In the good old days, a person could write a book and, if it wasn’t good for some reason, people didn’t buy it and it faded into meaningless obscurity. Good times. The problem for Laura Moriarty, who wrote a young adult book named “American Heart,” is that it was liked enough to be deemed worthy of a Kirkus Review, a pretty big deal.
When Laura Moriarty decided she wanted to write a dystopian novel about a future America in which Muslims are forcefully corralled into detention centers, she was aware that she should tread carefully. Her protagonist is a white teenager, but one of her main characters, Sadaf, is a Muslim American immigrant from Iran, so Moriarty began by diving into Iranian books and films. Moriarty explained via email that she asked two Iranian immigrant friends to read an early draft and see if Sadaf seemed authentic to them, and whether the language and accent fit with their memories and experiences.
A friend of Pakistani and American descent who is a practicing Muslim gave additional feedback. Moriarty asked a senior colleague at the University of Kansas, Giselle Anatol, who writes about Young Adult fiction and has been critical of racist narratives in literature, to read the book with a particular eye toward avoiding another narrative about a “white savior.” And after American Heart was purchased by Harper, the publisher provided several formal “sensitivity reads,” in which a member of a minority group is charged with spotting potentially problematic depictions in a manuscript.
It would seem that Moriarty, and Harper, covered their bases as well as anyone could. And yet, it was not good enough.
On Goodreads, the book’s top “community review,” posted in September, begins, “fuck your white savior narratives”; other early commenters on Goodreads accused Moriarty of “profiting off people’s pain” and said “a white writer should not have tackled this story, and neither should a white character be the center of it.”
Then a positive Kirkus Review came out and all hell broke loose.
The book’s critics were not pleased with the commendation. “Kirkus Reviews of books reinforce white supremacy,” author and activist Justina Ireland, who had posted a critical review of the book on Medium, wrote on Twitter. “I’m sick to my stomach over this, and I’m so sorry Muslim folks have to contend with one more reminder that their humanity is negotiable.”
And Kirkus Review did something it had never done before. Rather than weather the storm of its review, it pulled the review and replaced it with an apologia.
A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR IN CHIEF
It is a policy of Kirkus Reviews that books with diverse subject matter and protagonists are assigned to Own Voices reviewers—writers who can draw upon lived experience when evaluating texts. Our assignment of the review of American Heart was no exception to this rule and was reviewed by an observant Muslim person of color (facts shared with her permission). Our reviewer is an expert in children’s & YA literature and well-versed in the dangers of white savior narratives. She found that American Heart offers a useful warning about the direction we’re headed in as far as racial enmity is concerned.
The issue of diversity in children’s and teen literature is of paramount importance to Kirkus, and we appreciate the power language wields in discussion of the problems. As a result, we’ve removed the starred review from kirkus.com after determining that, while we believe our reviewer’s opinion is worthy and valid, some of the wording fell short of meeting our standards for clarity and sensitivity, and we failed to make the thoughtful edits our readers deserve. The editors are evaluating the review and will make a determination about correction or retraction after careful consideration in collaboration with the reviewer.
At Kirkus Reviews, we will continue to evaluate editorial solutions for better reflecting the expertise of our reviewers and their uniform appreciation for responsible portrayals of marginalized groups. We appreciate the discussion of these issues and celebrate the free exchange of opinions and ideas.
And what, you may wonder, made Moriarty’s book so awful, so horrible, that it demanded this reaction? It had a white protagonist, and thus fostered white supremacy and white saviorism.
“Many members of YA Book Twitter have become culture cops,” [Kat] Rosenfield wrote. “The result is a jumble of dogpiling and dragging, subtweeting and screenshotting, vote-brigading and flagging wars, with accusations of white supremacy on one side and charges of thought-policing moral authoritarianism on the other.”
But to dismiss YA Twitter as “toxic” is to ignore the foundation of the arguments: A concerted effort on behalf of the YA community to make sure that every child sees themselves accurately reflected in literature. (Emphasis added.)
One might suspect that every child is a bit (at least) different such that no book could possibly “accurately reflect” every child, and that no book could ever pass muster. Then again, why is this even an issue? Young adults can’t read books about others who are different than they are, even if they happen to share ethnicity or genitalia?
Not in the YA book world.
“YA needs to stop perpetuating the idea that only white stories and white lives are important,” Ellen Oh, author and co-founder of the nonprofit We Need Diverse Books, tells Bustle. “YA needs to stop publishing problematic books that continue harmful stereotypes. We all need to do better.”
You don’t like a book? Don’t read it. And as far as Moriarty is concerned, she was as dedicated to the cause as anyone, and still she was burned at the stake. The only thing she could have done to appease the orthodoxy was to not write the book at all.
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I’m very fortunate that as a young white boy, I had access to novels that accurately reflected my identity: riding the wild sandworms of Arrakis, leading my Mobile Infantry platoon to victory over the Bugs… you know, the typical experiences of a young white male.
Well, you did have the noble family in common.
Damn. I missed bringing up the litany against fear for Tuesday Talk. Fear really is the mind-killer.
Did Herbert ever say if the Atreides were white or anything else? I don’t think he did explicitly. I guess he was oppressing them by not mentioning that they were a minority or something. Blue eyes are awesome, though.
Diversity is the life of Spice. Or something like that.
Of course he did. Look at their name. Clearly Greeks. White hegemony through and through. Obviously racist.
You left our Richard Morgan’s The Dark Defiles . . . main character is a white gay sorcerer class warrior, sidekick is a black alien lesbian drug addict, other side kick is a giant dragon-killing barbarian who shags upper-class nobility . . . much better than it sounds, and woke as 🙂
If it’s called The Dark Defiles, that’s RACEIST by itself. SMH.
Juan Rico was from the PI.
Well, Ms. Moriarty,
I’m sure did not mind,
When she suddenly found,
A big Kirkus behind.
The comments on that site are hilarious. “If I were european my books would be in every school”
… or you know if your book was good. But no, it’s definitely the European thing.
The whole site is excuses and complaining instead of doing. Reminds me of the women in stem comic you post sometimes.
So, in order to appease, Kirkus threw its “observant Muslim person of color” and “expert” in children’s and YA literature under the bus. I’d like to have been there when the powers at Kirkus told the Muslim colored person that he/she/ze/xe/[insert pronoun] was not sensitive or clear enough about topics that seemed to be in his/her/zer/xer wheelhouse .
I thought of adding American Heart to my library’s collection out of spite, but after reading actual, non-SJW reviews, I don’t want to waste the money on a poorly written Huck Finn knockoff. And as bad as the kerfuffle over American Heart is, the one referenced in Kat Rosenfield’s story about The Black Witch is far worse. The reviewers (and I use that term loosely) seemed to have willfully misinterpreted the book, at best. I hate seeing things like this, not because books can’t be criticized, but because we rely on honest, accurate reviews when making book choices. And ridiculous crap like this just makes a tricky job that much harder.
If all one has is a hammer, etc
Well, that’s why we have Kirkus. It’s actually one of my faves. After bread. Sometimes, I feel I could be happy with just bread and Kirkus.
“I’m sick to my stomach over this, and I’m so sorry Muslim folks have to contend with one more reminder that their humanity is negotiable.”
While I know it’s one of the forbidden words in relation to a lady, but how is this anything but unhinged? I don’t see how a YA book of any quality should cause such a visceral reaction in a well-adjusted person. Which I guess may be part of the problem; far too many nutters.
Apparently this bunch of literary critics isn’t sophisticated enough to spot the irony of largely white* YA crusaders standing up against white savior narratives by sacking a nonwhite Muslim’s book review for not being the right kind of woke. If you’re a white supremacist who is willing to put on airs, this movement is the place to be.
*based on both a sampling of the Twitter discussions as well as their own metric for when whiteness poses a problem
I just can’t even. They’re eating their young in public now.
When will white people learn that buying and reading books written by marginalized people is an unacceptable manifestation of white supremacy. The fact that marginalized people are exposing their inner most selves and sharing the pain and suffering of their lived experiences should not be exploited for the entertainment of white people. The buying and selling of marginalized people thoughts, ideas and feelings is no better than buying their bodies and is little more than modern day slavery, which should be repugnant and repulsive to any modern society. These books were not written for you, white people, but for other marginalized people and we are sick of you trying to appropriate our cultures. It really is hard to parody progressives that people will recognize as parody. But if they were being internally consistent, this is the natural progression.
This is brilliant. Only by its presence here could one know its intent. Poe’s law strikes again.
This is great, but you misspelled “as a privileged white ally I am sick of us trying to appropriate their cultures.”
As I forced my way through that horrible ‘Bustle’ screed, II kept thinking a book most of the commenters would really like, based on how well it would jibe with their prescriptions as to what an author *should* have written, is “The Education of Little Tree.’
Kirkus I don’t know, but Goodreads comments are the reading equivalent of Reddit. Similar things were posted about “A Desert Called Peace” by Tom Kratman, also a white hero fighting the Muslim terrorists. However Kratman is ex-Marines, so I doubt the SJWs would have said it all to his face!
Its a shame Kirkus crumbled, another win for terrorism and another step backwards for freedom and civilisation.
A dark day when Kirkus strikes its tent.
I wrote a Kirkus starred and approved piece of fiction. It was deemed *WAF (Woke As … )
A brown body saved the world from the evil people. The End.
It’s almost like “diversity” means “ethnic cleansing of whites.”
Nah, couldn’t be.