Interlude: Eden Newman In Real Life?

No new chapter this week -- I've been preparing for an out-of-state convention and it's eaten up all my time -- but given recent current events I do have one tidbit to share.

The tidbit in question?  This story -- http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3123965/The-white-girl-posed-black-campaign-against-racism-story-brutally-lays-bare-hypocrisy-liberal-America.html

If you don't feel like clicking the link, it's about the recent controversy regarding Rachel Dolezal, the white woman who for years passed herself off as black via makeup, hairstyles, and faking her own family history.  She still claims to be black despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, including her (white) parents speaking out to the media.  And needless to say, media outlets have been having a field day with this.

All I can say is... Eden Newman, is that you? 

Seriously, though, when I picked up Revealing Eden for sporking purposes, I never thought that there'd come a time when something would happen in real life that the book could apply to.  Because even though I've heard stories about black people trying to pass off as white to avoid persecution, it's almost never the other way around.

Unlike Eden, however, it appears Rachel isn't lying about her ethnicity to escape persecution.  Some claim it's because she wants to champion the cause of African-Americans in the US and feels she can only do so as a black person.  Others say it's because her parents adopted black children and she wants the attention that they get.  Still others say she's just delusional, and bring up comparisons to the recent Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner deal.

My thoughts?  I feel this woman's doing it for attention.  There are people who will seek to get attention by any means possible, even if it's negative -- why else do Internet trolls exist, after all.  She sees that black people get a lot of attention, both positive and negative, and she adapted a black persona in order to get some of that attention for herself.  And to be honest, I don't feel sorry for her years of lying about her past coming back to blow up in her face.  Harsh, but when you make your bed, you have to sleep in it.

Okay, done for now... see you all next week.  Hope to have a new chapter sporked by then.

Chapter 3 - You Keep Using That Word...

So far we have established that our protagonist is a self-centered brat who's a heck of a lot more racist than anyone else in the book, and our antagonist is supposed to be a cold and arrogant jerk but comes across as professional and fair.  Oh, and apparently all black people are jet-black and have either stereotypically African-American or just plain ridiculous names.  And this world has pretty high technology for supposedly being a post-apocalyptic dystopia.  Only two chapters and it already hurts to keep going...

Eden leaves the lab and heads into the security area, where she steps into a glass cage for an inspection.  Apparently no one's allowed to enter any area in the Combs (which is still a stupid name for a city, I don't care if it's underground or not) without an inspection to check for sickness.  Seems kind of time-consuming if you have to get scanned anytime you enter or leave a building... though this is the first mention we've gotten of plague or sickness, so it seems kind of thrown in for no reason.

The robot that does the scanning is made to look like a "dark, masculine" human, which intimidates Eden.  I'm not sure why they need an android to do this job, which simply entails scanning the computer chips embedded in her head.  Probably just to hammer home yet again how Coals rule everything and Eden hates them.  At least the robot is described as "mahogany" instead of any shade of black, though the fact that our first black person who's not literally black is a robot is laughable.

Let them look.  They would never know anything about the Real Eden Newman.  Only Jamal saw her. -- p. 18

I dunno, lady, we've gotten to see plenty of your innermost thoughts and feelings, and they're not pretty.  If Jamal gets to see the "real" Eden Neman, why hasn't he taken off screaming yet?

We get a look at the employees' quarters, and once again Eden gets to bitch about Branson:

Even here, she couldn't escape Bramford's colossal ego.  Like an animal, he had marked his territory by carving a ridiculously large initial "B" onto each unit door.  His audacious company logo -- a snow-capped black mountain against a red desert background that offered false hope in a parched land -- glowed at intervals along the walls.  As if he owned everything, including her.  -- p. 18-19

Helpfully labeled online as the "are you

<expletive deleted> kidding me?" Samurai Jack face

Sorry, I think I just rolled my eyes so hard they fell out of my head.  If this is company property, of COURSE they'd be putting their logo on things.  It's what companies do.  Next time you're in a McDonalds, count how many times the Golden Arches show up on the walls, menu, uniforms, etc.  Bramford is hardly unique in this respect.  Also, the whole "marking his territory like an animal" analogy is pretty damn racist -- insisting that African-Americans are more "beastly" and "animal-like" than people of other races has long been a tactic of white supremacists and/or people trying to justify slavery, segregation, and other racist practices.

We still don't know much about what Bramford's company does, either... but I'm still failing to see how a mountain can be an audacious logo for a company.  It's a logo used by lots of companies -- Paramount Pictures, Sierra Entertainment, Shadow Mountain Publishing, Toblerone, and even Adidas use mountains or mountain-like shapes in their logos.  I can't wait until we get some flimsy justification from Eden or Foyt about how mountains have come to symbolize arrogance and pride in this post-apocalyptic future...

Eden starts to stew over getting put on probation again, and starts to have something akin to a panic attack.  Sweat "drilled down the sides of her face," which is the weirdest verb I have ever seen used to describe sweat.

The mental image it calls to mind...

In response to her freakout, her World Band pipes up and says her oxy levels are in the "red zone" -- and I forgot to mention last time that her world band constantly refers to her as "my dear," which is probably supposed to come across as comforting but seems more condescending than anything else to me.  Oxy is a "happy drug" that keeps Eden on an even keel, and is pretty much a ripoff of the soma drug from Brave New World.  It seems to me that what Eragon is to high fantasy (namely, a ripoff of elements from the most famous series of the genre), Revealing Eden is to dystopian novels, albeit with a nice dose of confused racism on top of it.

We also get a mention that happiness has gone "the way of the dolphins."

Stop reminding me of things I'd rather be reading/watching

than this dreck, book

Eden finally gets into her apartment, getting the jittery cravings from her oxy habit, and what do you know, she has a dog.  She MUST be a good guy!  Except she doesn't even act happy to see him, just charges into the room to get at her drug stash and shoot up a fix via a weird futuristic cap she has to pull over her head (apparently hypodermic needles no longer exist in the future).  The dog might as well just be furniture as far as this book is concerned.

So our protagonist is not only a selfish, whiny racist, she's an addict as well.  And we're supposed to sympathize with her?

We do get a little musing on Eden's part about how the apartment's too small for Austin, the dog (the fact that the dog gets a halfway normal name and the black people get named stupid things like Peach and Ashina is laughable but at this point minor compared to everything else), and Eden has to once again make it about her, pondering "Neither one of us fit, do we?"  Sympathy levels reaching negative levels...

Eden puts on her drug cap, gets her fix, and calms herself by having her World Band conjure up an image of a redwood forest -- excuse me, Sequoiadendron giganteum.  Throwing in random scientific names for plants and animals does not show me how smart your protagonist is.

Then we get this insensitive little bit:

At last, the familiar, pleasant rush flooded into her body.  Her world slowly turned a muted shade of gray.  Possibly, she wouldn't kill herself tonight.  -- p. 20

Good Primus, that's not something you just casually throw into the text!  I don't know if Foyt was doing this to shock the reader or to hammer home how miserable Eden's life is, but I'm feeling no sympathy for Eden and I'm shocked for the wrong reasons.  Depression and suicide are serious topics, and deserve to be treated with the proper respect in fiction.  When anyone, even a good writer, uses them for shock value or humor, it rubs me the wrong way... and when a crap writer uses them for cheap drama, it makes me want to hurl the book at the wall.  Again, in this case.

And by the way, the "killing herself" bit isn't followed up on for the rest of the chapter.  Guh... yeah, it was used for shock value.  Primus, I hate Foyt right now...

About this time Eden gets a call from someone called an Ethics Officer, or an EO.  It's a hologram, of course, like everything else in this world, and "naturally, she was a Coal."  Oh, shut up about it already.

The EO informs her that she turns eighteen in six months, and unless she's picked a mate by that date she'll be cut off from Basic Resources, which seems to mean food and oxy.  And somehow, despite the fact that it's hammered in YET AGAIN that Eden's an "ugly Pearl" and damned to never have a mate, the EO points out that despite her "mate-rate" is below average, a few of "her kind" have offered to pick up her mate option, but she's refused.

Eden knew they didn't really care whether or not she reproduced.  Truth was, they wished her dead.  The E.O. simply needed to check her name off a list... (Note:  How about we see some evidence of this instead of Eden just jumping to conclusions?)  "Because I don't want my child to be all Pearl.  I'd rather be dead than mate with one of my kind." -- p. 21-22

Get used to this.  You'll be doing it many times

if you choose to read this... thing.

Foyt, did you do ANY research going into this?  First of all, I have a hard time believing that in a society that's supposedly so against Pearls, the government is going to condone a Coal taking a Pearl for a mate, even if it's the Coal's idea.  Inter-racial marriages have long had a history for being frowned upon or outright banned -- heck, there are places in the US where inter-racial marriages were banned by law until well into the '60s, even later.  If this futuristic society of yours is so against Pearls, I highly doubt they'd be okay with a Coal deciding to marry a Pearl.

Second, does Eden honestly think having a half-Coal child is going to be the best thing for the kid?  Children of mixed heritage were often treated just as harshly as blacks, sometimes moreso -- having white ancestry didn't mean a thing.  There's a strong chance that your child is going to have it even worse off than you for being a "half-breed."  And what happens if your child is born light-skinned despite having Coal ancestry?  Without actual engineering, genetics aren't an exact science -- look at any family that randomly has a blond child show up after generations of brunette kids.

...Trying to think by this book's logic actually hurts.  Ouch.

The EO suggests Eden abide by the government's standard recommendations -- a suggestion Eden blows off as useless -- before ending the conversation.  Eden bitches to Austin, who of course can't do anything about it but be his usual loyal doggy self.  At least the dog is the one sympathetic character in this book.  C'mere, puppy, you belong in a better book than this.

We get a random flashback to when Eden got Austin ten years ago as a gift from her mom, and of course Eden/Foyt can't resist showing off how much she knows by rattling off the Latin name for a domestic dog, as well as the physical traits of the breed.  Yay, you know how to use Wikipedia, good for you.  *sarcasm*

Austin is apparently named after Emily Dickinson's brother (and an aside about how families are limited to one child each is uncomfortably wedged in here).  And here we're introduced to one of the book's weirder gimmicks.

To increase the size of their family, her optimistic mother had adopted her favorite poet, Emily Dickinson, as an ancestor.  Eden and her mother had spent many hours in Emily's World, the World-band destination where the Dickinson family lived in the 1900's.  When Eden's mother started to refer to her as Aunt Emily, Eden simply had accepted it.  And so, she'd also embraced the dog's name.  -- p. 23-24.

Dang, this book has pretty great technology for being a supposed dystopian novel.  I'd say the World-Band is a ripoff of OASIS from Ready Player One, but the publication dates of both novels are so close together (RPO came out August 2011, Eden January 2012) that this is probably more chance than actual plagiarism.  Still, RPO pulled it off better.

But back to my point -- as a plot device, Foyt has given Eden an "adopted aunt" in the form of American poet Emily Dickinson.  This is... I don't even know what to make of this.  It just FEELS weird.  Sure, there are people who claim to have famous people in their ancestry -- sometimes rightly so, sometimes faking it -- but here it just feels like one more thing thrown in for no reason.  Is it going to factor into the plot at all, or is it just one more thing Foyt felt like tossing in?  

Also, research fail -- Emily Dickinson died in 1886.  Scratch that, Foyt only knows how to use Wikipedia when she feels like it, or needs to look up a Latin name for a critter.  

Yes, this again already... I told you to get used to it

In the flashback, Eden asks if the dog is a Pearl -- because that's apparently the only important thing to her even at seven years old.  How in the world does Foyt consider this book to be anti-racist when the main character is so casually racist herself?

Eden's mom has a really winning answer, and by "winning" I mean "eye-rolling."

Austin is colorblind, Eden.  He responds to love and kindness.  Remember what Aunt Emily said?  'That Love is all there is, / Is all we know of Love.'  Promise me you won't forget.  Love is like a gentle wind that will open your heart if you let it.  -- p. 24

Eh, this doesn't need a caption

Okay, I get what Foyt is trying to say here -- that a dog doesn't care what color someone's skin is, so long as that person's good to it.  And that's a nice sentiment, to value people for who they are instead of their race.  But the term "colorblind" just feels off.  It's taking a word that means an actual medical condition (one that dogs, ironically, have long been said to suffer from, though research has since proven this isn't true) and appropriating it to mean something else entirely.  And really, you have to be VERY careful doing this.  

Eden continues to state that even at the age of seven, she knew love was dead, and now that her mom's dead she's given up on love and on Emily's world.  Somehow I doubt this -- I have an annoying feeling that "Aunt Emily" is going to come back to haunt us all...

Now I have a most satisfying vision of the ghost of Emily Dickinson coming back from the grave to haunt Foyt for attaching her name to this garbage.  *evil cackle*

Eden goes to eat and to feed Austin -- and because this is Da Future, "dinner" consists of pills for her and a "nutrient teat" for Austin, which he sucks on.  Dogs don't suck -- their cheek muscles aren't big or strong enough to allow for that past the puppy stage -- which is why they use their tongues to lap up water instead of sucking it up like a horse.  Unless Austin's still a nursing puppy or has a psychological problem (some dogs suck on blankets or toys if they were abused as a pup), he shouldn't be sucking a teat like this.

Also, Eden's food pills consist of white carbohydrate pills, blue protein pills, and red fat pills.  No vitamin pills, I'm noticing... is it too much to hope for that Eden dies of scurvy or rickets as the book goes on?  She also swaps out her protein pill for one of her father's fat pills, because apparently black people, the "beautiful race," aren't skinny.  *eyeroll*

Eden does her mandatory half-hour of exercise, which means jogging in place, and then heads to the bathroom to shower, get checked for cancerous moles, and get the "good stuff" -- her daily coating of Midnight Luster.  And for some reason, for her date with Jamal, she's chosen to wear a silky black nightgown.  Um... don't you usually sleep in nightgowns?  Unless Foyt got her words mixed up and meant "evening gown," though somehow I doubt it.

Also, "it wasn't a nightgown, it was a weapon."  So she's using sex to get her hooks into Jamal and get a Coal for a mate.  Lovely.  

Finally Eden touches up her makeup, giving us one last line of (possibly?) unintentional racist hilarity:

Red lipstick, smoothed over the lines to make her lips seem fuller, was the last touch.  She let her long black hair dip over one eye and smiled.

"Definitely passing, right?" -- p. 26

I'm just gonna leave this here... *

Every time I think it's no longer possible to hate the main character any more, Foyt finds a way to raise the bar.  I swear...

I'm gonna go finish The Last Bookaneer by Matthew Pearl (is that ironic or what?) before I do another chapter of this thing.  At least Matthew can actually write, does his research, uses a famous author's name and work (Robert Louis Stevenson in this case) with some modicum of respect, and actually treats issues of race with the proper respect...

* Picture credit -- "Golliwoggs on sale 2008" by alx_chief - AreYouReallySellingThat20080526. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Golliwoggs_on_sale_2008.jpg#/media/File:Golliwoggs_on_sale_2008.jpg