By Malinda Lo

For the past few years, I’ve read hundreds of reviews for Diversity in YA. I read them to determine whether a young adult book has a main character who is of color, LGBTQ, and/or disabled, and thus is appropriate to include on DiYA. Sometimes the book’s cover copy reveals this, but often it does not — or it deliberately obscures it — and then I have to read reviews to figure it out.

The reviews I read range from Goodreads reader responses to blog posts to mainstream reviews (like from the New York Times) to trade reviews. Trade reviews are brief reviews published in trade journals such as Kirkus or Publishers Weekly, and I usually start with these for several reasons. First, they’re short, and because I do DiYA in my spare time, I don’t have the luxury to read lengthy critical essays on every single potentially diverse book that’s being published. Second, these brief reviews pack in a lot of detail including spoilers, which are often key to determining if a book has diverse content. Third, they’re edited by the editors of those trade journals, which means they should have been fact-checked. Sometimes trade reviews do contain errors, but generally speaking I believe they are reliable about the facts of a novel’s plot.

If a trade review only hints about race or LGBT or disability issues, then I turn to blog reviews and Goodreads to confirm my suspicions. But more often than not I find that trade reviews do include details about the book’s diversity, and lately it has become increasingly common for trade reviews to state a character’s background quite plainly. I appreciate this because that’s why I’m reading these reviews, and I think an up-front statement that a character is gay is much better than an insinuation that the story has something to do with sexuality. It removes some of the stigma from historically marginalized identities, and it helps those of us who are seeking out these books to find them.

Of course, not all reviews discuss diversity in a skillful way. Frankly, it’s hard to do it in one paragraph, and I recognize that. I’ve encountered reviews that reveal broader assumptions about race, LGBTQ, and disability issues, and sometimes those assumptions are based in unfortunate stereotypes. Over the past several months I’ve been keeping track of reviews that I felt did a disservice to a book’s diverse content, and revealed latent racist, heteronormative, or ablist beliefs.

These reviews reveal a few specific issues or perceptions about diversity: the idea that diversity in a book is contrived; the critique that a book contains too many issues; the question of believability; the demand for glossaries; and finally, unsupported assumptions relating to race. Because these issues are so complicated, I’m going to be writing about them in several posts over several days.

Before diving in, a few caveats:

While these issues emerge in all kinds of reviews, I’m focusing on trade reviews of young adult novels because I read them more than other kinds or reviews, and also because they carry a significance that Goodreads and blog posts do not. Booksellers and librarians often rely on trade reviews to determine whether they should acquire the books for their stores and collections.

I quote from several trade reviews as examples, but I’ve chosen not to identify the individual reviewer. While each review is written by an individual, each review is also edited by an editor, and trade reviews are generally attributed to the journals rather than the individual reviewer. Kirkus doesn’t even publish the names of its reviewers, so all Kirkus reviews are essentially anonymous. That doesn’t mean that individual reviewers don’t have responsibilities to inform themselves about their assumptions relating to diversity; it means that the review editor also has a responsibility. Trade reviewing is the professional critique of books, and I think it’s important to examine how the profession sees diversity.

As an author writing about reviews, I understand I am entering a particularly fraught area of discourse. That’s why I want to be clear that I am not writing about any reviews of my own books. Honestly, I don’t remember if any trade reviews of my own books have included these issues, and I have refrained from looking them up again for these posts. I have no beef with any individual reviewers, and as I said above, my main purpose is examining how the book profession sees diversity.

I’d also like to disclose that I do know some of the authors of the books whose reviews I’ll be discussing, and I’ve even discussed their books with some of them, either in person or on social media. However, none of them know I’m writing this post. My intention isn’t to defend anyone I know; it’s to comment on perceptions of diversity in the reviews.

Finally, my goal isn’t to critique any individual reviewer; that’s why I’m not naming them. These are issues that go far beyond individual beliefs or biases, and are representative of much broader perceptions of diversity.

“Scarcely Plausible”

One perception that has cropped up in several reviews, generally of science fiction or fantasy novels, is the idea that a diverse cast of characters is contrived. Here are some examples:

“Some humans remain "Norms” while others are “Changed,” and therein lies the only prejudice; no one looks askance at homosexuality and all races are appreciated. Some elements appear contrived and slightly pedantic: there is exactly one gay couple and one lesbian couple…“ — School Library Journal review of Stranger by Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith "While any caper involving such a perfectly ethnically and sexually diverse team of teenagers, all blessed with genius-level skills, is scarcely plausible, it is nevertheless praiseworthy.” — Kirkus review of The Doubt Factory by Paolo Bacigalupi “Effort has clearly been made to diversify this cast, including a smart Dominican female lead. The supporting characters are less fleshed out.” — School Library Journal review of On a Clear Day by Walter Dean Myers

To “contrive” means to make something in a skillful or clever way. This is, hopefully, exactly how writers work. However, “contrive” often has a less positive connotation. In the review of Stranger, the critique that the novel is contrived suggests overt and clumsy manipulation; in other words, it reveals the actions of the man behind the curtain. In a novel, the writer’s goal is to cause the reader to lose themselves in the story, so anything that knocks the reader out of the story’s world may appear to be a flaw. When a diverse cast is criticized as “contrived,” though, it’s a bit more complicated.

The critique of The Doubt Factory’s “perfectly ethnically and sexually diverse” cast as “scarcely plausible” reveals a deep-seated belief that a group of people are unlikely to be ethnically and sexually diverse. As in Stranger, this diverse cast is read by the reviewer as contrived — as something constructed in a less-than-subtle manner by the author, and thus as unrealistic. In the review of On a Clear Day, the statement that “Effort has clearly been made to diversify this cast” suggests that this diversity would not have existed naturally; it needed effort.

There are numerous problems with the critique of diversity as implausible. First, this critique reveals a lot more about the reviewer’s assumptions than it does about the book’s quality. It suggests to me that these reviewers live in homogeneous peer groups and have little personal experience with diverse groups of people. The problem with this should be obvious: One individual’s personal experience is not universal. There’s nothing wrong with a reviewer recognizing that to them the book’s diversity felt jarring, but that doesn’t mean the book’s depiction was flawed. That means the book’s depiction of a diverse group of characters is different than the reviewer’s personal experience. In fact, if a book depicts something that a reviewer is unfamiliar with, I would hope the reviewer might take a moment to consider what that means.

The book industry, from editors to publishers to reviewers to booksellers, is overwhemingly populated by straight, white people. Stories about non-white characters face an uphill battle from the beginning because they have to explain themselves to gatekeepers who may not be familiar with the issues involved. In the real world, there certainly are peer groups who are homogenous, but there are also peer groups who are diverse. The existence of a diverse cast of characters is simply not unrealistic — ever. Even in real-world communities that are largely white or segregated into racial enclaves, interracial friendships and relationships exist.

I admit that sometimes I’ve encountered folks on the internet who object, “But in some small towns the people would not be diverse!” To them, I say this: A novel is not reality. The books that are critiqued for implausibly diverse casts have generally been science fiction or fantasy. These are books that depart from reality on purpose. These characters are not randomly diverse; they have been intentionally developed and placed in the narrative for a reason. For example, in The Doubt Factory, this “perfectly ethnically and sexually diverse team” of characters is purposely assembled by a lead character in order to pull off a heist that is an intervention into capitalist inequality. The diversity is a feature, not a flaw. An all-white cast would have been a flaw, as it would have resulted in a white savior story line.

I understand that some reviewers won’t agree with this argument, and I understand that books are personal experiences that differ from one reader to another. What disturbs me more than a review’s denial that diversity is realistic, however, is the belief that purposely creating — contriving with “effort” — a diverse cast is pandering to the diversity movement that has been simmering for decades, and has exploded in YA and children’s literature over the past year. For example, take this review:

“Fairy-tale–telling Hale tackles straight-up science fiction in a tale seemingly tailor-made to forestall complaints about lovelorn teen heroines and all-white casts of characters. Maisie Danger Brown (really), smart, home-schooled, one-handed half-Paraguayan daughter of scientists, has always dreamed of being an astronaut.” — Kirkus review of Dangerous by Shannon Hale

This review blithely ignores and ridicules the real-world inequalities behind “complaints about lovelorn teen heroines and all-white casts of characters.” This review is offensive, and if I had been the Kirkus editor, I would not have allowed this line to stay in the final review. It reveals a belief that simmers beneath all those critiques of diversity as implausible: the belief that nonwhite, LGBT, and disabled characters are simply unnecessary; that adding in these perspectives derails a story; that “reality” is white and homogenous.

It should be blindingly clear that I disagree with this belief. It’s frustrating to see it crop up again and again, coded beneath reviews that criticize diversity as “scarcely plausible” in one phrase while describing it as “praiseworthy” in the next. Diversity is not “praiseworthy”: It is reality. Reviews that deny this fact of life are well behind the times, and they do a massive disservice to the majority of children in the United States who are not white.

Coming up next time: “So Many (Too Many?) Issues”