“This Book is Awful, the Author is Literally Clueless, It'll Probably Sell a Million Copies, Yay, Publishing”: Racial Reckoning and YA Book Twitter

Abstract

This dissertation explores bibliosocial spaces (Book Twitter, Goodreads, the blogosphere, etc.) and their influence on the publishing industry. Extant research literature has explored the role of the trade reviewer for the library and bookselling professions, the function of customer reviews on book shopping sites, or types of responses to art, but my study focuses on the intersection of book response and social justice activism, specifically when it came to the release of two YA fantasy novels, The Continent (Drake, 2017) and Blood Heir (Zhao, 2019). My research questions, “What happens when socially marginalized people publicly critique novels that they believe misrepresent, demean, stereotype, offend, or harm them?” and “in the case of books that are withdrawn, revised, and (re-)released, are the revisions substantive and do they assuage, address, or ignore the critiques levied against them?” are answered via a three-part critical content analysis. First, each book in its Advance Reader Copy (ARC) form, then the controversy that erupted in bibliosocial spaces online, then each book in its final published form. Critical whiteness theory is the primary critical lens for my analysis. Implications for my study in the fields of publishing, education, and sociology are discussed, as well as implications for teen readers.