Armchair BEA Day 4: Diversity Undercover Giveaway


Diversity Under Cover Twitter Giveaway

Hello Everyone! Today is Giveaway day at Armchair BEA,  so I thought I would combine my two favorite things in this giveaway: Diverse Books and Simplicity !

A book is more than it's cover of course, but when there is such a lack of diverse books covers are very important in letting readers know there is something different between the pages.  I get equal parts Excited and Disappointed when I see diversity on a cover, or read a book with a great diverse character that isn't reflected on the books cover at all! Here are some examples of both:

Stellar
Star Wars is an interesting franchise. On the one hand their is something that is universally welcoming about the franchise however the original trilogy has only one female character, and one racially diverse character. This series is the story of a young cadet in the Imperial academy called Zare Leonis.  I commend Disney for not only putting this character in a three book series but also have him appearing on the hit Rebels animated show on Disney XD. Also the main female lead in this series is appearing on the cover besides Zare in the third book.

Undercover!


 Both of the books above have really fantastic racially & sexually diverse, characters that you wouldn't know about by the covers. However these covers are perfect for the storyline of the books and Lords of the Sith got tremendous press for the diversity in it's story.


Missed Opportunity

If you look extremely closely to this cover you might notice the racial diversity in the top character. I received this book as an arc years ago and was very pleased to discover that a large chunk of the cast of this novel *spoilers* were people of color.  The blogging  community was very vocal about the cover design, many claiming it was "whitewashing" of the male character. At the time I thought it might have been to prevent spoilers, but when they reissued the entire series with new covers, I really was disappointed that they didn't take the opportunity to show the main male character's racial diversity.

Now For The Contest!!
One Winner Will Receive a $10.00 Amazon Gift Card
Send Me a Tweet at @yogikai with a picture of a book that has a diverse character as the main or supporting character. In the tweet tell me if you think the cover is Stellar, Undercover or  a Missed Opportunity in regards to showcasing it's diversity include the hashtag #ArmchairBEA. I will number the @ replies in the order they come in and use the random number generator to pick a winner. The Gift Card will be e-mailed .
The contest will run until midnight 5/31/15

Rules

You Must be an Armchair BEA participant
You must reply in 48 hours when you receive the winner notification.

I'm so excited to see what books everyone showcases!


Comments

Natalie Patalie said…
I loved Ready Player One!
Girl Who Reads said…
It's interesting that you you think Across the Universe is racially diverse when everyone on the ship looked a like. The main male character was actually a clone. Was the book not filled with white people, yes, but within the book's world there was no racial diversity. Girl Who Reads
As someone who has read science fiction since she was 10 with we ring very little people of color it did seem diverse to me even though they were clones. I think there was a scene where the explained that they chose to breed out other Ethnicities to create uniformity .

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