by Angie Manfredi
Posted on March 5, 2009 at 1:54 am

YES, THANK YOU. Pretending the characters have no race is, to me, kinda like sitting there with your hands in your ears humming, loudly, and saying, it’s the same for everyone! And by pointing out the different experiences of people of different races YOU’RE THE RACIST!! I *hate* this line of thinking. It’s the Stephen Colbert joke about not noticing race. Just ask his black friend!

I say all this with “True Believer” being one of my favorite YA novels of all time. I LOVE that book. But I always, always saw the characters as black and would never, ever think along the “does it really maaaaatter?” school.

AS TO THIS BOOK: omg, it’s like some kind of crazy pod person wrote it. I cannot even begin to express my incredulity and straight up *hatred* for the idiot plot device of what LaVaughn figured out. (and how she proves it.) You have GOT to be kidding me! Are we suddenly in a daytime soap opera? What is HAPPENING? It is completely tone deaf with the rest of the novels and the fictional universe created. It serves NO purpose, undermines everything that has come before, and confuses the plot. The whole thing is muddled, the part with her friends, her irrational anger at Dr. Moore, the weird no woman could make it in medical school in the 1980s (what???) and then, of course, THE REVEAL.

How this series went so, so, so terribly head-scratchingly bad I will never know.

THANK YOU for writing this!!

by Amy P.
Posted on March 12, 2009 at 12:12 pm

I’m so with you about the soap-opera style of the “long lost daughter” piece in this book. That it is a particular mannerism that suggests Dr. Moore’s and Jolly’s relationship to LaVaughn is sooooo unbelievable, especially given the scientific bent of the novel. Nature vs. nurture, much? Here is where race becomes a legitimate issue: Dr. Moore and Jolly’s chance of being related by blood goes down quite a bit if they are of different races. Furthermore, it is possible that their shared DNA expressed itself in other ways besides the characteristic gesture? I wager it is, but we would have to talk about physical markers of race to address this.