TRANS-SCRIBE

Monday, 3 February 2020

New Starbucks Ad Features Trans Positive Message

Starbucks UK has revealed a new advert that features a trans man, and a positive transgender message.

The #WhatsYourName advert has been released as part of the companies new partnership with trans charity Mermaids. Starbucks has pledged a minimum of £100,000 to the children's charity, with more donations being raised from sales form their new mermaid cookies.

The advert features a young trans man named James, and show him going through life struggling with situations where he is called by his deadname. When visiting a Starbucks he's asked what his name is, and James is written on his cup before being called out to him.

Whilst this ad might seem somewhat unusual to some people, this is a situation that many trans and non-binary people have been through over the years. Choosing your new name can be a daunting and difficult task. Some people will go through number of names before they find one that fits, and being called by your name is a big part of seeing if it works for you. Having a stranger call out a name that you're trying is an easy way to see what feels right to you without facing issues of people calling you out on it.

With so many trans and non-binary people having either experienced this themselves, or knowing someone who has, it's not a surprise that it has resonated well with the community.

People have taken to social media to praise the advert, thanking the company for their positive representation.

Follow Him by Craig Stewart - Book Tour

'True love doesn't die – it devours. Just outside the sleepy town of Dreury, a mysterious cult known as The Shared Heart has planted its stakes. Its followers are numerous. More join every day. Those who are lost and suffering seem to be drawn to it; a home for the broken. When Jacob finds himself in need of such a home, he abandons his dead name and gives himself over to the will of The Great Collector.

'However, love refuses to let Jacob go so easily; his ex-fiancé, Nina, kidnaps him in the hopes that he can be deprogramed. As she attempts to return Jacob to the life they once had, a terrible fear creeps in: what if there isn't enough of her Jacob left? When The Great Collector learns of his missing follower, the true nature of The Shared Heart is unleashed. Nina discovers what Jacob already knows: that hidden behind the warm songs and soaring bonfires is a terrifying and ancient secret; one that lives and breathes… and hungers. And it's coming for them.'

I have to admit, I thought I knew what to expect of Follow Him for most of the book. Jacob has been taken in by a clearly brutal cult that's not afraid to torture and kill people, and his ex-fiance has to try to get him back from them without getting killed by them in the process. I thought it was going to be a psychological horror with a bit of an 'on-the-run' side to it, with very real human antagonists and threats to deal with. But over the course of the book I began to question some of this, beginning to think that maybe there's something a little more there than meets the eye, but never one hundred percent sure; and this kept my on my toes throughout, never knowing what to expect next.

The horrors of The Shared Heart are subtle to begin with, and at first it seems like most cults that people would be aware of, where a central figure has manipulated people into giving up everything to come and live and work together in a community tucked away from the outside world. Whilst this in itself is a quite disturbing situation to find yourself in, it's not until we begin to see the darkness just below the surface that we realise how dangerous and twisted the group is.

Once Nina has kidnapped Jacob from the cult it's very clear that this isn't a group that's just going to allow him to go, or one that will simply appeal to her good senses or the law to get her to release her prisoner; no, this is a group that will hurt her. Added into the tension of The True Heart finding her is the fact that Jacob is battling her as much as she's trying to break through his brainwashing. She's a woman that doesn't really know what she's doing, fighting desperately to get back the man she loved, and he's torturing her every step of the way.

Jacob, quite clearly, doesn't want to be saved from The True Heart. He doesn't want his old life back, and he doesn't want Nina. Whilst she's using their history together to try and help the man he once was, he's using that same history to hurt her. He brings up old wounds and tears them open, making past pain new and raw. The fact that Jacob is so vicious in his response to Nina and what she's doing is one of the most heart breaking parts of the book. She's trying to save someone she loves, and he's trying to destroy her.

The way in which Jacob fights against her the whole way, and steadfastly stands by The True Heart does make you begin to question whether Nina is really the hero of the story. She's fallen into what one would see as a more classically heroic role, saving a loved one from evil forces, but is she really a good person? She's kidnapped someone who left her when their relationship ended. She attacks him, tortures him, and tries to impose her will on him. If it wasn't for the fact that The True Heart is actually evil and kills people you'd have to question if she was the real villain. If Jacob had ran away and joined an Amish community to get away from the outside world would she still be the good guy for kidnapping him and keeping him tied up? I didn't expect Follow Him to make me think these kinds of questions, but very soon into the book I began to believe that perhaps there were no 'good guys' in this story.

I want to talk about what happens towards the end of the book now, so there will be some major spoilers, so if you don't want to know more but are intrigued I'd definitely say to go and grab a copy, as I've barely covered how good the book is. However, if you've already read it, or don't mind knowing how things end, please carry on, because there's some interesting things to discuss.

So, The True Heart are kind of onto something it seems. They're not just like every other crazy religion or cult that claims to know the truth, but seem to actually be onto things. I say seem to, because despite how the book ends I do have some very slight doubts. You see, when the mass suicides begin to take place and The Great Collector eats the cut out hearts, transforming into a monster this seems to make it quite clear that yes, their belief system was bang on and there is a supernatural entity at work here. However, we only ever see this through Nina, who has already displayed that she has been suffering from nightmarish hallucinations; so perhaps watching dozens of people slaughtering each other has tipped her over the edge into madness?

The fact that I don't know if the end is real or not both infuriates me and leaves me loving it. I want to know if the monster is real, but don't know if I'd be satisfied with knowing. Leaving it the way it does means that those who wanted the cult to be right are happy because there's a huge monster at the end of the book, and those who want a more subtle, psychological horror have an ending where Nina is left broken and mad by the events she's been through.

However you choose to take the ending, I think you'll be like me and be left shocked by the conclusion. I was in no way expecting the brutal and bloody conclusion that Craig Stewart gave us, and was left in a sense of shock from it. I didn't know what to think or feel once I'd finished that final page; and that meant that the book stuck with me. Because of this ending Follow Him will definitely be one of the more memorable books I've read this year, and I'm certainly looking forward to reading it again knowing the conclusion, to see if I can possibly make my mind up about if I believe what Nina's seeing or not.

Follow Him is a book that piles the tension on from the first few pages and doesn't let up once. There's a genuine sense of dread throughout as Nina is hunted by The True Heart. We get to see a character trying desperately to do what they think is right in a scenario that gets ever more and more frightening and out of hand, one that is sure to leave the reader shuddering. I cannot wait to see what more people think of this title, and will certainly be putting more of Craig Stewart's work on my to be read list in the future.

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Wednesday, 29 January 2020

Dread Nation by Justina Ireland - Book Review

The second volume of Justina Ireland's Dread Nation series, Deathless Divide, hits shelves next week. As such, it's probably a good time to go back and revisit my review for the first book in the amazing alternate history zombie horror series.

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‘Jane McKeene was born two days before the dead began to walk the battlefields of Gettysburg and Chancellorsville—derailing the War Between the States and changing America forever. In this new nation, safety for all depends on the work of a few, and laws like the Native and Negro Reeducation Act require certain children attend combat schools to learn to put down the dead.

Almost finished with her education at Miss Preston’s School of Combat in Baltimore, Jane is set on returning to her Kentucky home and doesn’t pay much mind to the politics of the eastern cities, with their talk of returning America to the glory of its days before the dead rose. But when families around Baltimore County begin to go missing, Jane is caught in the middle of a conspiracy, one that finds her in a desperate fight for her life against some powerful enemies. And the restless dead, it would seem, are the least of her problems.’

Whilst on the surface Dread Nation seems like a fairly straightforward alternate history story there’s a lot more to the world of the zombie-filled reconstruction-era America that Justina Ireland has created than it would at first appear.

Set within a world where the undead brought the American Civil War to an abrupt end, readers follow Jane, the black daughter of a wealthy white plantation owner, as she trains to become an Attendant, a bodyguard for a wealthy white woman.

‘An Attendant’s job is simple: keep her charge from being killed by the dead, and her virtue from being compromised by potential suitors. It is a task easier said than done.’

Following the end of the war the government established the Native and Negro Reeducation Act: an initiative that would train First Nation children and children of colour to fight zombies. This is one of the first places that it becomes apparent that there’s more to Dread Nation than just kick-arse women of colour fighting the undead. The combat schools created by the NNRA are based a lot more within reality than you would expect. For decades in the history of the United States native children were ripped from their families and sent to schools where they would be taught to be ‘civilised’ – to act like white people. This was often presented as something that would benefit these children, a way of bringing them into society and bettering them, where in reality it was often brutal and incredibly damaging. The combat schools are no different.

In the early parts of the book Jane is often worried about getting kicked out of Miss Preston’s. This isn’t because she wants the social advantage that graduating from the school would bring (think the Attendant version of Harvard or Princeton), but rather because many of the other schools are lacking. They train only a fraction as hard and over a shorter period, which often means that those graduating don’t last long. A background element to the story, this is a surprising commentary on how many systems in the United States are structured against people of colour, offering just enough that white people feel that they’ve done something good to help, yet failing to actually provide POC with anything that actually gives them any real advantages or advancements.

As the book goes on the commentary on life in America for POC only gets stronger, as more and more overt racism moves to the fore. This mainly comes from the antagonists of the book, rich white men who belong to the Survivalists, a political group that wants to ‘take back America’ and make things like they were before. Whilst slavery is now illegal in this world these people make it their mission to find workarounds for these laws, using black people as front line defenders against the undead, yet failing to provide them with real weaponry, keeping them shut away behind the scenes, giving them barely enough food to live, and brutally torturing them when they break the rules. Slavery in everything but name.

We get to see Jane, a young black woman who grew up treated well and sheltered from the horrors of slavery, have to face the harsh reality of life before the undead, and those who want to bring that world back. She’s not a fool, she’s faced prejudice countless times herself, but the events of the book push her to her physical and emotional limits. Accompanying her throughout most of the events of the novel is Katherine, a fellow student from Miss Preston’s. Katherine, however, is fair enough to pass as white, and has to play this role for a portion of the story.

This allows us to observe a new and mostly unexplored approach to racism: a black woman who everyone thinks is white having to see and hear awful racist things and not only not say anything, but to play along with it. Katherine begins the book as an annoying character, and something of an enemy for Jane, but by the final pages she’s an incredibly well rounded person, and one who has more than earned both ours and Jane’s affection.

One of the more surprising elements of the book is the lack of any romantic subplot, something that most books shoehorn in. These are strong and independent young women who not only don’t need men in their lives, but frankly don’t have the time to worry about romance whilst fighting to survive.

As well as representing people of colour, Dread Nation features LGBT+ leads. In a scene towards the end of the book it’s revealed that not only is Jane bisexual, but that Katherine is asexual. There’s isn’t a huge amount made of this, and it doesn’t hugely impact the story, yet it’s still great to see such positive representation. The characters aren’t defined by their sexuality, nor does it dictate events.

Dread Nation is a book with surprising layers, a story that on the surface is an action adventure story with women of colour fighting zombies in an alternate history. But beneath this is a look at racism and slavery in America, a story that shows that even though laws change and politics alter, people are still judged solely on the colour of their skin. Though never having been treated poorly due to the colour of my skin, as a transgender woman it’s easy to understand what it’s like to be judged as soon as someone sees you, because of who you are. Dread Nation captures these feelings perfectly: it puts you in the shoes of someone who is trapped in this life of hate and prejudice but can’t escape from it, even when they prove to be a more competent, kinder, and braver person than those in power.

A book with something important to say, Dread Nation is sure to stick with you long after you finish reading.

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