So question for you.  As you know, here at Stacks are trying to broaden our horizons by seeking out stories, narratives and authors from diverse voices.  Last year we created our Diverse Stacks, Diverse Lives Reading challenge and we had mixed results.  I think we both only completed half of the challenge.  This year we decided to split up our challenge and focus on different aspects of the our original Challenge. Kate is leading our Diverse Authors Challenge and I’m spearheading our Diverse Narrators Challenge.  So far this year I have read 10 books and I have read some diverse narrators from Essun in The Fifth Season, Ms. Marvel and Frangie and Rainey from Silver Stars.  I’m starting to read King’s Cage by Victoria Aveyard, who has described her main character, Mare as a mix race (white/Latinx).  I’m looking at my challenge and wondering about characters like Mare and Essun.  They are both described as olive or dark skinned respectively.  They are not the traditional white heroines that we have come to identify in fantasy and well fiction in general but they do not reside in  our world.  They live in a fantasy worlds that the authors created on their own.  In the case of Mare though, she lives in a world that came out of the ruins of the US after years of wars and natural disasters. Technically, Norta is the US but hundreds of the years in the future.  So can we count them in our challenge?  Is it cheating?  Or is it okay since they represent people and cultures in our world.  They may not be African American or Latina in the sense that we define them but they represent that narrative.  Women of Color can look to these characters and others like them and see themselves in them and isn’t that in the spirit of our challenge?  So dear readers out there, how do you define diversity in our reading?  Are strict in definition or if a character is define as “dark skinned” or “olive skinned” or anything but “fair skinned” as a diverse characters?

Let’s discuss this, sound off in the comments below.