There's been a couple RWBY books, mostly published by Scholastics (the middle/high school bookfair company). I read one of them, After the Fall it was called, following team CVFY.
It was... mostly forgettable. There were a few good plot elements that were intriguing and rather creative, but also a number of questionable decisions made throughout the novel. My favorite bits were with the old man and his grandson, def some strong literature with those two and the plot surrounding them. The main antagonists don't make much sense, though, imo. Each main character gets their own character development moments in the novel, but one definitely stands out as... not that great imo. All around, probably a 6 out 10 for me; above average, but not by much. Enjoyable nonetheless.
It's been a few months since I've read the book and I'm forgetting a lot about it, I should probably read a summary or something of it.
I'm curious on your second point. Could you elaborate?
If I remember correctly Fox is the first actual character in the show that has a skin tone darker than neon white. And even then he was barely a character. Then in the book they decided that he was blind, antisocial, and telepathic. And to me it felt like just the writers trying to excuse themselves for not having an actual black character until Flint Coal
Technically, Emerald came first, but yeah. Emerald is/was an unrepentant thief and a villain (narratively speaking), Flynt Coal is a bit of a racist caricature, and most of the characters w/ darker skin tones introduced in V3 -- Amber, Arslan, Ciel, etc. -- aren't characters so much as set dressing. And that's purposefully ignoring the White Fang which is basically filled with stuff you'd see from Fox News.
Personally, I 100% believe it was all incompetence rather than intentional, but the fact remains it is there, and a lot of fans don't see it (I wasn't participating in the fandom until RT's shutdown but sadly I too had to have all the bigotry pointed out to me).