What I wound up spending my Barnes and Noble coupon on last night was a hardback copy of Justine Larbalestier‘s Liar.

I’d seen a lot of traffic about this book on the publishing blogs a while back, pretty much because her publisher had initially opted to put a white face on the cover–and her protagonist, Micah, is not a white girl. I wanted to show my support of putting brown faces on covers if indeed the characters they are depicting are brown people, and so I felt it appropriate to buy a copy of the book.

Not to mention it sounds like a fascinating story in general, and an exercise in the ultimate in Unreliable Narrators. I will of course be reviewing it when I read it, and I encourage y’all to think about checking it out too, especially if you’re interested in YA reading.

This same issue is why I want also to check out Racing the Dark by Alaya Johnson. She guest-posted on Justine’s blog about how her father had tried to advise her to not put a brown person on her book’s cover, and how she’d found that Borders exiled her fantasy novel to the African-American section, where, sadly, most fantasy readers are not likely to bother to look for it. Racing the Dark sounds to me also like a refreshingly different fantasy novel, just because it’s not the traditional pseudo-European setting you’re likely to get, and that alone makes me want to check it out.