I was about to pick up house in the Cerulean sea and a few of TJ klunes other books that I own and of course he’s problematic. It has to do with the 60s scoop that involved Native Americans and what horrible things happen to them. My father being a part of that as a Native American himself and a young teen when it happened. He basically used a traumatic time in history as inspiration for his story house in the Cerulean sea. Which is not okay and he’s coming out with a second book to that one next year. I don’t think the publishers should be going forward with this next book but of course they will cuz it’s going to make them money. Should I now tell people the talk about this book but he’s problematic and after that let them do their own research or not say anything?

  • fizzycolt@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Authors don’t control where they get their ideas from. And the book itself isn’t mocking the tragedy or promoting it or even all that related to it. I personally don’t see how that is even slightly problematic. Authors do this all the time, it’s how being an author is!

    • ReadingIsRadical@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      It kind of is mocking it, though. In real life, the children in these “schools” were horribly abused and died in droves. We keep discovering mass graves near the sites of these places. In the book, the kids are all happy and the guy who runs the school is kind, and nobody ever stops to consider sending these kids back to their families. It’s like if someone set a twee romantic comedy in a Holocaust-inspired concentration camp, where the guards are all friendly and the showers spray laughing gas. If he wanted to write a story about a fun happy orphanage, he shouldn’t have gone around telling people it was about a genocide the survivors of which are still alive today.

      • Atuinne@alien.topBEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Sorry but I will apparently answer all of your comments lol.

        The guy who runs this orphanage is kind… For a reason? The kids are NOT all happy, including about being taken from their family. Linus actual job is to make sure the orphanages are being good to the children? He has a pivotal moment about what actually happens to the children?

        As I wrote in an earlier comment I do agree with the criticism about not even discussing a little about returning the kids to their parents. (If I remember correctly, it was a while ago).

        I would not call it mocking based on this. Did he say it WAS about this or did he say it was inspired by this horrible events and several more like it?

        • ReadingIsRadical@alien.topBEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          [My idea] remained fuzzy until I stumbled across the Sixties Scoop, something I’d never heard of before, something I’d never been taught in school (I’m American, by the way). In Canada, beginning in the 1950s and continuing through the 1980s, indigenous children were taken from their homes and families and placed into government-sanctioned facilities, such as residential schools. The goal was for primarily white, middle-class families across Canada, the US, and even Europe—to adopt these children. It’s estimated that over 20,000 indigenous children were taken, and it wasn’t until 2017 that the families of those affected reached a financial settlement with the Canadian government totaling over eight hundred million dollars.

          […]

          And so I began writing The House in the Cerulean Sea, imagining a world not so different from our own, where people who are different than the majority are controlled by those in power. The smallest of us—the children—are taken from their homes and placed into euphemistically named orphanages, overseen by caseworkers in DICOMY.

          He says it was principally inspired by it, and he goes on about the '60s scoop for quite a while in the interview. He’s trying to draw this parallel very strongly. And my problem with the guy who runs the orphanage being kind is that the residential schools were horrifically abusive. They were explicitly made for the purpose of genocide. You can’t just repurpose that into a fun happy orphanage which the children love and which they’re all fighting to preserve. It’s garish.

          And the kids are happy—at least, the ones at Arthur’s orphanage, which is what the story focuses on. They love Arthur, they love the orphanage, and they don’t want to be separated. They’re all fighting for the orphanage to stay open.

          Again, it’s like a writing a story about a concentration camp where the guy running it is kind and all the inmates are a big happy family and everyone’s banding together to stop the camp from being closed. Take inspiration from whatever you want, by all means, but absolutely do not go around in interviews telling everyone “well I was thinking about the Holocaust and I wanted to raise awareness, so I started writing this book about how kindness could have turned the concentration camps into a happy and fulfilling environment.”

          • YakSlothLemon@alien.top
            BEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            I’ve been finding out about the controversy by reading this, and your comment is really helpful. If he’s literally saying that this book is based on and inspired by the event, then I don’t see what his excuse is. It sounds like he was making a grab for relevance and it came back and bit him in the ass.