This bothered me a lot and if I had any art skills whatsoever, I’d help rectify that. Sadly however, when I looked into fan art (because when I fall for a series, I fall hard) I noticed that a lot of it whitewashes the characters. There are enough books out there that have white representation, it’s time that we see more non-white representation in publishing. In fact, I would even argue that few characters are white (It’s clear that Helene is, but I can’t think of anyone else off the top of my head) and that’s a pretty awesome thing to see. Refreshingly, not every character in this book is white. Let’s start with what I loved: Character diversity
A TORCH AGAINST THE NIGHT BOOK SUMMARY SERIES
It’s one thing to review part one in a series when you haven’t read the sequel(s), but now that I have, I find it hard to talk about one without the other. I first read An Ember in the Ashes and then moved on to A Torch Against the Night (logically), and originally was going to review both separately, but ultimately decided to talk about them together. “You will spark and burn, ravage and destroy. Now let me tell you how wonderful a decision this was. I wanted to pick a book that was written by a POC and also get the most out my credit (because Audible gives you a credit for any book each month, and An Ember in the Ashes was one of the most expensive of the choices I narrowed it down to, so I figured I would get the most out of the credit this way, and could buy the cheaper audiobooks myself #ReadingOnABudget). That was one of the reasons that I picked An Ember in the Ashes to start off my audio book experience. I might stumble across these books by accident, but I much prefer the idea of seeking them out with purpose. That being said, I think that by consciously picking books, I’m making sure that I’m supporting diverse and own voices representation that I otherwise might not read simply for lack of exposure. Now, I know some people have spoken out about how this shouldn’t be a goal, and we should just do this, and I see where they are coming from. One of my goals for 2017 has been to read more diversely and responsibly. Mind you, I might be biased seeing as it led me to the amazing performance of An Ember in the Ashes and A Torch Against the Night. I’m planning on talking more about my experience with Audible in a later post, but for now I’ll simply say that it’s pretty great. So I thought about it and decided to look into Audible, Amazon’s audiobook platform. And what I realized is that while I love busting out to a Bastille tune, I was losing a lot of potentially productive time. During the school week, I drive a fair amount: about an hour and a half a day on average.