Teen books

Bloomsbury USA faces another race row over book cover

Publisher under renewed fire for presenting the dark-skinned heroine of Jaclyn Dolamore's Magic Under Glass as white on the book jacket
Magic Under Glass by Jaclyn Dolamore The US cover of Magic Under Glass by Jaclyn Dolamore

Bloomsbury USA's decision to feature a white girl on the cover of Jaclyn Dolamore's debut novel Magic Under Glass, which stars a dark-skinned heroine, has sparked controversy across the internet and accusations of "white-washing", just five months after the same publisher was forced to back down over a similar controversy.

Magic Under Glass, a young adult novel, is the story of a "foreign" music hall girl, Nimira, hired by a sorcerer to sing with a piano-playing automaton. But she finds that a fairy has been trapped inside the clockwork automaton, and the two fall in love. Although Dolamore's heroine is described in the book as black-haired and brown-skinned – and the official trailer for the novel shows her as such – the cover chosen by Bloomsbury USA Children's Books shows a white, brown-haired girl. The choice has provoked outrage from bloggers and commentators, particularly following the publisher's decision (later reversed) last year to feature a white girl on the cover of Justine Larbalestier's novel Liar, about a black girl.

One teen reader and blogger, who calls herself Ari, said the cover of Magic Under Glass was "upsetting". "It makes me angry and it makes me sad," she wrote in an open letter to Bloomsbury, posted on her website. "I'm sure you can't imagine what it's like to wander through the teen section of a bookstore and only see one or two books with people of colour on them. Do you know how much that hurts? Are we so worthless that the few books that do feature people of colour don't have covers with people of colour?"

Australian author Larbalestier, who following a concerted online campaign last summer saw the cover of her novel Liar changed to reflect the ethnicity of its heroine, said that "sticking a white girl on the cover of a book about a brown girl is not merely inaccurate, it is part of a long history of marginalisaton and misrepresentation".

"Publishers don't randomly pick white models. It happens within a context of racism," she said. "This is about ... pervasive racism in every aspect of our world so that young kids grow up thinking they are inferior because they see so few reflections of themselves. This is not merely about book covers."

Fellow bloggers said they would be boycotting Bloomsbury over the move; others have been writing to the publisher to register their anger, not wishing to damage the career of debut novelist Dolamore.

The author said she did "truly understand" why some people were upset by her cover, but asked readers to "give Nimira and her story a chance". She told the Guardian that she had "originally considered making Nimira herself an ordinary sort of maid or governess", but decided that "it would be fascinating for her character to be [from] a far-flung land with its own sense of customs and history". "It gave her an immediate sense of character to me, and made the story world feel more global, even though it takes place mostly in one large house," she said.

Responding to the online uproar, Dolamore wrote on her blog that "Nimira is from a fictional land which is not meant to be a parallel to a specific country in our world". "Her culture has elements, such as costume and music, that might be drawn from Eastern European, Asian and Roma cultures, and I love that readers are interpreting her look in different ways," she continued. "I definitely don't want to tell people how to feel. I have no problem with anyone getting impassioned about a cause. But a writer is the only thing I've wanted to be all my life, it's an outlet for a girl who is often timid to express her soul. If you want to know how I feel about acceptance, love, and diversity, it is in my books. I'm glad the story has spoken to many readers. I believe that young readers crave books with ALL kinds of heroes, and the surest way we can satisfy that need is to support books that make heroes out of diverse characters."

Today's best video

Today in pictures
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jan/21/bloomsbury-race-row-book-cover/print
www.theguardian.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2015-27
126545
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:QPTJZRTDYYJFITZE5HQSK43MW6GDGCTS
<urn:uuid:604b5fd5-7f9a-43f6-acca-5fceda7420c9>
2015-07-07T04:19:45Z
199.27.76.67
sha1:LXQRPOUJMC6YJ5EW7WPFRE6HLAPWHMMG
<urn:uuid:2be2c8c0-a07d-459d-8ea1-e488ea17fd99>
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jan/21/bloomsbury-race-row-book-cover/print
response
<urn:uuid:99b3c52d-fa49-4ea6-960b-b0f0ffcfc364>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-179-60-89.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2015-27
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for June 2015
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf