YMMV / Save the Pearls

• Audience-Alienating Premise: It's a series about a future full of evil Black people and a heroic White girl who wears blackface and comes off as pretty prejudiced herself, and relies on other outdated tropes played straight (e.g. Food Pills). This all but alienated the general audience and the author had to resort to Vanity Publishing.
• Bile Fascination: It's likely the only reason anyone's even heard of this duology is due to people wanting to check just how bad the portrayal of racism is, after it got huge amounts of criticism for it. It would probably just have been overlooked as one of many teen dystopian novels published at the time if it weren't for this.
• Broken Aesop:
  • The series is ostensibly a fable about the foolishness of racism, set in a world where an environmental catastrophe has left melanin content as a prized thing, with blacks on top and whites on the bottom, with an interracial romance to drive home the point. What it is, however, is a series where white people are called "Pearls" and blacks are called "Coals," the white female lead starts off severely uncomfortable around black people (to the point of using slurs like "haughty Coal" in inner monologue), white people often wear blackface to "pass," the white lead is threatened with rape at the hands of a giant black man, and the love story is described as a "Beauty and the Beast" fable where the black love interest literally turns into a beast thanks to genetic engineering.
  • Also in regards to Bramson, his being turned into a chimera is treated as him having a chance to understand what it's like to experience being a social pariah... except that he was one of the most fair characters in the cast (protecting Eden multiple times from black people trying to kill her, hiring a white woman for a good position as stewardess of his private jet after her husband died in Branson's service, etc). Eden is the one who constantly misconstrues his actions as having ulterior motives.
• Don't Shoot the Message: Victoria Foyt claimed the books were intended to have an anti-racism message, conveyed via a Persecution Flip. This isn't an inherently bad idea, but many agree that this series really drops the ball with this, with its messages coming across as ham-fisted at best and offensive at worst.
• Narm: Let's face it, it's difficult to take the attempt at a Persecution Flip seriously when the minority race are called "Pearls." Especially when there are worse things to call Whites in this setup. But no, they get called after precious stones.
• Older Than They Think:
  • Save the Pearls has a similar premise to the Noughts & Crosses series, of which the first book was published in 2001 (nine years before Revealing Eden), although many people find that Noughts & Crosses handles the subject matter in a far more sensitive and nuanced manner. Noughts & Crosses was also written by a black author, unlike Save the Pearls.
  • A 1995 film starring John Travolta and Harry Belafonte used a similar Persecution Flip as a backdrop.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: To this day, the main talking point around this duology is that it badly bungles its anti-racism message to the point of actually coming off as racist. Victoria Foyt stated this wasn't her intention but for most readers it's hard not to interpret it this way given its reliance on racial stereotyping and over-emphasis on saintly white people being oppressed and threatened by people of color; Foyt's attempts to defend the duology's content also came off as tone-deaf or unconvincing. Notably, the racism stuff greatly overshadows the more bizarre plot elements, such as the protagonists hanging out with Aztecs and a furry romance.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: While Eden living in an oppressive society where she's discriminated against and made to feel lesser for her skin colour - along with the looming threat of her being cut off from government support if she can't find a mate by 18 - initially sets her up as a Woobie, the way Eden is depicted from page one diminishes this. She's openly racist towards black people, including frequently thinking about how much she despises them, hates being touched by them, assumes they all want to attack her and refers to them as "damn Coal[s]" (the latter of which she says is a slur) with little provocation. This is presumably intended to be a manifestation of Eden's hatred for the oppressive system she lives under, but it comes off more like she just hates black people rather than the system that favours them and she judges all black people as terrible based on their race/appearance (which is never treated as an intentional character flaw either), even though there are several black people who treat her decently and disagree with the discrimination; this includes her own love interest, whom she continues to show hostility towards even after he saves her life multiple times. Readers have also noted that her fantasies about ending the system seem to be less about creating an equal society and more about creating a white-dominant society.

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