Have you read Caitlin Kiernan? Murder of Angels wasn't a perfect book, but it had impressive prose, a real sense of wonder (and terror), a Vietnamese-American protagonist and a central lesbian relationship. I haven't yet read Dia Reeves's "Bleeding Violet," but the heroine is bipolar and biracial, and it's been getting some very nice reviews.
And I would be remiss in not mentioning Karen Healey's excellent "Guardian of the Dead," which has the first asexual-identifying character I've ever seen in fiction, a fat heroine (who knows martial arts!), and important characters who are Maori and Chinese-Australian, and handles its potential cultural appopriation issues with aplomb.
Sometimes genres get very narrow, when they get down to trying to press the same button over and over again, in this case the Laurell K. Hamilton button and the Charlaine Harris button (and the Stephenie Meyer button, for YA -- I don't think she's really had much influence on the adult market, though I could be wrong.) Secondary-world fantasy went through that in the 90s and I think that's why the market is not so good for it now. And what happens then is that the books that fall outside the narrowest confines of the genre get published by small presses, or they're shelved in 'mainstream,' or they don't get published at all. It takes more aggressive looking to find them, but I think they're out there. More and more I'm not picking books from the SF/Fantasy shelves, but looking for magical-realism stuff and weird fiction on the mainstream shelves.
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And I would be remiss in not mentioning Karen Healey's excellent "Guardian of the Dead," which has the first asexual-identifying character I've ever seen in fiction, a fat heroine (who knows martial arts!), and important characters who are Maori and Chinese-Australian, and handles its potential cultural appopriation issues with aplomb.
Sometimes genres get very narrow, when they get down to trying to press the same button over and over again, in this case the Laurell K. Hamilton button and the Charlaine Harris button (and the Stephenie Meyer button, for YA -- I don't think she's really had much influence on the adult market, though I could be wrong.) Secondary-world fantasy went through that in the 90s and I think that's why the market is not so good for it now. And what happens then is that the books that fall outside the narrowest confines of the genre get published by small presses, or they're shelved in 'mainstream,' or they don't get published at all. It takes more aggressive looking to find them, but I think they're out there. More and more I'm not picking books from the SF/Fantasy shelves, but looking for magical-realism stuff and weird fiction on the mainstream shelves.