Save the Pearls 2: Adapting Eden

Yes, you heard me. Save the Pearls does indeed have a sequel.

I have to hand it to Foyt in that she decided to go ahead and publish the second book. Given the extreme backlash she received over the first book, you'd imagine that she would abstain from writing a sequel entirely. Even if you were to approach this from a snark standpoint, how exactly do you top the previous volume?

Well, we only have to wait until January 23, 2013 to find out. Until then, we have this plot synopsis from Amazon:

In the sequel to the award-winning, dystopian novel, Revealing Eden, Eden Newman must adapt into a hybrid human beast if she hopes to become Ronson Bramford's mate. She has no choice but to undergo her fathers adaptation experiment at his makeshift laboratory in the last patch of rainforest. But when the past rears its ugly head, Eden and Bramford must abandon camp along with their family and friends. Luckily, an Aztec tribe that has survived with the aid of a healing plant provides them with sanctuary or is it? Too late, Eden realizes she is at the center of an epic spiritual battle between love and war. To survive, she must face her deepest fears or lose everything, including the beastly man she loves.

Before you ask, apparently the award it won was the Eric Hoffer award. I've never really heard of that either, but given how clueless Foyt was over how some could see the book's contents as offensive, it's equally possible that there are enough equally clueless people out there that would give it an award.

I have to admit, I'll probably check it out if I can get my hands on a copy. While I did find the book unintentionally offensive, I'm willing to give this a shot to see if she's improved anything since the last book. Although considering that one of the things people previously cried foul on was the constant referral to Bramford as a "beast" and she refers to him as a "beastly man" in this plot synopsis, well...   I'm fully aware that he's half-animal and that's what she's referring to, but part of what pissed off so many readers was that she used these phrases and terms without realizing that something that might seem inoccuous to her would come across as offensive to others because she herself has never actually had to deal with the negative stereotypes and images that they would. I admit that I've read things in some of the reviews that I didn't initially pick up on as offensive that came across as offensive to other readers.

In any case we only have about 5 days until the book becomes available. There's no word on whether or not there will be a Kindle version. I'm slightly curious enough to plunk down money if ARC aren't made available, so if I do fork over some of my own cold hard cash for review purposes then I'll either make it available for the review circuit afterwards or I'll hold a drawing on my page. Assuming I purchase it, that is.


Update:

I went searching to see if I could find any confirmation and Foyt's website gives the release date as Spring 2013, so I'm guessing that this is indeed going to release next week. The site also gives us the book's prologue. I'm giving you the link for you to follow at your leisure.

Prologue of Adapting Eden

OK. This certifies that I'll probably have to get the book and give Foyt my money just so I can read the WTF in all its glory. The series had previously had a distinctly dystopian flavor, but now elements of fantasy are getting mixed in? And Eden is the world's last hope for survival? 

Oh wow... I can't even begin to go over how badly the idea of "white girl saves the world" will go over, considering some of the criticism over the last book. I know that tradition is that the main character of the book is the Chosen One, but why isn't it Bramford that is the Chosen One Who Will Save The World?

Update 2: 

If you're curious about the first book, Revealing Eden, then I want to let you know that you can enter into a drawing for a copy via Goodreads. All you need is a membership on the site, which is free.

Enter to win Revealing Eden

On a side note, I'd really like to take this opportunity to ask people not to review the second book unless you've read it. Will the book stink? Dunno. Probably. Maybe. But until you've read more than a few paragraphs, it's really not fair to leave a starred review of Adapting Eden. If it's going to get negatively reviewed, let it gain those reviews fairly. 

Rape Erotica Part Deux: It's been going on for a while

Recently I posted a blog about a mini-brouhaha surrounding writer Marata Eros, who writes in the genre of rape erotica. It basically boiled down to readers downloading the book without realizing it was rape erotica, then posting one star reviews to Amazon and other sites detailing their disgust. Eros said she had a disclaimer all along, others said she didn't. The author was a little defensive, but ultimately the true gist of the reader response was because the idea of rape as erotica was disturbing to many.

I'd mentioned this to some of my friends on Facebook and was pretty surprised to be told that rape as titillation has been around for years and used to be a fairly common plot device in romance. For example, Catherine Coulter's Devil's Embrace features a female character that is stalked, kidnapped, and repeatedly raped by her captor... who she eventually returns to because she's fallen deeply in love with him. A little more sleuthing brought up Savage Surrender by Natasha Peters, where you have a fair young maiden getting her booty forcibly and repeatedly plundered by several scallywags, one of which is- you guessed it, the guy she is obviously destined to fall in love with. There's others, such as Christine Monson's Stormfire, where the guy not only rapes her but also backhands her, starves her, and generally humiliates her in about every way possible. You could look back even farther and find the writings of the Marquis de Sade, which is considered classic erotica by some.

I could probably find more, but you get the gist of things. Rape as erotica and entertainment has always been around. I'd elaborated on some of the reasons psychologists gave for people enjoying the genre and writing fiction, most of which center around the concept of freedom. By having their choices taken away from them, the women are free to engage in encounters where they have various sex acts done to them that they might not otherwise have done, with there being the implication that since they didn't have to assume guilt or responsibility afterwards. At least, that's what was in the reports. It's pretty freaky but the studies are an interesting read and if you're like me, researching this sort of thing helps to demystify something that baffles and quite frankly, frightens me.

I just wanted to elaborate a bit more on this, as it's pretty intriguing. It almost makes me wish that I was taking a degree is psychology, because this would be an excellent senior thesis.

Fifty Shades of WTF: The top 5 most unlikely candidates for the upcoming film adaptation

If you've even remotely paid attention to any of the Fifty Shades of Grey movie hype, you've seen that just about everyone under the sun has been rumored to either be interested in the movie or have been asked to perform in it. Ryan Gosling? He's been asked. Emma Watson? She's supposedly a likely candidate. My aunt's mother's second cousin's roommate's father? He's totally up for the role of Christian Grey.

Here's a listing of some of the more outlandish people that have been fingered as being involved, mentioned as likely candidates, or are interested in the movie in some form or fashion.

Selena Gomez. While it'd be a little awesome to see the white-washing of various book characters go in the opposite direction with the casting of a Hispanic actress, I just don't see her as being really right for the role. Maybe it's because she's too young. Maybe it's because she's too dominant. Either way, the rumor of her being Ana just seems really silly, but since Gomez has already shot down rumors of her being in the film I suppose we don't have to worry about this overly much.

Shia Lebouf. No. Just no. While Lebouf does seem to have the douchebag aspect of Christian Grey down, I can't see him being dominant enough to play Grey. Every time I imagine him trying to top someone, I just picture the other person getting irritated and turning him into a Shia sized floor mop.

Miley Cyrus. OK, so she's been listed on a website as being a likely candidate for the role of Anastasia Steele. I'm now picturing her as Ana to Shia's Christian. It's not a pleasant image and I'm currently wondering if I can self-lobotomize if I shove a pencil far enough up my nose. I know that Cyrus hasn't really acted up that much lately, but I just imagine her wandering around Grey's apartment stoned out of her gourd while Lebouf just sits in a corner and practices being the world's largest wet rag. Imagining them in the infamous tampon sex scene is a little warped because I keep seeing the roles switch around and having Cyrus remove Lebouf's tampon because she's just that much more masculine and dominant than he is. 

Justin Bieber. That's right folks, Justin Bieber. Depending on where you go, he's either up for an undisclosed role or he's been asked to play the role of Christian Grey himself. All jokes of him being more likely to play Ana aside, I'm finding it highly unlikely that the Biebs would be capable of playing a guy that's in his late 20s, unless he's supposed to be playing a teenaged Grey and that character doesn't entirely appear until book three. And yes, I think Bieber could kick Lebouf's butt.

Charlie Sheen. Somewhere, someone has said that he was in the running to play Grey, to which Sheen actually said that he wasn't interested. Sort of. I'm actually a little sad that this one is so obviously false, because it'd be kind of awesome if he was. The producers could put him and Cyrus together in the film and let them "do as they will", resulting in a drunken drug filled bacchanalia that would go down in history. They're already friends, so you wouldn't have to worry about them fighting on set. On a side note, I can see him being dominant enough to play Grey and if the movie was going to be a parody of the book,  Sheen would be their best bet by far. 

Authors Behaving Badly: The attack on Pam van Hylckama

Hi all! Today I've got a rather frightening case of "author behaving badly" for you. I don't have all the details but I'll update as I find more out. All of this is taken from the agent's twitter account. (BTW, thanks go out to author Naomi Clark for originally finding and pointing this out!!)

Less than 24 hours ago, agent Pam van Hylckama was attacked in her car. The guy came up and knocked a side mirror off, then when Pam unrolled the window to talk to him, he began slamming her head against the steering wheel. Luckily Pam's dog was there to help protect her, biting the man and causing him to flee. Pam later called the police at the urging of a family member.

Then they realized that it might not be a random attack. As stated above, Pam works as an agent and as such, both declines and accepts manuscripts and authors on a regular basis. The police believe that the guy that assaulted her (who is unnamed so far) was someone that she turned down. A look through her email showed that she'd received emails that said "The normal I hate you and I want you to die and I'll kill you". Pam had sort of just ignored those for the most part since agents get these all the time, but apparently the guy who sent these also had priors against him. The police then used the address the guy gave in his query to go to his house, where they discovered him with a bite mark on him from Pam's dog. The guy is now officially in police custody.

To put it frankly, this is pretty terrifying. Pam was just doing what agents do, yet she got attacked for it. I know that most of the irate and badly behaved authors would not stoop to physical violence, but this still is pretty scary. You never know when someone is going to take the information they discover about you, track you down, and try to physically assault you. Seriously, this is messed up.

UPDATE:

Pam has been fantastic enough to give me a little mini-interview! Click here to go there!

UPDATE 2:

I just logged on and noticed that there's been a fuss in the comments. I've deleted two of the remarks that were only made to be mean spirited and hateful. One made remarks while pretending to be someone else. Another insinuated that someone's sexuality affected their judgement. Neither contributed to the conversation at all.

But let me make this one point clear: it doesn't matter how Pam may or may not have acted towards the writer when rejecting his manuscript. Do I think she was rude? No. I don't. I think she probably gave him a form letter or something along those lines that she's given to countless other authors. She doesn't strike me as the type of person that would be rude or nasty. However even if she'd set his manuscript on fire, let her dog pee on the ashes, and made up a list of things she'd rather do than read any more of his book (such as rinsing her eyes out with lemon juice), that does NOT give him the right to attack her. That also doesn't mean that she "deserves" to be attacked. That it was fairly easy for the loon to track her down doesn't mean that she deserves the attack either. Rather than saying that she's at fault for having her personal information easily detectable, people should be lamenting that there are enough people with poor impulse control to where such things are necessary. That's blaming the victim and up to that point Pam had no reason to hide her information. She had no way of knowing that one of the people submitting to her would be that crazy.

As I can tell, the guy that attacked Pam had priors. That means that Pam was likely not the first person he lashed out against. This also means that no matter how polite Pam was, how much pains she took to spare his ego, or how kind her words might have been, this guy probably would've gone after her. It doesn't take a lot to set off someone who is mentally unstable. He might have attacked her even if his manuscript had been accepted, just because he didn't like the terms she was offering him. My point here is that the people who do this sort of thing are the type of people that would see anything as an invitation to an attack. Some of these crazies do it just because their shoe laces came untied. That anyone would ever think that for a second Pam might have done something to "deserve" this or that this crazy freak's attack was in any way justified is incredibly messed up.

THERE IS NO EXCUSE FOR PHYSICAL VIOLENCE. How Pam may or may not have acted is irrelevant.  There is no excuse for violence. We're human beings, not animals. The person that attacked Pam stalked her and then proceeded to smash her face against her steering wheel. The only reason that's all he did was because her dog defended her against the other person's assault. That anyone would think that a physical assault is an appropriate reaction to a manuscript getting declined is rather disturbing. Again, even if she was the rudest person on earth, which I doubt she was, that doesn't make physical violence acceptable. I'm going to assume that this person was coming on here to troll, but I wanted to make this statement because unfortunately there's always a group of people who will try to blame the victim in all of this, regardless of the circumstances.

I don't usually censor or delete posts on here, but I'd much appreciate it if people didn't make it necessary.


UPDATE 3:

I've noticed that on some of the various news sites about this, people are questioning Pam's apparent retraction of the statement that the guy had been apprehended and that it was likely to be the same guy that she rejected manuscript-wise.

I do want to make a brief statement on this, saying that until the case has been through the court system and everything has been 100% proven in a court of law, you have to be careful about how you discuss things. It's fairly normal for a lawyer to tell someone that they should refrain from making any absolute statements saying "this person did this" or "I believe it's someone I rejected at work". If this goes to court then those statements can be used in the case against the guy that attacked her. The guy's lawyer can say that she "poisoned the well" against the client and so on. There's a lot of ways that a good lawyer can twist this around, which is why she's more than likely being vague about everything now. This does not mean that the attack didn't happen or that the guy that attacked her isn't the same one whose manuscript she declined. It just means that Pam probably lawyered up and is being told that being vague right now is her friend.

Now as for the allegations that she's too calm for someone that has been attacked, people respond to things differently. We also have no way of knowing exactly how frantic Pam actually was at this time. It's very, very common for people to kind of detach themselves from everything. It's a form of denial and it's fairly common.   I've known a few people who have had some pretty awful stuff happen to them and they discuss everything with a minimum amount of fuss and screaming. It doesn't mean that the trauma didn't happen, just that they hadn't fully processed everything yet. Everyone deals with things differently and just because Pam wasn't ZOMG-ing on various social sites doesn't mean that the attack didn't happen.


Further reading:
*Pam's Twitter account

Daily WTF: Save the Pearls

When a friend introduced me to this series my mind skipped it, probably intentionally. This is a lot of WTF going on here.

Now before I get started in on this, in all fairness I'll admit that I haven't read the book. I'm not sure that I want to, as the premise sounds like something out of a bad 70s film. I might give it a try, depending on how my friend John reviews it. He's my go-to guy for potentially bad books.

But what is Save the Pearls, you ask? Put bluntly, it's a book where a post-apocalyptic future where solar radiation has killed off all of the white people. The remaining whites (called "pearls" in the book) are ruled over by dark skinned people (called "coals") and survive by donning blackface. Our book's heroine is of course a white girl, and of course she's the world's hope for survival. And our little pearl falls in love with a coal. Whom Foyt describes as a "beast-man".

I shit you not, that's the premise.

If you think that this sounds intentionally or unintentionally racist, you're not alone. A good portion of the people who heard the premise of Pearls has thought the same thing, with some posting negative reviews on Amazon saying as much.

I don't necessarily think that Foyt set out for her book to be racist and she claims that the book is supposed to be anti-racist and a "message of love and hope for the planet and for all men". It's just that in her writing she seems to be oblivious to how naive and ignorant her claims of "not seeing race" really is and how the book appears to pretty much most of its target audience. (I include adults in this as YA isn't just for teens nowadays.) To me this shows that you have a book that was written by a woman who is largely clueless of what the current issues in the world are for many people with skin color that isn't a shade of Caucasian. This is a woman who assumes that her son seeing her skin as tan (remember, she's a white woman) means that he doesn't see colors, a person who assumes that white people can sometimes pass for black simply by tinting their skin. This is actually the most offensive part of it all: that a white woman assumes that saying she isn't racist makes the book not racist. She's just that completely and utterly unaware of how bad it is that everyone is named after a gemstone of some sort... except for African-Americans, who are named after coal, are portrayed as "beast-men", and a whole slew of other stuff that makes me cringe.

Even if we were to ignore the cluelessness, then we have questions over the huge plot holes in the book. Why is it that only white people are affected by the solar rays? Dark skinned people get sunburn too, you know. If they're that weak that only the lily white people die off then odds are that the solar rays would be avoidable by people managing to stay, y'know... inside. Out of the sun. Or only coming out at night.

Also, if the dark skinned people are the people in charge then why refer to them as "coals"- a term that has already been used by others in a racist manner? Why would the dominant people refer to themselves as "coal" while the whites are referred to as "pearls"? Even if it's supposed to be a derogatory term, why would they refer to the "hated" color as a semi-precious object while they refer to themselves as well, coal? Why not have them call themselves "ebonies" while the white people are referred to as something other than a desired jewelry object? Or better yet, why not just forego the whole term thing and just refer to them by their skin colors? It would be a little more awkward, but not nearly as awkward and inexplicable as the whole "pearl" and "coal" thing.

Really the most offensive thing is Foyte's cluelessness, something that becomes painfully apparent in the free preview on Amazon. I might actually read a copy of this via Netgalley because this looks like it could be entertaining in its unintentional racism and cluelessness.

I just have to say that at one point Foyt was patting herself on the back for the book not initially getting any protest or complaints. I think that's less because people were accepting of how she wrote the book and more because they were busy trying to pick their jaws up off the flow.

Further reading:


*Today In Racism: YA Series “Save The Pearls” Employs Offensive Blackface And Bizarre Racist Stereotypes Plot 
*Just read the first chapter of Save the Pearls, Revealing Eden…
*Save the Pearls on Amazon 
*Official StP site 
*Official StP facebook page

Book Review: Need by Carrie Jones

Title: Need (Need #1)
Author: Carrie Jones
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Release Date: 12/23/2008
ISBN: 1599903385





Before I start this review, I’m going to be honest about one thing: I’m going to be spilling some spoilers about the book. Potentially big ones. I try not to post spoilers but this impacted my decision about the book. If you don’t want to know the spoilers but want to know how I felt about the book overall, I liked it for the most part. There’s just one part to the book that kept me from liking it as much as I would have otherwise.

Zara White suspects there's a freaky guy semi-stalking her. She's also obsessed with phobias. And it's true, she hasn't exactly been herself since her stepfather died. But exiling her to shivery Maine to live with her grandmother? That seems a bit extreme. The move is supposed to help her stay sane...but Zara's pretty sure her mom just can't deal with her right now.She couldn't be more wrong. Turns out the semi-stalker is not a figment of Zara's overactive imagination. In fact, he's still following her, leaving behind an eerie trail of gold dust. There's something not right - not human - in this sleepy Maine town, and all signs point to Zara.

For the most part this is a decent book. Many YA readers will like it, but some will find it a little lacking in comparison to some of the meatier & more complex books out there, such as the ones by Holly Black or Melissa Marr. Jones tries to straddle the fine line between producing something along the lines of Black/Marr & something more family friendly, but doesn’t entirely succeed. Her characters are interesting enough & the growing affections between Zara & Nick are cute. It’s just that the book kind of read like Jones wrote it as she was going along, throwing bits & pieces in as she went along. It’s not a terrible book but it does feel like it could have been a lot better.

Now for the part that really, REALLY irritated me. This is a spoiler. You’ve been warned.

Zara discovers that she’s the daughter of the pixie king & that her mom only slept with him because otherwise it would mean there would be more death and blood draining. Zara assumes that she’s the child of rape, only for her grandmother to say “it wasn’t forced- she consented”. That bothers me because it obviously seemed to be consent under duress. She didn’t want to do it but agreed because she had no other good choice. That still counts as rape & I would have imagined that an EMT (who has undoubtedly seen some horrific things in her time) would have known that. I’m horrified to think that some girls might read this & assume that consent under duress makes it not rape. What if some guy forces himself on a girl & she assumes “I initially said yes”, “I was too drunk to say no”, or “he said he’d kill me or someone else if I didn’t let him” means that it was consensual? I know that Jones didn’t mean for it to come across this way, but she’s got to understand that her phrasing in that scene was horrible & could have been put better. I'm honestly horrified that some readers might come out of this book thinking that consent under duress equates to consensual. I'd go on, but you get where I'm going with this.

Overall though, this book wasn’t bad & while I absolutely HATED that one scene in the book, I’m curious enough to want to read the next one in the series. I just know that for many, that one scene will be enough to put them off of the rest of her books.