outstanding!

14 Jan 2017 news 0 Comments

16002901_10158075705930652_7401028491210057394_nThat one word sums up my weekend so far! Yesterday I was part of the kids program at the 5th Annual Black Comic Book Festival hosted by the Schomburg Center for Black Culture up in Harlem. My co-panelists (l-r: Jerry Craft, David Miller, Alex Simmons, and Deirdre Hollman) were great and I sat in the audience with the kids so I could see their slideshows and drawing demonstration. When it was my turn, I could only see the kids seated in the first ten rows—the glare of the spotlight made it hard to see all the others in the packed auditorium—but I could tell that they were paying attention and getting excited about Ship of Souls. Scholastic’s Jackie Carter Memorial Fund made it possible to send each child home with one of our books and I signed quite a few once the program ended. The kids also asked great questions about overcoming rejection and finding inspiration when the well runs dry…I always insist that I’m not a comics fan, but the comics community is so expansive that I always end up feeling right at home. I Screen Shot 2017-01-14 at 1.08.42 PMwent back to Harlem today to catch the women creators’ panel but there was a line wrapped around the block! It was snowing and I’m pretty sure the panels are being filmed, so I headed back to Brooklyn. Sorry to miss it since there were no other women in the program, but it’s awesome that so many New Yorkers turned out in bad weather to participate in the festival. You can watch a news report here.

I got some great news last week: the Association of Children’s Librarians of Northern California (ACL) named Melena’s Jubilee an outstanding book for the month of December! And then today I read the first review of The Ghosts in the Castle over at Charlotte’s Library. Here’s a peek:

It’s a good story for any young (nine or tenish, I’d say) fantasy reader who loves ghosts and mysteries and castles.  What makes it special is that Zetta Elliott is unapologetic about directly positioning both modern and historic characters of the African diaspora in a fantasy novel.  She raises issues of colonialism, both its past and its present reverberations (including Zaria’s own family history), while keeping Zaria’s particular story going at a nice pace, so that the message doesn’t overwhelm the reading experience (in large part because Zaria is utterly relatable to any young Anglophile fantasy reader, and also in large part because it’s a neat ghost story).

The result is a fascinating, moving story that not only adds diversity to the genre but makes for good reading.  It’s just the right length for older elementary grade readers; if you are older than that, you might be left wanting more (which isn’t a bad thing….)

This review means a lot to me for several reasons. Charlotte specializes in speculative fiction for kids and over the years she has reviewed several of my books, treating me like an author who is making a contribution to the field. Last week I looked up bloggers who focus on middle grade fiction and found this list; but when I checked their submission policies, I found that most of the bloggers refuse to consider self-published books. So it’s rare to find a blogger as open-minded as Charlotte, and then to have her “get” the book AND recognize my project—to center Black children in fantasy fiction—that’s the cherry on top!