“Where Do You Get Your Ideas?” is a series of blogposts whose goal is to support writers by answering a question readers often ask. Today’s blog introduces Carol Siyahi Hicks and her debut novel, The Color of Acceptance.
The idea for Hicks’s book is rooted in her experiences in the 1960s civil rights movement. As a 19-year-old college student, she had traveled south to work on voter registration in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. This was in March 1965, not long after the murder and discovery of young civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, who had disappeared at night as they drove along Highway 19 in Neshoba County, Mississippi. That experience haunted her, fueling her sorrow that racial and ethnic discrimination still taint our nation.
Hicks describes The Color of Acceptance as “a tale of prejudice, passion, and perseverance.” The novel is the story of an adopted biracial child struggling to discover her identity. It involves ongoing discrimination, loves lost and found, and the challenge to wed her fervor for social justice to her art.
A journalist for most of her life, The Color of Acceptance is her first novel, a challenge that took her five years to write. She describes writing a novel as “the hardest thing I ever did. It’s a whole different animal, so you could say I learned to write a novel as I went. I think that it took so long to write, because I am a perfectionist and saw this as a labor of love. And I cared so deeply about the subject matter.”
Hicks reflects that “those who travel the writer’s path know what it means to bare your soul in the hope of touching the reader with our shared humanity. I hope that readers seeking something of value, find this work a worthwhile journey.”
The Color of Acceptance is available on Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+color+of+acceptance+carol+hicks&crid=3THKXRN7PRIG7&sprefix=the+color+of+acceptance+carol+hicks%2Caps%2C93&ref=nb_sb_noss
