She hadn’t read down to the end yet, when a girl named Amber is mentioned: “When Reese unexpectedly collides with the beautiful Amber Gray, her search for the truth is forced in an entirely new direction…” The person who asked that question had only read the first paragraph of the jacket copy, which described Reese’s feelings about David: “Reese and her debate team partner and longtime crush David are in Arizona when it happens.” I answered, firstly: “What makes you think Reese is straight?” At one of them, someone in the audience asked, “Is Reese white and straight in order to make Adaptation more mainstream?” Last fall, I did several events to promote Adaptation. So, when Adaptation came out, I was known for writing YA about nonstraight, nonwhite characters. I am both a lesbian and a Chinese American, and the subject of my identity comes up often when I do interviews or panels. Ash was a lesbian retelling of Cinderella, and Huntress was inspired by Chinese and Japanese traditions. My first two novels, Ash and Huntress, were YA fantasies about queer girls. They’re X-Files-inspired science fiction thrillers about a 17-year-old girl, Reese Holloway, who has to uncover what exactly happened to her and her friend David Li while they were unconscious at a secret military base in Nevada following a freak car accident. Inheritance picks up minutes after the end of Adaptation, and I think of the two books as one big story cut in two halves. Yesterday my novel Inheritance, the sequel to Adaptation, was published.
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