This is Canada Reads American Style, featuring two friends who love Canada Reads and Canadian literature. Welcome our host Rebecca from Michigan and Tara from Ontario. Hello and welcome to Canada Reads American Style. This is Tara and today we have a special guest with us. We have author Sarah Raleigh joining us. Before I start my chat with Sarah, I'm going to give you a little background info on her. Sarah Raleigh grew up in southern Ontario writing stories about freaky little girls with powers because she secretly wanted to be one. She is a huge fan girl of anything from manga, sorry manga, to sci-fi fantasy TV, to Japanese role playing games. Sarah has been nominated for the Aurora Award for Best Young Adult Novel and works in the community doing writing workshops for youths and adults. As an academic, Sarah has a PhD in English. She has taught at McMaster University and acted as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Ottawa. She currently teaches creative writing at Lakehead University. Her research concerns representations of race and gender in popular media culture, youth culture, and post-colonialism. Later this month, Sarah will be appearing at the Telling Tales Festival on Sunday September 22 at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Hamilton, Ontario. Welcome, Sarah. Thank you. That was a wonderful interview. I'm so happy to be here. Our wonderful opening. Thank you. I'm happy to be here. I cannot take credit for it because on your website, which we will have the link to in our show notes, you have your bio and I loved your bio and I'm like I'm just stealing bits and pieces from your bio because you did a great little, I didn't want to steal it all because I didn't write it. But two, I also want people to visit and read it themselves because it's just it's a really nice bio that you've written. Thank you. Everyone's welcome to come to SarahRolly.com website and learn more about me. Exactly. Well, that's what we're going to do today, too, and get them to learn more about you. Send them on your way to the website and get them buying your books because that's what we want because I'm so excited to speak to you because I am in the middle of more bones of ruin. Yeah. The bones of a weird mental day. I apologize for that. The bones of ruin trilogy. I just finished book two and I think I was midway through book two when I'm like, I got to see if Sarah will speak to me. I'm so excited when you said yes. I have lots of questions but I'm not going to ask too many about specific about them because I don't want to give any spoilers to true listeners. But let's talk about let's start with the bones of ruin trilogy and the main character Iris because she's amazing. Well, I'm glad you like Iris. Yeah, it's so funny. I am currently rewatching The Flash television show on the CW, The Old Show. And I really loved the character of Iris West, who's kind of like the love interest of The Flash, The Scarlet Speedster, Barry Allen. I'm a big West Allen fan, as I say, the shipper terminology. And what I noticed is sometimes black women in science fiction, fantasy programs, we don't get a fair shake either from the writers, the way that the writers write black women, or the way that the fans respond to black women. So I named this character Iris almost as a way to kind of honor that, to honor this history because Iris herself is a representation of kind of the ways in which black women have been treated, particularly in the 19th century in England. So the bones of ruin is a historical fantasy set in the 19th century, and it's set in London, England. And at this time you had really truly in history what's called human zoos and colonized people, Africans, Asians, South Asians, Indigenous peoples, oftentimes would be put on display. Iris, my character, Iris, was based off of a real person, Sarah, sorry, Sartre Bartman, who was taken from South Africa in the early 1800s and kind of pond display one of these human zoos until she died. And then even after she died, her bones are put in a museum for people to kind of look at. So again, there's a lot of like trauma, there's a lot of, you know, there's a long history of violence concerning black women, and sometimes that even continues to today in terms of sort of how we're treated, how people look at us. But with Iris, I kind of wanted a woman who embodies that history, but is able to overcome it. So Iris's superpower in this historical fantasy is that she can't die. So it's like even after she was put on display, even after her bones, you know, were carried to this museum. And once again, even posthumously put on display, she just regrew her body. And she walked right out of the museum. So Iris doesn't really know who she is. She, you know, that whole regeneration process and the process of dying carries his own trauma. She doesn't really know who she is. And so she has amnesia and her whole story is sort of figuring out her history and figuring out who she wants to be in this, in this crazy world, as opposed to other people telling her who she should be. In the first two books too, I also find that Iris is battling with her, with her powers, but also with her rage. Like as she's angry, she has a lot of things to be angry about. And she often I find holds it in, she taps it down, right? So she's not being to her full potential. I don't want to spoil it too much, but it's, I'm really looking forward to book three. Let's just say, I'm really looking forward to picking up book three shortly and watching her really blossom, because I find that's what's happening now. And she's made all these great connections with other her friends and stuff, but it's still all about her. Yeah, I think it's, it's really important for Iris and for people reading just to kind of see, you know, the ways in which sometimes women in general are kind of told to hold it in, right? If you're, if you're angry, if you're upset about something, hold it in, or oftentimes we're scolded for being angry, or if we kind of show ambition, or if we show, you know, that we're upset about something, or we think something is unjust, you know, there are many terms that are used to kind of denigrate women, right? Like, oh, you're nasty, you're the B word and this and that. It's so interesting, because right now we have, you know, in the American election, they may potentially get their first ever female president, perhaps we don't know. We're from Canada going to be watching to see what happens, but you kind of see the discourse surrounding, like, womanhood and, you know, you always have to be, you're expected to be amenable to people, and Iris in this story, she definitely makes a lot of friends. She always reaches out for community, but she's also portrayed a lot. She's also manipulated a lot, and I feel like she's at times trying to fight against that instinct to give into that anger, and it's just something that I've related to a lot, something that I think a lot of readers relate to, especially. Yeah, so the bones of ruin, all three books are out, but you have a new book, and you see, I think it's a duology that's coming out in January 2025, the queen spade. Let's talk about that, tell us about the queen spade. So talk about female rage, yes, I think this is another historical YA story, but this character is a lot less, you know, she's not grappling with her emotions, the way that Iris is. I think Iris is still very much like a soft girl, you know, she's got soft girl vibes, and she's still trying to figure it out. Whereas this character is like, no, I figured it out, I want revenge against everybody, and if you don't like it, then, you know, you're just going to have to deal with it. So this story is actually based off of the real life story of Queen Victoria's African God daughter. So Queen Victoria's 19th century, the queen of England, actually genuinely did have an African God daughter. She actually did have a lot of like God children who were like adopted into the family, people from, you know, South Asia, people from Africa, various parts of Africa, and they would be adopted into the family. And one of them was a woman named Sarah Forbes Bonetta, who was from so the Yoruba Ibadot tribe in West Africa, current day Nigeria. And she was an African princess who was orphaned, then kind of taken from her homeland and presented to Queen Victoria as a present. And I always found it fascinating that, you know, this history is just not the history that we're taught, you know, like I didn't hear about it ever until like, you know, a couple of few years ago, I think a couple years before I wrote the book, and that's just because I stumbled upon the information. I thought something like this, you know, where you have an actual British royal family with people from other parts of the world who were part of that family, that should have been bigger news, bigger history, and yet that history was erased. Nobody remembers it. It's like these people were erased. So I wanted to think about why that was, and what does it mean for sort of these colonized children who were, I think, in many ways used by the royal family to sort of show how multicultural and how benevolent the crown is and Britain is, but it's like when they weren't needed anymore, or when they weren't more troubled than they were worth, they were completely erased. So I'm taking that history and I'm reimagining it as a revenge thriller. So Sarah Forbes Bonetta, in my story, is somebody who wants revenge against the British crown for kind of turning her into a propaganda puppet in a way. And, you know, she has fun doing it. She's, you know, she's a little revenger, and she's mischievous, and, you know, everything she does, she does the style, and of course elegance, because it's the elegance that was taught to her. But it's kind of like she was, she's using the tools of sort of the upper class British elite, and she's using everything that she's learned from them against them. So she's very much of a trickster figure in this book. And I definitely wanted to see what I could say about this whole benevolent multiculturalism idea through Sarah's story. That sounds so good, Sarah. Rebecca and I are huge fans of female rage and vengeance. It sounds, we always feel bad saying that we love a book with vengeance, but I love a book with vengeance. And it's like, we have to always unpack. Like, why do we, why do we feel bad? Like, we shouldn't feel bad at all. But I feel like culturally, we as women, like, we're not allowed to be angry. So I'm here to say female rage is okay. Yeah, women, you know, being tough and unapologetic and angry, because heck, heck, we have a lot to be angry about. So, you know, expressing that is okay. And I'm definitely like, you know, it's not always easy. So I think through my books, I'm able to sort of explore those feelings. Myself. Yeah. Okay, I'm looking forward to that. Yay. Okay, let's do a little, we'll switch over, not really, but a little bit. Let's talk about diversity in publishing and the importance of diversity in publishing. And are we getting there? Hmm. Let's unpack that. I mean, I think that right now, I don't know, you know, in the New York Times just released this op-ed that talked about how some of the black sort of editors, the people who were hired to be in the publishing industry, and they're talking about the American publishing industry. But, you know, many of those people have either switched jobs, they've been let go, slash fired, they've been forced out, that kind of thing. And it's really upsetting because I know a lot of promises were made in 2020 when talking about blackness and diversity and et cetera, et cetera, all of that was in Vogue. And I know there have been a lot of great, especially in the YA market, there've been a lot of YA authors and children's authors, especially women, that have sort of pushed for diversity. There have been a lot of movements like the Weenie Books Movement and the #OwnVoices Movement. And even though I think that's created more opportunities for authors like myself to kind of, you know, have our books bought and sold and things like that, there's still a long way to go because I feel like a lot of those efforts have been waning, you know, now four years beyond four years after 2020. I think a lot of publishers are forgetting their commitments and a lot of books are being left by the wayside. A lot of authors that I know and have talked to personally have given up on publishing just because of the ways that they've been treated. And I think not just authors of color, but other marginalized authors, authors who are disabled, you know, authors of different sexualities, et cetera, et cetera, are noticing that a lot of that sort of vibrancy to foster diversity isn't as strong as it used to be. So I think my worry has been, you know, do publishers treat diversity as a trend? Have they always seen diversity as a trend that can come and go? If so, that's a problem because people are not a trend. Our humanity is not a trend. And I think there needs to be even a stronger push for publishers to protect those voices, especially now that we're seeing a lot of conservative backlash against diverse books and a lot of book banning in schools and libraries. Now, especially when we're talking about YA books, kids need our books the most. It's youth that really need our books. So to see that there's all the censorship going on worries me and I need for publishers to be on the ball. And that means fostering diversity. That means marketing our books the way that they would market, you know, the book of a, you know, a white cisgendered straight author, pushing it the way they would publish and push every other book, but also making sure there's diversity behind the scenes as well. Okay, and an essay that you wrote for The Walrus in February 2022, here's a quote from it. Art is not neutral. It is inherently political. Yeah, I love that quote because I don't think that reading can ever be reading is political. Sometimes it's, it just is. Can you expand on that for me? Yeah, reading is political. Art is political. Art is a cultural product. And we also are products of our culture. Even if we don't realize it, we're informed by all kinds of knowledge frameworks, all kinds of ideologies, belief systems that we have come to have without even without even noticing. How do we learn who we are in society and who the quote unquote other is? Who's the other in our mind? What stories have we been told about the other? What stories have we been told about ourselves? So, you know, through art in a lot of ways, we learn about who we are in relation to other people. So, things like, you know, books, but also television shows and movies who are usually the heroes who are usually the sidekicks, who usually the love interests, how are they treated, how are they treated by fans? That kind of brings me back to the flash rewatch that I'm doing and how poor Iris, in the comic books, the flash is a comic book character from the DC universe. And in the comic books, she's white, but in the show, she was casted as a black woman. So, before even the first episode aired, she was being given lots of hate by people, before people even saw what she was like or what the actress could do, what the character was about, because it was almost as if people didn't want to accept that a black woman could be loved, could be cherished by the hero, that kind of thing. So, you know, you flash forward to 2024, and you have Star Wars and the acolytes, and there's a lot of diversity in that show, but a lot of people hated it and didn't give it a chance, and then it was unduly canceled. Now, some people might say, "Oh, well, you know, that that show, the acolyte, was a bad show. It had bad writing." Yeah, but we used to give shows a little bit of breathing room to find its footing, certainly more than a season. So, a lot of the sort of, you know, I think a lot of the hate maybe came from the fact that people didn't really want to see, you know, a black woman and an Asian man in the main, as the main characters, because again, who are we taught is the main character, is the hero? How does art teach us about humanity, and who can be fully human, and who is not allowed to be fully human, and who is just a caricature, or a stereotype? So, when I say art is not neutral, that's really what I'm talking about, and even for the people who think they're just writing a book, and it's just entertainment. It's like, no, the ideologies that you believe in are going to be in that book, whether you realize it or not. So, and when we read as well, how do we, as readers, how do we, as readers, sort of read responsibly, or even sort of understand our own subject positioning, reading these books? Are we being unfair to a black heroine in the way that we wouldn't be unfair to a white heroine? Are we putting all kinds of expectations on a, you know, a queer hero that we wouldn't a straight hero, that kind of a thing? So, art is never neutral, but that's also why we can sort of use art to maybe challenge some of those archaic beliefs that people still hold on to. Thank you for that, Sarah. That was amazing. Let's move on to what you're reading, what you, what you're currently reading, what you've read, author recommendations. We're here for it. Well, I am teaching right now. I'm an English teacher and so I'm going to be rereading so that I can teach various books from the African continent. So, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart is, you know, one of the seminal books. And also, I think anything by Nettia Corifor, I'm going to teach her fantasy, I think it's middle grade. I think, like, I'm not sure whether that to, to sort of place it in middle grade or young adults. We'll just say it's a children's novel, children's fantasy novel, calls are The Windseeker, which I absolutely love. It's about, you know, a magical planet that's very sort of Afrocentric. A young girl finds out that she's sort of different from everybody else. She has these, these flying powers. And so, she ventures into this magical forest, this very sort of Alice in Wonderland. And she meets all these different creatures, these magical creatures, but she has to do it to save her best friend. So, it's a very fun book. I'm also going to be rereading Nadine Gordimer's July's People, which was actually written and published before the end of South African Apartheid. And it was kind of like a what-if story. Because Nadine Gordimer was writing it in the midst of, you know, South African Apartheid and different revolutions and people fighting for their freedom during that time. So, she was sort of writing this book as a, okay, well, what happens if we don't solve this? And it's really interesting to sort of see her take on it. And she's writing as a white South African woman, right? So, there's, there's a lot of interesting sort of dynamics there to behold. But in terms of like reading for fun, I am rereading Tracy Dion's inheritance. I think it's going to be an inheritance cycle now. I just remember Legend Born. And I know she has a fourth book coming out. And it's going to be like this whole series. So, it's really cool. It's like this African-American girl that sort of realizes that she's part of this Arthurian, this present day King Arthur kind of circle of super friends. I don't know how else to say it, but it's a retelling of King Arthur. The main character Brie is kind of involved. There's a love triangle involved with two like Arthurian legend types. I think you can kind of guess if you're interested in King Arthur, who might be involved in that. And I just love it because I'm a big Merlin fan. Yeah, I love BBC Berlin. And one of the things I absolutely love the most about it was sort of the love triangle between Guinevere, Arthur, and Lancelot. So, if you're interested in that kind of thing, I would really, really recommend Tracy Dion's books while going crazy over them. And LaZell Sandbury is, I mean, I can go on forever, but I love LaZell Sandbury's "Tender Beasts" and her fate series is really great. That's amazing. Thank you, Sarah. Those all sound great. And you've put some new authors on to me. So, I also love like a series too. I like being able to dig and jump into a series. Yeah, that's amazing. Long series are great for like the mythos and, you know, getting into the lore. Although, I tend to be pulling back a little bit. Like, I used to do trilogies. And now, you know, like you said, the queen spade is the first of a duology, but it's actually my first book that I'm writing that's not fantasy. So, even though it's still lore-heavy in a way, in terms of the history, I'm kind of pulling back from like the epic fantasy kind of lore geeky stuff that I usually do. So, we'll see how that works out. I think it's going to be fantastic. I was going to say, now that you've mentioned the geeky stuff, I would be remiss if I did not ask you what your favorite manga is. My youngest son is a huge manga reader. Huge. And I don't read them, but I hear all of them. So, I would love to know what. Can I ask what he's reading? Well, he reads one piece. Soul Eater. Right. I think it is Soul Eater. And oh my gosh. And oh, his favorite is Jojo. Jojo. Oh, yes. Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, I think. Yes. That is his favorite. Like, he loves that one, but he's kind of in between. And he even said to me the other day, he's like, I kind of want a new one to read because he still, he hasn't finished all of, I think, one pieces. It's been going on for a long, like, that goes on. I think he said, like, there's over a thousand chapters and he's on 900. So, he's getting close. It's impressive. But he was like, I need something else. So, if you have another recommendation, a manga recommendation. Oh my gosh, I have a lot of manga. Well, tried and true if you want to go for Shonen manga. And in Japan, they kind of have like different markets. Like, Shonen manga is meant for, it's kind of like the equivalent of middle grade for boys. Jojo, middle grade for girls. And then you have, like, Sainen, which is like, more adult for men. And what is the, Jose? Jose is for, I guess you can say, like, young adult, new adult for women. And I kind of, like, I struggle with those categories anyway, because I feel like men and women can read, like, whatever, right? Like, most of the stuff that I've read in my childhood is probably Shonen. A lot of girls read Shonen. Not as many boys read Shonen, which I feel like is maybe a cultural thing and a bit sad. So, I'm going to recommend some Shōjo and some Shonen. Shonen, definitely Naruto. If you haven't already read it, Naruto is one of my favorite. And, you know, one of the classics, Dragon Ball, one of the classics, Dragon Ball is very fast paced. Hunter Hunter is not finished. But I definitely would recommend it just because the world building is truly on another level. I would recommend, in terms of Shōjo, there is a really great manga. And it is finished, but I have to figure out who the artist is. It's called Basara by Yumi Tamura, which I absolutely love. It's like a romance, epic fantasy, adventure set in Japan, but it's like a dystopian Japan. And you have the child of destiny who's meant to, like, you know, save the world from tyranny. But he dies in, like, the first chapter, and his twin sister has to pretend to be him. Right? So his twin sister is going around pretending to be the child of destiny to bring about sort of the revolution. And it's so great. I also like really cute Shōjo manga, like Car Cactus Sakura, and Sailor Moon, and Sugar Sugar Rune, and all that stuff. You know, and old ones, if you're interested in old manga, Rosa Fisai, like really old, like 70s old, 70s, 80s, when I think before the big manga boom in America, Rosa Fisai is a great Shōjo manga. Like, I always say, like, it's weird because, you know, a lot of guys online that I've talked to online are like, so against reading Shōjo manga. And I'm like, there's a lot of great stuff in here. You know, there's a lot of drama, there's a lot of adventure, action. You know, like, if you want action and fighting for Shōjo-yuki has a lot of that. Sailor Moon has a lot of that. You know, just like a lot of Shōjo manga has romance in it, you know, and a lot of, you know, like bleach has stuff like that. So, you know, give, you know, give things a try, step outside of your comfort zone, and you might be surprised what might end up becoming your favorite manga. Yeah, that's awesome. Thank you so much for joining us today, Sarah. Thank you so much for having me. Man, happy reading everyone. Thank you for joining us on our bookish journey. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing, rating, and reviewing Canada Reads American style wherever you listen. You can connect with the podcast and Rebecca on Instagram at Canada Reads American style and with Tara at On A Branch Reads. Until next time, keep reading. [BLANK_AUDIO]
