Hi, hello. Welcome back to my channel, my
name is Jess
and today we're going to talk about some
more book communiTEA
of course. I want to preface this video
by saying that there may be a topic
that comes up that I get a little
passionate about. I'm going to try to
control myself and just stick
to the facts and receipts that I have
but if there is an outburst,
I'm sorr,y okay? I'm gonna try to keep it
in line though. Got a few things to go over and as I did
last time, i'm just really going to try to um
give a brief overview, showing you
receipts and then keep it pushing.
And if you want to do a deeper dive, I 
hope this gives you
a foundation and then you can go search
online or on Twitter or whatever and do
your own research but i'm going to get
started.
Okay, first thing is I think it was last
week it was announced or I saw it on
Twitter that Penguin U.K. was releasing another
special edition of The Starless Sea by
Erin Morgenstern. This is The Starless
Sea. This is the U.K. Waterstones edition. It is
very beautiful but it is not signed or numbered which
is a new popular thing to do
today. So the Penguin edition comes with
like a slip cover and it looks like this but
I think the end pages are different
and it is also numbered and signed. So
there are only 100 copies, I'm pretty sure they're
already sold out and like I said signed
by Erin
Morgenstern. This is her second book, I 
haven't read it. I've heard
mixed reviews about it but the reason
this is tea
is because the cost of the book is £300!
Now, i've done the math for you: that is
€335.14
OR $399.25 for a book. That is, I mean I guess if you
love the book, you get to have this rare edition um but
I'll insert the website here:
So, i'm on the Penguin
website and here is the
deluxe edition of The Starless Sea and I
guess the only difference
is this slipcover and that it's signed
and numbered and there's only
100 but other than that
i'm pretty sure this looks exactly the
same as the
Waterstones edition and it just added a
slipcover and numbered and signed,
which is not worth £300.00,
that is bonkers to me.
No siree bob. Yeah, I mean this was already
expensive enough because you know
ordering from the U.K., the conversion rate
from pounds to
dollars, the shipping, good enough for me.
Even if I read this book and it becomes
one of my favorite of all time, I'm not
paying
400 doll-hairs for a book. There were
some really funny tweets about it
and um at first I was like you know
thinking it was
somebody put an ARC up for sale for $400
or something but
I was shocked, okay? Okay.
So Cassandra Clare, author of The Mortal
Instruments, The Infernal Devices, all the Shadowhunter
books, she had an ARC
giveaway the other week for Lost Book
Of The White, a book it says that she did
with
Wesley Chu and there were 5 winners. And so 1 of the people who received
one of the ARCs unfortunately scanned every single page
online and had their friend translate it.
I feel like it was a Spanish copy
because she does mention
notifying her Spanish publisher and so
that sadly is probably is going to affect
further giveaways. She said that "I'm saddened as well
because this likely means the end of fan
giveaways."
So of course always that one, that
one asshole who has to ruin it for other
people. And there were some other tweets that
i'll put here where people were saying
like, this one: "help why are people so mad
over a dodgy rich author with an incest kink getting her
3719th book leaked early to like five
people when everyone would have read the epub
next month. I think that's what it means anyway
and someone else posted
like a video and it said "Cassie when she
found out she won't earn any money
because ARCs are getting leaked."
And so I know there are issues with
Cassandra Clare.
I read the first three books in The
Mortal Instruments, I did not like the
incest plotline but still she doesn't deserve for her,
her books that she gave away for free to
be scanned online
for people to read. So that's just how I
feel about that.
Then we've got Mackenzi Lee who is the
author of The Gentleman's Guide
To Vice and Virtue, I believe, it's a Y.A.
novel. I haven't read it.
I think the main character is a bisexual
male and Mackenzi Lee is
a woman and um so there is a
conversation more recently about women
writing stories about queer males, I'm not gonna
get into that. Anyway she apparently is writing a new
book that's being released by Disney
called Gamora and Nebula and people are
not happy. A few months ago
she was working in a bookstore, I don't
know if she still does and she was signing books and sending
them off to uh customers. So that doesn't sound so
bad except that the books weren't hers, they
were not the books that she wrote.
So she was taking books that customers
had ordered from other authors
and signing, sometimes drawing a doodle
in them and sending them off to
paying customers.
Hi, editing Jessica here.
So I wanted to correct something I said. Mackenzi Lee, I
went back to Twitter,
and apparently people requested that she
write in these books
and the bookstore uh replied to
tweets saying this is okay because
people requested that she write in
these books. But there were tweets by other some of
the authors whose book she wrote in or
signed
tweeted their feelings especially
authors of color like they weren't okay
with that and one of the bookstores replies was
"Did Tolstoy say something?"
and so yeah just was a messy situation.
If I was an author, I wouldn't want
someone else signing my book either so
I just wanted to correct that.
So I think she deleted her Twitter and hasn't been
on there since so, yeah she was "canceled" but then not
really because obviously she's writing
this new novel so,
about that. All right, then we've got a
book
that I thought was not out yet but
Goodreads says that it was published on
August 10th and it is called The Stars and Stripes Between Us
by Audrey Rivero and here is the tagline
"he's a libera,l she's a conservative.
What could go wrong?"
I'm gonna read the Goodreads blurb: "He's
a liberal, she's a conservative. What
could go wrong?
When progressive, bisexual MIT junior,
Nathan Campbell, meets Marina Salinas
on the hockey rink, he's immediately
smitten. She's gorgeous, smart,  funny,
competitive. There's just one problem,
she's a republican. Unable to resist each other, Nate and
Marina begin to date in secret,
sneaking around Boston to explore what
they both know is a really bad idea. But beyond the bubble of their growing
affection tensions on the campus are
rising.
When Nate's roommate tries to get
Marina's friend expelled for hate speech
they'll both be forced to pick sides. Can
their spark survive the storms of
political division or will they, like so many others, be able
to overcome the things between them?"
I hadn't heard anything about this book
and then I saw it on Twitter
Like I said it says published August
10, 2020
and there are 5 ratings, it has a 1.6
and it sounds terrible. That premise? No
thank you. That's all i'm going to say on that. Keep
it pushing. Okay the next one is another
book but this one doesn't come out until
January 2021 and it's called The Duke's
Princess Bride.
So at first, I was very confused about
what was going on in romancelandia.
There were a lot of subtweets about
this book
uh basically glorifying
colonizers? And then I saw things about
author of color, white reviewer. I was
just so confused so
if I- uh, I apologize if i've understood
this incorrectly and someone correct me
in the comments but this book is written by Amalie Howard,
who is an author of color and the book has
a main character who is an Indian woman
and the male you know love interest is a
white British dude but this is set in like the
late 1800s, so like English imperial rule
kind of thing and he's basically like
white savior white dude come to save the
day, I think. I'm going to read you a blurb
from someone's review
so you can have a better idea because I
can't explain it as well. The issue
apparently is because the author is
an author of color, the first big review
that came out-
I don't know if it was the author
herself or someone else- was written by a
white woman and so
the conversation was do you as a white
woman have a place
to critique um these problems
in a book written by an author of color?
And then other reviewers came forward
who are like also like, i'm an own
voices reviewer
and that's whose review I found on
Goodreads who linked to the
white woman's review. I don't want to
call her- i mean her name is Vicky Hoyle,
that is the lady who wrote the review.
So the own voices reviewer basically
shouted out to her review and is saying
yes these things are problematic
and so i'm just going to read you a
blurb from Vicky's review.
She said: "There is a powerful anti-racist
historical romance to be written about
an Indian heroine set against the backdrop of 1860's
imperialism but The Duke's Princess Bride by Amalie
Howard is not it. Although, it is an own voices story by an
author of color which aims to unpack
racism and colorism, it is underpinned by
a colonialist logic that suggests a
problematic lack of reflection about the
power relations at the heart of its
story. Some of what I'm going to describe in
this review amounts, in my opinion, to a
kind of epistemic violence
in that the book obscures or erases the
oppression, exploitation,
torture and murder of Indian peoples
under British rule
both in India and elsewhere in the
empire. And it keeps going.
So yeah there's, so now there's this
conversation
one, i'm assuming the author said
something but again I can't find the
like I can't find the original source so
if somebody could let me know, please let
me know but so there's a conversation of a white
reviewer critiquing a book by an author of color.
There's a conversation of
how authors of color should tackle
problematic topics in their book
and then obviously authors
versus bloggers and reviewers, it's a mess.
There's, I still honestly don't understand all of
what's going on but I just know
from that, that this book sounds a bit
messy and um I mean it wasn't on my radar
anyway, so it's not like i'm gonna read
it but
I --there has to be.. more often than not
authors of color are held to this like
higher standard than like a white author sometimes but
sometimes, which it sounds like in this case, the
critique is valid. I'm not good at saying things,
words. So i'm gonna leave it at that.
Anyway, Im gonna link both of these
reviews in the description so you can
read them if you would like and get a
better idea of the story and how they felt about it.
But that was just kind of a really
surface level summarization.
Something else I saw just on Twitter
today is a new
book that is supposed to be released it
says
not till 2022 but it's called Dancing
With Fire
by Jordan Marie Green and it's one of
those like blurbs, like we've acquired
this book. So it's: Emily Settle at
Feiwel and Friends
has bought Jordan Marie Green's debut Y.A. rom-com 'Dancing With Fire'
in which a 16 year old girl dreams of
trading in her hula skirt for a pair of
fire- knives, chronicling the obstacles she faces
breaking into the male dominated sport
including winning over the director by
playing tour guide to his spoiled teenage son. Publication
is scheduled for winter 2022. And it is a white lady
that is writing the book and the tweet I
saw um
said "At first glance I am sure this looks
like a harmless YA romance but Hawai'i
isn't just a location and hula isn't
just a kind of dancing (despite its
ubiquity and tourist entertainment)."
So, it said  "I can't find anywhere that
this author is Kānaka" [ I'm probably
saying that wrong, I apologize]" though she
says she lived in Hawaii."
So that--
Someone else quote tweeted this and said
"This shit here is not okay. reading the
description of this book and the
author's tweets about her characters and
story just made me flush with anger. I'm
shaking with it."
Um so...
it doesn't look like a good look. That
will be interesting to see if that
does make it to publication. Okay so
someone on Twitter tagged me in this and
at the end, because people will send me things and I
will, I'm gonna list basically credits to
people who sent me links. But, so there is Alphonso Dunn, who's an
artist and he made a book um one's called Pen
& Ink Drawing workbook to kind of show
you
how to draw, basically. I hope that's not
trivializing it but
he is a black man who was a
chemistry teacher. He quit his job to
finish this book, which took him a lot of
time, a lot of work
and so then there's Jake Parker or Jacob
Parker
who is the so-called "creator" of Inktober
which i've seen go
around on Instagram every year and I
guess he's trying to trademark it?
Even though I think it's kind of a
community created thing and so
the tweet was "Jake Parker plagiarized my
book" because Alphonso
published or uploaded a YouTube video
about this and he goes through
in the video and talks about you know
how long it took him to do the book and
then he went online, he saw this book up for pre-order, got
excited, kind of looked through it
or what was posted and said that it
looks very, like the exact same of his book and so
he is saying that Jake Parker
plagiarized his book.
Like, I  won't say word for word because
it's drawings but there are words but
I mean what he did show does look
eerily similar or basically the same. I
did go to Jake Parker's Instagram and he
has up a statement saying that he didn't (plagiarize)
and that he's upset that Alphonso took it
public instead of contacting him
privately..So, I don't know but I will
put Alphonso's video down in the description. It is long but he goes through all these
different things.
Obviously, I don't know but it looks
suspect and I just wanted to make you
aware. Okay goodness, the bookish community
just always got something poppin'. We've
got LitJoy Crate, is it LitJoy Crate?
They are a large book
subscription box
company. So I-- I've never
got a box from them but I think they do
monthly boxes and so..so
I'm on LitJoy Crate's website and like I said they're a subscription box company
and so recently-- a few months ago they
were under fire because they had
dream catchers in their box and I think
they released a statement, I don't think
it was really an apology, it was kind of like a statement because
it's obviously called
cultural appropriation. So then things
died down somewhat. So this month they posted that
they were holding a rep
search and in conjunction with that with
a Harry Potter related box. So obviously most of you know about J.K.
Rowling's transphobic tweets
and so multiple companies had made
statements that they were no longer
going to
sell Harry Potter merchandise or have
Harry Potter merchandise in their
subscription boxes
but LitJoy is not one of those. And so
that box is very Harry Potter centered
and now I'm on their website and they've
got a whole subscription.
So you've got LitJoy Magical
Subscription: a new subscription box from
LitJoy.
Um so let's see, they're quarterly boxes
and each one has a magical theme. So then
I scroll down and October's is Diagon Alley.
Then January is The Burrow and April
they have The Big Seven
and they've got Magical Classes,
Fantastic Beasts,
so they're all directly Harry Potter
related, they're not just
fantastical or magical, they're all Harry
Potter related boxes.
Snd so of course people have been
outraged that they still
continue to um support J.K. Rowling after
what she said.
So they put out an Instagram post that
conveniently had the comments turned off
and said you know these are not directly
licensed merchandise
(which way to call yourself out online)
and
um so the money's not going to her, that
they stand
with their, with the trans community and
um you know they're not trying to hurt
anyone, they just want to keep the magic
alive.
But people are not here for it. But there
are people that are.
And that is why I don't think that
they're going to change their behavior
because as long as the company is
getting money and thriving,
the people are going to continue to
support it like
or I mean they're going to continue to
do what they do because they're like
well we're not seeing any negative
effects like
they may lose some subscriptions here
and there but I mean there are a lot of
people who are happy under those posts,
who are like yeah i'm excited to get
this and I mean they have these
boxes planned through next October
for this Magical Subscription. I didn't
even know that until I went to this
website. I just knew they had that one
box
that they included in their rep
search post.
So, yeah yeah um this just brings up the
conversation of can you separate the art
from the artist?
You know..I  don't know but there it is on
the website..
Magical Subscription... who knows lord.
Last but not least is uh Sweet Sequels.
So a lot of people already know about
this, so  I don't know if this is that
shocking to anyone but Sweet Sequels is
a bookish merchandise shop run by Haleigh.
Um, she has an Instagram page and then
her shop- I don't know
what that's through but I used to follow
her years ago and then
saw the like um anti-abortion rhetoric
she was sharing and I unfollowed but
people still follow her. As of yesterday
she had 18,000 followers.
Since you know, June, when George Floyd
was murdered and all the riots and
things have started, I  have seen people share her page a few
times because of her nonsense. So,
she is a Christian, like uber Christian,
fundamentalist, whatever you want to call
it and anti-abortion obviously, so
anti-planned parenthood, very right-wing
conservative.
And so she'll sometimes post her art
and you know maybe just a bookish quote
but then sometimes she post it and like a biblical
scripture and then she gets into current
events. So
something she posted a few months ago
was
um that you can't be you can't say Black
lives matter
and be pro abortion because what was it
like 39%
of babies that are aborted are black, or
that's what she said.
Um and this is when I said i'm trying
hard to just give you the facts.
I'm just gonna, i'm just gonna reign it
in.
And other people were trying to tell her
how
harmful these things she were saying was
and that she needed to
amplify other black voices instead of
her own and she said I
am amplifying black voices and then she
shared the black voices that she listens
to and they are people like Ben Carson and
Candace Owens and the Hodge twins and Diamond and Silk.
and do you see, do you see a pattern here? She also
is like very anti-mainstream media which
fine,
media has its issues and she said
that I only follow
"unbiased media "and she linked them all
in this description
and so of course I went and clicked on
every single page including Ben Shapiro..
Again, do you see a theme? And they all
had the same,
all these pages, whether it was black or
a white person running them, were all the
same: very um "liberalism
is communism", very anti-black,
um yeah, they were all the same but
they're "unbiased", you know that's what she says and so
recently she posted again about abortions and and
bringing up black lives matter and all
of that.
And people of course were commenting and because she's like you know
not all cops are bad- which we fucking
know-
but so she, i'll post her tweets (IG posts) I mean they're very
long you can go look on Instagram if you
want, I
mean I don't recommend it but um
so she was saying that while Brianna
Taylor, Brianna Taylor's death was a tragedy and
an accident, you know it really is her
boyfriend's fault for opening up fire on
the police officers- although they
entered his home on a no-knock warrant and the warrant
wasn't for them. Aren't these same people always "yay
second amendment"? I'm trying to -- let me calm down, let me
calm down. There was also on one of the pages that
she calls "unbiased news", their theory is that
Brianna Taylor was no innocent woman,
that you know she was involved in drugs
or drug trafficking or something.
And I just think it's ironic
that these same people who say the
unborn babies who are aborted every year
um can't speak for themselves, well the black people being murdered can't
speak for themselves either because
they're no longer here.
I'm getting, i'm getting so angry. So
those are just some of the things
that she says, so I
would just like to try and calmly say
that if you are a white person
and you don't believe that white
privilege is a real thing
and you listen to people like Candace
Owens and Diamond and Silk and Ben
Carson and whoever else um
and you choose to listen to this small
minority
of Black people who are black
conservatives versus
the black majority who are telling you
that racism is real that, you do have a
privilege, that they're killing us
disproportionately,
you have a problem. I-- I don't..okay I said i'm trying to calm
down. So that is just some of the nonsense
that Sweet Sequels is about, that she
shares on her page,
some of it she shares in her art um and
so I just want you to be an informed
consumer and know that this is how she feels and
what she says online
and um there's really no reasoning with
her because she is firm in her belief
and she's not going to listen to any
rational argument. Um although you're not supposed to judge
people, she's totally going to judge you. So I just
want you to know if you came across her
art
and you were going to buy it, maybe think
twice. Or maybe if you don't know if
you're following her, maybe go look because maybe you don't
want to be supporting someone like that.
Everyone can have their own thoughts,
obviously. Religion is fine, I have no problem with religion.
Everybody who practices their own
religion,
do what you want to do. The problem with
religion comes in when you use your
religion to try to dictate how other
people live
and that's where the problem is. And I 
feel like that's how Sweet Sequels is.
Like if you're not a Christian and you don't
subscribe to these
virtues and morals that I have then
you're wrong and that's not her place and so I,
I choose not to support someone like
that and I hope that you think about
who you're supporting as well with your
dollars
or even your energy. So that is that, not
gonna say anything else.
This is the second time i'm recording
this because I got so heated
earlier. I think those are all the major
things that I saw this week,
I probably missed something, let me know
in the comments um
if I miss anything, how you feel about
any of these topics
that i talked about today and I hope you
give this video a thumbs up if you liked
it. I hope you subscribe.
I hope you're taking care of yourself
and staying hydrated and staying distant
and um doing something that brings you
joy. But thank you for watching.
I will link any information that I have,
any video or blog post, anything, in the description
and I hope you have a good day. BYE!
Augustus wants to say hi, HI!
