The relationship Inej shares with her parents is so, so important to me. Not many YA books talk of the beauty of acceptance and support from a family and celebrates that love, which Inej’s parents do, for each other and their children. That’s just one reason though; found family is just as celebratory.
More than that, Inej as a Suli girl, who is brown and an acrobat, severs many lines of linear and stereotypical thinking. Often brown cultures, with regard to parenting across continents, are thought of as very narrow or close minded, toxic, abusive, neglectful and outright and the blame is so heavily put on the fact that these families are brown. People from these families are not held responsible; their brownness is held responsible. The cultures are used to justify that, as if such trauma were a commonplace experience in these families. If people of other cultures themselves can so plainly mention it and say parenting is just like that if people hail from these communities, imagine how much this line of thought is ingrained into children from within these cultures.
Walking into the book, I was half expecting the painful, far from her family or consistent disagreements that Inej might have been subjected to. This comes in addition to the fact that YA books often loosely mention families, rarely address the impact they have on children.
So the enormous joy of seeing such a healthy relationship between Inej’s parents, of such understanding and warmth between the morals, values and wisdom Inej holds with significance and the sort of respect she has for her parents is so deeply important to me. Not just because it breaks the aforementioned perspective, but also because it reinforces a positive influence and importance that families can have on characters. Something that YA books tend to not explore enough. It also implores you to think about healthy, established relationships and how else you could view them, no matter how minimal information canon provides about that.
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