Her Story: Ladies In Literature is a special, month-long series on Pop! Goes The Reader in which we celebrate the literary female role models whose stories have inspired and empowered us since time immemorial. From Harriet M. Welsch to Anne Shirley, Becky Bloomwood to Hermione Granger, Her Story: Ladies In Literature is a series created for women, by women as twenty authors answer the question: “Who’s your heroine?” You can find a complete list of the participants and their scheduled guest post dates Here!
About Natasha Díaz
Natasha Díaz is a freelance writer and producer. As a screenwriter, Natasha has been a quarterfinalist in the Austin Film Festival and a finalist for both the NALIP Diverse Women in Media Fellowship and the Sundance Episodic Story Lab. Her personal essays have been published in the Establishment and the Huffington Post. Color Me In is her debut young adult novel. Originally from New York City, Natasha now lives in Oakland, California.
To me, a literary heroine is a woman whose fierceness leaps off the page. She doesn’t need to be a warrior in the traditional sense, wielding a weapon and chasing down evil at every corner. Don’t get me wrong, I love me a woman who can kick literal ass, but sometimes I just want someone I can relate to. A person who is messy and insecure and takes at least as long as I do to decide what delivery to order (we are talking hours). I want someone imperfect, honest, unafraid to make mistakes, and hungry to learn and grow and seek out the answers to the questions she needs to be her best self.
Enter: Rosa Santos, a teenage girl with an appetite for pastelitos, the sea, and a connection to her Cuban heritage. The problem is, her Abuela, the last member of their family to have lived on the island and the closest link to their Cuban identity, refuses to talk about it – well, beyond reminding Rosa about the curse placed upon the Santos women, which leads the men they fall for to be swallowed up by the ocean should they dare step foot in the water. Rosa lost her father to the sea before she ever got to know him, as did her mother on the night he and Abuela escaped from Cuba on a boat.
Rosa is at a crossroads in so many aspects of her life, she is applying to college, deciding whether she will stay in Port Coral, Florida or to get her higher education abroad in Havana, the only place in the world where her Abuela, the only stable member of her family, would not approve of her going. She is trying to figure out how to have a relationship with her mother who comes and goes from Port Coral as she chases her career as an artist while at the same time running away from her past. Rosa is falling in love and trying to keep that romance at an arms-length, afraid to doom Alex, the mysterious and cute pastelito chef who rolled into town, to the same fate as her father and Abuelo. The quest toward understanding her past, leads Rosa to realize that she has to forge a new path between her history and her future, one that is unique to her person and exists within her own heart and experience. Her journey is inspiring and beautiful and tragic, but in the end, it is empowering. It is a ballad of strength and perseverance for anyone who has ever felt they don’t have a right to be who they are or own where they come from.
So many Americans are members of various diasporas, children of parents or grandparents who left (or were forced from) their homeland and started anew. Often, books depict these characters as simply Americans, citizens of this country who have acclimated and perhaps still hold on to a handful of traditions or customs as they exist within the context of their new home. As a woman who comes from a multiracial background and is the daughter of a first-generation half-Brazilian half-Liberian American mother, I felt so seen by Rosa and her struggles and the way that the book remained true to her Cuban culture, unwhitewashed and unfiltered. To see a character as strong and driven as Rosa echo so many of the feelings I have had over the course of my own life was not only refreshing but extremely necessary.
We can all take a page from Rosa and her brand of heroine as she fights with herself, for herself, because sometimes, the internal struggle is just as difficult to conquer as one that exists outside the surface.
Title Color Me In
Author Natasha Díaz
Intended Target Audience Young Adult
Genre Contemporary, Realistic Fiction
Publication Date August 20th 2019 by Delacorte Press
Find It On Goodreads ● Amazon ● Chapters ● The Book Depository
Debut YA author Natasha Díaz pulls from her personal experience to inform this powerful coming-of-age novel about the meaning of friendship, the joyful beginnings of romance, and the racism and religious intolerance that can both strain a family to the breaking point and strengthen its bonds.
Who is Nevaeh Levitz?
Growing up in an affluent suburb of New York City, sixteen-year-old Nevaeh Levitz never thought much about her biracial roots. When her Black mom and Jewish dad split up, she relocates to her mom’s family home in Harlem and is forced to confront her identity for the first time.
Nevaeh wants to get to know her extended family, but one of her cousins can’t stand that Nevaeh, who inadvertently passes as white, is too privileged, pampered, and selfish to relate to the injustices they face on a daily basis as African Americans. In the midst of attempting to blend their families, Nevaeh’s dad decides that she should have a belated bat mitzvah instead of a sweet sixteen, which guarantees social humiliation at her posh private school. Even with the push and pull of her two cultures, Nevaeh does what she’s always done when life gets complicated: she stays silent.
It’s only when Nevaeh stumbles upon a secret from her mom’s past, finds herself falling in love, and sees firsthand the prejudice her family faces that she begins to realize she has a voice. And she has choices. Will she continue to let circumstances dictate her path? Or will she find power in herself and decide once and for all who and where she is meant to be?
