Oree: Pinup Style

This is award-winning artist Lee Moyer’s pinup-style rendering of Oree Shoth from The Broken Kingdoms, which will represent the month of September in the new forthcoming CHECK THESE OUT: Literary Pinup Calendar for 2013.

I talked awhile back about the creation process for this, but now I see the final product and… wow. I love it. I especially love that she’s not looking at the viewer, not just because she’s blind but also because it conveys the total artistic focus that’s so much an element of her personality. She knows you’re there, looking at her; she knows she’s naked; she knows she’s in a tree; these things are unimportant because she’s got an image burning up her creative brain. This pose is in partial defiance of pinup tradition, Moyer explained when we first discussed it, because a pinup usually caters to the male gaze by having the model stare seductively at the viewer. Of course Oree’s like, eff that, got stuff to do. At the same time she’s beautiful enough to turn a god’s head and she knows it. It’s this unselfconscious acceptance of her own beauty that makes this work as a pinup — for me, anyway, because I can’t think of anything sexier than a woman who knows and loves herself.

I think this is awesome. Now — ’cause I know ya’ll are gonna ask — I do visualize Oree as very dark-skinned, and I mentioned this to the artist when I saw an earlier draft. He noted that the lighting — necessary to depict the visible magic of her painting, and of Madding’s symbolic presence, and of the Tree itself — does impact how her coloring comes across. Given the detail and the color of the lighting, that makes perfect sense to me. That’s how her hair is supposed to look, too; the style I described her wearing in the book (natural with a two strand twist-out) is the way I used to wear my own hair. If you’re wondering, Moyer used a live model for this pose; she’s credited as Favour Kibs, a Kenyan-born runway model with the Model Mayhem agency. I haven’t met her, but she’s obviously a beautiful woman, and I’m honored that she was willing to lend her likeness to my character.

via  nkjemisin.com

artemis-devotee:

girljanitor:

Okay, so I had planned to write a big long review of this book, but you know what? It’s too fucking good.

You need to buy this book.

It is a fantasy novel. It is the best fantasy novel. It is in a fantasy universe populated with protagonists of color, and evil white people. There are a few good white people, but mostly evil white people who have wayyyy too much power and are evil.

You need to buy this book if only for the scene where the disabled Black woman protagonist picks up a bottle of white people shampoo, sniffs it, and just rolls her eyes and thinks, are they expecting me to use this astringent shit on my beautiful Maroneh(Black) woman hair?

It in particular is actually the second book in the series, but I accidentally read it out of order the first time (and have since read the other) and it didn’t particularly suffer from being read out of order.

You need to buy this book.

There is also a bit of sexy sex. The exact right amount of sexy sex.

I cannot tell you how much I fell in love with this book. All three, but in particular this one was my favorite.

There is also a significant amount of queer sex in the trilogy. QUEER PEOPLE OF COLOR.

This is N. K. Jemisin. She wrote this book.

You need to buy all of her books.

I plan to.

I’m very interested in reading this series ‘-‘

You can read the first three chapters of the first book here.

It’s really, really good.

If Tolkien Were Black by Laura Miller (full article here)

N.K. Jemisin (left) and David Anthony Durham

Looking at the most visible exemplars of epic fantasy — from J.R.R. Tolkien to such bestselling authors as George R.R. Martin and Robert Jordan — a casual observer might assume that big, continent-spanning sagas with magic in them are always set in some imaginary variation on Medieval Britain. There may be swords and talismans of power and wizards and the occasional dragon, but there often aren’t any black- or brown-skinned people, and those who do appear are decidedly peripheral; in “The Lord of the Rings,” they all seem to work for the bad guys.

Our hypothetical casual observer might therefore also conclude that epic fantasy — one of today’s most popular genres — would hold little interest for African-American readers and even less for African-American writers. But that observer would be dead wrong. One of the most celebrated new voices in epic fantasy is N.K. Jemisin, whose debut novel, “The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms,” won the Locus Award for best first novel and nominations for seemingly every other speculative fiction prize under the sun. Another is David Anthony Durham, whose Acacia Trilogy has landed on countless best-of lists. Both authors recently published the concluding books in their trilogies.

Although they came to the genre from different paths, both Jemisin and Durham have used it to wrench historical and cultural themes out of their familiar settings and hold them up in a different light. “I never felt that fantasy needed to be an escape from reality,” Durham told me. “I wanted it to be a different sort of engagement with reality, and one that benefits from having magic and mayhem in it as well.”

In Durham’s trilogy, four royal siblings are deposed and then fight their way back to the throne in an empire presided over by the island city of Acacia. Their dynasty’s power resides in a Faustian bargain made with a league of maritime merchants: the League supplies a rabble-soothing drug in exchange for a quota of the empire’s children, who are sent off across the sea to meet an unknown fate. As promised, “Acacia” is a sweeping yarn filled with adventure, intrigue, sorcery and battles.

Jemisin’s series, too, is set in the capital of an empire that has been run by an aristocratic clan for generations. The power of the Arameri family, however, resides in the gods — specifically a pantheon of deities whom they have imprisoned and enslaved. The narrator of “The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms” is the daughter of a renegade member of the clan who ran off with a foreigner. Raised in a remote kingdom with its own fiercely independent customs, she returns to the capital seeking information about her mother and, once there, becomes embroiled in vicious palace intrigues.

She made the main character a woman and, in an even more marked departure from the norm, she decided to have that character narrate the book in the first person. “I knew that what I was writing was inherently defiant of the tropes of epic fantasy,” Jemisin said, “and I wasn’t sure it would be accepted.”

When Durham decided to write an epic fantasy, he set out to recapture the enchantment he felt as a 12-year-old, discovering Tolkien at his father’s house in Trinidad, while “brushfires and buzzards” ranged over the neighboring hills. Jemisin, on the other hand, based her trilogy on “the old-school epics: not Tolkien, but Gilgamesh.” The gods in her imaginary world evoke the squabbling divine families of the world’s great myths: “The ancient tales of mortals putting up with gods and trying to outsmart gods, of trickster gods outsmarting other gods: That’s the basis of my work.”

“The genre can go many, many more places than it has gone,” said Jemisin. “Fantasy’s job is kind of to look back, just as science fiction’s job is to look forward. But fantasy doesn’t always just have to look back to one spot, or to one time. There’s so much rich, fascinating, interesting, really cool history that we haven’t touched in the genre: countries whose mythology is elaborate and fascinating, cultures whose stories we just haven’t even tried to retell.”

jehannedepizan:

mylesbiansensesaretinglingagain:

girljanitor:

Okay, so I had planned to write a big long review of this book, but you know what? It’s too fucking good.

You need to buy this book.

It is a fantasy novel. It is the best fantasy novel. It is in a fantasy universe populated with protagonists of color, and evil white people. There are a few good white people, but mostly evil white people who have wayyyy too much power and are evil.

You need to buy this book if only for the scene where the disabled Black woman protagonist picks up a bottle of white people shampoo, sniffs it, and just rolls her eyes and thinks, are they expecting me to use this astringent shit on my beautiful Maroneh(Black) woman hair?

It in particular is actually the second book in the series, but I accidentally read it out of order the first time (and have since read the other) and it didn’t particularly suffer from being read out of order.

You need to buy this book.

There is also a bit of sexy sex. The exact right amount of sexy sex.

I cannot tell you how much I fell in love with this book. All three, but in particular this one was my favorite.

There is also a significant amount of queer sex in the trilogy. QUEER PEOPLE OF COLOR.

This is N. K. Jemisin. She wrote this book.

You need to buy all of her books.

I plan to.

just bought this, can’t wait to read it

I KNOW WHAT TO GO READ AFTER SHERLOCK HOLMES (I look forward to something way less problematic than Holmes, too!  /understatement of the century)

You really should. I’ve gotten a lot of messages from people who’ve started reading it and they’re pleased. :D

karalianne:

karalianne:

girljanitor:

Okay, so I had planned to write a big long review of this book, but you know what? It’s too fucking good.

You need to buy this book.

It is a fantasy novel. It is the best fantasy novel. It is in a fantasy universe populated with protagonists of color, and evil white people. There are a few good white people, but mostly evil white people who have wayyyy too much power and are evil.

You need to buy this book if only for the scene where the disabled Black woman protagonist picks up a bottle of white people shampoo, sniffs it, and just rolls her eyes and thinks, are they expecting me to use this astringent shit on my beautiful Maroneh(Black) woman hair?

It in particular is actually the second book in the series, but I accidentally read it out of order the first time (and have since read the other) and it didn’t particularly suffer from being read out of order.

You need to buy this book.

There is also a bit of sexy sex. The exact right amount of sexy sex.

I cannot tell you how much I fell in love with this book. All three, but in particular this one was my favorite.

There is also a significant amount of queer sex in the trilogy. QUEER PEOPLE OF COLOR.

This is N. K. Jemisin. She wrote this book.

You need to buy all of her books.

I plan to.

Okay. So.

I just bought the first book in this series for my Kobo (because $7.99 and easier than trying to find it in the store). And when I saw she has lots of other books? WIN!

So I will read this one and if I like it I’ll get the rest of the series and read them, and if I like the whole series I’ll try more of her stuff.

Because when I find a good author I like reading, I am very loyal.

YOU GUYS THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR RECOMMENDING THIS AUTHOR!

I am about to start Chapter 4 of the first book. I read the first three chapters today and it was hard to put it down to do other things. The writing is AMAZING. I just want to keep reading to see what happens next! I will definitely be getting the rest of the books in the series!

And may I just say that if you refuse to read these books simply because the main character is not white, or because the bad guys are white? You are totally missing out. N.K. Jemisin is AMAZING. (And, by the way, that’s a ridiculous reason to refuse to read a book.)

I know, right? :D Like, I still can’t get over it. I had a DREAM about the series the other night. I can’t wait til after I reread The Wheel of Time series because I think i’m gonna come right back and reread this one!!!!

(also, it’s a racist reason. just sayin)

mylesbiansensesaretinglingagain:

girljanitor:

Okay, so I had planned to write a big long review of this book, but you know what? It’s too fucking good.

You need to buy this book.

It is a fantasy novel. It is the best fantasy novel. It is in a fantasy universe populated with protagonists of color, and evil white people. There are a few good white people, but mostly evil white people who have wayyyy too much power and are evil.

You need to buy this book if only for the scene where the disabled Black woman protagonist picks up a bottle of white people shampoo, sniffs it, and just rolls her eyes and thinks, are they expecting me to use this astringent shit on my beautiful Maroneh(Black) woman hair?

It in particular is actually the second book in the series, but I accidentally read it out of order the first time (and have since read the other) and it didn’t particularly suffer from being read out of order.

You need to buy this book.

There is also a bit of sexy sex. The exact right amount of sexy sex.

I cannot tell you how much I fell in love with this book. All three, but in particular this one was my favorite.

There is also a significant amount of queer sex in the trilogy. QUEER PEOPLE OF COLOR.

This is N. K. Jemisin. She wrote this book.

You need to buy all of her books.

I plan to.

just bought this, can’t wait to read it

IT’S SO GOOD. IT GAVE ME LIFE. ALL THREE ARE SO GOOD BUT THIS WAS MY FAVE BECAUSE OREE IS SO AMAZING.

Okay, so I had planned to write a big long review of this book, but you know what? It’s too fucking good.

You need to buy this book.

It is a fantasy novel. It is the best fantasy novel. It is in a fantasy universe populated with protagonists of color, and evil white people. There are a few good white people, but mostly evil white people who have wayyyy too much power and are evil.

You need to buy this book if only for the scene where the disabled Black woman protagonist picks up a bottle of white people shampoo, sniffs it, and just rolls her eyes and thinks, are they expecting me to use this astringent shit on my beautiful Maroneh(Black) woman hair?

It in particular is actually the second book in the series, but I accidentally read it out of order the first time (and have since read the other) and it didn’t particularly suffer from being read out of order.

You need to buy this book.

There is also a bit of sexy sex. The exact right amount of sexy sex.

I cannot tell you how much I fell in love with this book. All three, but in particular this one was my favorite.

There is also a significant amount of queer sex in the trilogy. QUEER PEOPLE OF COLOR.

This is N. K. Jemisin. She wrote this book.

You need to buy all of her books.

I plan to.