Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Continent
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://keiradrakeauthor.com
CITY:
STATE: UT
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
| LC control no.: | no2018039138 |
|---|---|
| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/no2018039138 |
| HEADING: | Drake, Keira |
| 000 | 00608cz a2200181n 450 |
| 001 | 10707223 |
| 005 | 20180430073157.0 |
| 008 | 180326n| azannaabn |n aaa c |
| 010 | __ |a no2018039138 |
| 035 | __ |a (OCoLC)oca11263779 |
| 040 | __ |a ICrlF |b eng |e rda |c ICrlF |d HU |
| 100 | 1_ |a Drake, Keira |
| 370 | __ |a California |e Utah |2 naf |
| 372 | __ |a Young adult fiction |a Poetry |2 lcsh |
| 374 | __ |a Authors |a Poets |2 lcsh |
| 375 | __ |a Females |2 lcdgt |
| 377 | __ |a eng |
| 670 | __ |a Drake, Keira. The continent, 2018: |b title page (Keira Drake) author bio. (writes poetry, music and novels, lives in Utah, but is a native Californian) |
PERSONAL
Born in CA; children: one daughter.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer.
AVOCATIONS:Gaming, music, writing poetry, golfing, reading.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Originally from California, Keira Drake is a writer based in Utah. She writes works that are often geared toward a young adult audience and are typically part of the science fiction and fantasy genres.
In 2018, Drake released her first book, The Continent. Its protagonist is a teenage girl named Vaela, who lives in the Spire, a rich country separated from the warring tribes of the Continent. Vaela goes on a vacation in the Continent and becomes stranded there. Now, she forced to live among one of the tribes. Vaela falls in love with a boy called Noro and takes up the cause of ending the war between the tribes.
Advance copies of The Continent were released to a select group of readers. Shortly after, some of those readers began posting online about themes in the book that they viewed as problematic. In particular, the Topi people, portrayed as savages in the book, bore similarities to the Native American tribe, the Hopi. Additionally, some readers suggested that the book’s plot included a white savior trope that minimize people of color. Zoraida Cordova, contributor to the YA Interrobang website, commented: “The book has two warring tribes: the Topi and the Aven’ei. The Topi are described as having ‘reddish-brown’ skin, ‘painted faces,’ and faces with ‘broad with hard angles.’ … Growing up in the United States, it isn’t a big stretch to use these descriptions to bring to mind stereotypes used to describe Native Americans. Pairing the Other with savagery is also a heinous stereotype.” Cordova added: “The idea that Drake, claiming to be part Native American, didn’t see the connection and similarity between the words Hopi and Topi shows a disconnect with Native Americans and First Nations.” In an interview with Everdeen Mason, writer on the Washington Post Online, Drake stated: “I was simply not thinking about things like racial stereotypes. … It’s almost mortifying to say that because it was so blatantly obvious when it was pointed out.” Drake worked with her book’s publishing company to rewrite the book. Drake told Mason: “There are certain people who feel the book is unfixable. … That was not something I ever agreed with. I felt that the story of The Continent was an important one to tell.” Drake told Lila Shapiro, contributor to the Vulture website, that she welcomed the responses to her book, stating: “Criticism is the thing that’s going to make you better at what you do.” Of the rewritten version of the volume, she told Shapiro: “I wrote a book about how privilege allows us to turn a blind eye to the suffering of others, and I wrote that book without seeing certain things myself, and that was incredibly humbling.”
Reviewers also offered critiques of the rewritten version of The Continent. A contributor to Kirkus Reviews remarked: “The novel falls short in never probing the responsibility developed nations bear for contributing to” poverty. The same contributor concluded: “A sizzling romance cannot compensate for the blind spots.” “The worldbuilding and premise have potential, but the story falls short in execution,” asserted a Publishers Weekly writer. Ariel Birdoff, critic in School Library Journal, suggested: “The plot … lacks nuance.” Birdoff added: “The problematic ‘white savior’ trope is employed throughout, making this difficult to recommend.” A reviewer on the American Indians in Children’s Literature website commented: “These kinds of books rest on a flawed foundation. They’re written by people who want to use race and racial issues, misrepresentations of the past and present, to help—let’s be real—White readers learn about injustice. Along the way, readers of the groups that, historically and in the present, experience oppression and racism on a daily basis, are essentially asked to be patient. I think that’s wrong. Drake is trying to be a savior. Her editor is enabling that motivation. Her publisher is putting money into this project.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 2018, review of The Continent.
Publishers Weekly, January 22, 2018, review of The Continent, p. 86.
School Library Journal, March, 2018, Ariel Birdoff, review of The Continent, p. 116.
ONLINE
American Indians in Children’s Literature, https://americanindiansinchildrensliterature.blogspot.com/ (February 8, 2018), review of The Continent.
Bustle, https://www.bustle.com/ (November 27, 2016), Zoraida Cordova, review of The Continent.
Keira Drake website, http://keiradrakeauthor.com/ (June 11, 2018).
Vulture, http://www.vulture.com/ (February 18, 2018), Lila Shapiro, author interview and review of The Continent.
Washington Post Online, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ (March 19, 2018), Everdeen Mason, review of The Continent.
YA Interrobang, http://www.yainterrobang.com/ (November 7, 2016), Zoraida Cordova, review of The Continent.
About the Author
Keira Drake is a full-time author and enjoys writing poetry and music in addition to novels. She is an avid gamer with a soft spot for titles that feature epic and astounding storytelling. When not writing or gaming, Keira is likely reading, napping, golfing, drawing or spending time with her sweet, sassy daughter. She lives in Utah and loves it, but is a native Californian and will remind you of that fact at every opportunity.
https://smile.amazon.com/Continent-Keira-Drake/dp/1335474935/ref=sr_1_1_twi_har_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1528075465&sr=8-1&keywords=Drake%2C+Keira
About Me
Thanks for taking the time to visit! I’m Keira Drake—I write YA fiction, usually with sci-fi/fantasy elements. My debut novel, THE CONTINENT, the first in a trilogy, is in stores and online now, published by Harlequin TEEN! I’m so excited to share this book with the world, as well as all the future stories I want to tell! :D
image
Here are a few things about me:
I am an avid gamer. I have no intention of endorsing any console over another, because I’ll probably always buy them all. But I will say that I was an Xbox girl for 14 years, with a gamerscore of about 50K, until I bought a PS4, and was converted. It’s just a superior machine. That’s all I can say. Also, Nintendo forever. #Switch #BreathOfTheWild
DUNE, by Frank Herbert, is my favorite book. Well…that one, or GOD EMPEROR OF DUNE. I can never decide. :)
I read very widely—sci-fi, fantasy, historical fiction (my favorite), non-fiction, contemporary fiction, etc. and I have a particular interest in books about the sea. Horror, mysteries…not so much–but there are always exceptions!
Favorite authors: Frank Herbert, Stephanie Dray, Catherine McKenzie, Rena Olsen, Chelsea Sedoti, CS Forrester, JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis.
I love getting to know other writers. And I heart bloggers with my whole heart. And readers. Do you like books? Basically, we might be BFFs. :)
I go full nerd. Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate, Doctor Who, Supernatural, Wonder Woman, LEGO, Metal Earth steel model kits, Halo, Assassin’s Creed, Mortal Kombat, Fallout, Zelda, Horizon Zero Dawn. Yesss!
Thanks again for dropping by. Let me know if you have a blog–or a book–I might like!
QUOTED: "The novel falls short in never probing the responsibility developed nations bear for contributing to"
"A sizzling romance cannot compensate for the blind spots."
Drake, Keira: THE CONTINENT
Kirkus Reviews.
(Feb. 15, 2018): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Drake, Keira THE CONTINENT Harlequin Teen (Young Adult Fiction) $19.99 3, 27 ISBN: 978-1-335-47493-3
Grief-stricken and stranded far from home, a sheltered young woman must rebuild her life and reconsider all she believes to be true.
Apprentice cartographer Vaela Sun thinks she's the luckiest teen in the Spire when her parents announce they have obtained coveted tickets for a family heli-plane tour over the Continent. Peopled by the warring Xoe and Aven'ei, this icy, remote land has long been cut off from the Four Nations who regard its inhabitants as little more than curiosities. When their heli-plane crashes in the wilderness, blonde, fair-skinned Vaela is the sole survivor. Rescued by Noro, a bronze-skinned, black-haired Aven'ei assassin with whom she soon falls in love, Vaela makes a new life for herself on the Continent, learning to survive without the aid of servants and even taking a job shoveling manure. Coming from a technologically advanced land where peace and prosperity are taken for granted and various ethnicities intermarry without prejudice, Vaela struggles to understand the values of her new homeland. Her gradual awakening hews closely to the well-worn trope of the young Westerner who achieves self-actualization through experiencing the seemingly simple pleasures of the developing world. While apparently attempting to critique poverty tourism and indifference toward the struggles of developing countries and indigenous peoples, the novel falls short in never probing the responsibility developed nations bear for contributing to these problems in the first place. The resolution similarly deprives the people of the Continent of agency.
A sizzling romance cannot compensate for the blind spots. (Fantasy. 12-16)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Drake, Keira: THE CONTINENT." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2018. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527248311/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&
1 of 4 6/3/18, 8:25 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
xid=c89eb180. Accessed 3 June 2018. Gale Document Number: GALE|A527248311
QUOTED: "The worldbuilding and premise have potential, but the story falls short in execution."
2 of 4 6/3/18, 8:25 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
The Continent
Publishers Weekly.
265.4 (Jan. 22, 2018): p86. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Continent
Keira Drake. Harlequin Teen, $19.99 (320p) ISBN 978-1-335-47493-3
A privileged young woman struggles to survive after being stranded in unfamiliar, hostile territory. Aspiring mapmaker Vaela Sun has grown up in the nation of the Spire, in a culture that has abolished war. For her 16th birthday, her parents take her on an airship tour of the Continent, where the rival Xoe and Aven'ei peoples appear determined to wipe each other out. When the airship is destroyed, Vaela's only hope is to make a new life among the Aven'ei until she can get home. As she assimilates into their society and falls for handsome Noro, she adopts a new goal: persuade the Spire to intervene and end the war. Drake's debut novel comes with a controversial pedigree, having been substantially revised following early criticism of the depiction of the cultures of the Continent. That aspect is improved, but Drake still offers a predictable romance coupled with a "sheltered protagonist goes native" storyline; in one scene, Kaela gleefully attempts to introduce indoor plumbing to the Aven'ei, only to discover she has no idea how it works, either. The worldbuilding and premise have potential, but the story falls short in execution. Ages 12-up. Agent: Jim McCarthy, Dystel, Goderich & Bourret. (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Continent." Publishers Weekly, 22 Jan. 2018, p. 86. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525839863/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=315fccfe. Accessed 3 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A525839863
QUOTED: "The plot ... lacks nuance."
"The problematic 'white savior' trope is employed throughout, making this difficult to recommend."
3 of 4 6/3/18, 8:25 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
DRAKE, Keira. The Continent
Ariel Birdoff
School Library Journal.
64.3 (Mar. 2018): p116. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2018 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
DRAKE, Keira. The Continent. 320p. Harlequin Teen. Mar. 2018. Tr $19.99. ISBN 9781335474933.
Gr 9 Up--Sixteen-year-old apprentice cartographer Vaela Sun is going on a tour of the Continent for her birthday. The trip is a highly coveted one among her peers, and Vaela is excited to be going despite the ongoing war ravaging the country. The Aven'ei and Xoe have been fighting for centuries with no signs of peace. Vaela and her family live in the Spire. The Spire is an affluent nation that has abolished warfare and vowed to remain neutral no matter what. Unfortunately, Vaela will witness the Continent's fighting firsthand. When a tragic accident leaves her stranded in the desolate wasteland, Vaela finds herself at the mercy of the warring local tribes. This fast- paced story attempts to address the stark disparity between prosperous civilizations and war-tom nations as well as the moral implications of remaining neutral in a violent conflict but fails and instead includes racist undertones. While some may find the setting unique, the plot is simple and lacks nuance. The problematic "white savior" trope is employed throughout, making this difficult to recommend. VERDICT A strictly additional purchase.--Ariel Birdoff, New York Public Library
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Birdoff, Ariel. "DRAKE, Keira. The Continent." School Library Journal, Mar. 2018, p. 116.
Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A529863605 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=6820939e. Accessed 3 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A529863605
4 of 4 6/3/18, 8:25 PM
QUOTED: "I was simply not thinking about things like racial stereotypes. ... It’s almost mortifying to say that because it was so blatantly obvious when it was pointed out."
"There are certain people who feel the book is unfixable. ... That was not something I ever agreed with. I felt that the story of ‘The Continent’ was an important one to tell."
This book is racist
damaging rewritten
Keira Drake’s debut was slammed for using racial stereotypes for her characters. Unlike other authors, she rewrote the book.
By Everdeen Mason March 19, 2018
Eight weeks before the release of her debut novel, Keira Drake woke up to 50 messages on Twitter asking if she was okay. Her novel, “The Continent,” was to be published in January, and the hardcovers were printed and ready to go.
Drake, a former freelance marketing consultant from Salt Lake City, logged on and saw that her book — which had been circulating in advance reader copies for seven months — had been called racist, and the outcry was growing. Twitter threads live-tweeting the book (many now deleted) burned with angry reactions. Others warned their friends not to read it.
“I’m still in shock at the Native American representation in The Continent BTW,” one person said. “This book could really do some damage.”
Drake, 42, said she tried to defend herself, including on her since-deleted blog. “But as the day went on, I realized, ‘Oh, my God. Oh, it’s so true.’”
Author Keira Drake (Andra Coyle)
Drake contacted her publisher, Harlequin Teen, and asked to push back the publication date so she could make revisions. Harlequin agreed. Natashya Wilson, Harlequin’s editorial director, said it was the first time the publisher has had to delay a book’s release for revisions. The printed hardcovers were destroyed. The new version, which Drake calls the “revision of my heart,” is to be released on March 27.
Drake’s novel is about Vaela, a cartographer’s apprentice from a wealthy family. On her 16th birthday, she is given a ticket to go on tour with her family to a place called the Continent, where two warring tribes battle in a lush landscape. When tragedy leaves her the only survivor of her family stranded on the Continent, she finds herself living with the Aven’ei, one of the communities.
The other group, the Topi, are the main antagonists, and their depiction caused the biggest uproar among advance readers. Drake said she made a list of the criticisms expressed online and enlisted sensitivity readers to help her improve her novel. Sensitivity readers — hired to look for offensive content — have become more common as the publishing industry becomes more aware of its own biases.
Drake and Wilson maintain that the book was never supposed to be about race. “The main theme of ‘The Continent’ is how privilege allows us to turn a blind eye to the suffering of others,” Drake said in a phone interview in February.
Wilson explained that when she originally edited the novel, she was looking for potential problems with pacing, plot and dialogue. “I was simply not thinking about things like racial stereotypes,” she said. “It’s almost mortifying to say that because it was so blatantly obvious when it was pointed out.”
The Washington Post compared the old advance copy with a newly revised copy received in 2018 and spoke with Drake about changes she made.
Original version
The Topi are more ostentatious — they wear brighter colors, fringed sleeves, bone helmets — that sort of thing.”. . .There are villagers below too; they are singularly dark of hair, with beautiful bronzed skin, and look to be very tall — even the women.
New version
The Xoe are far more expressive — they wear bright colors, great painted cloaks, helmets of metal fitted with bone — that sort of thing.”. . .There are villagers below, too; and quite a lot of them, with skin so white it might be made of writing paper-far paler than even those of the Spirian East. Their hair ranges from silver-not gray- but shimmering silver-to black and every shade in between, and most look to be very tall, even the women.
A depiction based on the new description of characters from the 2018 edition of “The Continent,” which is to be released on March 27. Author Keira Drake changed the race of the characters from people with reddish-brown skin and dark hair to people with pale white skin and hair that ranged in color from silver to black. (Jodie Muir for The Washington Post)
Drake also changed the name of the race of these people to Xoe because of their similarity to the Hopi, a federally recognized tribe. She added more detail to the description of their home town and removed all 24 instances of the words “savage,” “primitive” and “native.” These terms have been used to dehumanize and justify the systemic discrimination of Native Americans throughout U.S. history.
“The Continent,” by Keira Drake. (Harper Collins)
“Children’s books [are] not free of ideology,” said Debbie Reese, a member of the Nambé Pueblo tribe, in an interview. “They are trying to persuade people to think a certain way about something, whether or not a writer knows it.”
Reese, founder of the blog American Indians in Children’s Literature, is one of the strongest voices in the movement to improve representation in children’s literature, and her career has been defined by showing how these negative portrayals can be harmful.
In Reese’s blog posts about “The Continent,” she also addressed the depiction of the Aven’ei, which Drake changed in her new version. They initially were depicted as vaguely Japanese. Drake said she was inspired by all Asian cultures, but the original draft gave characters stereotypical Japanese names, mannerisms and roles such as ninjas.
Original version
In the light of the dwindling flames, the features of his face emerge: high cheekbones, dark almond-shaped eyes that slope gently upward at the outer corners, full lips. His skin is smooth, his jawline angled and strong.
He is a bit shorter than Noro — perhaps just under six feet — and ruggedly handsome, with strong arched eyebrows and a sweep of long, dark hair about his shoulders. His wide grin turns into an expression of open surprise when he sees me.
Her face is heart shaped, with a delicate pointed chin and a dimple in each cheek, and her hair falls neatly to her chin, shining like a curtain of smooth obsidian . . . her eyes are dark, like all of the Aven’ei, and steady, like Noro’s.
New version
In the light of the dwindling flames, the features of his face emerge: dark eyes, lips set firmly in an expression of concentration. His skin is smooth, bronze in the firelight, his jawline sharply defined.
He is a bit shorter than Noro — perhaps just under six feet — and ruggedly handsome, with strong arched eyebrows and a sweep of long, dark hair swung up into a knot atop his head, both sides of which are shaved from the tops of his ears downward. His skin is bronze, sun kissed, like most of the Aven’ei, much like a Westerner back home-darker than my own but not quite brown. His wide grin turns into an expression of open surprise when he sees me.
Her face is heart shaped, with a delicate pointed chin and a dimple in each cheek, and her hair falls neatly to her chin, shining like a curtain of smooth obsidian . . . her eyes are steady, sparkling hazel in the sunshine.
One of the major ways Drake dealt with the criticism around her racial depictions was to change Vaela’s race. The main character is now part Aven’ei to avoid “the trope of the dark-skinned aggressor or white savior narrative,” Drake said.
Additionally, Drake offers a less militaristic approach to resolving conflict than in her previous version.
Original version
I tap the paper. “Build walls. Destroy access points. Create defenses the likes of which have never been seen on the Continent! Spirian construction is vastly superior to anything the natives can contrive — don’t you see? You can save the Aven’ei without ever raising so much as a finger against the Topi. You have the power to end this. You have the power to stop another war.
New version
I tap the paper. “Build towers, so that the Aven’ei might see when a Xoe force is coming. Establish plain sight of all access points. Create defenses the likes of which have never been seen on the Continent! And then, down the line, perhaps the Spire can help the Aven’ei and the Xoe to meet in the middle, to accomplish a peace of their own accord. Don’t you see? You can help without ever raising so much as a single weapon. You have the power to end this. You have the power to stop another war.”
Drake said she was inspired to write her book after hearing a story on the radio of a woman dealing with the war in Iraq. “The entire family was just huddled together at night listening to the bombs going off,” she said. “It was so heartbreaking.”
This conflict is the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which prompted insurgency and, later, the rise of the Islamic State, which in turn destabilized other parts of the Middle East. In Drake’s book, peace is created when a group from Vaela’s home country shoots people to stop them from fighting. The book wasn’t meant to advocate for or against an interventionist foreign policy, Drake said. “I just want to propose the questions.”
She’s confident that this revision says what she wanted to say. “There are certain people who feel the book is unfixable,” Drake said. “That was not something I ever agreed with. I felt that the story of ‘The Continent’ was an important one to tell.”
Everdeen Mason is The Washington Post’s audience editor. She also writes a monthly column highlighting the best new science fiction and fantasy books.
Design by Eddie Alvarez/The Washington Post; top photo by Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post.
QUOTED: "Criticism is the thing that’s going to make you better at what you do."
"I wrote a book about how privilege allows us to turn a blind eye to the suffering of others, and I wrote that book without seeing certain things myself, and that was incredibly humbling."
Can You Revise a Book to Make It More Woke?
When a YA novel was criticized for racism prior to publication, the author attempted something radical — she pushed its release date and rewrote it.
By Lila Shapiro
'The Continent' will be published on March 27 by Harlequin Teen.
February 18, 2018 9:00 pm
In 2013, when Keira Drake sat down to write her debut young-adult fantasy novel, The Continent, she wanted to write about privilege, about the way that those who have it can so easily turn a blind eye to the suffering of those who don’t. Her imagination had been sparked by an NPR report about bombings in Iraq; it brought her to tears, and when she switched off the radio, she began thinking about what might happen if someone like her — someone white, sheltered, and privileged — suddenly found herself in the middle of a war between two violent societies in a foreign land. Drake set her fantasy in a place called the Continent, a brutal realm where privileged tourists, safe in their heli-planes, gaze down with detached curiosity at the native people slaughtering each other below. After a heli-plane crashes, Drake’s narrator is saved by one of the natives from an attempted rape at the hands of an enemy tribe, and she, in turn, saves his people from ruin.
Drake’s editor at Harlequin, Natashya Wilson, thought the book had best-seller potential. She offered Drake a “significant” three-book deal (publishing code for an advance between $251,000 and $499,000), and Harlequin launched a major marketing campaign, sending Drake to conferences around the country. Early readers of advance copies were enthusiastic. A review posted on Goodreads half a year before the book’s scheduled publication date hailed Drake as a visionary for her “eye-opening” revelation that “a native isn’t a savage or primitive.”
It wasn’t until five months later that a legion of less enchanted readers took to Twitter to offer a differing perspective. Justina Ireland, an African-American author of young-adult fiction, tweeted out a point-by-point summary of her read in which she called the book a “racist garbage fire.” Ireland eventually deleted the thread after receiving a barrage of death threats, rape threats, withering reviews of her own books, and an anonymous email to her editor calling her a bully and urging him to drop her. And so it was that Drake, like her protagonist, suddenly found herself at the center of a feud between two warring factions.
Over the last few years, the world of young-adult literature has been riven by a turbulent debate over race and identity. On one side are those who believe that YA publishing is too white, that too many white authors resort to stereotypes in portraying characters of color, and that these depictions are harmful to children — especially those from marginalized backgrounds. On the other side are those like the author Lionel Shriver, who wrote in a recent essay on the Guardian website that “there’s a thin line between combing through manuscripts for anything potentially objectionable to particular subgroups and overt political censorship.” This debate, in its current incarnation, can be traced back to 2014, when the organizers of BookExpo, the biggest publishing trade show of the year, convened a special panel of acclaimed children’s authors and failed to include a single woman or person of color. Young-adult author Ellen Oh began tweeting under the hashtag WeNeedDiverseBooks, and convinced the convention organizers to add a panel with authors of color, inaugurating a broad movement for greater diversity in publishing.
Drake, who’s 42 years old and lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, where she previously worked as a freelance marketing consultant, says that she wasn’t familiar with this conversation. She found herself poring over Twitter with a dawning sense of horror. One reader observed that Drake’s cast of characters included “Magic Black people, Ninja Asians, and uneducated, ruthless Natives who get drunk and try to rape the precious white girl.” Another wrote that the whole thing had “vibes of colonization.” A petition surfaced urging Harlequin to delay publication of the book and address “the troubling portrayals within of people of color and native backgrounds.”
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Drake had named one of the tribes the Topi. They had reddish-brown skin, smeared their faces with war paint, and savagely attacked people with arrows, but it had not occurred to her that readers might see the Topi as a racist version of a Native-American tribe, the Hopi. “That was 100 percent unintentional,” Drake told me at the Harlequin offices in her first interview reflecting on the saga. Once readers pointed out the similarities, “it seemed so obvious,” she said. “I was ashamed. I was like, ‘Did I do this subconsciously? How could I not have seen this?’”
More than a few authors have stoked the fires of Twitter outrage with similar offenses in recent years. Wilson, Harlequin Teen’s editorial director, also oversaw the publishing of The Black Witch, another title that was widely criticized as racist. The author, Laurie Forest, is white, but not every author who has attracted controversy in this era is. Late 2015 and early 2016 saw the publication of two picture books that, in an odd coincidence, both depicted smiling slaves preparing desserts. One of them, A Birthday Cake for George Washington, was written, edited and illustrated by people of color. The publisher, Scholastic, eventually decided that the book might give readers “a false impression of the reality of the lives of slaves,” and the title was removed from bookstores.
Occasionally, authors who have caught heat in this woke era will apologize; more often, they will stand their ground. But Drake’s situation appears to be unique in one respect. After reading through the criticisms of her book, she called her editor at Harlequin and asked if she could rewrite it.
The tradition of the white hero versus the dark other has been an integral part of fantasy literature since the genre’s inception. On one level, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy is about a bunch of white guys of varying body shapes beating back an invading horde of yellow-skinned, slant-eyed savages. In The Chronicles of Narnia, by C.S. Lewis, some of the principal villains, the Calormene, live in the desert, have swarthy faces and long beards, wear turbans, carry scimitars, and eat bread with oil instead of butter. “Tolkien and Lewis were men who were born when the British empire was at its height, and the cartographies of their imagination were influenced accordingly,” Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education, who focuses on race in children’s and young-adult literature, told me. “This fear and this hatred of the dark other is so deeply inscribed in the European imagination.”
Contemporary fantasy as we know it rests on the bedrock of Lewis’s and Tolkien’s imaginations, which perhaps explains why Drake would write a book that often seems at pains to mimic the voice of a Cambridge don born during the waning days of Queen Victoria’s reign. The main character, Vaela Sun, lives in a “magnificent” place called the Spire, where she works as an apprentice cartographer and says things like, “Oh, how I love my homeland!” The barbaric Topi — renamed the Xoe in the new version — don’t speak English at all, so if they have anything on their minds besides shooting people full of arrows, it goes unsaid. A few days after Ireland’s Twitter takedown, Drake, in a response published on her website, explained that she modeled the Topi not after the Hopi, but on Tolkien’s evil horde, the Uruk-hai, who are half-human and half-orc. She didn’t realize that Tolkien had based the orcs on his impressions of people from Central Asia. She sees that now. “When you do look back at these books,” she said of Tolkien and Lewis, “you can see how certain sort of negative ideas have shaped things. There’s a lot more awareness of this sort of thing now.”
Drake told me that her revision process had been “eye-opening” and an “incredible experience.” In our meeting, she was nervous but thoroughly upbeat. This time around, she was sure she’d fixed the problems that plagued the first version. “This is the book I wanted to write,” she said, “Maybe I’m not the most amazing writer in the world, but I love this story, and I can’t wait for people to read it.”
Drake found herself poring over Twitter with a dawning sense of horror.
It took several months for Drake and Wilson to figure out how to approach the revision. “I was a mess,” Drake recalled. “I felt like I had hurt people and that was really, really hard.” The criticisms were painful to read, but so were some of the comments of people who supposedly supported her. About two months after she decided to revise the book, her husband, Declan, went on a Twitter rant calling Justina Ireland a “bigoted troll.” In a Facebook post, Drake described this as “a betrayal of the worst kind.” She and Declan are now separated. (She said it had nothing to do with this incident.) Others told her that she “caved to pressure” by deciding to revise the book. Drake disagrees. “Criticism is the thing that’s going to make you better at what you do,” she said.
Drake, her agent, and her editor eventually put together a master list of problems they wanted to fix, compiled from online critiques. One way to revise the book would have been to embrace its latent potential as a commentary on colonialism in North America, or to ground it more authentically in an understanding of the real-life situation that inspired it — the war in Iraq. In the end, Drake went in the opposite direction, making a wide range of minor changes that erased any similarities between the fictional tribes and recognizable cultures. She replaced the Xoe’s “war paint” with “colorful tattoos,” and changed the Xoe’s skin color from bronze to pale. She deleted a passage in which her narrator compares the Xoe village to an “ant colony” and removed the much-criticized attempted rape scene. In response to the argument that she’d written a white-savior narrative, she made Vaela, the savior, a distant descendant of the Aven’ei, the other tribe that lives on the Continent, whose members still seem vaguely Asian, although in the new version they no longer have “almond-shaped” eyes.
Many critics bristled at what’s been described as a Trumpian section in the first version, in which Vaela urges a Spirian council to stop the war by building a wall that would separate the two tribes. “Spirian construction is vastly superior to anything the natives can contrive,” Vaela declared. In the new version, Vaela suggests the council build towers instead, and she no longer calls Spirian construction “vastly superior.” But it’s not clear that her updated line will allay the concerns of those who criticized the book for its colonial overtones. Now, Vaela urges the council to “create defenses the likes of which have never been seen on the Continent,” where the native people are still so technologically unsophisticated that they react in shock when Vaela tells them about indoor plumbing.
Drake told me that she took heart from the fact that her sensitivity readers “loved” the revision and just suggested a few minor “tweaks.” But when I spoke to one of the two sensitivity readers Harlequin had hired, she recalled sending suggestions for an extensive rewrite to Wilson, who was reluctant to pass them along to Drake. According to the reader, Wilson said she felt that they’d already put Drake through the wringer, and that another page-one revision would be too onerous. Publishers often cite their hiring of sensitivity readers as proof that they’ve done due diligence, but they pay as little as $250 per read, and they’re always free to ignore the sensitivity reader’s suggestions. Once the reader sends in their notes, they have no control over whether or how that advice is put to use.
It remains to be seen how readers will respond to the revised version of the novel, which will be released on March 27. A Kirkus review, published this month, observed that the story still “hews closely to the well-worn trope of the young Westerner who achieves self-actualization through experiencing the seemingly simple pleasures of the developing world.” Debbie Reese, the founder of American Indians in Children’s Literature, an advocacy organization, wrote a chapter-by-chapter critique of the first version in which she concluded that she didn’t believe the book could be revised. Her reading of the revision confirmed this assessment. “She made superficial changes that do not change the impact of the story,” Reese told me in an email. Yes, the natives of the Continent have less melanin now, but they remain “savage and primitive and cannot be redeemed.”
Thomas, the professor, told me that a student asked her recently whether it’s possible to write a fantasy that is “raceless.” “I said no,” she explained. “You cannot completely divorce yourself from your race or your culture or your ethnicity, because writing always happens in a context. You can try, but you’re going to leave your fingerprints on the characters whether you intend to or not.”
Jenny Trout, a white author of fantasy and romance who blogged about The Continent early on, went through a similar reckoning a few years ago. She told me she wished she had known about sensitivity readers back in 2009, when she was writing a series for Harlequin’s Mira Imprint that depicted Gypsies as “magical creatures” who were shaped as though “each was cut from a spare scrap of cloth.”
“I didn’t know the Roma were real people,” she told me. “I had the privilege of ignorance, of never having to think about any of the things I was writing because I was being influenced by white writers who created those tropes and profited.” Trout noted that it can be difficult for white writers to face up to the ways in which racism seeps into their prose. “White people are taught their entire lives that they’re not racists,” she said. “Our culture tells us that white people succeed because we’re all exceptional, even if we’re not being told explicitly that our race is superior. It’s entrenched in every part of our lives.” Trout’s biggest concern about books like The Continent, and her own series, is that the gatekeepers of publishing are still insufficiently aware of this dynamic. “The answer to the question ‘how did this get published?’ is fairly simple; white authors write books loaded with racism, the publishers that buy them either don’t have a diverse enough staff to see the problems in the books or they just don’t listen to criticism,” Trout wrote in her blog post about The Continent. “The problem with books like these begin with the authors but ultimately end with the gatekeepers.”
Wilson, who is white, stresses that Harlequin will catch more of these issues in the future. She noted that the publisher is working with sensitivity readers, and that “an inextricable part of Harlequin’s commitment to bringing readers excellent stories is a commitment to inclusivity and sensitivity.” Drake, for her part, told me that she condemns racism whenever she sees it, and that the charges of racism hurt her in part because she felt they were so untrue. But when I asked how she squares this with the controversy surrounding The Continent, she was flummoxed. “Honestly, I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t see it.” She said the mystery would probably bother her forever. “I wrote a book about how privilege allows us to turn a blind eye to the suffering of others, and I wrote that book without seeing certain things myself, and that was incredibly humbling.”
*A version of this article appears in the February 19, 2018, issue of New York Magazine.
QUOTED: "The book has two warring tribes: the Topi and the Aven’ei. The Topi are described as having 'reddish-brown' skin, 'painted faces,' and faces with 'broad with hard angles.' ... Growing up in the United States, it isn’t a big stretch to use these descriptions to bring to mind stereotypes used to describe Native Americans. Pairing the Other with savagery is also a heinous stereotype."
"The idea that Drake, claiming to be part Native American, didn’t see the connection and similarity between the words Hopi and Topi shows a disconnect with Native Americans and First Nations."
An Open Letter on Fantasy World Building and Keira Drake’s Apology
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By Zoraida Córdova on November 7, 2016 Op-Ed, Writing
I want to talk about world building in fantasy novels and Keira Drake’s apology.
The Continent by Keira Drake has gone from a book I knew zero about to the only thing on Book Twitter™. The Continent follows Vaela Sun, who is gifted a tour of the Continent for her sixteenth birthday. When her plane crashes, she becomes the lone survivor of her trip, left stranded and left alone to survive in the land locked in battle for centuries. The novel is slated to be released on January 3rd by Harlequin Teen.
For those who may have missed it, various authors were tweeting about the problematic content within The Continent on the morning on November 3rd. After that, author Justina Ireland requested a review copy and live tweeted her reaction to its content.
There are two camps. One feels the “social justice warriors” should stop talking about the problematic content in The Continent and are screaming “censorship.” The other wants the publishers to delay release and give the book another editing pass with actual sensitivity reads with this petition. I agree with the latter.
There is no vendetta against Keira Drake. Neither the original posters or Justina Ireland tweeted at the author or messaged her at all. Drake did send Justina Ireland direct messages on Twitter. Drake has issued an apology. Currently, her husband is Tweeting at anyone willing to disagree.
Drake is a debut author. I know what it’s like to be a debut. I know the pain of writing the book of your heart. The nerves, the pressure, the hopes that we pour into our work. But being a debut isn’t a free pass when it comes to criticism. Most authors would agree with me that the scrutiny on our words gets more severe down the line. It is not enough to call a book racist and move on. Six months from now, another book will take the place of The Continent, and the rage cycle will resume. So where do we go from here? I think breaking down fantasy world building and examining Drake’s apology can be the start to a solution for Harlequin Teen.
Let’s start with writing fantasy novels. Writing fantasy is hard. You have to go up against the heavy hitters, the Tolkiens and Rowlings and Martins of the world. On top of an original plot, you need an original world, gripping characters, and something that makes it unique to you instead of regurgitating Game of Thrones.
Fantasy is a genre in which the characters and world take place in an imaginary world, usually (but not always) involving magical creatures and elements. Fantasy = Magic. Scifi = Technology. Things cross pollinate and blend and you end up with a zillion subgenres. (Before anyone wants to explain to me that my definition doesn’t encompass X and Y, relax. We’re getting really basic right now.)
The Continent falls in science fantasy. There is no magic and made up tech like “heli-planes.” Vaela Sun lives in a Utopian world where there is no violence, except in the Continent which is full of “savages” still at war.
For those of you who haven’t read The Continent, the Continent as titled in the book has two warring tribes: the Topi and the Aven’ei. The Topi are described as having “reddish-brown” skin, “painted faces”, and faces with “broad with hard angles.”
…I mean, this isn’t a great leap of logic here… pic.twitter.com/qJ0fsCaNqa
— Justina Ireland (@justinaireland) November 3, 2016
Growing up in the United States, it isn’t a big stretch to use these descriptions to bring to mind stereotypes used to describe Native Americans. Pairing the Other with savagery is also a heinous stereotype. As the author made a claim to have Native American ancestry (though not a specific nation), this should be apparent. Drake explains the origins of her Topi tribe in her “apology” post entitled “The Continent – First Response.”).
“The Topi, one of the native peoples who inhabits the Continent, were inspired by the Uruk-Hai in Lord of the Rings. LotR is one of my favorite books, and the savage, brutal nature of the Uruk-Hai breaks my heart every time I read it, which is at least once per year. The Topi are a savage people—they are in no way inspired by or meant to represent Native Americans. Like many, I am a person of mixed nationality and race (Sicilian, Native American, French, Irish, Danish), and take great interest and pride in my ancestry.”
[“The Continent – First Response.” post is available as a .pdf.]
When Keira Drake says that she modeled her world on fictional people, there’s a flaw. The Uruk-Hai are technically not people. They’re Orc and man. They’re violent. They’re fodder and nameless. But they’re also not sad. Orcs are not given names or speaking parts in contrast to the Fellowship and their allies. They’re a nameless army created by an evil wizard. They’re evil fodder to make Aragon grow into the Once and Future King–I mean -Heir of Isildur and bring forth the Age of Man. Orcs are beastly and hideous and the darkness to the white race of Man, portrayed by Tolkien and brought to life by the very white films. How else can you show the “goodness of Men” if not by contrasting them to a thinly veiled race of dark-skinned monsters?
I do love the Lord of the Rings, but it has its racial issues as well. The Topi in The Continent are not Orcs. They’re described as human.
Keira Drake claims to be partially Native American, which still does not excuse the stereotype. According to my Ancestry.com results, I’m 8% African, but that doesn’t give me the authority or background to write about a fictional Black tribe from a coastal desert land. The idea that Drake, claiming to be part Native American, didn’t see the connection and similarity between the words Hopi and Topi shows a disconnect with Native Americans and First Nations. The creation of the Topi relies on the construction of our human descriptions. As fantasy readers or writers, we fancast. We see the actors and setting in our minds by what’s described on the page. We know if we’re basing things off of other cultures.
In her apology, Drake says, “Any likeness of the fantasy cultures in the book to actual cultures was unintentional, and was not brought to my attention by a large number of early sensitivity readers.” Since Drake did not base the Topi on a Native tribe, were her multiple sensitivity readers only Asian? African-American?
What sort of sensitivity readers do you get for a book where one tribe is based off Tolkien’s hybrid monster army? If Drake is claiming to have multiple sensitivity readers, but also claims to not have based the book’s races on human races, how can someone sensitivity read without intent?
As Drake is also of Irish ancestry, she knows of the negative “drunken” stereotype associated with Irish men. Other races said to be drunks are African Americans, Latinxs, and Native Americans. In The Continent, the Topi have a scene where they drink and one nearly rapes the main character. The violent, drunk threat of Native men towards white women is also a stereotype.
When you come from a certain background, you are well aware of the stereotypes that are said about you and your people. I don’t want to deny anyone’s identity, but Drake is a white woman, and does not have to deal with the racial biases and repercussions that Native Americans have to every single day.
Other descriptions that evoke the Topi as looking like Native Americans are that they are “dark of hair” and beautifully bronze and tall:
the-continent-keira-drake-topi-descriptions
… The architecture is different from that of the Aven’ei: cruder, harsher, yet terribly formidable, even in the frozy, icy territory the Topi call home. The little towns, too, are much closer than the Aven’ei villages; I am reminded of an ant colony, with many chambers all connected together, working to support a single purpose. A great lake – shaped like a five-ponted star – lies at the near center of the Topi sttlements. There are villagers below, too; they are singularly dark of hair, with beautiful bronzed skin, and look to be very tall – even the women. … “The Topi are well-known for their use of color,” the steward says, “whether in dress, or war paint, or in the settlements themselves.” …
Further evidence that the Topi are people and not monster-Orcs comes from the editor’s questions at the back of the book.
the-continent-keira-drake-discussion-questions
… The Continent is a book about war and peace, voyages and home, and what we know and what we think we know – and, ultimately, it is a book about people. How does the author use characters to illustrate the contradictions in human nature? Discuss. …
Tropes can be subverted. Fantasy authors should know the expectations of the genre and can use that as an advantage to trick their lovely readers into an unexpected ending. Stereotypes are different. Stereotypes are harmful. When they’re translated from the human world and into the fantasy world, that’s lazy writing. But here, Harlequin Teen and Keira Drake have an opportunity to make it clear that the Topi are either monsters different than the human races described in the rest of the book, or work to subvert the racist stereotypes currently at play.
As for the Aven’ei tribe, Drake says:
“In regard to the Aven’ei, this fictional group of people was inspired by a large number of cultures, including Asian and European peoples. The language of the Aven’ei is phonetically similar to Japanese; that is purely because as a linguist who studies four languages, I find it absolutely beautiful, musical, perfect in sound. The Aven’ei are not Japanese. Nor are they Korean, or Chinese, nor are they based on an assumption that Asian cultures are interchangeable. They are a fantasy race: brave, intense, flawed, invented.”
The only non-Japanese thing about the Aven’ei is their tribe name. The names used for the Aven’ei characters are Japanese: Yuki. Noro. Aki. Keiji. These are not invented names. Pairing that with Keiji’s training to become an “Assassin” dressed from head to toe in black brings to mind the image of a ninja. Pairing that with the physical descriptions that stereotypically reference those of Asian descent, we have the Aven’ei’s “almond eyes.” There is no denying the predominant Japanese influence.
the-continent-keira-drake-almond-eyes-avenei-description
… In the light of the dwindling flames, the features of his face emerge: high cheekbones, dark almond-shaped eyes that slope gently upward at the outer corners, full lips. His skin is smooth, his jawline angled and strong. He is younger than I surmised – not much older than I am – and he is most certainly Aven’ei. …
Keira Drake goes on to say:
“The diverse peoples of the Spire itself are widely varied. This book is a fantasy novel, not intended to represent the cultures of our world, but to express the diversity of appearance in life which is natural and beautiful.”
Now I write directly to Keira Drake. I’m sorry, Ms. Drake. I don’t understand what this means. Respectfully, if The Continent is as you say, an allegory, then it 100% represents the cultures of our world because you’re representing the violence of our world. I want to point out that when creating fantasy, there are few wholly original worlds. The names and descriptions you use are basing things on pre-existing cultures. It becomes appropriation when it isn’t done right. Did Tolkien appropriate Norse culture when he created Rohan? No, but he was a white dude, and the riders of Rohan were good guys. (At least, sexy Karl Urban was.) If you, as you claimed, want to “listen and learn,” then please rethink these things before proceeding with The Continent.
I’m not personally acquainted with Debbie Reese, but I know that she is an expert and scholar in her field. She has also Tweeted about The Continent, the lack of diverse staffs at publishing houses. If contacted, WNDB would be able to help pair Harlequin Teen with sensitivity readers. Perhaps new clarifications can put to rest the who the Topi and Aven’ei are.
When I read fantasy, I know what people look like based on what is in the text. I know they’re based on a race. The people of Dorne in Game of Thrones aren’t Arab and Mediterranean, but they look it. The people of The Girl of Fire and Thorns by Rae Carson aren’t Spanish and Iberian, but the words are there to represent that it was the dominant cultural influence. The people of The Star-Touched Queen by Roshani Chokshi aren’t Indian, but we know the book is based on Hindu and Indian culture. When world building, you can’t cherry pick the things you like from other cultures, put a new name on it, and hope no one notices the similarities.
I know this is daunting. The idea that you work so hard to create a novel, only to see that it has hurt many people, isn’t an easy realization. Julie Murphy is an example of someone who didn’t get something right in their book, and penned a thoughtful apology.
For anyone who claims that a “book is just a book” and that this is “just fiction,” reconsider. What was the last book that changed your life? What was the last book that allowed you to feel represented? What was the last book that saved you from hurting yourself? Words matter. That’s why we hold authors to a higher standard when their words cause pain to others. I am not above reproach, and there may come a time when I mess up, too, and I hope I will have the YA Community there to help me right my wrong.
As fantasy authors, we know what inspired us. Culture, race, setting. To deny any of it is a disservice to the people who read our books. When you’re crafting your epic worlds and adventures, keep in mind the people you’re writing for. It is my sincere hope that Harlequin Teen and Keira Drake give The Continent another editorial pass. And I honestly wish them well should they get it right the second time around.
After writing this post, I read the news that the debut group, The Swanky 17s has disbanded following The Continent controversy. My debut year (2012) gave me some of the best friendships I have, and I feel for the authors who will miss out on that camaraderie. My email is open to anyone who has industry questions or just wants to say “hello.” If I can help in some way, I will try.
Controversy #2: When the release date of The Continent by Keira Drake had to be postponed because the story hinged on racist tropes.
The Continent follows Vaela Sun, a girl who is gifted a tour of the Continent for her 16th birthday. When her plane crashes, she becomes the lone survivor of her trip, and she is left stranded to survive on the the Continent — a dangerous place where feuding savages have been locked in battle for centuries. As many reviewers pointed out, the savages appeared to be based on Native American and Japanese peoples. Author Keira Drake countered those accusations and argued that her book was meant to be an allegory of war and violence.
In an article for YA Interrobang, I broke down Keira Drake's apology and explained the process of creating fantasy worlds that don't depend on stereotypes. Scholar Debbie Reese of American Indians in Children's Literature "storified" the events from her perspective and reactions in her series "Debbie Have You Seen..." Other reviewers and book bloggers found the themes of the novel problematic.
In the end, Keira Drake and Harlequin Teen decided to move the publication date of the novel:
The novel has not been issued a new release date.
For fantasy that does diversity right, read these books:
Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor , $10, Amazon
Court of Fives by Kate Elliott , $10, Amazon
Orleans by Sherri L. Smith , $10, Amazon
QUOTED: "these kinds of books rest on a flawed foundation. They're written by people who want to use race and racial issues, misrepresentations of the past and present, to help—let's be real—White readers learn about injustice. Along the way, readers of the groups that, historically and in the present, experience oppression and racism on a daily basis, are essentially asked to be patient. I think that's wrong. Drake is trying to be a savior. Her editor is enabling that motivation. Her publisher is putting money into this project."
Thursday, February 08, 2018
Not Recommended: Keira Drake's THE CONTINENT (the 2018 revision)
You may recall that, back in 2016, there was a lot of pushback to Keira Drake's The Continent.
I recommend you read Zoraida Córdova's critique on November 7, 2016, at YA Interrobang. It is excellent.
In response to the intense conversations on social media, Drake and her publisher, Harlequin Teen (a division of HarperCollins), decided to postpone the release of The Continent to give Drake an opportunity to revise it.
I wonder if their decision is based on a multi-book contract?
The Continent is the first book in a series she is going to write. It is "Book 1" in the series, and will be released on March 27, 2018.
~~~~
In their announcement on November 7, 2016 (posted to their Tumblr page), Harlequin Teen said:
Over the last few days, there has been online discussion about racial stereotypes in connection with one of our upcoming 2017 titles, The Continent by Keira Drake.
As the publisher, we take the concerns that have been voiced seriously. We are deeply sorry to have caused offense, as this was never our or the author's intention. We have listened to the criticism and feedback and are working with the author to address the issues that have been raised.
We fully support Keira as a talented author. To ensure that the themes in her book are communicated in the way she planned, we will be moving the publication date.
- HarlequinTeen
I wrote about the 2016 ARC (advance review copy) on January 31, 2017. Over the last couple of weeks, I've read the 2018 ARC.
My conclusion?
Drake's revisions are superficial.
The Continent is not better now than it was in 2016.
~~~~
If you haven't read the book, here is what you need to know to make sense of my review:
The main character is a teen named Vaela Sun who lives on a land mass called the Spire. In their heli-planes, people of the Spire like to fly over a land mass they call the Continent, to see the battle there between two nations of people. It reminds them how far they've come. Vaela and her parents are on the tour with Mr. and Mrs. Shaw and their son, Aaden. When their heli-plane crashes on the Continent, Vaela is captured by the Xoe and rescued by Nomo, who is of the Aven'ei nation.
Let's start with changes to the books description. The first and last paragraphs are unchanged. The middle paragraph has some changes. The word "uncivilized" is gone from the 2018 description. The significant change, however, as shown here in the highlighted text from the middle paragraph, is about who Vaela is:
2016:
For Vaela--a talented apprentice cartographer--the journey is a dream come true: a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to improve upon the maps she's drawn of this vast, frozen land.
2018:
For Vaela, the war holds little interest. As a talented apprentice cartographer and a descendant of the Continent herself, she sees the journey as a dream come true: a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to improve upon the maps she’s drawn of this vast, frozen land.
In the revision, Drake has made Vaela a descendent of one of the nations on the Continent. That information is presented on page 18:
“Did you know, my mother says, addressing the Shaws, “that Vaela and I are of Aven’ei descent?”
Aaden looks back and forth between the two of us. “Are you quite sure?” he says. “Many claim as much, but its rarely true.”
She smiles. “We can trace it all the way back to one of my ancestors, a Miss Delia Waters. She was a cultural attaché for the East—an illustrious position, all told—and spent a great deal of time on the Continent, back in that all-too-short bit of time when we had contact with those living overseas. Anyhow, we haven’t all the details, but we know she married an Aven’ei by the name of Qia who died soon after their wedding. She returned to the Spire, kept her given name, and gave birth to a baby boy—Roderick—a man of considerable accomplishment, so the story goes.”
At her website, Drake said that she is Sicilian, Native American, French, Irish, and Danish and that she takes great pride in her ancestry. Vaela and her mother, in this revision, have pride in their Aven'ei ancestry. She's got it a bit odd, though. Miss Delia Waters was not Aven'ei. She fell in love and married an Aven'ei man. Their son, Roderick, is the ancestor with Aven'ei heritage. An interesting note: as this story unfolds, Vaela falls in love with Nomo, who is Aven'ei.
For many years while I was at the University of Illinois, I worked towards helping the university get rid of its "Chief Illiniwek." It was stereotypical, but fans loved and love it. When I or others described its history and its stereotypical aspects, we were sometimes countered by a person who said "well I'm part Native American and I think it honors Native Americans." That claim was put forth as a shield to give their point of view credibility. When pressed, they could not specify a Native nation (some said "Cherokee" -- which is not surprising). For others, a research process was being done--much like the one that Vaela and her mother have done. It'd be interesting to know Drake's backstory for their claim. What was Drake thinking of as she developed this for them? And was she (or is she) undertaking similar research on her own Native American ancestry? Either way, her decision to give Vaela that ancestry feels to me like a shield that gives Drake a way to say that this is not a White savior story. If Vaela's actions in the rest of the story changed in some way as a consequence of that identity, it might have worked, but there isn't any change. That identity is just inserted. It is returned to at the end, but all those pages in the middle are unchanged.
When Vaela's mother tells Mrs. Shaw that they have Aven'ei ancestry, Mrs. Shaw has some racist ideas that she doesn't hesitate to speak aloud. Mr. Shaw replies to her. Here's that passage (p. 19):
“I do hope you haven’t inherited any violent tendencies,” says Mrs. Shaw, before sticking a forkful of duck confit into her mouth, chewing it carefully, and swallowing. “I suspect that sort of thing gets passed right down through the generations. Bit of a questionable lineage, isn’t it?
A hush falls over the table at this remark; my mother and father shift in their chairs, and I sit quietly, poking at my entrée, my face flaming even though I am certainly not the one who should be embarrassed. Eventually, Mrs. Shaw looks round at us, her eyes wide. “What? Have I said something off?”
Mr. Shaw clears his throat. “Now dearest,” he says, “that’s a rather singular way of thinking, isn’t it? An outmoded way of thinking? Violence itself is not a thing exclusive to the Xoe and the Aven’ei. After all, before the Four Nations united to become the Spire, the people of our own lands were ever locked in some conflict or another.”
In recent conversations about racist characters and the words they utter, writers and critics state that there has to be someway to immediately check that racism, on that page. Mr. Drake is doing that, above. But, seeing it in action... it feels forced. It, like the passages about Vaela's identity, are simply pasted into this story. There's nothing to make them work as part of the story. Cut them out, and you wouldn't miss them. Why, then is all of this here? As I said above, it feels like Drake is inserting them as a shield to protect her from criticism. Another change to the 2018 ARC is that Vaela prays, here and there, to "Maker." I wonder if that is Drake's effort to turn that Aven'ei heritage into some semblance of an Aven'ei religion? That is possible, but I didn't find it significant enough to matter.
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Some of the changes Drake made were easy to do. She was able to easily replace every use of "Topi" with "Xoe." She was able to search for "natives" and replace that, too, sometimes making minor edits in the words before and after the change. Here's an example (highlights are mine):
2016, p. 15:"Have you any thoughts, Mr. Shaw, about the natives on the Continent?"
2018, p. 17:"Have you any thoughts, Mr. Shaw, about the Xoe and the Aven'ei?"
Those changes, however, are superficial. You can swap "natives" for "Xoe" and unless major revisions are done to the ways that group is depicted, it doesn't matter. We still see them as brutal, doing things like hurling a head at the heli-plane. There's one part in both books where Vaela tells Nomo that they are people, too, but--as before--that effort is overwhelmed by the rest of the book. Indeed, when the Topi/Xoe are attacking the Aven'ei village, Vaela sets out to kill one with her knife and she kills others, later, on a battlefield. Her statement to Nomo that they're people, too, is feeble in light of all else she says and does, and all the ways that Drake describes them.
If you read my review in January of 2017, you may recall that I was especially troubled by Drake's description of the Topi village. That is gone, but the changes do nothing, because the Topi/Xoe's character (as a people) is unchanged. Here's a passage about their villages from the 2016 ARC. In each of these two excerpts, I'll highlight the major changes (p. 47):
The architecture is different from that of the Aven'ei: cruder harsher, yet terribly formidable, even in the frozen, icy territory the Topi call home. The little towns, too, are much closer together than Aven'ei villages; I am reminded of an ant colony, with many chambers all connected together, working to support a single purpose.
And here's the revised passage in the 2018 ARC (p. 51):
The architecture is different from that of the Aven’ei: the buildings are small, for the most part, with long triangular rooftops dipping low toward the ground. Roads and walking paths twist here and there, looking around and about the small homes and other structures. All is sturdy and formidable in this frozen, icy territory the Xoe call home. The towns, too, while small, are much closer together than Aven’ei villages. I have the sense of greater cooperation, of community, of connection—of something like we’ve established in the Spire.
Where she used "war paint" to describe the Topi, Drake is using "colorful tattoos" instead. Instead of having "reddish brown" skin, their skin is pale. What they look like, though, doesn't ultimately matter. What they do, is unchanged. When the heli-plane flies over a field where the Topi/Xoe and the Aven'ei are fighting, there's blood everywhere, spattered on the snow. The Xoe have killed all the Aven'ei and decapitated an archer. The Topi/Xoe then scream, raise their fists in the air, "drunk with victory, reveling in blood" and heave the severed head at the heli-plane (p. 51/56). See what I mean? It doesn't matter if the Topi/Xoe are in face paint or tattooed. It doesn't matter how much Vaela's thoughts here and there seem to think well of them.
At the end of the story, Vaela returns to the Spire to ask for help. In the 2016 ARC, her idea is that the Spire can use its resources to build a wall between the two nations of people. In the 2018 ARC, her idea is that the Spire can build towers. Here's those two passages:
2016 (p. 262):“Build walls. Destroy access points. Create defenses the likes of which have never been seen on the Continent! Spirian construction is vastly superior to anything the natives can contrive, don’t you see? You can save the Aven’ei without ever raising so much as a finger against the Topi. You have the power to end this. You have the power to stop another war."
2018 (p. 265):“Build towers, so that the Aven’ei might see when a Xoe force is coming. Establish plain sight of all access points. Create defenses the likes of which have never been seen on the Continent! And then, down the line, perhaps the Spire can help the Aven’ei and the Xoe to meet in the middle, to accomplish a peace of their own accord. Don’t you see? You can help without ever raising so much as a single weapon. You have the power to end this. You have the power to stop another war."
Having given Vaela Aven'ei ancestry, Drake must think that her not-Spire-alone identity solves the White Savior problem of those passages. Who Vaela is, however, doesn't matter. She went to the Spire--to the more "civilized" people--to get help. By the end of both versions, the Spire arrives. They are exercising their power to stop the war on the Continent. I should note that there's more than one nation on the Spire, and it isn't all four that come to help.
Back on Feb 9 to insert a screen cap of the method I use for this kind of analysis. First column is 2016 ARC; second one is 2018. These four pages are from the first chapter, where most of the book's new content appears.
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I think that Drake was also criticized for the language she created for the Aven'ei. They, and the language they speak, she said on her website, were inspired by Asian and European peoples--in particular--Japanese. Here's some of them:
Name changes:
Inzu is now Kinza
Teku is now Nadu
Keiji is now Kiri
Shoshi is now Shovo
Yuki is now Raia
Hayato is now Kastenai
Some are words:
miyake is miyara (supposed to be a term of endearment)
takaharu is tanadai (supposed to mean something akin to a whore)
Some of the physical description of the Aven'ei is gone or changed, too. In the 2018 ARC, Nomo's eyes aren't described as being "almond shaped."
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As noted above, I do not think the revisions are substantial enough to address the issues raised in 2016. There are many who wonder what Drake could have done to fix The Continent.
Frankly, I think these kinds of books rest on a flawed foundation. They're written by people who want to use race and racial issues, misrepresentations of the past and present, to help -- let's be real -- White readers learn about injustice. Along the way, readers of the groups that, historically and in the present, experience oppression and racism on a daily basis, are essentially asked to be patient. I think that's wrong. Drake is trying to be a savior. Her editor is enabling that motivation. Her publisher is putting money into this project. Those are my thoughts. I welcome yours.
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Update, Feb 9, 2017: I will begin adding links here, to some of the conversations that are taking place elsewhere.
Courtney Milan, on Twitter, Feb 9, 8:13 AM: "It feels like the author thought the problem was 'this race described as violent and uncivilized is too much like earth races" and not "maybe your world-building shouldn't present an entire race as violent and uncivilized."
K Tempest Bradford, on Twitter, Feb 9, 8:32 AM: "Surprise, surprise, the revised version of #TheContinent is among us..."