Friends, I haven’t been active in terms of blogging, and it’s all because college has been kicking me in the butt. Oof, what’s new?
But anyway, I am very, very excited to finally introduce this week’s blog tour for The Dragon Warrior by Katie Zhao! Katie is an incredibly dear friend of mine, and I’m so happy to be able to put together a little something to help hype up her debut novel.
an ARC review (digital)
published 01 October 2019
young adult, dystopia, & fantasy
tagged for #ownvoices, lgbtqiap+ representation (sapphic, bisexual, lesbian), & poc representation
After the War of Kinds ravaged the kingdom of Rabu, the Automae, designed to be the playthings of royals, usurped their owners’ estates and bent the human race to their will.
Now Ayla, a human servant rising in the ranks at the House of the Sovereign, dreams of avenging her family’s death…by killing the sovereign’s daughter, Lady Crier.
Crier was Made to be beautiful, flawless, and to carry on her father’s legacy. But that was before her betrothal to the enigmatic Scyre Kinok, before she discovered her father isn’t the benevolent king she once admired, and most importantly, before she met Ayla.
Now, with growing human unrest across the land, pressures from a foreign queen, and an evil new leader on the rise, Crier and Ayla find there may be only one path to love: war.
Did any of you think that I’ve finally run out of blog tours for this year? Well, if I’m being totally honest, I thought so, too.
Initially, my blog tour for The Wolf of Oren-yaro was tentatively scheduled for 2020 so that it would be closer to the book’s release date. However, shortly after my author spotlight of K.S. Villoso (whom I love and adore because she’s been nothing but amazingly supportive of me and my book blogging), I came up with the brilliant — albeit, much more difficult and energy-consuming — idea of splitting the blog tour into two. Thus, this one’s going to be my most ambitious blog tour (or tours?) yet!
Hello from this side of the world! Throughout this whole week, a bunch of incredible book bloggers are going to share their love for the latest release from Talem Press, Bronwyn Eley’s Relic, which is her amazingly written YA fantasy debut. I am very ecstatic to feature this lovely book on my blog, and I hope all of you are equally excited!
It’s a truth universally acknowledged that the media industries are dominated by white people. Persons of color are often overlooked.
Some say that POCs don’t sell, while others claim that there were no POCs at that specific era (for certain historical fiction). As expected, white become the standard. They would make the effort to choose anyone other than POCs since it’s what everyone else is doing.
Sadly, this includes the publishing industries. They often choose to publish books with Asian rep by white authors, rather than Asian persons who write their own stories. This resulted in many readers, including me, who started to think that being white is better and ultimately, being ashamed and rejected their own culture, since our favorite fictional characters at that time were one.
I grew up white and only became Asian American in my 30s.
Odd statement to make, but an honest one. My mom was from Hiroshima Japan and at the age of 12 had lost her family, home, friends, to the atomic bombing on August 6, 1945. She met my dad, a white, American serving in the US Air Force stationed near Tokyo. They married at US embassy in Tokyo in 1959 and then came to the United States.
My mother faced a lot of prejudice and racial slurs when she arrived. She hadn’t expected that, after all it was 14 years later, and she had lost all that she loved in the war. She decided not to mention Hiroshima and kept a low profile. She worked on her English language skills, and within 5 years became a US Citizen. She “Americanized “(her word) our home. We didn’t have Japanese decorations, and she didn’t own any kimonos. She delighted in sharing her favorite Japanese fairy tales like Urashima Taro, in English.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a South Asian mother in possession of an unmarried 20-something daughter, must be in want of a son-in-law.
Marriage is an essential part of life, many a South Asian mother would say. Therefore, the goal of an unmarried 20-something daughter is to find a quality match. A quality match has at least the following traits: a similar background, a good job, and a good family.
The process of finding a quality match through an arranged marriage has been the topic of romance media, which centers the experience of South Asian people for decades. It’s been seen in Bollywood, Pakistani dramas, and films which bring together South Asian cultures and Western culture, but now it’s also being seen in OwnVoices romance novels.
