The Brightest Sun by Adrienne Benson

This post is late because I wasn't sure if I wanted to publish it at all. You see, I hated this book so much that I wasn't sure I wanted to give it any sort of extra publicity at all. That being said, I feel like it would be disingenuous to only post books that I enjoyed instead of pointing out problematic books of our era. With that being said, here we go:

Adrienne Benson managed to write a book that managed to be an insult to everyone reading it. She had three main  characters, the white woman who escapes her problems by going to Africa, the other white woman who escapes her problems by going to Africa, and the Maasai woman whose problems can only be fixed by the white woman fleeing reality.

I don't even want to talk about the story here, what I want to talk about is the trend I have seen of books written by people with very narrow exposure to a culture with their main settings in that culture. In the author bio we see she was brought up by aid workers across sub-Saharan Africa, but never in one place too long. She was not exposed to village life, and was not involved with the local community. She has also written for buzzfeed, which shows as her writing style is easy to follow and the narrative is clear.

Ms. Benson also served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal. I'm a returned PCV myself, and I would feel woefully unprepared to write a novel about village life in Ghana despite my two years steeped in the culture. Benson crosses a boundary that stopped being appropriate to cross decades ago, and she does it poorly.

Why am I so mad? Well, here's the sentence that made me quit the book for a solid four days before I could pick the piece of trash back up again, "All the mothers there were fine-tuned to the concept of benign neglect; that was the Maasai way." 

Let me say that I understand what she was attempting to convey, but this hamhanded morally superior tone was the opposite of informing the reader. In fact I think it informs us a lot more of the author than of the tribe she pretends to know.

I would recommend this book to a guttertrash fire or recycling plant, this will be the first book of this blog that I do not share with another person; do not buy this book.

White Rabbit by Caleb Roehrig

White Rabbit is a young adult mystery novel by Caleb Roehrig. If this novel had featured your stereotypical scooby-squad protagonists I would have suggested to skip it; fortunately for us that is not the case.

White Rabbit has a very pulp feel to it: kids stumble onto a crime scene, and the kids have to figure it out before the adults do. The main story has everything you'd expect from a kid's mystery book: heaps of dead bodies, romance between leads, and a few 11th hour twists to throw the honor students in the audience off their game.

So why am I still recommending this 330pg cliché? Because of representation. The fact that the book is so cookie cutter is exactly why it's a great book to give impressionable kids. It not only addresses the stigmas attached to figuring out your own non-heteronormative sexuality at a tender age, but also addresses the very real homophobia and uncertainty people feel when they come out.

White Rabbit's a typical book you'd find battered and dog eared sticking out of a thrift store backpack on the bus. It's honestly wonderful to see a kids book written for kids that doesn't have a heavy handed message so much as it just happens to have representation and it's unashamed of itself for that selfsame reason.

I would recommend this book to any middle schooler or early high schooler, as it's an interesting read and makes the reader evaluate facts and analyze differing narratives in an easy to manage level. I would double recommend to any kids who are questioning their sexuality or who have friends who are going through that struggle.

Caleb Roehrig goes to great length to garner the audiences empathy without trying to make the character's backstories total sob stories, and for that Roehrig has my respect.