Episode 3 of Critical Conversations in Children's Literature with guest Dr. Libby Gruner

Critical Conversations in Children's Literature is a web series developed to bring children's literary writers in conversation with scholars to discuss critical topics brewing within the field. This web series is funded by CAL IRA funds.

The series was developed by Dr. Lashon Daley an assistant professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University. This series is funded by the College of Arts & Letters Instructional Activities Grant and is hosted in collaboration with the National Center for the Study of Children's Literature. Episode 3 features a conversation between Dr. Daley and Dr. Libby Gruner, centered on the topic of collaboration within the academic field of children’s literature. Libby Gruner is the 2021-2022 President of ChLA, which is the Children's Literature Association (ChLA). Libby is a scholar of both YA and Victorian literature. She has taught at the University of Richmond since 1993, where she is a Professor of English and Coordinator of Faculty Development in Teaching.

Without further ado, here's episode 3 of CCICL:

We hope you enjoy this episode!

My Defense of “Blood Heir” by Amélie Wen Zhao

Ever since the delayed release of Blood Heir I have been following the novel’s rocky road to publication.

After reading, re-reading, and researching, I’m here to defend the book.

For those who haven’t heard, Blood Heir by Amélie Wen Zhao was called “this year’s most controversial YA novel” by Slate Magazine.

Fellow author LL McKinney of A Blade So Black blasted Zhao’s book on Twitter calling it “anti-black”. The original blurb for Blood Heir read: “In a world where the princess is the monster, oppression is blind to skin color, and good and evil exist in shades of gray…” In a string of tweets from January 2019, Author LL McKinney states (after reading half of an advanced copy) “I don’t give a good god damn that this is an author of color. Internalized racism and anti-blackness is a thing and I…no” (Twitter, 2019). I have to admit, this is probably not the best pitch for a novel and I can see why McKinney was upset, but I was disappointed to see an author of color being torn down before her book was even published.

People responded to McKinney’s tweet saying they were immediately cancelling pre-orders of Zhao’s book.

McKinney was not the only person upset by Zhao’s novel. According to The New Yorker, “critics felt that Zhao’s slavery narrative had erased a specifically African-American experience, and they objected to a scene in which an apparently black slave girl dies in an apparently white character’s arms, in an act of self-sacrifice. Zhao, who emigrated from China when she was eighteen, said that her book drew on ‘the epidemic of indentured labor and human trafficking prevalent in many industries across Asia, including in my own home country’” (Waltman, 2019). For the “black slave girl” I believe refers to May, who is never described other than a young girl with “turquoise eyes” in the final copy. I cannot confirm that May was black in the advanced copy reviewers read; in the final copy, May’s skin tone is never referenced.

Map of the imagined Cyrillian Empire in Zhao’s novel

From the point of sending drafts to beta readers, negative reviews flooded Goodreads before she even published the book. She sent drafts to beta readers from 2014-2017 to perfectly finetune her novel (Zhao, 452), so some of the following reviewers may be beta readers.

A Goodreads reviewer addresses one controversy of the novel: “Another generic fantasy that appropriates Russian culture by twisting the tragic history of Anastasia Romanova. NO THANKS.” The reviewer shelved this on a shelf called “Cultural-Appropriation”. I also want to point out there is no direct reference to Russia in Zhao’s book besides her saying [online] that she was inspired by the story of the Russian Grand Duchess Anastasia, and I see no obvious relation to Russia, but people have argued the novel is Slavic-inspired. The map above, which can be found in the book, shows Zhao’s fantastical world does not appear to be one exact country.

Cultural appropriation is not a new criticism for young adult novels. By “another fantasy” the reviewer is referencing Leigh Bardugo’s popular young adult fantasy novels set in the make-believe Grishaverse, especially The Shadow and Bone trilogy, which has been accused of appropriating Russian culture. I am not well-versed enough in the culture to know whether Blood Heir nor Bardugo’s books have Slavic influence or not, but I have not seen anything from Zhao mentioning Slavic culture in any form on social media or directly mentioning the culture in the novel.

Another review simply states “horrible and racist” [published before the final copy’s publication].

Yet another: “the magic system in the book just felt like a rip off of the Grishaverse” [referencing Leigh Bardugo’s novels].

And finally: “I couldn’t stop thinking about the whole mess earlier in the year with the book. Yeah, that’s a personal one. I just couldn’t disconnect that, and all the vitriol from that, from the book itself. But like I said, personal. And, not having read the first version of it, I don’t know the changes that were made so. It’s a me thing.”

This last review resounded with me, because Zhao isn’t being given a second chance from everyone. She heard criticism from reviewers and changed aspects of her book, but nonetheless, Zhao has been somewhat ostracized in the YA literature community for doing something new and different.

Following the backlash, Zhao pushed back the publishing date and sent her book through many sensitivity readers and editors to address concerns.

According to Katy Waldman’s article, In Y.A., Where is the Line Between Criticism and Cancel Culture? published in The New Yorker, the intentions of the book are not as sinister as they may seem. “The book’s allegories seem mythic, not historical. They are about discovering one’s hidden potential, celebrating the liberation of the self. If anything, the damning readings of Blood Heir seem guilty of something that the Y.A. community mitigates against: the misapprehension of a cultural context unfamiliar to one’s own”.

Clearly, there was a lot of controversy before this book was even published, and that’s why I decided to pick it up. I barely touch the surface of the expansive novel and its controversies in this blog, but I wanted to address them.

Here is your spoiler warning.

The inspiration for the novel, the young

Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia.

At the start of the book, Anastacya Mikhailov has been convicted of a crime she didn’t commit: killing her own father.

Zhao creates such an exciting plot and world in the very first page. From the very beginning, Zhao throws the reader into Princess Anastacya’s world. Anastacya is in prison, waiting to be sold off to a work contract or indenturement (Zhao, 12). Anastacya, disguising her identity by calling herself “Ana”, is in hiding from being accused of murdering her father, the Emperor Aleksander Mikhailov. It was rumored Princess Anastacya was executed or drowned while fleeing execution.

Blood Heir is inspired by the compelling true story of the Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia. The inspiration from the infamous story of Anastasia is seen in Anastacya’s story: A royal family was murdered, but rumors spread that the Grand Duchess Anastasia escaped the assassination.

From the very beginning, Blood Heir keeps the reader on the edge of the seat. After being convicted of murder and thrown in prison, Ana convinces a fellow inmate, Ramson Quicktongue, to break out of prison. Through hijinks and mayhem Ana and Ransom break out of prison to avoid being forced into “Employment Contracts”, essentially, being trafficked and forced to work.

After breaking out, fiercely independent Ana teams up with Ramson and fights to get her friend May back from the Playpen, a place Affinites are taken to perform, often against their will.

With exciting tension on every page, I had to know what happened next. With regards to the story itself and the character developments, I really loved the novel, except for the romance, but this is a common critique I have. Ramson is this bad-guy-gone-good from the Navy who is enlisted by Ana to help her find May, and of course, they fall for one another, when all I wanted was more Ana and May and less romance.  

There is an arguably forced storyline of Ana and Ramson both being damaged people fighting the urge to fall for one another, and in the end they do. That being said, I do have to appreciate Ana’s fierce determination throughout the novel never being smothered by Ramson. Through it all, Ana still is a fiercely independent woman determined to get her friend back, but I think the book would have been excellent without the love story.

While breaking out of prison, it is discovered that Ana is an “Affinite”, or a person with a special ability or connection to physical or metaphysical elements. In her case, Ana has a blood affinity, which is seen as deadly and a curse.

Back to the issue of slavery or indentured servitude, there are “employment contracts” with Affinites in the Cyrilian Empire. The employment contracts are what stirred up the controversy. Never does Zhao directly call it slavery in the book, but it has been compared to slavery by outside sources.

There is a very eerie scene for those who are familiar with the history of slavery in America. After being found without papers proving their “employment”, Ana’s friend May, another Affinite, is taken to be sold. At this trading/trafficking post, creepily called “the Playpen”, Affinites are put in glass domes and forced to perform while people bid on them.


However, some are not there against their will. “The Ice Queen”, a woman in pale blue with white hair is one of the few performers not forced to perform at the Playpen:


            “She looks like she’s enjoying it,” Ana whispered.
            “She’s a regular…She works with the brokers.” [Ransom said]
            “Under contract?”
            “Right, but…She’s not contracted against her will.” [Ransom said]

In this passage, The Ice Queen serves as this false image that those in the Cyrillian Empire are all performing of their own free will, but The Ice Queen is being paid, and from what we know of, she is not forced to dance or entertain. After learning May is scheduled to perform soon, Ana goes back to the Playpen.

This is probably one of the eeriest parts of the story, as we watch young May trapped in a glass stage being forced to show her Earth Affinity. She is advertised as the “Child of Earth” (Zhao, 223). People in the audience delightfully request for May to grow a fruit tree, juggle rocks, and make a statue from the earth, almost as if she were a circus animal. I honestly can see this being likened to a historical slave auction, and it’s truly a scary thing to read; people are ready to bet on a child, a child originally described as black. 

May breaks her glass cage when rebels storm the Playpen, and in the same scene a knife is thrown into her stomach, and May dies in Ana’s arms, as May begs Ana to carry on the Revolution of the Affinites (Zhao, 241). This is, most likely, the scene McKinney is referencing in her tweet. Although May is no longer described as black, it is interesting, and maybe problematic, to think of how May was originally written black. I don’t know how I would respond to this scene with the original details, but for those trying to attack Zhao still, I think we should give her the benefit of the doubt. Although I am sure she, being a college-educated woman, knew about American slavery, we need to be reminded Zhao did not grow up around the narrative of American slavery, she grew up in Beijing, and in the end, she listened to criticism and made changes.

Author Amelie Wen Zhao

So why did Zhao choose this controversial topic in the first place?

Zhao grew up around the narrative, and reality, of modern human trafficking.

In an interview with NPR, Zhao states: “these are forms of modern slavery that continue to impact 20 to 40 million victims around the world in countries such as North Korea, India, Thailand, Russia, Eastern Europe…And the main character, Ana - she is one of these vulnerable populations, and she's in danger of being trafficked and exploited. And that's what she fights against in the book. I really wrote her to be powerful and to be an angry girl, to really be a champion of justice and what she thinks is right.”

She continues, “At the time [of her ARC’s being read], it was really overwhelming because a few early readers had said that it was - believed my book was a portrayal of chattel slavery in America. And it snowballed into a lot of people who hadn't read the book, and there was just so much critique coming from people who hadn't read it. So that was really devastating to me because these are some real issues that draw from my background and from global issues that are ongoing and continue to affect so many people. So it was particularly devastating because it felt to me like my perspective wasn't welcome in this country. And honestly, for a while, it just felt like I wasn't allowed to have a voice in exploring deeply poignant subjects that were personal to me. Like, my fiancé is the descendant of a Chinese indentured laborer. And I believe these are difficult truths and ugly histories that need to be confronted through literature.”

On Goodreads, Zhao shared the Dear Reader letter included in the ARCs (Advanced Reader Copies) of Blood Heir. A passage of the letter reads as follows:

I emigrated from China when I was 18. Drawing on my own multicultural upbringing and the complex history of my heritage that has incidences of bias and oppression. I wrote ‘Blood Heir’ from the immediate cultural perspective. The issue around Affinite indenturement in the story represent a specific critique of the epidemic of indentured labor and human trafficking prevalent in many industries across Asia, including in my own home country. The narrative and history of slavery in the United States is not something I can, would, or intended to write, but I recognize that I am not writing in merely my own cultural context. I am sorry for the pain this has caused.

Zhao also touches on those attacking her for trying to victimize herself or her characters. “I am an immigrant. I am a woman of color. And I am an ‘Other.’ In my time in the United States, I have never experienced the sense of crushing fear about my identity that I have recently. ‘Get out of my country, communist!’ is only one of the slurs I’ve had screamed at me from across the street. What I’ve experienced personally and seen across social media outlets and national television broadcasts has all amounted to a hyperawareness of my foreignness, my Otherness, and the possibility that because I am different, I am not worthy of belonging” (Goodreads, 2018).

The full letter can be found below my citations. I cannot speak to if this book is offensive or not. I don’t think the original blurb that McKinney read was a good pitch for the novel, but what is incredibly important is this author is not a western author. She grew up in Beijing and likely did not grow up with as much knowledge of the history of slavery in America as many Americans did; what she instead grew up with was the reality of human trafficking, especially in Asian countries. I think the topic Zhao is writing about is incredibly important, especially for a Western audience who may not be familiar with modern day trafficking or slavery.

Zhao’s book goes beyond just slavery. Blood Heir has brought up issues of cancel culture as well as western-centric views of slavery pushing away any other narrative of trafficking or slavery, like the narrative Zhao is trying to bring forward. Her book being “cancelled” almost proves why her book is important: people aren’t talking about the issue of modern trafficking in young adult novels. Successfully cancelling the publication of Blood Heir could have been detrimental to readers in the United States being educated about the relevance of slavery and trafficking.

With Zhao’s book, we are reminded that men, women, and children around the world are being taken and sold even today, not just historically.

We are reminded how people are discriminated against and dehumanized for being “different” from the majority. We are reminded of the cruel truth that Ana has to face head on, and Zhao and others have faced as well.

I don’t think the final copy of Blood Heir should be shot down, especially without being read. In fact, I think Blood Heir is an excellent book discussing important taboo topics such as trafficking, and I think it’s presumptuous to assume that aspects of this novel are based strictly on western slavery, especially when it is written by an author who is not from North America. I recommend those opposed to the novel in some way to actually give Zhao’s final copy of the novel a read with an open mind before jumping to criticize it.

There’s all this talk about me saying what others are saying about Blood Heir, people attacking the author, but right now, I want to say something to the author.

To Miss Zhao, who will probably never, ever read this blog:

Congratulations on a great debut novel, and I can’t wait to see the sequel.

You kept fighting to tell your story, and the story of so many other people.

Keep fighting.

I’m fighting for you, too.

-SS

Works Cited:

Garcia-Navarro, Lulu, editor. National Public Radio, 17 Nov. 2019,                                              https://www.npr.org/2019/11/17/780231746/am-lie-wen-zhao-on-blood-heir.

McKinney, LL (ElleOnWords). “I don’t give a good god damn that this is an author of color.   Internalized racism and anti-blackness is a thing and I…no. Square up.” 28 January 2019, 11:07 AM. Tweet.

Waltman, Katy. “In Y.A., Where Is the Line Between Criticism and Cancel Culture?” 21 Mar.           2019, https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/in-ya-where-is-the-line-between-       criticism-and-cancel-culture.

Zhao’s letter to the reader on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2279470600?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1

Pilot Podcast Interview ft. Dr. Krystal Howard and NCSCL Director Dr. Joseph T. Thomas Jr.

Hey Everyone!

We here at the NCSCL have enjoyed interviewing all of the fantastic guest speakers that have visited this last academic year. In an effort to keep innovation going, we decided to do something a little different in our interview with Dr. Krystal Howard and made the NCSCL Podcast! Our first episode is the recorded interview between our director Dr. Joseph T. Thomas Jr. and guest Dr. Krystal Howard and following her talk on the pedagogical impact of verse novels.

Being that this is the pilot, there is still a lot that we want to work on and improve in the future. Please comment and let us know what your thoughts on this type of project are--what works, what can be improved, what you would like to see in the future, if you would like more of this type of content--so we can keep growing as a center.

Here is the link for the Podcast (and to our SoundCloud account if you want to follow us there). Below is the embedded version. We hope you enjoy!

Highlights from Dr. Krystal Howard's Lecture:

Back in February, Dr. Krystal Howard graced the NCSCL and SDSU by giving a talk on verse novels and their pedagogical impact. Unfortunately, due to a busy semester, it is only now getting published. Nonetheless, please enjoy the highlights from the talk! There is also a special test-run/pilot podcast interview with Dr. Howard and our very own Professor Thomas following soon!

Dr. Krystal Howard graced SDSU students and faculty on February 27^th with a lecture discussing her current research interests. Titled “Form as Political Resistance,” her talk looked at verse novels for children and young readers that focus on the education of the young poet--specifically Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming and Kwame Alexander’s Booked, both of which “advocate for the value of stylistic imitation through the depiction of children who write influence or erasure poems.” She discussed how these novels “highlight model authors who emphasize racial tensions” and that “the influence of erasure poems within these novels reflects socio-cultural concerns and follows the long-standing tradition in children’s literature of using texts as pedagogical tools that model behavior, and, specifically in this case, writing behavior.”

Before beginning, she explained that she got into this area of focus by reading the verse novels Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson and Out of the Dusk by Karen Hesse in an undergrad creative writing poetry class and became interested in “the form of the book.” This interest lasted with her through her MFA, Master’s, and Ph.D. programs, where, in the latter, she focused on verse novels for young readers.

            Underway with her lecture, Dr. Howard stated that Brown Girl Dreaming and Booked “focus on the artist coming of age” and that “each of these texts advocates for the value of stylistic imitation through the depiction of children who write influence or erasure poems.” Defined by an audience member, erasure poetry is “taking someone else’s text and whiting out/blacking out some of the words in order to say things that combine into your own work.”

Both these texts also “engage directly with the relationship between an artist’s creation and an artist’s environment” which “leads to emotional maturation for the characters within the text, while serving as evidence that learning to write poetry can be accessible to young readers situated outside of the text.” She also noted how both Brown Girl Dreaming and Booked “highlight model authors who emphasize racial tension,” with Brown Girl Dreaming looking at life growing up during the Civil Rights era and the influence of Langston Hughes on the young writer and Booked showing a contemporary young author erasing parts of Huckleberry Finn. As such, “the influence of erasure poems within these verse novels reflects socio-cultural concerns and follows the long-standing tradition in children’s literature of using texts as pedagogical tools that model behavior, and, specifically in this case, writing behavior.”

Dr. Howard emphasized that “the inclusion of fragments of the protagonist’s writing within the pages of the narrative underscores an emphasis on formal experimentation, collage, and the politics of form.” She defines collage--loosely--as “the layering and linking together of miscellany within a single work,” but, according to scholars such as Rona Cran and Rachael Fairbrother, collage in literary texts “moves beyond the assemblage of fragments, bringing ideas into conversation with one another, encouraging a sense of defamiliarization in the reader or viewer in order to fix attention on uneasy realities in contemporary culture, and, ultimately, emerging as a powerful site for political resistance.” Collage in the two focus texts, then, serves to “give voice to the difficulties experienced by the protagonists and to explore the issues of both confession and crisis.”

She focused specifically on the power of collage as a form of subversion and art, arguing that “in contemporary children’s and young adult literature, collage is used in order to unsettle the traditional artist coming of age narrative, and to make visible the political and social forces that help shape the writer’s developmental process” before moving on to discuss how “the verse novel is uniquely situated to address pain and healing because its form draws attention to itself as a created artifact.” An example of this is “the lyric’s emphasis on emotion, as well as poetry’s general use of space on the page, [that] invites the reader to linger over language, breaks in line and stanza in between poems,” which, considering that Woodson’s and Alexander’s verse novels contain poems within them written by young protagonists, “calls on the reader to hold space in the narrative and slow their pace further in order to consider the writing of the characters separately.”

She elaborated on what constitutes a verse novel, speaking of them as “a popular hybrid genre that engages with multiple genres, including poetry, prose, and drama” that “focuses on the emotional event and shows the reaction before and afterwards,” and is “characterized by hybrid construction.” She clarifies further that her definition of verse novels is “…a series of poems linked by a narrative thread” that involve fragmentation and white-space to make the reader pause to contemplate the “gaps created by a collage of line, language, poem, scene, and para-text” which “creates an intimacy between the reader and the speaker of the poem.” The importance of this is that, “by weaving together narrative and the confessional voice, the verse novel provides the structural space necessary for reader contemplation and becomes a mode in which young readers can actively participate in the making of meaning by putting together the fragments of someone else’s life and then parlaying those resulting insights into a deeper understanding of their own experience.”

Continuing, she moved on to discuss verse novels that focus on the growth of the young writer, and how they “are unique because they present the child writer learning aspects of craft through influence, both by revering and parodying various source texts.” She quotes Tom Hunley in how poets gain their individual voice by imitation of other poets and Harold Bloom’s argument about how “‘poetic history is held indistinguishable from poetic influence, and an individual becomes a poet when she first discovers or is discovered by the dialectic of influence, first discovers poetry as being both external and internal self.’” She adds to this Dr. Joseph T. Thomas Jr.’s ideas of how child poets are “influenced through reading official school poetry, the dominate mode of poetry in schools, the kind of poetry written by adults and taught to children in the classroom” and that “‘certainly there are children who strive to emulate the adult poets they encounter, but more common are those who specialize in the sometimes bawdy playground poetry. These child poets reveal that children have a poetic tradition all of their own. A carnivalesque tradition that signifies young adult culture.’” All of this, according to Dr. Howard, is apparent in Woodson’s and Alexander’s texts. She states “While Woodson relies on poets typically associated with official school poetry, with whom her child poet speaker forms an artistic connection, Alexander draws on the childhood tradition of found poetry in order to emphasize play and humor as well as his character’s general distaste for his educational environment as a catalyst for his protagonist’s poetic tact.”

Concluding her talk, Dr. Howard expressed that Woodson’s and Alexander’s verse novels “draw connections between the education of the poet and elementary, secondary, and post-secondary institutions, linking pedagogy in the classroom and narratives directed at young readers” while also noting that “the act of inserting a creative protagonist’s own poems into a narrative is inherently pedagogical as it models for young readers how a poet might begin his or her own writing practices” serves as a powerful rhetorical move on the behalf of the author. Additionally, their verse novels are groundbreaking due to the fact “they draw on various traditions in order to illuminate contemporary issues surrounding racism in artistic expression” as well as “put forward influence, imitation, and writing response as key developmental practices” with Woodson’s protagonist “employ[ing] a method of influence that utilizes source texts by imitating structure, line, and style and Alexander’s by “use[ing] the erasure poem as a form of play and subversion in the educational setting.” These practices instilled, therefore, are an imperative aspect in the development of the young writer, states Dr. Howard,  and they “provide a map for, and a window through which, young readers can see themselves becoming poets through sustained close-reading of model poets, and a crafting of response poems that are inspired by the works of other writers that they read.”

After the talk, Dr. Howard answered a myriad of questions from faculty and students alike, and each left feeling they had learned something important about the nature of verse novels, whether that be in their construction or application. We at the NCSCL and the faculty of the English and Comparative Literature Department are grateful for Dr. Howard’s visit and look forward to seeing more of her research in the future.

For more info on that, check out Dr. Howard’s website and the next NCSCL blog for a follow up podcast conversation between her and our very own NCSCL Director Dr. Joseph Thomas Jr.!

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