While I don't do this for every novel, I was looking at some others' peoples reviews of Carve the Mark by Veronica Roth. I noticed that many, many people talked about this book being racist. Honestly, I kind of wish stereotypes didn't even exist in the world. As someone I know recently said, "I would rather let the characters I write be awful because they are human trash, rather than their race, class, religion..." and so on. I completely agree with them. If writers didn't have to worry about stereotypes, things would be so much easier. They could simply focus on writing a good story, and that's what Roth did, in my opinion.
I'm sorry if this makes me seem ignorant, but at first, I didn't even notice that Roth had been racist. When I'm reading, I don't really think about the race of a person. I can hardly even think about what their face looks like. Typically, if the author says they have a certain hair or skin color, I may try to imagine it, but I mostly focus on the events and the emotions when I'm reading. I think that's all a person really should be paying attention to. Apparently, she portrayed someone's race poorly because they were an aggressive character. I don't know the exact details, because I didn't really pay attention to that kind of thing. Anyways, I'll say that there were a lot of horrible characters in that novel. There were ones who were probably white, and all different kinds of races. I didn't go in depth and study all the characters, but according to one blog, two of the most violent characters were white. Nobody complains about them.
I think that a reader should only despise an author's work because they killed off a good character, or because they absolutely despise the antagonist, not because they think it is racist that someone who was dark-skinned happened to be evil. What should Roth do? Just completely make all of the evil characters white or any other race but that one specifically?
Overall, I think the story was actually really good. If you aren't going to read this story because you have heard it is racist. Please try to read it anyways and simply focus on the story, rather than the character descriptions. You might enjoy it a lot more. I personally actually loved this book. I'm sorry if I have offended anyone with this post, but this is just my opinion. I just want people to enjoy a good book for what it is, and not worry about the races off the characters. Just read!
