I didn't take any of your comments on my Facebook post as criticism of me because you were much more affable there. You didn't say something like "What Internet have YOU been using?", which is, come on, a little snide. Perhaps you can't see why I would take that as criticism of my having a shocked reaction to the tumblr and Jezebel and posting about it, but, well, I did. So be it.

I'm not going to even begin to get into whether or not I think assuming all characters in a book are white, until the author tells you differently, is racist because that's a can of worms I don't want to delve into, nor do I think I'd do the topic any justice. But I will say that if a minority sees that as a problem, or an example of "white male homogeneity," I'm not going to argue against their opinion because their experience is not my experience. I can not know how something like that might make them feel.

I will say, though, that if I were Suzanne Collins and I read that someone had read the book, but overlooked the descriptions of her characters because they didn't find it important to the plot, I might be a little peeved. If she didn't want people to know what the characters she created looked like, then she wouldn't have written descriptions of what they look like. It doesn't matter if it was just one or two lines, in the case of Rue and Thresh. It's there because she wanted it to be there. Katniss is clearly described as looking different from her mother and her sister, and this is important to her character often feeling like an outsider. The fact that she looks more like Gale than she does her own family is, I think, important.

So I wouldn't say you overlooking the character descriptions offends me because it makes me think you're racist; it just kind of offends me as a writer who hopes people read all the words that I write...