In the mid ‘80s, when I was in law school, I participated in a seminar about how American law has treated African-American women over history. One lively discussion that stuck with me concerned whether a white person could ever fully understand, let alone properly describe, the life of a black woman. A classmate, an African-American woman, categorically stated that it couldn’t be done. Sullenly, I maintained that it should be possible.

This conversation came back to me, years later, when I wrote No Castles Here. About half the important characters are African-American. The primary setting is the inner-city in an imaginary neighborhood of Camden, NJ, a city where the majority of residents are African-American. Could I, as a white person write about the African-American experience?

Many, like my colleague back in the 1980s, strongly believe it isn’t possible for me to do it — as illustrated in this blog discussion about the blurb for the book. But that wasn’t what I had set out to do.

I wanted to portray a poor bullied loser who encounters a bit of magic in his life. Because the references were easier for me, I made him white. I based his character, his family’s character, the neighbors, and the neighborhood on the hundreds of people I met and on the neighborhoods I wandered over the years, in the New Haven area, Brooklyn, and during my short time in Camden and Philadelphia.

Whether I was successful in what I set out to do, others will have to decide. But regardless of the success, the effort taught me humility. It made me realize how much I didn’t know. Before spending time with my characters, I was often guilty of white default, which is choosing the color of my character’s skin the same way I might chose his or her eye color, and not paying attention to the details of the person’s life. Being faithful to those details required a lot of effort, and made me far more sensitive to how they can be gotten wrong. I wrote about this recently in an essay published in Anna Tambour’s wonderful website: It’s not like choosing the color of her hair. It’s a very personal essay, but it helped work out for me the wrongs of white default.

The Minnesota Parent magazine came out with its “100+ great books to read this summer” issue. Much to my pleasure, No Castles Here was mentioned as recommended for “tween idealists and deep thinkers.”

Thank you Minnesota Parent!

Great news! An audio version of No Castles Here will be released at the same time as the paperback edition. That’s March 10, 2009, to be more specific.

I can’t wait to hear the production!