Interview with L V Lewis, author of Fifty Shades of Jungle Fever
Tell us about Fifty Shades of Jungle Fever Fifty Shades of Jungle Fever is, of course, a parody of the very famous book Fifty Shades of Grey. Keisha Beale and Tristan White are the counterparts of Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey. Keisha Beale is a twenty-four year old biracial woman from the south side of Chicago who’s two years out of college at DePaul, and ready to put her major and passion to work. Keisha‘s dream of running her own recording studio, record and music store with her best friend, Jada Jameson, is jeopardized by a botched first meeting with venture capitalist Tristan White. White is the thirty-two year old billionaire CEO of White Enterprises who comes from a long line of wealth and lives life as a “One-Percenter” on the Gold Coast of Chicago. He was born into a life of privilege, and is accustomed to controlling every aspect of his life. Tristan White isn’t fifty shades of f**ked up like Christian Grey, but he does have some issues in his past that have largely shaped who he is at present. In this story, Keisha is the one with the past that affects their relationship. Fifty Shades of Jungle Fever, like many before it, is a story about forbidden love in which the taboos are an interracial romance, socio-economic class, intermingling of business and personal relationships. When humor and BDSM is added to the mix, the resulting story is one that takes the reader on a roller-coaster ride through a gamut of emotions. What genre is it? I have languished somewhere in the middle of the top 100 lists for African American literature on Amazon for the past few weeks, where I have been sandwiched between Toni Morrison and Attica Locke on occasion, two African American authors I respect immensely. This made for such an incongruous grouping, I had to take a print screen of it, so I can have bragging rights that I was once on a list with these two. What kind of readers will it appeal to? What was it about Fifty Shades of Grey that inspired you to write your book? What can we expect from the rest of the series? The final two will be Jada and Nathan’s stories, and will be even less like the Fifty Shades saga. Jada had a much different upbringing than Keisha. Her family has always been upwardly mobile, but even her family has its skeletons in the closet. As she enters Nathan’s world of professional sports, she is thrust into a situation that plays out similar to “Basketball Wives.” However, Jada, an even stronger personality than Keisha, will eventually learn to handle it, just as she embraced her Domme nature when it was a brave new world. The sub-genre of interracial erotica is quite rich and fertile. Why do readers and writers find it such a draw? Finally, I am a believer in the human race, as I’m sure many other men and women out there are. I think there is also a draw to these stories because they help to dispel the ethnic preconceived notions that separate us. You have talked about being criticized for your portrayal of African-Americans in this book. You are an African-American yourself. Can you address the criticism? I expected reviews that touched on my writing itself, on the mechanics of it, and my adherence to the plot, where I ended the first story and the like, but my first “reviews” on GoodReads were people calling into question my audacity to write this book at all. I call it blind censorship. They were judging it unread by the subject matter alone. Mind you, some of it was hate for Fifty Shades of Grey, but some labeled me racist and misogynistic right out of the gate. I also had people who asked for ARCs and entered the Giveaways only to pan the book because they didn’t get the wry ethnic humor, or were grossly offended by it. I had to begin my next Giveaway with the disclaimer: If you are offended by ethnic humor, please don’t read this book! My message to those individuals is my favorite quote right now: “People have the right to call themselves whatever they like. That doesn’t bother me. It’s other people doing the calling that bothers me.” ~ Octavia Butler I suppose it’s my favorite now because of the controversy surrounding my book when it was first released. I was pretty much told by someone not of my ethnicity that I didn’t have the right to call myself or my characters, what I wanted to. Nothing spurs me to action more than when I’m told I can’t do something. Tell us a bit about yourself. Have you got a blog where readers can keep up with your work? Which social media platforms do you use and how can we follow you on them? Where can we buy Fifty Shades of Jungle Fever? What’s next? I’m also in the planning stages of a YA series under a penname (my children need something from me out there that I can push for them to read). The two romance novels I’m writing are of the more vanilla variety. *** |
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My interview at Indie Author Land. Check it out, leave copious comments