I appreciated Malone's handling of race, in that it was a regular story that happened to center around black people. It's like, you know, racial progress and what not! So anyway, since I was pleasantly surprised to see a black person on the cover of and otherwise typical romance novel, I grabbed the galley. I don't know the reason for this - I don't know if publishers think such stories aren't marketable, or what, but I for one appreciate them when I can get my hands on one.

Don't get me wrong, all of the above are important stories that need to continue to be told, read, and discussed, but I don't think there always has to be such a stark division between stories about minorities (in which everyone is always struggling with everything) and contemp lit in which minorities very rarely get even an honorable mention. Yeah, I was starting to think I was a figment of my own fucking imagination.

Shocking, right? Some of us not only don't live 'in the hood' - sometimes we live in the suburbs!!! Madness. Some of these mysterious minorities are doing many of the same things that white people do: falling in love, fighting with their siblings, playing with their kids and trying to get ahead in their careers. hiding from immigration, and we're not all first-generation immigrants suffering under Tiger moms and dads who want us to be doctors when we really just want to be singers or cartoon artists or whatever.

There are middle and upper class minorities yo!!! We don't all have street swag from fighting our way through gang and drug addict infected neighborhoods every day, we're not all cholos running around South L.A. And as if things couldn't get crazy enough, not all of these brown people have poverty line-single parent-excessively urbanized stories. Did you know that, walking around in this great country of ours, there are brown people? Yeah, I know.

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