Daughters of Dynasty–A Disappointment in the End

“Don’t be naïve,” Ba says scathingly. “Journalism isn’t about telling the truth, if there is even such a thing. It’s about controlling the narrative.”

-from Her Rebel Highness by Diana Ma

I was intrigued by the first book in Diana Ma’s Daughters of Dynasty series, “Heiress Apparently” where the main character, Gemma Huang, searches for answers about her family as well as finding her place in society. The first book, set in contemporary times, touches on liberal activist topics such as climate change, sustainability, feminism, and non-binariness. Without these, the stories would still be interesting enough that you would pick up the second book in the series which just recently came out.

Titled “Her Rebel Highness”, it actually goes back one generation to narrate the story of Gemma’s mom, Lei. Set against the backdrop of the Tiananmen Square massacre, it talks about squelching of free speech and the Communist elite’s efforts to retain their own power and riches while the masses live on a hand-to-mouth existence. With the system fighting against them, they have to overcome greater odds in order to attain even a small fraction of what the moneyed have–which is a well-paying job to pull themselves out of abject poverty. The gap between the rich and the poor was glaring and it was worthy to point out that this existed in a system of government that purports equality–where clearly there is none.

The student activists in the book also varied in their opinion of what they are actually fighting for. Some denounced capitalism and was all for socialism. Whether this is the author’s own personal opinion pushed into the character’s beliefs is unclear. However, understand, that this is probably what the young readers will be reading about when they get into these YA books.

I was able to get through the end of the book riding solely on the story events and plot, which can actually be interesting. However, when I got to the Author’s Note at the end of the book, that’s when it really turned sour for me.

Here, Diana Ma observed that the “peaceful [emphasis mine] Black Lives Matter protestors were met by tear gas, Tasers, and armed National Guard” while the “violent insurgents stormed the U.S. Capitol with the intent to harm our government representatives and overthrow a democratic election, maiming, and killing Capitol police in the process, …were met with words of praise and support from some of our leaders.” This upside-down understanding of what truly happened for both of these groups and events reflects either the author’s reliance for news events on mainstream media or her utter bias and perception of what truly happened at the BLM riots and J6 protestors despite all the evidence that is slowly being rolled out. Buying up the narrative of mainstream media as facts, she pushed this same narrative in her author’s note at the end. It might be a good idea for Diana Ma to reflect back on her own words regarding journalism which I post at the top of this post.

This left such a bitter taste in my mouth, and it made me question how easily, we, as parents, hand over our children’s minds and ideals over to pop culture–movies, TV shows, online videos, magazine, and books. It truly is time for parents to take back their children and really monitor what their children are reading and watching. I’ve read enough YA books published in the past few years to observe an injection of liberal agenda and talking points into these stories.

Parental Advisory

same-sex attraction

non-binary character

language

NOTE: At the bottom of her website is a Contact page where readers may wish to leave comments for the author. If you wish to leave her a message, it might be a good idea to politely point out facts about the damage caused by the BLM riots and how the Capitol police actually allowed protestors in. Any violence that ensued came from Antifa (infiltrators) who wanted to portray patriots as violent. The death of the Capitol Police was caused by something unrelated to the event. This had been confirmed by autopsies. The one notable death that occurred on January 6 was of unarmed Ashli Babbit who was shot in cold blood by a capitol police.