The strange irony of this novel—at least right now—is just how white it is. After years of laboring over a thriller where I bent over backwards to make the cast as inclusive as possible, somehow I’ve landed here.
I keep turning it over in my head, asking myself if there’s a character I could reimagine as non-white. But the nature of the story itself makes that a minefield. It’s not that I don’t want to go there; it’s that the themes I’m playing with are already volatile. If I layered race onto them, that might overwhelm everything else. Instead of engaging with the questions I want readers to wrestle with, the conversation could easily veer into a very different debate.
So I’m in this odd place: tackling heavy issues with a lighthearted touch, but deliberately leaving race out of it—not because it’s unimportant, but because it would dominate in ways that could drown out the other signals I’m trying to send. Is that the perfect solution? Probably not. But for now, it’s the one I can live with.
