Where creative storytelling meets purposeful strategy
Author:SHE LIT EDITOR
I started she lit in 2016 as a personal blog to describe my adventures in Los Angeles aspiring to be novelist while holding down a day job as a news editor and engaging with other readers on the hottest books of the moment. From my love of creating news and features content, I reshaped she lit into a blog for women looking for interesting stories on the books they’re reading, the authors they’re following, and everything in between. Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | shewrites@shelit.com.
Summary: Boom Town by Nic Stone centers on a strip club employee who searches for her former work bestie after the replacement hiree also goes missing. Now that two women have disappeared without a trace, she finds all trails lead to one mysterious man.
Synopsis: Micah, who goes by Lyriq, works at Boom Town, an established strip club in Atlanta. She gained notoriety performing with Felice, known as Lucky. Lyriq distances herself after a devastating breast cancer diagnosis. She has undergone surgeries to remove her breasts and is deciding on reconstruction surgery. The burden is too heavy to share with Lucky.
But Lucky takes the distance as abandonment. She finds solace with a customer named Thomas McIntyre. Thomas is not the average patron; he is a White man and a secretive music executive. He tells Lucky he wants a baby while his wife does not. Lucky gravitates toward Thomas’ promise of helping her find meaningful work outside Boom Town.
Lyriq is usually resting whenever she gets a chance at the club. She can no longer dance, but she helps keep the club running smoothly. One night, she finds Lucky after an assault. She knows Lucky needs her, but when she tries to understand the turn of events, Lucky is gone.
When Lucky stops showing up to work, Lyriq assigns Lucky’s locker to Damaris, who becomes Charm. She vouches for Charm as a favor, but the teen is having trouble applying her dance skills to Boom Town’s expectations. Then, Charm disappears. But so do thousands of dollars from the club. Lyriq is now forced to find Charm (and the money) and start the search for Lucky.
Theme: Power, privilege, and control
Like in most (if not all) stories surrounding a strip club, the power dynamics are clear-cut. The dancers are at the bottom of the hierarchy. The clients who are enjoying their bodies hold the power. In this story, the women are navigating their lives around the obstacles to hold onto their power.
Lucky and Charm don’t matter to Bones, the club’s manager. He is furious about Charm stealing money from the club. But he sees their disappearances as annoyances; he has to hire more dancers. And on top of that, he is losing money over Lucky and Lyriq’s act coming to an abrupt halt. It is due to Lyriq’s health condition, which triggers a domino effect as Lucky becomes dangerously close to Thomas and subsequently disappears.
The club holds some power over them. Lyriq stays at the job to pay for her health care. Lucky has a master’s degree in education, yet makes more money as a dancer than on a teacher’s salary. Then, she gets trapped in Thomas’s web of deceit to the point Lyriq belatedly questions the bond.
The surroundings these women had lived in before the strip club felt overpowering as well. Before she became Lucky, Felice separated herself from her family. Before she became Charm, Damaris was involved with a youth pastor at her church. She was underage while believing she was in a mature relationship. To find their power, they found themselves at Boom Town, where their power was under threat again. Micah, Felice, and Damaris are fighting to gain control over their situations.
Theme: Missing Black women and chosen family
A body is found in the first chapter of the novel. Lady Josephine, an unhoused woman, discovers the body in the woods, where she has created a home. She represents a segment of the population of missing Black women.
The main theme of the novel is the plight of missing Black women and how they can quietly disappear from a community. Boom Town is a place of business, but when two employees stop coming to work without an explanation, nothing happens. Nobody reports them missing. People who are looking for them feel like they could get more done than the police. And some people do not connect their absence to a disappearance.
It’s a strip club, while most corporate workplaces will at least contact authorities if an employee fails to show up. Boom Town is a place where many workers have severed ties with friends and families outside of it. This is why Lyriq knows she must look for Lucky and Charm.
As for Charm, she has Dejuan, a friend she was living with, who comes to the club looking for her and raises the alarm on her disappearance. This heightens Lyriq’s concern and forces her to activate the hunt for Lucky, too.
Theme: Motherhood
Being a mother takes on many definitions in this story. Lyriq serves as a motherly figure to Lucky and Charm. She knows she is the one looking out for these girls in a dangerous environment, inside and outside Boom Town.
According to Thomas, his wife, LaBrettney aka Brett, does not want a baby. He is obsessed with having a child. Lucky finds herself becoming empathetic. But her empathy leads to danger. More threads tied to motherhood and reproductive choices affect Felice, Damaris, and Brett.
Conclusion: The author’s adult debut novel has heart and grit, but it is a rocky read with multiple first-person points of view shifting back and forth from the present and the past. The writing is stream-of-consciousness, so the characters’ voices lift off the page. For some readers, this may distract them from engaging with the story. There is a lot of exposition, where the author explains backstory upon backstory and bookends chapters with the present. The story is unique and thrilling for a commercial fiction novel, but the changes in voice and writing style weigh it down, potentially heightening or diminishing engagement.
I started She Lit in 2016 as a blog sharing my adventures as an aspiring author. At the time, “aspiring” fit the bill. I had been writing (and rewriting) a manuscript for several years, but I had zero idea about how to push it out into the world. (Side note: It was never published. It still needs work 😉)
I was living in Los Angeles, where literary lifestyle events ruled my calendar. I was making an effort to be in the same rooms as best-selling authors, literary agents, book club enthusiasts, bookish celebrities, and other aspiring and emerging writers. Also, by moving to L.A. from Sacramento, I was fully aware of my fortune: the access to these events in a metropolitan area known as a creative capital.
These events were more than entertaining — they birthed wisdom that I knew other writers would be interested in. Because the blog centered on me, I named it She Lit. I was a woman fostering the spark in my potential authorship.
But sharing the wisdom could only go so far. One of the main pieces of advice I received and would give to writers is: read books. Obvious, right? But many writers lose the time to read books when they are knee-deep in a manuscript, screenplay, or any other creative writing project. The time especially disappears when you are juggling a full-time job, parenting, schooling, and other life priorities.
That’s when the advice and experiences shifted to a book blog. But I was competing in a social media sphere where book influencers seemed to be reading a book every day, whereas I spent most of my free time developing my own stories. I read at least three books a month, but it seemed to be no match with BookTok, BookTube, and Bookstagram.
Over the post-pandemic years, I had been querying literary agents about my young adult social justice novel. I had won a competition that I believed would open doors. Before the competition, some literary agents showed interest (during the Black Lives Matter movement) but eventually rejected my story. I kept pushing forward because that’s what you’re supposed to do as a writer, or so I was told.
After querying 100+ literary agents (more than half after my industry win), I decided to pivot to another unfinished manuscript, forgotten on my computer. Thankfully, I was a writer overwhelmed with too many ideas, leaving remnants of stories in myriad files and folders on the computer and on my desk.
Now, I’m querying my upmarket adult fiction novel. Yet I had ignored She Lit to get to this point. I didn’t want to forsake my beloved book blog, but I evolved as an emerging writer. The original intent gnawed at me: I want to share the wisdom I extracted from literary experiences, as well as the wisdom I gained independently about the industry.
I made mistakes, mainly because I was given advice that didn’t jibe with me. We’ve all been there, but the publishing industry is complex enough that the information you receive must be put under a magnifying glass before you act. Being a creative storyteller means you have to be purposely strategic. That’s why I crafted this mission statement:
She Lit is a literary lifestyle brand spotlighting women’s voices in publishing through tailored content and data-driven insights that inspire readers and empower writers.
The She Lit newsletter will still provide insights on publishing, as in its previous iteration, but will focus more on published authors, emerging writers, and aspiring writers. As a longtime journalist, I view trendy stories and buried data as learning models. I plan to share how the latest happenings and statistics will relate to your approach in getting your story published.
Colored Television by Danzy Senna ventures into the touchy subject of biracial identity through a protagonist desperate to share her story but finds it is considered indigestible in book form to a screen-obsessed society, which she figures would rather consume her story through TV.
Jane, a biracial woman proud of her ethnicities, is a literature professor at a liberal arts college who can’t wait for her sabbatical. She plans to spend it finishing her epic novel that spans generations, decades, and centuries. It centers on biracial identity politics in the U.S. and is told through various characters. She feels her powerful novel will change America so much that it will become a classic. If she gets this sophomore novel published, then she will be granted tenure. But one of her female colleagues returned to campus without tenure because her epic novel was rejected. She pushes those negative thoughts as she submits her long-awaited book to her agent and editor. The book has to work for her as she and her family house-sit for her uber-successful TV producer friend in a Los Angeles mansion. They don’t have permanent housing, and she feels her talent should bring her a mansion as well.
Weeks later, Jane learns that her agent and editor could barely read her work. It’s considered a complete labyrinthine mess. They drop her since they waited a decade for just the rough draft. The explanatory rejection authors fear when the publishing middlemen are unable to decipher your story is described on page 79 in the hardcover edition:
Later, Jane would only remember certain phrases. Josiah felt the book was “Frankensteinian.” Like the monster, he said, her book was an ungainly mishmash— and like the monster, it felt sloppily constructed, the stitches and scars showing. He said it was sarcastic, bracing and cruel at times, mawkish and purple at others. It bewildered him. He had no idea why she was cramming all these figures together. What did Zoe Kravitz have to do with the Melungeon people in nineteenth-century Tennessee? How did any of it connect to Sydney and Justin, O.J. and Nicole’s kids, or to Jane’s own creature — this fragile, trembling 1950s film actress who roamed the book in her negligee, barefoot and suicidal, worrying about the color of the baby growing inside of her. Josiah didn’t understand what Jane was attempting to do here, but he cared about Jane and felt that publishing this novel would be a kind of career suicide.
Not only are Jane’s literary dreams shattered, but her economic stability is uncertain. Her husband, Lenny, is a struggling artist obsessed with learning Japanese to have an exhibit in Japan. Their daughter, Ruby, would rather play with the White dolls as she makes more White friends in their temporary living status. Their son, Finn, is on the autism spectrum as they seek to understand his needs. Jane realizes that no book means no tenure. Out of desperation, she goes through her friend’s desk to find contacts in the television industry. She ends up meeting mega-producer Hampton Ford, who seems interested in her work. His assistants, Layla, the “Nigerian Valley Girl,” and Topher, the “perennially lost white boy,” are pathetic at pitching premises for shows. But Hampton likes Jane’s idea of having a biracial family sitcom akin to Black-ish, so he asks Jane to join the team.
After pitching contemporary episodes, Jane feels proud about this new phase in her creative career. Except Hampton is not feeling any of the finessed ideas. Then, Jane tells him about her epic novel about biracial identity. Hampton is so intrigued that he offers to read her manuscript. Jane feels her fortune is finally changing, so she looks for a house in her ideal neighborhood she nicknamed Multicultural Mayberry. She prepares for a high-earning career like the friend who allowed her to house-sit. As she realizes all her dreams may not come true the way she hoped, she wonders if her stories will ever see the light of day.
The story shows one’s racial and ethnic identities through stereotypical lenses. And these lenses are developed from stories by writers who do not have a connection to the said group or groups they are writing about. Jane and Lenny have thoughtful conversations on racial and biracial identities constantly throughout the story as they try to figure out how best to tell stories about the biracial experience. Lenny is Black, but because of this, he feels he understands the complexity of the conversation, while Jane wants to share her stories centered on biracial characters, real-life figures, and pointed moments in history. When she receives the opportunity to work with a powerhouse like Hampton Ford, she applies her deep intelligence and subject expertise to construct everyday sitcom episodes that will impact audiences of all backgrounds. She is so hungry to share her perspectives, outside of her pillow talk with her husband. This eagerness, which can also be interpreted as desperation, eventually harms her in the end.
Another subject woven through the story is the high rate of rejection in creative industries. Jane is a debut novelist who hasn’t delivered her sophomore success. She feels the pressure to secure a book deal to secure her tenure as a professor and home as a mother. She appears lost in the mix, trying to take care of her children and support her husband’s art while looking for an avenue for her story to live. Her mind races back to a time when she chose her husband, moved from New York City to Los Angeles for a new creative start, and started having kids to understand her current situation.
Overall, the book details the ups and downs of a creative career when someone feels ready for the next stage, and the stage keeps moving. It also dives deep into biracial ethnic studies. The main character struggles to share her lived experience as a biracial woman when her intellectual approach is dismissed. The question of how to bring her art forth to the public lingers throughout Jane’s story.
*Given a copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review*
One of Our Kind by Nicola Yoon is a slow-burn psychological thriller set in a Black utopia where race is no longer a barrier, but when some characters seek to improve race relations outside the utopia, they notice their neighbors eerily avoid the topic of race.
Jasmyn is a Black woman carrying the world’s weight on her shoulders. Besides being a wife to King, a former teacher, and a mother to six-year-old Kamau, she is a civil rights attorney worrying about her cases and the ones that make the news. Those cases, like the one involving a young Black girl named Mercy Simpson being shot by police, have her wanting to stay rooted in her Los Angeles community. But King wants to move to Liberty, California.
Over the last few years, King has transitioned his career from public education to finance. This has elevated the family to a new income bracket. Now, they can move to Liberty, which is 100% Black and high-income. Located on the outskirts of Los Angeles, Liberty is the brainchild of Carlton Way, a financial entrepreneur who happens to also be King’s mentor. Jasmyn is unsure about the mansion life, but King convinces her that it is the next step for their expanding family. Since she is pregnant with their second child, Jasmyn finally approves the move. She can’t wait to be around her own people and not worry about the weight of the world at home as a Black woman.
Right away, Jasmyn notices a coldness among her new Liberty neighbors. She brings up the developments in the Mercy Simpson case, and her neighbors don’t seem concerned. They may be too relaxed with their wealth and addiction to the wellness center atop the hill. She notices them meditating up there in their robes, and it doesn’t sit right with her.
The only neighbor who shares Jasmyn’s concern is Keisha, who’s also Kamau’s teacher at the local elementary school. Keisha also detects the coldness and prefers to stay away from the wellness center, though her wife frequents the center. Together, they decide to start a Black Lives Matter chapter to raise awareness about the Mercy Simpson case and other future cases. They meet another neighbor, Charles, who wants to start the chapter based on his same interpretations of Liberty. He, too, doesn’t trust the wellness center that his wife loves.
Then, suddenly, Charles changes his mind about starting a BLM chapter. He even cuts off his dreadlocks and sells his Afrocentric art collection. These moves bewilder Jasmyn and Keisha. They move forward with their plans. Then, Keisha changes her mind as well, now that she straightens her natural hair and wears neutral-toned business suits — a far cry from her Afro, colorful clothing, and large gold hoop earrings.
Jasmyn is now the only one left standing. King won’t completely commit to opening the chapter with her or volunteering with Black youth like he used to when they lived in the city limits. Everyone seems to be addicted to the wellness center. Jasmyn has stayed away because she’s pregnant and doesn’t want any treatment to harm the baby. But King loves going to the wellness center. Things are not adding up. Using her court connections, Jasmyn hires a private investigator to see what happened to the last family who lived in her mansion. The family had only stayed for a year. Why buy a house for only a year? The more she finds out, the more she feels she’s in danger.
The idea of a utopia was coined by Thomas More in his 1516 classic Utopia. He created the word “utopia” from ancient Greek, which translates to “not a place.” So, if a housing development or closed-off community boasts that it is a utopia, then there is already a reason to run in horror. The book garnered some online criticism for creating a story around a Black utopia that ends in giving in to the racism of the outside world. Without giving too many spoilers, the ending becomes a Get Out-esque situation. The utopia is flawed from the roots because it targets certain people and convinces them to be in a social experiment when reality seems too overwhelming.
With the utopia, the novel taps into the monolithic definition of Blackness. One of the main examples is showing Jasmyn’s desperation to unite her neighbors to start a BLM chapter. The real-life controversial organization works to protect Black lives across the diaspora, but not every Black person supports the mission and its activities. Jasmyn assumes every Black person is in agreement with feeling upset over a police brutality case, and that’s not the case in Liberty. But that’s what makes the hairs on her arms stand up? In this politically charged society, it may feel safer for many Americans to live in communities that share their values, and Jasmyn is realizing she did not move into a like-minded community. Other examples emphasize the monolithic falsehoods within the African American community, such as Keisha wearing her Afro and hoop earrings, which means she’s down for the cause. And when her style changes, that is the telltale that she is not down anymore. While other characters seem cold for ignoring the Mercy Simpson case and straightening their African curls, it feeds into the stereotype that all Black Americans feel the same way about certain issues by their vocal expression and outward appearance. How the characters are constructed with simplicity may distract some readers expecting a complex racial thriller.
Overall, the simplicity also speaks to the author’s transition from the young adult genre to the adult genre. In YA, character and story development must be easier for a young reader to follow. We see the same pattern in this adult book, though the tension between the characters and unfolding events still make it a page-turner.
Our Missing Heartsby Celeste Ng transports us to a near-dystopian future where Asian Americans are sidelined in society due to security fears soaring too high over China, and their contributions, especially in the arts, are being systematically eliminated from public consumption.
Bird is a 12-year-old boy who lives with his university librarian father. His mother is out of the picture, but he doesn’t know where she is. She was known as Margaret Miu, a Chinese American poet whose indie-published poetry collection became a target under PACT, or the Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act. The poem, “Our Missing Hearts,” remains a rallying cry for the disenfranchised, which includes Asian Americans, now known as Persons of Asian Origin, and other people of color who are still seen as threats. At school, Bird only has one friend, Sadie. Outspoken about being taken from her “Chinese sympathizer” parents, Sadie brings up the memories of her peaceful home and how the current politics destroyed it. Being a biracial girl, Sadie has a hard time staying with foster families. Within a split second, Sadie is transferred out of their community. But Sadie’s stories about her parents have already influenced Bird, who is tapping into his memories of his mother. He receives letters he feels are from his mother with illustrations of cats. He tries to solve the riddles, yet he needs more information. His father refuses to bring up his mother, but Bird is getting older and has questions that lead him on a journey that thrusts him into a world of advocacy.
All over the country, a scattered network of librarians would note this information, collating it with the Rolodex in their minds, cross-referencing it with the re-placed children they might have learned about. Some kept a running written list, but most, wary, simply trusted to memory. An imperfect system, but the brain of a librarian was a capacious place.
In the real world of banned books impacting libraries, the story shows a deep connection to libraries and librarians acting as justice-seekers. Bird’s father is a linguist whose connection to Margaret has relegated him from professor to librarian. Because he is White, he can raise Bird, but he fears the times when someone may detect Bird’s Asian ancestry in his son’s facial features. This fear forces Bird’s father to remain a quiet librarian who refuses to break the rules. On the opposite side, when Bird sneaks off to the library, librarians search for Margaret’s book or another related book such as one featuring Asian fairy tales on Bird’s behalf. They know these books have been banned, but they still hold out hope they can be found. Someone requesting a banned book may be an advocate. The librarians are sharing notes between pages of books as a secret communications channel for advocates.
The advocates are seeking racial justice. Asian Americans are in hiding or have been removed through imprisonment or deportation. When one group is being disenfranchised more than ever, then other historically disenfranchised groups do not feel safe. It’s why Marie Johnson, a first-year college student who’s African American, went to a protest and used “Our Missing Hearts” as a rallying cry for the first time. She is killed by a police officer’s stray bullet. The event puts a target on Margaret’s back. That’s when she lives her life on the run, especially since Child Protective Services threatened to take Bird away. Margaret finds herself at Marie’s parents’ house, where she believes they could provide a haven. They are upset that this Asian woman has shown up at their door when her poetry inadvertently led to the events that killed their Black daughter. It forces Margaret to reconcile how she saw her parents react fearfully in the presence of African Americans in the past and how most people react fearfully toward her now as an Asian American.
She thought, belatedly, of the Asian and Black worlds, orbiting each other warily, frozen at a distance in a precarious push-pull. In her childhood: a young Black girl shot, Los Angeles on fire, Korean stores aflame. Her parents had fumed, reading the news, indignant at the damage, the delinquency. And then, years later, a young Black man dead in a stairwell, a Chinese American cop’s finger on the trigger. There’d been outcry on all sides — an accident, police brutality, scapegoating — until the circles separated again into an uneasy truce.
Margaret’s line of thought goes to the uprising known as the 1992 Los Angeles Riots, which kindled after the acquittal of the police officers who had viciously beaten Rodney King. The uprising inflamed with the burning of Korean American business owners’ stores because of the death of 15-year-old Latasha Harlins, a Black teenager who was killed by a Korean American grocer the year before. In 2014, Akai Gurley, a 28-year-old Black man, was killed by an Asian American police officer in an apartment building in Brooklyn, New York. In both cases, the punishments were reduced to probation. The aforementioned events emphasize the community relationships fractured by the hierarchical racial caste system that has been turned on its head in the story with Asian Americans at the bottom compared to African Americans who had historically been at the bottom. The story emphasizes how discrimination toward any group harms the entire society as productivity goes down by raising widespread fear and accusing people of not being American enough.
Margaret eventually becomes a part of the resistance in New York City by trying to raise the volume on the injustice. As Margaret hides from society the best she can, Bird finds himself in hiding as well on his quest to search for the mother he barely knew and for the solution that would bring his family together again.
Overall, the story hits a timely chord as a believable dystopia as anti-Asian hate peaked amid the COVID-19 pandemic and security concerns out of China. The thread on banned books and the authors who wrote them being shunned is also a real issue that penetrates the media every day. Seeing how these relevant issues interplay in a society driven by fear is eye-opening, especially through the lens of a boy who only wants to know where his mother is and how he can find her. Family separation, particularly for Indigenous Americans and people of color who are immigrants, is another issue that has spanned centuries in North America. Bird’s innocence and determination to get answers about his mother’s whereabouts soften the edges of the distressful storyline. The poetic storytelling helps move the mundaneness as the characters seek justice.
Thicker than Water by Kerry Washington reflects on the award-winning actress’ life from her humble beginnings in the Bronx to her stardom in Hollywood as she begins to seek the truth in a long-held family secret.
Even as a young child, I felt that I was never who my dad needed me to be. I knew he really wanted a son and that they weren’t having any more children. I wondered if I could soften the blow somehow by being a daughter who was prettier, or smarter, or braver, or more successful, but even that didn’t work.
Kerry Marisa Washington was born in New York City, and her story focuses on the meaning of her middle name. Marisa translates to “girl of the sea” in Latin. She embodies her mermaid nature by swimming as a child with her cousins and neighbors at a government-subsidized cooperative housing building for middle-income families. When she swims, that is the time she feels the most free. She tries to hold onto that childhood freedom when she overhears her parents fighting at night. The tension between her parents over legal turmoil circulating her father’s real estate dealings makes her anxious. As she evolves from child to teenager, she absorbs her family’s troubles as the only child. The child her parents desired for so long after years of infertility. The child who lives in the shadow of a stillborn sibling who came years before her when her mother was married to another man. The child who is slowly growing older and finding her purpose.
What soothes the blossoming anxiety is acting. Kerry becomes a standout in middle and high school performances. Her mother worries about the lack of stability in a potential acting career. The only famous person they know is Jennifer Lopez, who taught Kerry dance at their local Boys & Girls Club, but according to Kerry, everyone noticed J.Lo’s charisma. To Kerry, she may not be cut from the same cloth. As a teen accumulating roles in school performances, she joins Mount Sinai Hospital’s Adolescent Health Center’s S.T.A.R. program, which educates and entertains children about the dangers of risky sexual behavior. She gets recognition when she plays the role of a girl who discovered she had been diagnosed with HIV/AIDS during a televised ABC town hall. She also nabs her Screen Actors Guild membership off a speaking role in an ABC after-school special. These could be viewed as moments of unintentional manifestation when she later becomes the first Black actress to lead a primetime TV drama in nearly 40 years on the same network in her role as Olivia Pope on Scandal.
Her love for acting is noticed by a mentor, who refers her to an agent for an audition for Interview with the Vampire. She loses the role to Thandiwe Newton. As a Black teen girl in high school, Kerry isn’t winning roles, but when Thandiwe Newton also nabs the role of Sally Hemings in another audition, Kerry heads to George Washington University in D.C. The university is not too far away from New York City, but Kerry’s growing anxiety evolves into an eating disorder.
She struggles with her binge eating for years, but upon graduation, she heads back home in hopes of nabbing roles with her college training. She gets her first big role in an independent film called Our Song about three Black young women in a marching band. She soon gets the pivotal role as Chenille, a teen mother balancing school in inner-city Chicago, in Save the Last Dance.
My biology had been their enemy. Consequently, I had learned to survive without a true relationship to it. I didn’t know my body; I couldn’t read its signs. I didn’t rest when I was tired, didn’t register when I was hungry, couldn’t decipher when I was full. Over time, my body became my enemy, and I couldn’t bear the discomfort of being fully present in my skin. I sensed that my embodiment scared my mother and threatened my dad. Presence itself—being fully alive and aware—became something to avoid. The fuel that had powered our family was pretending.
Over the last several years solidifying her TV and film success, the private star marries her husband Nnamdi Asomugha and raises two children while being a bonus mother to a stepdaughter. Scandal is coming to an end, and Kerry is exploring options with her production company, Simpson Street. Upon meeting Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. at an event, the renowned historian invites Kerry to be featured on his show, Finding Your Roots on PBS. But then her parents give her devastating news about her lineage, which forces her to question her identity and her past.
On the heels of Americans seeking discoveries within their DNA, the actress learns that her willingness to please her parents and feeling down when she thought she wasn’t the perfect child fueled so much of her anxiety. While handling these emotional fluctuations, she also chose a career filled with rejections that kept watering the seed in her mind that she wasn’t good enough. In her role as Olivia Pope, we see Kerry Washington portray this complicated woman with such poise that we may not realize how much energy goes into showing that poise to an audience. By telling her story, she seems more down-to-earth, despite her opportunities of acting arising so early in her life.
The memoir follows Kerry as she goes through the ups and downs of acting, a career she felt connected to as a preteen. Witnessing her work ethic while witnessing the countless rejections can be seen as inspirational for readers who are also in ambitious careers. Her first film did turn out to be an indie film darling and opened the door to her role in Save the Last Dance, but she had already been acting for more than a decade.
Overall, the memoirist does a wonderful job of connecting the trials and tribulations to finding solace in memories tied to buoyancy and freedom, especially with being one with the water. The liquid made up of hydrogen and oxygen makes one feel weightless, so when situations weighed on her, she thought about the feeling in the water. The thought of water didn’t fix everything, but realizing she had felt the feeling of freedom at one point helped her navigate the hardships. This book works well for readers and Scandal fans who are interested in inner child and teen healing, body positivity, career exploration, and genealogical discovery.
Issa Rae stars as Sintara Golden and Nicole Kempskie as Sintara’s moderator in writer/director Cord Jefferson’s
AMERICAN FICTION.
Photo credit: Courtesy of ORION Pictures Inc.
The screenwriter behind one of the most-nominated book-to-film adaptations this award season said in his Oscars speech that the risk-averse film industry should support so-called risky creative projects by artists of color.
Cord Jefferson won an Academy Award on Sunday for Best Adapted Screenplay for American Fiction. The sleeper hit is based on Percival Everett’s 2001 novel, Erasure, and centers on a Black author who seems to have trouble selling his philosophical novels and instead writes and successfully sells a novel serving every negative stereotype about Black life on a silver platter to the publishing industry. As the Erasure author promotes his new novel James from the perspective of Jim in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the American Fiction screenwriter and director is advocating for more projects by artists of color to be greenlit.
“It’s a plea to acknowledge and recognize that there are so many people out there who want the opportunity that I was given,” he said. “I understand that this is a risk-averse industry. I get it, but $200 million movies are also a risk, and it doesn’t always work out, but you take the risk anyway.”
In his speech, Cord mentioned he was given the opportunity after others in the industry passed on the project because it was viewed as too risky to pursue. The film features an African American author questioning the type of novel publishers and society expect from him because of his race. Cord mentioned how the film industry is risk-averse, similar to the book publishing world. For Black authors, many literary agents and publishers tell them regularly that their stories starring Black characters and racially tinged storylines are not worth consumption by the national or international audience.
With the Black Lives Matter movement exploding after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, the publishing industry took it upon itself to cater to Black authors. More agents were willing to open their submissions to saying publicly they wanted to support Black authors. More publishers were accepting those authors’ works. Four years later, the excitement of the attempt to balance the playing field is gone. The authors and the books that were greenlit during that time are now trickling down to bookshelves.
American Fiction stars Jeffrey Wright as a Black author and literature professor named Thelonius “Monk” Ellison looking for a publishing home for his newest novel based on a European tragedy. His agent, played by John Ortiz, keeps telling Monk that publishers didn’t get his book. They wanted something more “Black,” which Monk can’t figure out why that is expected of him. By the way, what is more “Black?” He sees the rise in We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, a new novel sweeping America by Sintara Golden, played by actress and authoress Issa Rae. Sintara’s book makes Monk’s skin crawl with the flagrant stereotypes of living in the ’hood.
So, one night in his study, Monk writes his own novel flagrant with stereotypes. He goes further to title the book, My Pafology, as opposed to My Pathology, under a pseudonym and an assumed identity as a convict. When a publisher wants the novel, Monk can’t believe the book sold so quickly. He decides to go even further with the ridiculousness and change the title to Fuck. The F-word is the main word the industry warns writers to not use in a title to make a book marketable to the masses, but the publisher says it will use that title. Monk is stumped by the events that have made him a star in disguise and tries to hide his identity amid the firestorm the book brings.
Black authors have long dealt with the expectations of applying stereotypes to their stories to make those stories more digestible to the American public. But the power of readers is diminished when authors are being told by the gatekeepers that their stories don’t matter because those books most likely will not sell, especially with main characters of color and racial plotlines.
In unofficial field studies, while networking with other writers over the years, I hear constantly how writers of color, particularly Black writers, in many cases cannot get an agent because they have been told by agents numerous times that readers are not looking for their stories. Therefore, their stories aren’t worth being published.
White writers, again from my networking experience, seem to be rarely told their stories aren’t sellable. Their work is also seen as more flexible with developmental editing, therefore they are more likely to get advice on how to improve their stories before they are told that their stories won’t be profitable. If they choose the traditional publishing route, then they are more likely to sign contracts with their agents of choice and eventually land a publisher.
To take matters into their own hands, many Black authors self-publish their books as entrepreneurs. That means they have to work extremely hard to make their stories visible to book buyers. Self-published authors usually pay out of pocket for their physical copies to be published and hope to earn a decent percentage of the sales.
American Fiction’s Oscar win places attention on the need to bring forth more creative projects produced by Black artists that have been rejected over concerns about the return on investment. Every creative project is risky, as Cord said, but it may be more worthwhile to take the risk and make sure the book, for example, gets into the the right hands. A book’s success depends on a good public relations strategy. So, the assumption a story won’t sell is, by industry standards, premature since all manuscripts carry financial risk.
There was no family meeting to sit the kids down and prepare them psychologically for all these changes to come or to get them to weigh in on what they’d like to do and how they were feeling. Just as there wasn’t any discussion about the trauma of moving us away from all the family and friends we’d ever known in New York City and the people who looked like us. You go where your parents go and they’ll hear nothing of your unhappiness or fears or anxieties or, for god’s sake, your opinion.
Born in New York City, Carmen is raised as the daughter of a Dominican immigrant mother and a Chinese immigrant father. Her parents eventually divorce after a tumultuous marriage that leaves Carmen and her older brother, Alex, under the care of their mother, Lupe. After Lupe remarries quickly, the siblings are living with their White stepfather, Marty, in New Hampshire. Being a brown-skinned girl with a Chinese surname in predominantly White suburbia makes Carmen stand out. She feels uncomfortable with the microaggressions from her Catholic school teachers and classmates. As the family expands to adding four more girls, Carmen begins to see the pressure in the household with her mother spewing vitriol to her and her siblings.
As high school graduation approaches, she has to depend on her father to pay for college. Her tuition is expected to be paid by her father, who sells jewelry and other accessories to department stores in shady operations. Those operations lead to her father serving time in prison. With her father imprisoned and her stepfather unemployed, Carmen finds herself financing her college education and eventually finding her own independence. Her resourcefulness leads to an executive assistant position at Christie’s auction house back in her hometown of New York City. Her ambition eventually places her on the path to multimedia financial journalism.
After finding success in her career and heartbreak in a failed marriage, Carmen learns that her mother has been diagnosed with colon cancer. At this point, her mother and stepfather are divorced, and her stepfather has moved back to New York City. With her mother sick, her stepfather tells her that her father is not her father. She had noticed over the years that as her brother looked more Chinese like a Wong while her looks failed to head in the same direction. She brings the long-held family secret to her mother, who fights against the truth. After her mother dies, Carmen realizes there was more to the secret that defined her upbringing and forced her to question the past and present.
My Spanish was being displaced by French, the only language offered in school. It became harder to understand my beloved abuela as both English and French squeezed space in my brain, burying my Spanish deep, one shovelful of New Hampshire at a time. My English pronunciation was East Coast newscaster, just as my mother wanted, no Dominican-NYC flavor like my extended cousins, who’d taunt me with “You talk white!” My clothes were prim, proper, pastel eighties “good girl.” I looked like a forty-year-old accountant, not cool like my cousins. Code-switching became my destiny whether I liked it or not.
Once she learns the truth about her genetic biology, Carmen finds herself questioning her racial, ethnic, and cultural identity. With the memory of being a little girl who loved dressing up to go to Chinatown, she is no longer Chinese. Her last name is no longer accurate. The alienation she felt in her New Hampshire home growing up as Dominican-Chinese, different from her younger siblings, resurfaces. Realizing that she doesn’t have the same exact DNA as her brother, who arrived with her in the new version of the family household in New Hampshire, is heartbreaking and frustrating.
Like many housewives at the time, her immigrant mother believed the American Dream could be brighter with a White husband in White suburbia. This recurring theme throughout the story shows how a person who identifies with a particular ethnicity or more ethnicities can experience a different reality from even other immediate family members. In Catholic school, for example, a nun credits Carmen’s intelligence to being half-Chinese. The nun assumes this by taking Carmen’s surname and believing the stereotype of all Asians being smart. When she gets older, other people of color confuse her for being White or being Black. Her multiracial and multiethnic identity makes her wonder how her journey would have differed knowing her true racial and ethnic identities.
The theme of race, ethnicity, and culture resonates throughout her story with the truth about her DNA weighing heavily on every memory thread. If her mother was happy with the man believed to be her father, then would she have been removed from her diverse hometown of New York City? If her stepfather was her biological father, would she have been treated the same way as her stepsisters? How much of her life would have been different if she had known her paternity and ethnicity?
Overall, the memoir hits on the notes of other memoirs by women of color who have had their lives stamped by their racial and ethnic identities. These memoirs examine how their intersectionality impacted their growth from childhood to adulthood. This memoir could be useful to readers interested in adapting to new environments, learning about family history and heritage, and persevering as an eldest daughter and a woman of color.
Ricki Wilde is the youngest daughter in a wealthy Atlanta family that takes their funeral business seriously. Except she loves floral design and uses that passion for the funerals and social media clout. Her sisters and her mother think it’s a crying shame that Ricki wants to play with flowers all day instead of taking leadership roles in the undertaking empire. She prepares a business plan for a flower shop, but it’s rejected. She wonders about her next move. One day, she comforts an elegantly dressed widow named Ms. Della. Upon hearing Ricki’s story, Ms. Della offers her the first story of her brownstone in Harlem. Since Ms. Della just lost her husband, she didn’t want to be entirely alone. The first story had been vacant for years, but it’s the perfect place for a flower shop.
In Harlem, Ricki opens her shop. She finds out that the brownstone was the site of a famous Harlem Renaissance nightclub. As she searches around the property, she sees a man her age who disappears mysteriously. She even notices the scent of night-blooming jasmine in February, which is unusual because it’s not the flower’s season. That’s also mysterious. While trying to unravel the mystery of the location, she needs to keep her business afloat. Via Instagram, she highlights different flowers at different locations throughout the neighborhood to boost business. Her heightened visibility leads her to find the mysterious man.
Ezra Walker has been looking for Ricki forever. And Ricki feels a supernatural pull to Ezra. She has tea parties with Ms. Della upstairs and confides in her celebrity friend, Tuesday Rowe, about her newfound love interest. Ricki learns more about Ezra as she falls deeper in love with him. But he has a secret. He’s a perennial. Not the plant that returns every year, but a person who has been cursed with immortal life. Once upon a time, Ezra was an up-and-coming pianist during the Harlem Renaissance who escaped the segregated South after his family was killed by Jim Crow terrorism. He was cursed by a dancer at the nightclub that used to be housed in Ricki’s brownstone. The only woman who could break his curse is Ricki. Ezra had been writing a song for nearly a century that he could only play for Ricki. If they are still together by Leap Day, then Ricki will be cursed with immortal life as well.
The author loves to weave pop culture references into her stories, and this story doesn’t disappoint. It also seemed like she had been pressured by an industry that loves romantasy to inject that magic into a modern-day love story, and it works seamlessly. The fantasy sprinkled into the romance doesn’t overtake the story despite the plot leaning more toward fantasy. The groundedness in reality is still strong. The term “perennial” for an immortal person also seems to be up for debate as a flowerlike word choice by the author, instead of an official dictionary definition.
Another aspect of the romantasy is the historical element of the Harlem Renaissance and its documented and undocumented culture. Stories still emerge about the 1920s era, where African American society flourished in New York City. The story is set in a brownstone that was a nightclub where sultry sin and artistic influence occurred inside and outside its walls. The setting remains a century-old dream for many people like Ricki and Ms. Della, who develop an intergenerational friendship that supports each other in their transitions, as Ricki finds love after leaving home and starting a business, and Ms. Della finds love after the death of her husband. Harlem feels like a magical place all on its own.
Overall, the love story stretches over pages with positive energy, though the ending is likely predictable for readers who know to expect the happily ever after by dissecting every character’s relationship with each other.
Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson revolves around two adult siblings trying to decipher their mother’s deathbed confessions as they imagine her living different lives and identities.
Eleanor Bennett is dead. But before she died from cancer, she had recorded her deep-rooted secrets with the help of her lawyer-boyfriend, Charles Mitch. Charles brings the recordings to Eleanor’s two children, son Byron and daughter Benedetta, or Benny for short. Byron and Benny haven’t spoken to each other in years. An oceanographer on the rise, Byron doesn’t understand his younger sister’s decisions to not stay on the straight and narrow path their Caribbean immigrant parents set them on. Benny, a college dropout, is still trying to establish roots in her career and love life after some heartbreaking moments that she tried to share with her family but felt she was rejected. As the two siblings feel awkward around each other back home in California, they have to sit with Mr. Mitch and listen to the hours of recordings their mother left behind.
Eleanor Bennett was born Coventina “Covey” Lyncook. In the 1950s and 1960s on a Caribbean island similar to Jamaica, Covey loves competitive swimming with her best friend, Bunny. Covey’s father, Johnny “Lin” Lyncook, a Chinese immigrant on the island, owns a general store. He’s also a gambler, so Covey tries to focus on her schoolwork. Her mother is gone and has failed to reach back out to the family. To ease the missingness of Covey’s mother, Pearl, a family friend and the housekeeper, takes it upon herself to watch over Covey. Pearl helps the family while maintaining a successful baking business. Her most requested dessert is the wedding treat of black cake, which Covey learns to make.
Covey’s life is turned upside down when her father promises her hand in marriage to a known moneylender and murderer named Little Man Henry to settle a gambling debt. At 17 years old, Covey knows she doesn’t want to marry this 38-year-old criminal but rather spend her life with Gilbert “Gibbs” Grant, her boyfriend who wants to study abroad in the U.K. for a more promising future. When Little Man Henry falls dead at the wedding with the black cake with lilac icing barely touched, Covey makes a run for it to the waves. The storm brewing above should make the swim precarious, so when Lin finds Covey’s weighty wedding dress on the beach, he believes his daughter is dead.
With assistance, Covey gets to the U.K. to work as a nanny. She must keep a low profile, so she changes her last name since she is a suspect in the murder of Little Man Henry. But she wants more of a career. She enrolls in a nursing program with other Caribbean women. There, she meets a woman her age named Eleanor Bennett. A tragic turn of events forces Covey to become Eleanor to seek the career she wants. Feeling like she dodged another bullet, Eleanor arrives in a workplace where a violent incident and the aftermath change the trajectory of her life again bringing her to the U.S. with a husband and eventually a family.
Black cake is popular in English-speaking Caribbean countries where it’s considered a twist on Christmas plum pudding. It’s usually served on special occasions such as weddings and holidays. In the book, Pearl makes a living with and later without Covey’s mother providing black cakes as Covey becomes an apprentice. With being forced to change her life three times, Covey as Eleanor brings the recipe to her new homeland and teaches the recipe to her daughter. Benny carries an old plastic measuring cup in light of her mother’s death because it gives her comfort. Byron finds a bowl of fruits marinating for the black cake while searching through the kitchen. Their mother would marinate dates and maraschino cherries in rum and port every five years to bake a layer of black cake for her and Bert to enjoy a slice on every wedding anniversary. The dessert becomes a symbol for Eleanor’s children as they bridge her past as a young woman to the mother they always knew. When they learn about another family member, the siblings are determined to bake the black cake to enjoy the dessert their mother always held close to her heart.
Another theme in the book is the ocean. Though Covey leaves home to escape punishment for a crime, her best friend, Bunny, still defends her. Bunny eventually grows up to be Etta Pringle, a global swimming champion. Etta never forgot how Covey inspired her to take those long-distance swims on their island. When Covey as Eleanor becomes a mother, she instills her love of swimming into her children. While Benny loves to bake mainly because of the black cake tradition, Byron loves the ocean as he would surf with his mother. In the U.S., African Americans still deal with the stereotype of not being able to swim, mainly because of the country’s past of discriminating against them and other people of color by cutting off access to pools and waterways. But in countries where the population is predominantly of people of African descent, the waterways represent freedom and the residents are usually strong swimmers. This perspective of people of African descent who love swimming, and not only love the sport but also love the ocean, is refreshing to see as a part of Caribbean culture.
Overall, the book builds up tension well as Covey aka Eleanor tells her autobiography through audio speakers and the events swirl into more events as her children examine her every word and imagine her every situation. More stories have used the theme of the deathbed confession, but some of the characters are considered famous, so their autobiography is worthy of listeners. But this story stands out by featuring a young Caribbean woman, who lacks wholeness without her mother and is forced into an arranged marriage, and how she overcame sexism and racism to get what she wanted in the end though it looked different than what she would have expected. The story has been adapted into a TV series on Hulu. The book would entertain readers who are interested in family secrets and dynamics, oceanic power, and Caribbean history and culture.
⚠️ Trigger warning! The story and the post below have graphic references to topics such as sexual assault.
Black Cake on Hulu brings Charmaine Wilkerson’s debut novel to life through a cinematographic lens, showing the main character’s inner conflicts of hiding her identity multiple times to escape an arranged marriage that ends in murder.
The TV series opens with Covey escaping the murder scene in her wedding dress toward the ocean in 1960s Jamaica then shows 70-something Eleanor walking into the ocean with her surfboard, determined to get lost in the water. The girl and the woman are the same person. How Coventina “Covey” Lyncook, played magnificently by Mia Isaac in her youthful years, becomes Eleanor Bennett, played by Chipo Chung in her older years, makes the story within Black Cake full-bodied like the rich dessert that serves as its title.
For the quick synopsis (the book review can be found here), Covey is growing up in Jamaica as a competitive swimmer and the only daughter of Johnny “Lin” Lyncook, one of the only Chinese immigrants in the Black community. Her mother, Mathilda, left years earlier, so her mother’s friend and housekeeper, Pearl, helps raise her while earning money baking black cakes for weddings. When Lin runs into gambling issues that threaten his general store, he arranges for Covey to marry Little Man, a career criminal. Seventeen years old, Covey wants to keep swimming with her best friend, Bunny. She is also in love with Gilbert “Gibbs” Grant, a fellow competitive swimmer. When Little Man falls to his death during the reception right when Pearl’s black cake is being served, Covey makes a run toward the ocean. She is now a suspect in her husband’s murder. In the water, she is rebaptized as Coventina Brown on her way to England then Eleanor Douglas in Scotland then Eleanor Bennett in the U.S. Her two children, Byron and Benedetta “Benny,” spend the length of the story deciphering their mother’s deathbed confessions through audio files before discovering they have another sibling.
The overwhelming theme of the loneliness around hiding your true identity to escape a life choice someone made for you bleeds into most of the scenes involving the character of Covey. Her gambling father forces her into an arranged marriage with an older man known for his criminal activity, and now the girl who had dreams of taking over the world of competitive swimming is running for her survival. The criminal arrangement still leads her to a life of criminality that forces her to change and steal her identity to escape trouble.
In the second episode “Coventina,” Covey labors over a pot of Chinese fish soup at her clients’ family home. She is ordered to make fish and chips for the two children she cares for as a nanny, but the homesickness is too overpowering in London. While she has access to the kitchen, she makes the soup. The maid, who is also Chinese, smells the soup and tastes it. She recognizes the dish and questions Covey about how she learned to make the soup. Covey answers that her grandmother taught her without revealing she too is Chinese. The maid leaves with suspicions. Covey can’t afford to bond with the maid over their shared ethnic identity because she is hiding her entire identity. What if the maid is a Chinese woman from Jamaica? When Covey serves the children the soup, they are disgusted and upset that fish and chips are not being served as expected. Though she is homesick, Covey is embarrassed that she tried to bring a sense of home into someone else’s home, especially serving children without developed and diverse palates. The moment is smaller than the many pivotal moments, but it stands out in demonstrating Covey’s loneliness and homesickness in such a simple light. The dinner forces her to reexamine her fear of living within the Caribbean and Chinese communities in London and wonder if the next batch of immigrants who arrive on the next ship will recognize her and turn her in to the authorities in Jamaica.
The third episode “Eleanor” shows us how Covey becomes Eleanor after assuming the identity of her upbeat roommate Eleanor, played by Karise Yansen, who is killed in a train accident as they are traveling to live a new life in Edinburgh, Scotland. In the show, she has a hard time finding a job as a Caribbean immigrant while recovering from her leg laceration from the accident. She feels she has to hide even more. It mentally takes her back to the island where she is courting Gibbs, played by Ahmed Elhaj. Since she has a boyfriend, she wants Bunny to find one, too. But Bunny, played by Lashay Anderson, doesn’t seem interested in the local boys. She confesses that she likes Covey the way she’s supposed to like boys. Covey reprimands her friend to never repeat those words and advises Bunny to pretend to like a boy out of protection. Back alone in Edinburgh, Covey as Eleanor realizes the advice she had given her friend is the advice she needs for herself to survive.
In the same episode, Covey finds a secretarial job. Out of excitement in finding employment, she wears a light pink crocheted dress with pink heels topped with white flowers on her first day. Right away, her Scottish female colleagues seem to be annoyed by her presence and make comments about the brightness of her outfit. Covey is again reminded to hide. So, the next day, she arrives in an outfit with a drabber color. When she spots accounting errors, she tries to bring the problem to Beatrice, played by Anna Mawn, the ringleader of the women in the office. She gets angry at Covey for insinuating she has made a mistake.
But Covey doesn’t feel right about the mistakes in the account. She goes to her male boss, who seems understanding of the situation. He admonishes Beatrice for ignoring the mistakes and invites Covey to dinner with his wife. The trust between Covey and her boss makes her feel seen in a positive light. Then her boss reveals that he knows Covey is lying about her identity. He points out the lack of nursing education, a lie Covey used on her résumé as part of her new identity as Eleanor. With Covey afraid to confess, her boss sexually assaults her. Beatrice notices Covey in shock returning to their room in the office. She follows Covey into the restroom, where she explains the boss had assaulted her and the other women in the office, but they all needed the job. She tells Covey to clean herself up and return to her desk. Covey is visibly upset over the ordeal and how she let her walls down to the first person who showed her attention when she was supposed to be invisible.
Covey returns to London after having her daughter, Mathilda, as a result of the assault. As the seventh episode “Birth Mother” shows a pregnant Covey trying to stay under the radar at a church, she fights to be noticed to keep her daughter. But she fails when a couple swoops baby Mathilda in a quickie adoption arranged by the nuns. Covey is running after the car carrying her baby away, but she cannot keep up.
Since Edinburgh turned out to be a disaster starting with the tragic death of her roommate, Covey puts on her cloak of invisibility in the fourth episode “Mrs. Bennett” while walking the streets of London. She notices a protest across the street, and in a perfect moment of fate, she lays her eyes on her beloved Gibbs. He is yelling into a megaphone alongside protestors, but he stops when he lays his eyes on Covey. They immediately reunite and spend time together. But one day, a Caribbean girl notices Covey. She calls out to Covey, but Covey answers to Eleanor now. The girl asks about Eleanor’s whereabouts since it was reported that Covey had died in the train accident. Covey hides behind Gibbs and explains the stress and the loneliness of hiding in plain sight. Gilbert Bennett Grant becomes Bert Bennett while Covey becomes Eleanor Bennett.
The series shows a healthy portion of the recently past present and current present with Byron, played by Ashley Thomas, and Benny, played by Adrienne Warren, who are making sense of their mother’s story and realizing why both their parents had to change their names once they started their new lives in the U.S. But the dramatic sequence of events featuring Mia Isaac as young Covey tugs on the heartstrings more since the strong emotions of disappointment, loneliness, and despair lay within Covey’s past. Throughout the series, there are flashbacks to the relatively peaceful existence Covey lived in Jamaica, even after her mother, Mathilda, left the family in hopes of finding the promise of a better life in the West. The turquoise ocean, the lanky palm trees, and the golden sunlight of the island warm the screen every time, even at times when the story shows a rough scene. The cover for the series shows a young Covey running away toward the ocean at sunset from her deadly reception. How young Covey navigates a path she stumbled onto for the sake of living her life is the root of the storyline.
The eighth episode ends with adult Bunny, a world-famous competitive swimmer played by CCH Pounder, admitting to killing Little Man with a poison Pearl was preparing for the wedding to give Covey a chance at the life she wanted. Pearl decides it is too risky to use the poison, but Bunny sneaks it into Little Man’s drink. Covey’s three grownup children — Byron, Benny, and Mabel Mathilda, played by Sonita Henry — have joined Bunny, now known as Etta, to discover this revelation. But the TV storyline omits some of the book’s ending and opens to new possibilities of a second season.
Toward the end of the book, Etta leads Byron, Benny, and Mabel Mathilda to visit Pearl, played by Faith Alabi, in Florida. She would visit Pearl when she competitively swam in the state. Pearl is in shock that not only Covey was alive this entire time, but she raised a family with Gibbs. All the children remind her of Lin when they laugh. And Mabel looks the most like Covey, though she is considered White. Still in Florida, Etta also guides Covey’s children to their biological grandfather, who they learned with the revelations is Chinese and still alive in his 90s. After a tumultuous gambling past in Jamaica, his luck had turned in the U.S. through investments. He had a private investigator find Covey, who at the time was living as Eleanor Bennett in California, but he felt his daughter should’ve reached out to him. Though he left the island, most of the island at the time ended up in Florida instead of the U.K. in the late 1960s, so he believes Covey would’ve found him if she wanted to. These crucial reunions and meetings, for example, aren’t covered in the series, but they could add another element in a new season.
Another part of the book that failed to make it to the screen is Covey as Eleanor before her death going to see her old friend, renowned swimmer Etta Pringle, speak at a conference. Eleanor sits in the crowd, and Etta notices the face of her old friend who she believed died in a train accident in Scotland decades earlier. Eleanor gives Etta a note with a phone number. They discuss awkwardly a date to meet, but by that time, Eleanor is dead.
In the TV series’ fifth episode “Mother,” Byron gets arrested for beating Benny’s abusive ex-boyfriend on the street after Benny calls to be rescued. In the book, Byron’s girlfriend Lynette, played by Rebecca Naomi Jones in the show, calls Byron to notify him that she couldn’t make it to his mother’s funeral because her nephew had been involved in a police incident. Also in the book, Lynette gives birth to their son. But in the show, Byron finds out at the end that he will be a father when Lynette shows up to the funeral, so his parenthood can be explored in another season.
The series emphasizes a few events in the book. One example is Mabel Mathilda, who is a cultural food anthropologist who gets canceled for whitesplaining indigenous foods during a panel discussion. She is the daughter who reluctantly is given up for adoption. She was raised in a White family and not told about her adoption until Eleanor Bennett’s lawyer Charles Mitch, played by Glynn Turman, reaches out to her. Mabel is raising her son, Gio, alone, but she sends him to boarding school while she lives between London and Italy. This is shown on screen, but in the book, we see Mabel yearn for Gio to return home after noticing her neighbors’ son, who is the same age as Gio. Mabel’s husband died before Gio was born, but the series can dive deeper into Mabel’s life. The scene in the TV series where young Covey is running after the car belonging to Mabel’s adoptive parents is excruciating to the point that Mabel will have to deal with that image and bring it up with her family. She still also has to tell Gio that she is adopted, has met her biological siblings, and went to her biological mother’s funeral while lying about being on her book tour in the U.S. The show spotlights the personal lives of Byron and Benny since we meet them at the beginning of the series, while Mabel is introduced in “Mother,” therefore we have the abridged version of her reality.
Reminiscent of the visual reimagining of Natalie Baszile’s Queen Sugar by Ava DuVernay and Oprah Winfrey, Black Cake keeps its story mainly intact and gives moments more space to breathe and expand. Along with author Charmaine Wilkerson, Oprah is also an executive producer for Black Cake. Thanks to showrunner Marissa Jo Cerar’s book-to-TV credits, the series tells the story with dramatic cinematographic shots. The series is so exquisitely done, but it’s due to the novel being entertaining and heart-wrenching simultaneously with the tension pulsating on every page the way it’s pulsating in every scene.
Dictionaries, encyclopedias are banned books in Florida schools under a new law
I put my book blog on ice after spending 2023 not concentrating on my reading goals. Though I had entered a hiatus, I had been monitoring the changes in the publishing industry such as the litigation and politics behind book bans. The conversation around banned books has already erupted in 2024 due to Florida’s House Bill 1069, which expands the Parental Rights in Education Act, or what has been coined as the “Don’t Say Gay” law.
Escambia County in Florida, which includes Pensacola, made headlines last year when Penguin Random House and PEN America sued the county school district and board over the removal of books. But with H.B. 1069 in effect since last July, the school district says it added more titles to comply with the law. During a hearing in the federal court case on Wednesday, the judge rejected a motion to dismiss the case, a win for the publishers and authors, the Pensacola News Journal reports.
An updated list revealedWebster’s Dictionary & Thesaurus for Students, along with The American Heritage Children’s Dictionary, The Dictionary of Costume, The Clear and Simple Thesaurus Dictionary, and Merriam-Webster’s Elementary Dictionary also made the extensive list of 1,600+ books taken off school library shelves. Eight encyclopedias were also banned, though The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers may not be suitable for children to read anyway.
The definition for a dictionary is a “reference source in print or electronic form giving information about the meanings, forms, pronunciations, uses, and origins of words listed in alphabetical order,” according to the Kids Definition on Merriam-Webster.com. The dictionary defines an encyclopedia as a “work that contains information on all subjects or one that covers a certain subject thoroughly usually with articles arranged alphabetically.”
The fact that students may not have access to these resources shows the attack on obtaining information. The Escambia County book ban saga was documented by The Washington Post last month to show the distress on all sides of removing books from school libraries and classrooms. This year, the attention remains on this Florida county as it becomes a hotspot for book bans. With the federal court case still ongoing, the final result could become precedential for other communities in the same battle.
Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng follows a boy looking for his mother whose poem unintentionally sparks a movement against anti-Asian policies that have separated families.
Family Lore by Elizabeth Acevedo centers on a woman who wants her sisters to organize a wake in her honor while she’s still alive, but the family wants to know the reason for the wake.
Velvet Was the Night by Silvia Moreno-Garcia is set in 1970s Mexico where a woman searches for her missing neighbor and runs into a man also questioning the neighbor’s whereabouts and secrets.
book club news
Audacious Book Club is reading Start Here by Sohla El-Waylly
Belletrist Book Club is reading Holding Pattern by Jenny Xie
Going To Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project is now streaming on Max. The legendary poet spoke about exploring space and time for the documentary last year at the Books in Bloom festival. Read about the experience here if you have a subscription.
events
The 2024 ZORA! Festival Season of Programs started on Zora Neale Hurston’s 133rd birthday on Jan. 7 with more scheduled events occurring throughout January around the author’s hometown of Eatonville, Florida.
“All in all, for the case in Escambia County today, this is a major win. This is a major win for the students in Escambia County. This is a major win for the professionals that are hired and the media specialists to determine what books are age-appropriate and best for our children, and it is a good day for the Constitution and democracy. So we are really thrilled to see that our complaint is going to continue as it should be.” — Katie Blankenship, director of PEN America Florida, in the Pensacola News Journal
The Woman in Me by Britney Spears pulls the curtain back on the making of one of the biggest pop stars the world has ever seen and reveals how her superstardom eclipsed her familial trauma.
Taking the title from the lyrics of the 2001 hit “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman” from the Britney album and Crossroads soundtrack, the long-awaited memoir made headlines with the sordid details of Britney’s relationship with fellow pop star and Mouseketeer Justin Timberlake during the turn of the century where tabloid articles and paparazzi photos overtook the media landscape. But there’s more to Britney’s life story starting in Kentwood, Louisiana. Born 25 miles away in McComb, Mississippi (also R&B pop star Brandy’s birthplace), Britney is a little girl who loves singing and dancing.
The woman in me was pushed down for a long time. They wanted me to be wild onstage, the way they told me to be, and to be a robot the rest of the time. I felt like I was being deprived of those good secrets of life—those fundamental supposed sins of indulgence and adventure that make us human. They wanted to take away that specialness and keep everything as rote as possible. It was death to my creativity as an artist.
Her father, Jamie, transitions through jobs as a welder to a construction worker to a gym owner, while her mother, Lynne, runs a daycare center raising Britney and her brother, Bryan. Britney scores opportunities to audition for The All New Mickey Mouse Club and perform on Star Search. Like many future stars at the time, once these opportunities end, she is back home. Her family eventually welcomes her younger sister, Jamie Lynn. The family dynamic is volatile. Her father is an alcoholic. Her mother smokes and yells constantly. She feels the most in power when she is performing.
“Tragedy runs in my family,” Britney writes when telling the story of her paternal grandmother, known as Jean, who was committed to an asylum by Britney’s grandfather after losing a baby. Her grandmother was 31 years old when she shot herself with a shotgun over her infant son’s grave. New York Magazine covered this story in November 2022 in a longform piece that explores Britney’s ancestral tree on the Spears side to set the background for the conservatorship that ended in November 2021. Like her grandmother, Britney suffers from mental health issues after having her two sons a year apart. She says she had been forced to take Prozac for years. She had been hospitalized, where she says she was given lithium instead. Lithium was the drug her grandmother had taken as well. And like her grandmother, the reason why her mental health had destabilized is misunderstood.
I was a little girl with big dreams. I wanted to be a star like Madonna, Dolly Parton, or Whitney Houston. I had simpler dreams, too, dreams that seemed even harder to achieve and that felt too ambitious to say out loud: I want my dad to stop drinking. I want my mom to stop yelling. I want everyone to be okay.
One aspect that seems to have been dominated by the Justin Timberlake headlines is the mistreatment Britney endured being married to backup dancer and wannabe rapper Kevin Federline. The father of her two children, Kevin disappears into recording studios and industry parties while Britney is breastfeeding one son and is pregnant with another one. As her marriage is falling apart and her custody arrangement goes against her, paparazzi stalk her more than ever to capture photos of her in disarray. Then in 2007, she shaves her head at a barbershop with camera lens catching the moment outside. A few weeks later, she strikes a paparazzo’s car with an umbrella. The media salivates over these incidents and brands them as erratic, but Britney blames the stress on her postpartum depression, her divorce, the death of her aunt, and her family’s failure to help her properly through the grief. Throughout the book, she clarifies her emotions during events that dominated tabloids because her voice was misconstrued or silenced when it came to defending herself.
The memoir serves as further defense for her sanity, post-conservatorship. Now, Britney makes headlines strictly with her Instagram usage. She often tapes herself dancing and modeling clothes with smoky eyes. In the book, she explains she finally has the right to express herself through photography. She owns the images and reels she shares on social media and poses for the camera of her volition.
I am willing to admit that in the throes of severe postpartum depression, abandonment by my husband, the torture of being separated from my two babies, the death of my adored aunt Sandra, and the constant drumbeat of pressure from paparazzi, I’d begun to think in some ways like a child.
As for her infamous relationships, she was 24 and 25 years old when she had her sons. She married Kevin at 22 years old in 2004. That was only 2½ years after her unexpected breakup with Justin. When a girl falls in love with a boy at eleven years old and reconnects with him in a relationship plastered on every tabloid page, it’s natural for judgment to lead to soul mate talk. The raw emotion on the pages of Britney’s memoir just shows how she had to grow and move on from a relationship that seemed like it could last forever. Showbusiness had gotten in the way of both her major romances, which both ended disastrously with her receiving the weight of the judgment as the woman.
Though she discusses her most memorable tours and appearances, Britney uses the memoir to give us a picture of the life she tried to make private until it was forced into privacy with her 13-year conservatorship. She describes the loneliness of performing while under a conservatorship like serving as a reality show judge and headlining a Las Vegas residency. A conservatorship is defined in legal terms as the designation of a conservator by a court to manage the financial and personal affairs of an incapacitated or incompetent individual, minor, or older adult with limited capacity. Britney was under a conservatorship when she shouldn’t have been classified as incapacitated or incompetent since she worked under extreme pressure. When the legal battle to gain back her independence started in 2020, many fans didn’t realize what a conservatorship entailed. Now, that her father is no longer her conservator, she is free, but she lost many years of her adulthood not having the freedom to control her wealth, decide on what to put in her body, or even drive her car.
Looking back, I think that both Justin and Kevin were very clever. They knew what they were doing, and I played right into it. That’s the thing about this industry. I never knew how to play the game. I didn’t know how to play the game.
Overall, the memoir gives Britney a chance to explain her side of the story, which was largely ignored or misconstrued by the media machine. The book is written in her voice (think her lengthy Instagram captions), where you can tell she is sorting out her feelings and emotions during difficult times of her life. She chose Oscar-nominated actress Michelle Williams to record the audiobook on her behalf, which is unusual, especially for a celebrity who uses her voice to opt out of recording her own story. How you use your speaking voice can vary greatly compared to how you use your singing voice. The way the entertainment industry took a young Southern girl who loved to perform and transformed her into a robot to sell millions of albums and concert tickets took an insurmountable toll on the pop star. Now, that her story is out in the open, it seems like she is setting the parameters for her life.
⚠️ Trigger warning! The story and the post below have graphic references to topics such as sexual assault, molestation, and violence.
The musical film version of The Color Purpleopened on Christmas Day 2023, earning $18 million during its record-breaking holiday debut and updating the 1985 film with the elevation of expressing the message of love, faith, and empowerment through vivid daydreams.
“I think it pisses God off when you walk by the color purple in a field and don’t notice it” is one of the film’s most memorable lines revealing the title. It is said by homegrown blues singer Shug Avery, played originally by Margaret Avery and recently by Taraji P. Henson. Purple is the color of royalty, nobility, luxury, power, and ambition. Color psychology tells us the combination of rage red and tranquil blue opens up purple to the interpretation of various emotions. The color purple alone has literary interpretations, especially with purple prose, the literary phrase defined as long-winded, flowery language. Purple prose could be seen as literary fiction, the genre The Color Purple fits into. The novel by Alice Walker earned the renowned author the title of being the first Black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in fiction.
A story full of trauma and triumph, the daydreams in the second film adaptation focus on the power of imagination to lift the main character toward the love she felt was missing throughout her life.
The song-and-dance routines add the element of hope in early 20th-century Georgia telling the story of Celie, a Black woman whose Pa handed her off to be the wife to a cruel man known as Mister. She is still recovering from the deliberate abduction of her two babies by Pa, who had raped her. And she will miss her sister, Nettie, who’s her confidante and the one who is told she can make a way for herself in the world through her education. Celie is forced to raise Mister’s three children, cook, and clean all day. She goes through this pattern for years until she meets the famous Shug Avery, who forces her to live her life despite her past and present abuses.
The first daydream sequence from Celie’s imagination occurs after a baby girl drops her pacifier on the floor in the family general store. This is before she is sent off to be married to Mister. In the film, this is young Celie, played by newcomer Phylicia Pearl Mpasi. As Celie sweeps the floor, she picks up the pacifier in awe of the baby girl. She believes it is Olivia, the daughter Pa fathered and abducted. Since Pa tells Celie that he gave the babies to God, Celie fears her babies could be dead. Olivia is riding in the stroller handled by a woman Celie doesn’t know. To keep the moment to herself, Celie runs outside the store with the broom and imagines herself in a dark dream sequence. She is singing “She Be Mine” with the ensemble of men singing and dancing beside her in prisoners’ jumpsuits in a field, where they have rakes, similar to her broom. The setting is charcoal gray; no celebration for color. Then, the dance routine morphs into washerwomen under a waterfall as Celie raises her arms skyward. Her dream sequence is interrupted by Pa, played by Deon Cole, with the threat of punishment. Before she hurries back into the store, we see Celie hold the delicate pacifier close to her chest.
The next daydream sequence is with Celie and her sister, Nettie, played by Halle Bailey, who also starred in the book-to-film blockbuster The Little Mermaid earlier in 2023. Celie has already been married off to Mister. Nettie asks to stay with Celie in Mister’s house to escape Pa’s sexual violence. While looking for wood, the two sisters are walking under the trees on a dusty road, but the sunlight shines on Nettie as she begins to belt out “Keep It Movin’.” Nettie has the opportunity to be optimistic since she’s the sister who can earn an education and understands her future is brighter with her education. She mentions Africa as the birthplace of their ancestors and wants to journey there someday. In fear of Mister’s wrath, Celie becomes anxious, wanting to hurry to get the wood before the sun sets. Celie doesn’t understand that her world could open so wide since she doesn’t attend school and has already birthed two children who had been taken away. The joyful day disappears when Nettie has to escape Mister’s sexual violence and is thrown out of the home in the middle of the night. When Mister brings out his shotgun, Nettie flees into the darkness. Celie is alone again.
Years later as an adult, Celie is played by American Idol winner Fantasia Barrino. She is in a constant rotation of cooking and cleaning Mister’s home without much attention from him. If he gives her attention, it is usually a violent interaction. So, Celie seems to have a short-circuited imagination. The photo of Shug Avery comes alive for Celie as she notices this glamorous woman. We’re taken back for a few seconds to the moment of Shug’s photo shoot. Shug Avery is also the love of Mister’s life. Celie could only wonder what the woman is like, but her imagining how the photo is produced is a daydream sequence that fails to feature Celie herself.
When Shug finally comes to visit Mister, Celie has the chance to experience the glamour up close. Shug takes a relaxing bath with her record playing in the background. Shug needs somebody to flip the record, so Celie enters the bathroom quietly and flips the record since it’s her job to do everything around the house. But she’s in awe of how Shug can lay out her naked body covered in soapy bubbles and enjoy her leisure time. Shug asks Celie to scrub her back. While scrubbing Shug’s back, Celie is transported into another world, but this time it is still charcoal gray to match the gigantic gramophone playing Shug’s record. Celie is singing “Dear God – Shug” about the wondrous feeling she is experiencing in the presence of the great Shug Avery. Then she slides off the bathtub, surprising Shug. The moment is awkwardly over. But her imagination is revving up again.
During the visit, Celie becomes Shug’s companion as Mister, played by Colman Domingo, continues to tend to the farm and go out drinking. Shug notices Celie never smiles. Celie admits she doesn’t have much to smile about. While applying her iconic red lipstick, Shug tries to guide Celie to joy by having her wear lipstick. Celie’s face brightens up. Feeling pretty boosts her confidence. She tells Shug that Mister has beaten her less during the visit. Shug tells Celie to fight back. Shug even reveals that Celie’s husband’s name is Albert. Mister is a title; Celie didn’t know her husband’s name.
The newfound hope for a new life forces Celie to daydream more in the beaded dresses and headpieces that Shug wears. Shug performs at Mister’s son Harpo’s converted speakeasy. She arrives on a boat to the speakeasy in her red dress and feathers. The diva’s entrance and performance force Celie to enjoy herself; it has to be the first time she has ever enjoyed a night out. Shug and Celie leave together and later watch a movie at the cinema. They sit high in the auditorium, most likely in the colored section. It looks like nobody else is in the theater. They share a passionate kiss. The passion grows into a daydream sequence of Shug in her gown stepping down on one side of the stage to Celie in her gown sashaying on the other side singing “What About Love?” with a pianist and band playing on stage. They unite in the center.
As Shug and Celie grow closer and away from an inebriated Albert, Celie believes she’s going with Shug to Memphis. At first, Celie is left behind to combat Albert. Her life of wonder is shut down, and she’s trying to fight back against Albert’s cruelty, thanks to Shug’s advice. But the magic of Shug is gone, and that made the whole world of difference coexisting with Albert in the same house. Shug eventually returns with a new suave husband. A raucous Thanksgiving dinner ensues with Celie cursing out Albert, visibly upset with Shug arriving in town with a husband and saying she will take Celie to Memphis with her this time. Celie jumps up and places a knife under Mister’s chin. Everyone stops Celie from cutting Albert. Harpo’s estranged wife Sofia, played by Danielle Brooks who also starred in the book-to-TV Netflix series Orange Is the New Black, comes alive again with her fighting spirit after spending six years in jail for defending herself against a White mob. Shug and her husband jump in the car to take Celie and Harpo’s girlfriend Mary Agnes “Squeak,” played by H.E.R., to Memphis, but not before Celie points her two fingers like thunderbolts at Mister and says the famous curse: “Until you do right by me, everything you think about is going to crumble.”
On Albert’s farm, the land has been riddled with locusts. The cursed land can’t grow anything, then it catches on fire. Albert barely has anything left, so he decides to make things right with Celie. He sells some of his land to help bring Nettie and the family of missionaries she has worked with for years home to the United States after their passports were destroyed in Africa. He learns of the opportunity to be of assistance through one of Nettie’s letters that he would hide from Celie, who has now already moved out after finding dozens of old letters unearthed by Shug. He surprises Celie at the store and purchases an iridescent pair of pants. Celie packs the pair up, questioning the choice. She feels at ease once he leaves the store. Then she sings, “I’m Here,” the pivotal song of the musical with the message of gratitude for being alive and able to move forward.
Once in Memphis living in Shug’s mansion, Celie discovers Pa has died. The general store is now hers, though Pa’s widow has to tell Celie that Pa was her stepfather and the store never belonged to Pa, but to Celie’s biological father who had left the business in Celie’s and Nettie’s names. They never knew, but Celie is about to take her sewing to a whole new level. She reopens the general store as a fancy pants store. The daydream sequence stars Celie and her friends, including Shug, Sofia, and Mary Agnes, singing “Miss Celie’s Pants.” Celie was an abused housewife for years, but now she is an entrepreneur using her sewing skills and love of color through fabrics. She chooses pants as a piece of clothing that means empowerment since even then men almost entirely wear pants, but she and her chosen family of women are decked out in fancy pants.
The film ends with Celie finally being reunited with grownup Nettie, played by Ciara, who had been raising Celie’s children, Olivia and Adam, with their missionary parents in Africa. Celie created her chosen family, even with Mister in his iridescent pants, when her biological family was taken away from her, but they are now all under the willow tree enjoying Easter brunch with her. They hold hands and sing “The Color Purple.”
The musical is being praised for its positivity, but it’s getting criticism for downplaying the trauma. The weight of trauma is showcased in the original film. The balance between the two films is refreshing and gives the audience another way to digest this classic tale. Finding the good in our situations is more of a theme in the present than it was in the 1980s when the book and the original film debuted. The story takes place between the 1910s and 1930s when self-care and self-love were rarely topics being discussed. The self-love message from Shug evolves into sexual love in the story that is not really shown in the 1985 drama because even then queerness was a touchy element to show on camera, especially between two Black women existing in another time in history.
The Color Purple was published in 1982, and two years later with the news of the film from Steven Spielberg, the novel began to see bans in school libraries and literary curricula. The week the new musical version of The Color Purple opened nationwide in theaters, the Orange County Public Schools in Florida banned the novel to comply with House Bill 1069. The bill was passed by the Republican-controlled state legislature and signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis as an expansion of the “Don’t Say Gay” law, according to Orlando Sentinel. The novel ranked #50 in the 100 most banned books between 2010 and 2019, per the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, which has been documenting attempts to ban books in libraries and schools since 1990.
Ghanaian filmmaker Blitz Bazawule directed the new film. He’s also the author of the 2022 novel, The Scent of Burnt Flowers. Whoopi Goldberg, who played Celie in the 1985 film, made a cameo as the midwife who delivers Adam in the beginning of the film, while Oprah Winfrey, who played Sofia, serves as executive producer with Spielberg and Quincy Jones. Both women had earned Academy Award nominations in 1986 for their performances. “A bold new take on the beloved classic” is the slogan for the 2023 film. It was a bold move to update the film and show the banned book in a new light. Perhaps, students who had access to the book taken away from them by their school administrators may read the book on their own after watching the new screen adaptation. After all, the story’s root is about love and how you have to pave your path to feel love.
*Given an advanced reading copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review*
Rhythm & Muse by India Hill Brown is a predictable young adult romance novel giving us the perspective of the boy pining for the popular girl he has a crush on.
Darren likes Delia Dawson, the popular girl at his school known as Dillie who has her own podcast Dillie D in the Place to Be. He has Delia Daydreams, in which his best friend Justin always keeps shaking him out of. One day, Justin gets to spend time with his wannabe rapper cousin in a recording studio session. Darren tags along though he knows Justin’s cousin doesn’t have the rhythmic talent necessary to be a decent rapper. While in the studio, after listening to awful raps, Darren and Justin perk up to the cousin’s beats. Justin pushes Darren to sing on the beat for fun. Darren used to sing in the choir, but a mortifying experience made him drop out of choir and put his music dreams on hold. But he sings anyway – about Delia. Coincidentally, Delia’s podcast is running a competition for a new jingle. Somehow the track Darren recorded was submitted anonymously. As podcast listeners groove to Darren’s track, he can’t let anyone know he recorded it, especially Delia. He realizes they attend the same church, though he hadn’t been there in a while. He joins Delia on an all-night church sleepover where they bond over 90s R&B and their suspicions on the anonymous song that’s growing in popularity. While Darren gets closer to his dream girl, he second-guesses every move until Delia makes him more comfortable in the moment. When Delia announces the winning song of the competition, Darren knows it’s his chance to tell her the truth. But he still second-guesses telling her the truth, which endangers the relationship they are trying to build.
First, Darren’s obsession with Delia makes him a boring character. Yes, he sings, but the reason why he stopped is weak, and it is built up too much throughout the story to be that weak. The incident that has taken him away from music also has decreased his desire for college, in which he is working with a high school counselor. His second-guessing with Delia eliminates tension between the characters too quickly. He already has the girl the minute they click, which makes for a predictable ending. Other issues like his parents being married and in love and having simple dialogue adds to the boringness in the family of characters. Not saying we need a divorce, but the parents didn’t add enough tension to the situation. His love for 90s R&B could be a questionable decision since today’s teens are most likely listening to contemporary artists. Though it’s talked about how his parents taught him to love 90s R&B, it comes off as inauthentic with a music-obsessed teen not aligning himself more with music topping the charts now.
Overall, this young adult debut reads on the bland side with the unexciting characters and developments. It seems like a safe choice in YA literature as the genre continues to be battered by the banned books movement. The entire point of a romance novel is to reach the happily-ever-after, but when the main character’s personality is too tied to the person they want to be with and the tension falls apart too quickly, the story becomes less entertaining.
*Given an advanced reading copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review*
Nigeria Jones by Ibi Zoboi follows the daughter of a Black revolutionary in Philadelphia trying to fulfill her mother’s wish for her to have a normal life.
Sixteen-year-old Nigeria is the daughter of Kofi Sankofa, an activist who has built his identity and his community around uplifting people in the African diaspora with his pro-African beliefs. Nigeria has always been in his shadow as his warrior princess who can practice shooting guns under the protection of the Second Amendment and organize the youth who seek guidance in their community household. She also takes care of her 1-year-old brother Freedom.
With her mother missing, Nigeria takes it upon herself to be that motherly figure to Freedom while trying to find answers of why her mother is no longer around. Her mother’s friend KD, a White woman, tells Nigeria that her mother wanted her to attend the Philadelphia Friends School, a Quaker high school. It’s the same school KD’s daughter Sage, who is biracial, attends. And Sage and Nigeria used to be close, but Kofi has driven a wedge between the families, not wanting someone White in his circle who could allegedly taint his daughter’s mind. Nigeria has been homeschooled her whole life with her education focusing on the African diaspora rather than European history taught in American schools. But if Nigeria’s mother wanted her daughter to go to school, then what is the problem?
While still upholding her responsibilities, Nigeria wanders into the high school her mother had hopes she would attend. At Philly Friends, she follows Sage and her cousin, Kamau, through hallways and in classrooms struggling to find the balance between her tailored education at home and the one presented to her at a predominantly White school. Her new environment welcomes new opportunities, like getting involved in the diversity, equity, and inclusion club and practicing for debate club with a White boy named Liam, who seems to understand Nigeria better than she thought he would. As she battles her father in attending the school, she finds herself tracing the events that led to her mother’s disappearance. Since it was her mother who registered her for the previous school year before she faded out of the picture, Nigeria feels she needs to better understand her mother’s whereabouts in order to accept the new life she envisions for herself.
The story touches on eldest daughter syndrome, a branch of the birth order theory that has taken over the internet. The eldest daughters are usually the ones with the most responsibility and the ones who receive the most blame. Nigeria is experiencing this phenomenon while also coming out of being the only child for 15 years. Though her father treats her as his version of the apple of his eye, Kofi smothers any chance for Nigeria to find her own path under his roof. She supports his teachings while not quite understanding the world outside her home. The father-daughter dynamic pushes Nigeria to seek her own world because her mother is no longer there to soften the blow of any tension between her and her father. Most teenagers are finding themselves around 16, but Nigeria’s journey feels more complicated without her mother and knowing that her mother had other plans for their lives.
Overall, the conflict between Nigeria and the Movement she grew up in makes this young adult novel more layered. The main character is a teenager who really hasn’t experienced the real world with being tied to a community house where she is homeschooled. She is striving to do something most kids her age already do: attend school, especially attend an excellent high school in order to attend an excellent university. But we see all these factors at home weighing her down to the point she doesn’t know how to escape, or she escapes with guilt. It’s a heavier read with the blend of racial and social justice elements that come up throughout the story, but it speaks to the teenage girl who feels like she is unable to think for herself because her life is being controlled at every turn.
Nichole Blake, who goes by Nic, is turning 12 years old, and for her birthday, she is looking forward to being trained by her dad on how to use the Gift as a real Manifestor. The Gift is a supernatural ability, which Nic’s dad has and therefore Nic has inherited. They are known as Remarkables. The human beings without the Gift are called Unremarkables. Though Nic wants a dragon badly, her dad gives her the safer option of a hellhound for her birthday. The hellhound, who is named Cocoa, has horns and is the size of a tiger. When Nic’s best friend JP comes over, he only sees a regular dog as an Unremarkable. Well, Nic has a feeling that JP may have seen more of Cocoa as a hellhound, but she lets that feeling go.
Since Nic and her dad have moved around the U.S. a lot, Nic feels settled in Jackson, Mississippi. It’s a city built on an inactive volcano, but they made a home with finding Remarkable friends at Ms. Lena’s juke joint where Rougarous, Vampires, Giants, and Fairies frequent. Bags with mojos, which control the elements with good intentions, and jujus, which control the elements with bad intentions, are sold and bought there. The juke joint is a safe haven for their community. Her dad works as a handyman, who collects haints, demons, ghouls, and other Remarkable creatures that are destroying Unremarkables’ homes without their knowledge. He sells these creatures to Ms. Lena to find a place for the evil spirits.
In Jackson, homeschooled Nic also has JP, the only other Black kid on the block, as they obsess over middle-grade author TJ Retro’s fantasy series. It reminds Nic of Remarkables, except the characters in the series use Magic, which is considered a corrupt form of the Gift. When they go to a book signing to meet TJ Retro, they learn that he is an old friend of Nic’s dad. Since her dad refuses to teach her how to fully use her Gift, Nic receives a piece of Giftech, or Gift-infused technology, from her favorite author that ignites an unintentional adventure between the Unremarkable world and the Remarkable world. On this adventure, she pulls in JP and Cocoa to help her discover the truth about her family and find the Msaidizi, one of the most powerful tools in the universe, in order to save her dad who is accused of stealing it and kidnapping her.
Black folklore is interwoven into the storyline to heighten the differences between Remarkables and Unremarkables and give the tale a touch of familiarity. In the story, John Henry is the half-Giant who won a rock-drilling contest while building a railroad with a sledgehammer, which was the Msaidizi. High John the Conqueror, the shapeshifter who fell in love with the Devil’s daughter in one story, used the Msaidizi through a plow and an ax to plant and reap acres of corn, one of the impossible tasks given to him by the Devil. Annie Christmas is the half-Giant who used the Msaidizi as a pole for her keelboat to save hundreds of people. All figures are considered to be fictional but believed to be based on real people who overworked themselves to death by proving their superior strength. But in this novel, they all were Remarkables who knew how to use the Msaidizi.
Along with folklore, racial elements are also connected to the Gift. The Blakes’ Gift is believed to have originated in Africa and passed down by their ancestors. Through the pain and trauma amid the trans-Atlantic slave trade, it is believed many people who had the Gift forgot their power and were unable to pass it down. During their adventure, Nic and her friends are kidnapped by a wizard who brings them to the Grand Wizard, as in the KKK, though the terrorist organization is not mentioned. Wizards are considered dangerous because they know about the Gift and use a wand to conjure up what they think is close to the Gift. The wizards claim to not be associated with the KKK, but they still want to capture Nic and her friends for their Manifestor connections.
Overall, the book is fast-paced with fantasy that seems more authentic to the Southern landscape with the mentions of haints and folkloric legends. A key to the author’s success in previous novels is getting into a young character’s mind and speaking in their voice, and this novel gives us another relatable character finding her true identity amid tough circumstances. This book review is a dose of the unputdownable story to avoid spoilers, but, of course, the ending opens to the potential second book in the series.
Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm by Laura Warrell is a literary fiction novel that introduces us to a womanizing jazz musician and the females who cross his path, including his daughter.
It’s 2013, and Circus Palmer is a 40-year-old trumpet player who takes gigs across the country but doesn’t like to plant roots anywhere. In the first few pages, he learns that Maggie, the woman who enthralls him, is pregnant. He tries to convince her to end the pregnancy; he can’t be rooted down to anything. And she shouldn’t root herself down since she’s a drummer. A child can’t fit into their musician-touring life. Maggie says she wants the baby, and she returns to drumming while Circus heads home to Boston. We meet his 14-year-old daughter Koko, who’s trying to navigate high school and control her fluctuating hormones. With Circus back in the picture, Koko still harbors the emptiness she felt for years living without him and living with her regretful, depressed mother, Circus’ ex-wife Pia.
While Koko and Pia are constants in Circus’ life, the jazzman finds himself constantly attracted to other women. He falls for a twenty-something waitress at a bar where he plays for gigs, for a mysterious woman on the train, for a woman who will do anything for him when he visits her in nearby Providence, Rhode Island. He comes across a woman he wanted to marry years ago while he witnesses the decline of the woman he did marry by the weight of taking care of their daughter and desiring love from him. All these women still don’t make up for losing Maggie and the child she may be carrying. As he wonders about that child, he realizes the need to focus on Koko as his daughter falls for boys who remind him of himself. Though his dream of recording an album still lingers in the background, his womanizing cripples his ability to assume the fame he swears he can taste.
Unpeeling the layers of the womanizer and the women hurt by the actions make for an absorbing story. It switches between perspectives with the trail of women Circus leaves in his wake. Even meeting the women who spend one night with him show how his carelessness can feel magnitudinous to the women he hurts. Koko detects the pain he is causing other women because her mother lives with the pain on a deeper level. So, the added thread of a teenage daughter hungry for love seeing her father also hungry for love gives the story more depth. And Circus, of course, doesn’t put two and two together about how his actions affect Koko or his career. He thinks his womanizing helps him stay away as a father in case he messes up parenthood and helps him stay creative with his music when a muse disappears. Yet, the dependence on women derails his future, as he lives in a pattern of unfulfilled opportunities.
Overall, the book introduces characters who are intriguing as they sift through their emotions after welcoming Circus or re-welcoming him into their lives. Watching the characters come into their feelings on the pages make the story memorable as if you know the characters. The smoothness of the details about their everyday lives also hops off the page.
Gabrielle Union, Keith Powers, and Gina Torres add star power to the fashion-centric romantic comedy The Perfect Find based on Tia Williams’ 2016 novel. Though the film follows the storyline on pages, there are still a few touches that brought the so-called unconventional love story to life onscreen.
Jenna Jones, played by Gabrielle, is an out-of-work fashion editor still recovering from the unraveling of a 10-year relationship with millionaire entrepreneur Brian, played by the debonair D.B. Woodside. In the beginning of the story, we see Jenna floundering at her mother’s house, avoiding New York City like a plague. Her mother, played by Janet Hubert for too short of an appearance, tells Jenna she needs to go back to her life in the city. Her romantic downfall that led to her career derailment has to be on everyone’s mind since it’s still on hers.
In less than five minutes in the film, Jenna returns to her Brooklyn apartment with a chic bob and designer attire in tow. And now that she’s back at home, she needs a night out with the girls, played by Aisha Hinds and Alani “La La” Anthony. They head to a fancy party in Harlem looking for an innocent one-night stand. When Jenna feels like she ran out of luck, she falls tipsily into the arms of a younger man. They kiss, but the kiss is too much for Jenna, who finds the man’s youthful age too ridiculous to take seriously.
Bright and early the next day, she finds herself slightly humiliated in the office of her corporate archnemesis, Darcy Hill, played by Gina. Darcy laughs at the fact that Jenna has to grovel for a job when Jenna allegedly stole her jobs in the past. The competitive world of fashion journalism was a losing game for Darcy until she built her own namesake media empire at Darzine. Jenna earns the job with the expectation to produce multimedia pieces to increase digital subscriptions. Darcy assigns her twenty-something son and photographer Eric to work with Jenna to come up with these pieces. Except Eric happens to be the much-younger man Jenna was kissing the night before.
Jenna tells Eric that they can’t develop a relationship despite their natural magnetism. They even bond over vintage Black Hollywood films, thanks to the poster of starlet Nina Mae McKinney displayed in Jenna’s office. Eric is Jenna’s boss’ son. The relationship is not only unprofessional but could make Jenna the laughingstock of Black New York again with another misstep in love. When the girls try to hook Jenna up with a blind date, Jenna decides to throw a dinner party to ease the nervousness. She even invites Eric and tells him to bring friends. The more the merrier. At the party, nerves are high as Jenna realizes the blind date is not a match. So, Eric becomes a match with his cuteness and conversation. And a secret relationship between coworkers blossom.
Intimacy builds between the couple until Darcy warns Jenna to stay away from Eric romantically because she has her suspicions. Jenna disobeys that order while Eric is demanding to emerge as a public boyfriend, and not a private lover. But the volcano of secret love erupts when Darcy catches Jenna consorting inappropriately with her grown son on her cerise velvet sofa. The argument leads to Jenna being fired and Eric being upset about Jenna not telling him that his mother had an instinct about the romance.
Months pass by. It’s Christmastime. Eric is working on the documentary he always wanted to do on his murdered father Otis. Jenna reaches out to Eric. They arrange to meet at a late-night diner. What Eric believes is a simple catch-up turns out to be a surprise from Jenna with a sonogram. She’s pregnant. Eric being in his early twenties and figuring out his path in cinema make him ask for space. Darcy soon pays a visit to Jenna. Not only did Jenna date Darcy’s son, but she got pregnant by him, too? It’s a lot, but Darcy recalls when she was a first-time mother and vows to support Jenna as a grandmother.
After accepting paternity, Eric surprises Jenna at a doctor’s appointment. He confesses he still loves Jenna and invites her to the Darzine gala. The film ends with Jenna rubbing her pregnant belly alongside Eric on the red carpet. Their relationship is public, and the family Jenna always wanted is a dream come true.
The décor and fashion alone are two reasons to put your feet up and sink into the sofa with a bowl of popcorn and a glass of wine. Designs meant to leave you awestruck include the first time Jenna meets Darcy at the office. Jenna wears a pink cape by Nina Ricci with Stella McCartney pink silk pants, while Darcy stuns in a multicolored Manish Arora coat. Even author Tia models in the photoshoot as a glam disco geisha queen and on the red carpet in a gold sequin dress. More fashionable cameos include Remy Ma, Winnie Harlow, and Dwyane Wade, Gabrielle’s real-life husband. Jenna’s office is supposed to be a cluttered dump, but in its original iteration we see leopard and zebra print wallpaper, racks full of silky frocks, and fully dressed mannequins sitting on file cabinets. This is just motivation to create a Pinterest board for the jaw-dropping home office.
“I really wanted to see Gabrielle in a palette that I hadn’t seen her in very much in other films, a more pastel-toned palette,” said director Numa Perrier to Netflix’s blog Tudum. “When it came to Darcy — Gina Torres being such an iconic woman — we wanted to dress her to the nines. We wanted her to just be an absolute New York fashion woman who’s bold and unapologetic and takes up all the space in the room.”
One major plot adjustment is the unplanned pregnancy. In the book, Jenna and Eric don’t see each other until four years after the firing and the breakup. They spot each other at the park as Jenna watches her son Otis play and drinks a latte with Billie, the main character of Tia’s 2004 debut novel The Accidental Diva. Jenna reveals that Otis is Eric’s son and explains she kept her pregnancy a secret because she didn’t want to interfere with Eric’s budding film career. The screenplay written by Spelman College alumna Leigh Davenport, also the creator of Run the World on Starz, features the pregnancy as another plot twist at the end. With Gabrielle’s real-life fertility struggles, the moments feel more heartwarming.
Another noticeable difference is that Brian is Black in the film while he’s described as a “Jewish Adonis” in the book. And Darzine in the film is StyleZine in the book with that only being one of Darcy’s nine online women’s magazines. The must-see film is a soothing adaptation of a book that was first indie-published by Brown Girls Books and reprinted by Grand Central Publishing after the runaway success of Tia’s third adult novel Seven Days in June.
The Sex and the City reboot centers its second season’s third episode on Carrie Bradshaw narrating her story of grief for her audiobook. As she bumbles with emotion over the chapter detailing her husband’s untimely death, Carrie does everything in her power to avoid having to complete the narration.
And Just Like That… returned for its second season June 22 on Max, formerly HBO Max, and picked up where the first season left off: Carrie moving forward after the sudden death of her husband, John, better known as “Big.” The grief connects to her writing in the episode “Chapter Three.”
Traipsing around Manhattan in her iconic heels, Carrie, played by Sarah Jessica Parker, is heading to the studio to record her latest book, Loved and Lost. This book fits into a different genre compared to her other books. This one is about her journey of grief after the death of Big, played by Chris Noth (Sexual assault allegations against the actor emerged immediately after his character’s demise. He denies the allegations and hasn’t been criminally charged).
Carrie’s foray into the grief memoir genre has given her an opportunity to narrate her audiobook. Most memoirists tell their stories for the audiobook, and it’s become more of a standard for memoirs about grief. But when Carrie speaks into the microphone, she keeps choking on her words, reliving the moments from the premiere episode of the series where Big dies from a heart attack after riding on his Peloton (The fitness company’s stock fell due to the negative storyline). Carrie’s male audio producers try to coach her through the annunciation issues, like she’s swallowing her t’s and popping her p’s, but they can’t pick up her frustration in reliving that distinct memory by reading it aloud.
“A memoir this personal needs to be read by the author,” her editor says after Carrie urges for an actress to be hired to record the audiobook, like Julianne Moore or Julianna Margulies. Then Carrie learns that the studio has been booked for five days. She thought it would be only for two. But the publisher already factored in extra days to accommodate the emotional hardship of reading the story. Back in the recording studio, Carrie starts to hear the water from the shower on that tragic day and sees water blurring the words on the e-book she’s reading from. The audio producers decide it’s better to skip the chapter for the time being.
After a tearful moment in the recording studio, Carrie receives advice from Bitsy Von Muffling, played by Julie Halston. Complaining about the upkeep after a facelift, fellow widow Bitsy recommends Carrie should do whatever she loves to do to make her feel better. So, Carrie goes shoe shopping. She bursts through her apartment door with Bergdorf Goodman bags filled with shoes, such as a pair of pink Gucci ankle-cuff leather pumps and copper-studded Giuseppe Zanotti Intriigo mules.
While trying on her new shoes, she calls up the main audio producer and tells him she has contracted COVID-19. Therefore, the producers need to hire that actress Carrie had suggested earlier. The viral disease that caused a yearslong global pandemic is now treatable enough that it can be a lie to get out of work. She stays in her apartment, even enjoying a hamburger and fries when her friends Seema and Anthony, played by Sarita Choudhury and Mario Cantone respectively, call her for lunch. She lies to them about her fake COVID. Seema comes to visit where Carrie admits her lie and tells her how she needs to attend her neighbor Lisette’s jewelry showcase.
At the showcase, Carrie and Seema are chatting when they see a man in a black suit pocket the jewelry on display. While they’re questioning the theft, Carrie yells that she has COVID, which clears the outside tents. Seema brandishes a handgun, which turns out to be a lighter. The jewelry is gone, and Lisette, played by Katerina Tannenbaum, is devastated. Carrie visits Lisette the next day with pastries as they mourn the loss. Mourning, even for material objects, helps Carrie prepare to narrate the chapter detailing her husband’s death in the recording studio. She celebrates with Seema, who has recovered her Birkin handbag stolen in the beginning of the episode, at a communal table with young men visiting from Australia. At the end of the episode, Carrie’s lie manifests into real COVID.
Though the writing in the reboot fails to be as crisp as the writing in the original Sex and the City series based on Candace Bushnell’s 1996 book, emphasizing the hardship of narrating an audiobook about grief seems to be a realistic issue memoirists deal with.
Marketing maven Bozoma St. John, for example, went on tour earlier this year to discuss her grief memoir The Urgent Life: My Story of Love, Loss, and Survival. In the very first minutes on her audiobook, she narrates the day her husband died from a rare cancer thought to be treatable. Tembi Locke’s 2019 memoir From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home came to life onscreen with a Netflix miniseries. She narrates the story of losing her husband to cancer elegantly for the audiobook edition. You can find the book review here.
On the other hand, Sheryl Sandberg didn’t narrate the audiobook for Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy, her 2017 memoir about losing her husband, SurveyMonkey CEO Dave Goldberg. She may have been worried about being overtaken with emotion, or the publisher decided her voice wasn’t the right fit, even when more memoirists are reading their life stories. Elisa Donovan of Clueless and Sabrina, the Teenage Witch fame stepped in to narrate the Option B audiobook. In fact, the actress narrated the 2021 audiobook for her own grief memoir about losing her father in Wake Me When You Leave: Love and Encouragement via Dreams from the Other Side.
This a rare episode for Carrie where we see the process of her promoting her book. This is a newer process for some authors, especially for memoirists, with coming to terms to reading an audiobook, even when it draws up tough feelings. Audiobooks are more popular than ever, so publishers are banking on authors to vocalize their own stories of loss and healing.
