Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Diverse Book Tours presents Hush Puppy by Lisa Cresswell



Welcome to the Hush Puppy blog tour! I’m Lisa Cresswell, the author of Hush Puppy, as well as several other young adult and middle grade books.  Hush Puppy has been published for about a year now and the reviews have been overwhelmingly positive. Here’s a link to a few of them if you like to read that sort of thing. In a nutshell, it’s a Romeo and Juliet sort of tale set in the rural south where white kids and black kids still don’t mix much.
 

I wrote the book as an exploration of friendship and betrayal, but because the plot focuses on the relationship between a black girl and a white boy, I couldn’t help addressing their race and the effect it had on them. It didn’t start out being a story about race relations, but in a way, it is. In the end, the heroine Corrine pays a hefty price for befriending a white boy. I remembered growing up in North Carolina how blacks and whites interacted.  Things haven’t changed all that much from the 1960s in some places.

Right about the time the book was going to be published, Trayvon Martin was murdered by a man who assumed he was up to no good because he was black. It really brought home the fact that things have not changed for black Americans and just how much they need to. I dedicated the book to Trayvon and all the other kids who have tasted the bitterness of hate. It breaks my heart all over again to add Michael Brown’s name to that list this year.

These stories need desperately to be told and shared. That’s why I support the #WeNeedDiverseBooks movement and why I wanted to tour Hush Puppy with Diverse Book Tours.

I hope you’ll visit the other sites on the blog tour, subscribe to my blog for updates, enter the giveaway, and add Hush Puppy to your”‘ TO BE READ” list on Good Reads. I hope you'll read, review, and discuss it. I answer all the comments I get on the blog, so if you have a question or a comment, please ask away. I’d love to hear from you.

Peace everyone. I wish you happy holidays~


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