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Can you imagine not reading Terry McMillan's Waiting to Exhale? This book was written by a Black woman. When she wrote it, do you think she only considered it would be appealing to women of color? This is often the response I get from romance readers who are not "women of color." Although the books have Black characters on the cover and the main players are African-American, the story is still a romance. At the core of the novel, it's a ROMANCE.
My first published novel was Whispers of Love. I didn't write it because my characters were Black. They only happened to be Black. The story, a woman in the witness protection program identifies her ex-husband to doctors who are trying to save her child's life, bringing the father and the danger that sent her into the program back, would have worked if the characters were green, or blue, or had no color at all.
Should I have passed up reading Amy Tan's book The Kitchen God's Wife because I am not Chinese? I grew up in Buffalo, New York. Shouldn't I have read Michael Lee West's American Pie because I'm not a southern woman? Of course not. We'd consider these reasons absurd. Yet I've stood in the bookstore aisle or sat behind a table at a booksigning and had people ignore ethnic novels because they were written for Black women.
The novels were written for women (without the adjective), lovers of romance and anyone who wants a good story.
Anybody ever think what women of color read before there were ethnic romances? Who should read an ethnic romance -- everyone!
