last summer

The latest installment in the What a Girl Wants series is up at Chasing Ray.  This time around Colleen asked us to consider what books we wish we’d read before heading off to college (or before your senior year—I misread the question!).  My choices: Kindred and One Crazy Summer.  What about you?  Here’s what Tanita Davis had to say about her younger self:

I don’t think I knew how to think through the grays in life, even as a high school junior. In my conservative Christian school, everything was still so black and white, and my life was still so hemmed in by what I thought were hard-and-fast rules for The Way Things Must Be. Despite living smack dab in the middle of hypocrisy, I was completely blind to it. In spite of the tendency of my peers to put certain people on pedestals, I was still trying
to figure out what made the special people special — and me so ordinary. On the homefront, I was still trying to have Hallmark Family Moments and didn’t realize that most people simply don’t live that way, certainly not such deeply dysfunctional people. It hadn’t yet occurred to me that some battles you don’t win…

And on a slightly different note, what THIS girl wants is for more men to speak out the way Sunit Bagree did in Sea Breeze Journal of Contemporary Liberian Writing:

Indeed, there are absolutely no legal or moral grounds to rape a person under any circumstances. Rape is cruel, degrading and, ultimately, dehumanizing. When a woman is raped, her control over her personal security and integrity is violently taken away and she suffers psychological trauma. Claiming that women deserve to be raped if they dress or speak in a particular manner is nothing short of a desperate attempt to defend a vicious and destructive practice.

And from the parallel universe that is today’s publishing industry, this exciting news: Tyra Banks is launching a YA fantasy trilogy called Modelland.  Guess what it’s about?