C.O.R.A. Round Up

I'm late in announcing this, but the new C.O.R.A. Diversity Roll Call is up on Color Online--Susan has us looking at either memoirs, or books about food. There's still over a week left on this topic, so plenty of time to participate.

I also wanted to take a minute to thank everyone who participated in the previous Roll Call.

The Liar cover: what can I say? When I suggested creating a new cover as one way of addressing the "Liar" cover controversy, I thought I was kidding. But that's exactly what they did. Allison, Jodie, Miss Attitude, Rasco, Nymeth, Doret, Renay, Jen, and Julia's words were some of the many drops in the sea of posts that inspired the first phrase of the Publisher's Weekly article about the change: Proof of the power of the web.

If we can help inspire a change in book covers, folks, surely we can help inspire greater readership and publicity for diverse books as well. Yes, we can.

**

By the way, Bloomsbury made another selection, but here on Worducopia the Firefighter cover easily won the poll, with 50% of the votes.

**

Our other topic was gender in children's and YA books, and the response to that topic was equally powerful, in my opinion. In fact, we'll likely revisit that topic at some point because we just touched on one aspect of a huge subject.

Kenai weighed in just today with her thoughts about what the "Harriet Potter" series would be like--if Harry were Harriet, would Ron have to be Rhonda? Would Dudley have to be Dudlette?

Zetta Elliott gives an author's perspective on gender issues for writers. Be sure to read the insightful comments on that post as well.

For suggestions of books with appeal to both boys and girls, we have the following posts:

For very young children:
Rebecca, Lost in Books
Susan, Color Online

For early readers:
Doret, Happy Nappy Bookseller

For middle grade readers:
Evelyn N. Alfred
Rebecca, Lost in Books

For young adult readers:
Jess, Lost in A Book
Evelyn N. Alfred
Happy Nappy Bookseller
Rebecca, Lost in Books