who knew her black skin was beautiful just the way it was. It was my parents’ mission to ground my normalcy in my agency, not in my proximity to whiteness. Perhaps that education, that pedagogy of possibilities, is why I sold my car and put the money toward publishing the first in a YA fantasy series starring teens of color. It’s not a series about tokenism. It’s about agency. It’s a love letter to my fascinating sisters and to my future children. It’s beyond diversity—fantasy or not, at its heart, my trilogy is reality.

Imani Josey is a writer from Chicago, Illinois. In her previous life, she was a cheerleader for the Chicago Bulls and won the titles of Miss Chicago and Miss Cook County for the Miss America Organization, as well as Miss Black Illinois USA. Her one-act play, Grace, was produced by Pegasus Players Theatre Chicago after winning the 19th Annual Young Playwrights Festival. In recent years, she has turned her sights to long-form fiction. The Blazing Star is her debut novel.

Author Interview: Cindy Pon

The moment I heard about it, I put Want on my to-read list because, um hello, sci-fi thriller set in Taipei? Yes, please. I’m over the moon this book is out in the world now, and we at Rich in Color will be talking more about Want in August! More on that next week. Today, we welcome Cindy Pon (@cindypon) to Rich in Color to talk about Want, writing, and representation. Check it out!

First off, I have to say that I was beyond excited for Want, a YA set in Taipei, Taiwan! I’ve been there! Ahhh! Ahem, anyway… How did it feel, writing a book set somewhere that’s clearly personal for you? Not to mention in an all-too-plausible near future setting that feels very relevant to current events right now?

All my novels are special to me, but WANT especially because it was an ode to my birth city. I really wanted to bring the city alive for readers, I wanted Taipei to be a character in itself. From some reader reactions, I feel like I achieved that for them, and it makes me so happy! As for relevancy, WANT is the novel that took longest from fruition in 2011 to actual publication. Six years is a LONG time, and I began to worry my near-future thriller would be retro-thriller soon enough. ha! Often the reader reactions were that the world felt very believable and real, and that is because I pulled a lot directly from headlines.

One thing I found fascinating was the seamless switching between languages in Want. Different books usually handle this in different ways to varying degrees of success. How did you decide you were going to handle the issue of portraying different languages?

Hmm. It had to make sense but also feel organic and not confusing? I had great beta readers and critique partners, and I relied on them to make comments on points of confusion. I admit I’m a very intuitive writer, so it’s just a matter of does this fit, does it flow, does it make sense? Especially as I’m revising.

I definitely ship Zhou and Daiyu. But another relationship that felt incredibly central to Want was family – the found family of Lingyi, Iris, Victor, Arun, and Zhou. What made you choose this particular cast of characters?

Originally, WANT began as a short story in Diverse Energies (Tu Books) and only featured Zhou and Daiyu. I found both of them utterly fascinating, and it was their dynamic and my curiosity over what their stories were that convinced me to flesh the short story into novel length. As for the squad, I wish I could tell you I did tons of brainstorming and character notecards and trawled through countless images online for inspiration, but as with so much of my writing, they just happened. I did know that I needed distinct characters with distinct traits and abilities to offer to the group. That was the first and easiest thing to decide. Then, they basically told me who they were with each revision.

You referenced the movie Lucy in a Diversity in YA post. For me, Want felt like the anti-Lucy, and that’s something we need way more of. What do you hope to see in the future in terms of Asian representation in media?

I want movies and shows and media in the west to feature Asians front and center as protagonists and heroes, in all genres, from comedy to drama to speculative fiction. We’ve been shunted aside for far too long as far as representation, and so often, the bits we are given are offensive or stereotypical or completely dispensible. All the whitewashing is becoming tired and ridiculous. Our erasure still in media is very real.

The moment I finished reading Want, I wanted (haha) more. I hear there’s a sequel happening. Can you tell us anything about it?

Yes! My fantastic editor offered on RUSE, the WANT sequel, while I was actually in Shanghai for a research trip. So I am hoping to set RUSE in Shanghai. My second books are always dealing with the consequences of what happened in the first novel, and that is what I want to focus on in this one, too. Won’t say much more than that. ha!

Want is definitely going on the top of my list of fave Asian YA reads. What are some of yours?

Aww, that is such a compliment coming from you. Thank you so much, Jessica! I really love Malinda Lo’s Huntress and her forthcoming thriller A Line in the Dark. I also loved The Reader by Traci Chee, Rebel Seoul by Axie Oh, ENTER TITLE HERE by Rahul Kanakia, and Julie Dao’s Forest of a Thousand Lanterns! So much more to choose from since my Silver Phoenix debut back in 2009!

I imagine people have asked you what your favorite Taiwanese food is. But what I want to know is… What’s your favorite pearl milk tea flavor?

hahaha! Coconut milk tea OR barley tea (no milk)!

Finally, what new YA books are on your to-read list this year?

I’m super excited to read The Epic Crush of Genie Lo by F. C. Yee, Wild Beauty by Anna-Marie McLemore, The Library of Fates by Aditi Khorana, Warcross by Marie Lu, Uncanny by David Mcinnis Gill, The Glass Spare by Lauren Destefano, and The Speaker by Traci Chee!