Tag: black female authors

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Book Review: ‘The Final Revival of Opal & Nev’ by Dawnie Walton

The Final Revival of Opal & Nev by Dawnie Walton

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


The Final Revival of Opal & Nev by Dawnie Walton reexamines the trials and tribulations of a fictional 1970s soul rock band fronted by a White British man and an Black American woman who see their rise decline during a racial riot at a major concert. Marked with exquisite detail, the story trips up on telling multiple perspectives to the point it’s difficult to connect with the many characters and their worlds.

Sunny Shelton is a music journalist and the daughter of Jimmy Curtis, a drummer who was fatally beaten during a 1971 concert featuring the top talent from up-and-coming label Rivington Records. What sparked the melee was the conflict between Opal & Nev, an interracial soul rock group, and the Bond Brothers, a Southern White band who brought the Confederate flag on stage. Opal, a Black woman from Detroit who summered in Alabama when she was young, hated that the Bond Brothers had the audacity to bring this oft-perceived offensive symbol of oppression on stage. The history of how the concert went south becomes fascination for Sunny who revisits all the players decades later to write a book about the events that led to her father’s untimely death. And the fact that Opal was having an affair with Sunny’s father at the time of the concert blurs the emotions of Sunny’s journalism as she tries to revive a music magazine as editor in chief.

The book is packed with details that the story of Opal & Nev feels authentic. The story focuses on this band, but the story comes full circle with the band’s influence on the deadly concert that becomes part of music history on the level of Woodstock. The details also become problematic where the characters become sidelined by telling their stories to Sunny, who as a narrator fades in the background but reappears toward the end as she pieces who was at fault for her father’s death. The plot is reminiscent to Taylor Jenkins Reid’s novel, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, but in that masterpiece the journalist with the dead father and the Hollywood actress are the only perspectives the reader receives with their stories intertwining at the end as well. In Evelyn Hugo, the characters’ truths flow well with the same story backdrop of a journalist’s interview process highlighting an icon’s journey where in Opal & Nev that technique fails especially with the characters’ truths changing almost every page, so a character’s thought process gets amputated by another character’s thought process.

Opal is supposed to be the main character, but when the story is not told from her point-of-view, it seems like a loss for the reader to really get to know how magical she seems to be. She is presented to us as this badass Black female singer struggling to become a star amid the civil rights movement who has elements of Betty Davis or Tina Turner, overshadowed by a male musician but finds her voice. But her voice is misconstrued when she tries to plot revenge on the Bond Brothers and destroy the Confederate flag at a high-profile concert. This part of the story feels all too real of a Black woman trying to raise awareness about racial insensitivity yet is the scapegoat for the disaster that results from the explosive anger.

Overall, the novel features an extraordinary fictional music saga, but the characters contributing to the story get lost in the shuffle of a pretend journalistic venture. The elaborateness of the fake historical account can be awe-inspiring as well as destructive to the story’s resonance.




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Book Review: ‘Caul Baby’ by Morgan Jerkins

Caul Baby by Morgan Jerkins

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Caul Baby by Morgan Jerkins explores the relationships between women in two families intertwined by a broken promise that haunts a community over the alleged power of the caul.

Set in Harlem, the novel introduces us first to Laila, a Black woman who seems to have it all in her perfect brownstone where she lives with her perfect husband. But she can’t carry a baby to term, her miscarriages becoming the talk of the town. Then one day, she’s pregnant again but constantly worries about losing the baby. A man at her church named Landon approaches her about the opportunity to make sure her baby will be born alive and full term. Landon, who happens to be Laila’s niece Amara’s godfather, seems to be someone who can be trusted. He offers Laila a piece of caul, a rare layer of skin purported to have protecting powers. Laila ponders about buying the caul for her unborn child when she meets Josephine, a clerk at the convenience store. She sees Josephine get a paper cut and instantly heal with the caul she tries to hide. This magnetizes Laila to Josephine Melancon, who also says she’s had a history of miscarriages. Once Laila decides to buy the caul, Landon says the deal is off. This drives Laila to insanity as she loses her baby.

Laila ends up losing her husband and her home and lives with her sister Denise. Denise’s daughter, Columbia University student Amara, sees her aunt Laila unable to recover from the breakdown. The attention on Laila saves Amara, who is keeping her own pregnancy a secret. When she meets her godfather Landon at the church, Amara falls but rebounds. Landon notices this power and the pregnancy and offers Amara a place to hide out. Amara stays with Landon and his family until she gives birth to a girl named Hallow. Born with a caul, Hallow is raised by Landon and his mistress Josephine and is groomed to continue the profitable Melancon family business of selling caul to wealthy White people and denying caul to the Black people in their community.

Years later, Amara is preparing for a run as district attorney, but what the Melancons did to her family still gnaws at her. Laila’s tragedy becomes her driving force to be a successful lawyer, and she feels she finally found the legal solution with shutting down the Melancons’ caul-selling empire. In the back of her mind, she’s also thinking of the daughter she gave up and wondering what happened to her.

The novel is centered on the folklore of caul and how it would be sold through centuries to people who sought protection from danger. It also blends in family, fertility, race, class, and gentrification, spanning over 20 years in an evolving Harlem. Female-centered families anchor the story with most of the focus on the Melancons with matriarch Maman, oldest daughter Josephine, and youngest daughter Iris, who also lost her mind from having to be cut for her caul to protect anyone who pays for it. Iris’ daughter Helena had an accident as a child making her unfit to donate caul, which makes her an unruly companion to Hallow, who’s considered the perfect caulbearer. Josephine also feels stuck in the business but sees her affair with Landon as a way out. As the Black residents of Harlem see a mysterious family in the brownstone, the Melancons inside are in constant conflict about the business they refuse to share with the community because the community cannot afford the caul services. If one has the remedy, then why not share it with your community? That’s the question that plagues the outside where residents like Laila and Amara have a vendetta against the Melancons.

Overall, the first novel from journalist and nonfiction author Morgan Jerkins is a smooth literary fiction read that takes an element of magical realism and mixes it with the changing times around race and gentrification.




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Book Review: ‘Kindred’ by Octavia E. Butler

Kindred by Octavia E. Butler

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Kindred by Octavia E. Butler takes time travel and blends the science fiction concept across race, gender, and DNA with the main character going back to the antebellum South to save an ancestor in order for her to live in the future.

The story starts with Dana, a Black woman in 1976 Pasadena, California, who is in the hospital recovering from the loss of her left arm and waiting for her White husband Kevin to finish with the police. How she loses her arm is a journey that begins on her 26th birthday when she finds herself in 1815 Maryland saving a White boy from drowning. When she asks the boy’s name, she learns it’s Rufus Weylin. The name rings a bell because the boy is her ancestor, the father to one of her foremothers, Hagar who was born in 1831. Dana needs to save him, so he can eventually plant the seed for Hagar with his slave Alice Greenwood to make sure she will exist.

Before she gets in trouble for being a free Black woman in 1970s attire, she finds herself back home to a worried Kevin. She is later summoned again by Rufus where he is burning the curtains in his bedroom. Dana realizes she returns to the past under Rufus’ control when he is in trouble and the only way back home is her own fear. As fear controls the time travel, Dana returns to the past again, but this time Kevin holds on for the ride. Now, she and her husband are stuck in the antebellum South where their interracial relationship is illegal. Kevin tries to find his place as a White man in the prior century by spending time with the slave-owning Weylins while Dana is adjusting to life as a slave and befriending Alice and the other slaves. The inhumanity and cruelty of slavery motivates her to uplift the slaves with her futuristic ideals, but it results in Dana receiving a punishment so severe that it scares her back home—without Kevin. She is determined to return to save her husband and her ancestors to make sure her existence comes into being.

This masterpiece is categorized as science fiction, but it exceeds the genre by having the main character return to the past to save herself instead of traveling to the future to save the world. The story emphasizes the complicated nature of African American ancestry with the slave master being a part of the bloodline and Dana needing Rufus to survive in order for a Black branch of the bloodline to lead to her birth.

There is a dependency between Dana and Rufus as Dana wants to exist while Rufus, who accepts Dana as a time traveler without knowing their shared lineage, also wants to exist subconsciously despite his tendency to fall into life-threatening situations. Dana sees Rufus grow up, and as Rufus becomes a man, he begins seeing Dana in a sexual light, especially with her resemblance to Alice. That development confuses Dana, who wants to keep Rufus happy for her survival and the survival of the slaves on the Weylin plantation.

What also adds another dimension to the story is Dana having a White husband in a time when their marriage is legal but still receives negative attention. Her family and his family were not too happy when they married, so as she navigates her contemporary world in an interracial couple, she finds herself 150 years in the past dependent on Kevin to save them. Also, at home she depends on Kevin, the successful author with his best-selling book giving them the money to buy their new home where Dana begins her time travel. Dana wants to be an author, too, but her dreams take a hit in boosting Kevin’s career. For survival in both worlds, Dana has to work with her husband and her forefather because the color of her skin impedes what she can do.

The more Dana drops into the early 1800s, the more she realizes she can’t present herself as a free Black woman on a plantation. She gets closer to her other ancestor, Alice, who also needs assistance especially as a slave, but their connection reaches the frustrated friendship level since Alice knows she can’t trust Dana with her disappearing acts and her tendency to stand by Rufus, Alice’s owner and rapist. Dana gets complaints from other slaves for wanting to be White and using that alleged privilege to her advantage.

The empathy fight Dana struggles with in having Rufus’ back when he follows the slavery law of the land becomes overwhelming. Every time she returns home to 1976 California, she has physical and emotional bruises and scars trying to make sense of her surroundings that are over a century and thousands of miles apart.

Overall, Kindred packs a multitude of elements into a novel that has a Black female character straddling two worlds in two different time periods and facing racism for her choices to survive in a world not set up in her favor.




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Book Review: ‘Well-Read Black Girl’ by Glory Edim

Well-Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves by Glory Edim

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Well-Read Black Girl is an anthology by Black female writers who discuss how they became writers, but while some stories strike a chord, others lack depth.

Between the stories, the anthology has lists of written works by Black women to check out. It’s a valuable resource for a to-be-read list. The writers themselves usually mention a work that changed their life and directed them to writing. Jesmyn Ward discusses the unexpected Black girl magic within Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth by E.L. Konigsburg. Dhonielle Clayton credits Coffee Will Make You Black by April Sinclair with making her realize her sexuality. Zinzi Clemmons discovers how close she grew up next to the Brooklyn brownstones highlighted in Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones. Mahogany L. Browne compares the girls in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye to the ones she grew up with in Northern California and how they all felt invisible as Black girls.

While some essays mostly focus on one experience and one book, others broaden their journey. Rebecca Walker talks about being Alice Walker’s daughter and how hanging out with Black female writing dynamos informed her future career. Gabourey Sidibe writes about her mother’s disappointment in having a daughter and how that motivated her to live her best life. Renee Watson tells the story of how she became a Rose Festival Princess in Portland despite being a big Black girl expected to lose and how Lucille Clifton’s poetry later moved her to accept her body.

The anthology gives insight to what inspires some of the top Black female writers, but it comes off as a collection meant for a younger audience. The theme of how you became a writer or what it means to be a Black writer also simplifies the essays with several mentioning well-known books as inspiration with similar reasoning. Marita Golden writes about Zora Neale Hurston’s impact on her career, particularly with Their Eyes Were Watching God. Zora is an expected source of inspiration due to her popularity, and the essays that highlight other lesser-known Black writers resonate better and make you feel as the reader you’re learning about or being reminded of a writer’s legacy.

Overall, the anthology is entertaining, but some stories are better than others and what inspires authors can sometimes be interesting and sometimes not, depending on how they write their inspiration story.




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Book Review: Zikora by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Zikora: A Short Story

Zikora: A Short Story by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Zikora by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a short story that explores the multidimensional emotion around pregnancy, especially for a professional woman who decides to raise her baby alone.

Zikora is a Nigerian lawyer working in Washington, D.C. who finds out she’s pregnant by her ex-boyfriend, Kwame. They are both on a similar career track, but Kwame assumed Zikora was on birth control when they had unprotected sex. Zikora swears she told Kwame she wasn’t on birth control and his willingness to have unprotected sex meant he was ready for commitment and children. As Kwame claims he didn’t know the consequences, Zikora decides to have their child on her own. At work, she downplays her pregnancy because she’s up for partnership at her law firm and is competing against a presumably White woman who brags about her childlessness. Her motivation to keep her child stems from a situation in college, but her fear of having a baby at the wrong time with the wrong partner emerges from other people’s situations like her cousin who has six children because she forgets to take her contraceptive and now feels stuck or another cousin’s cousin who fainted to death in a fancy hospital even though it was her third pregnancy. Zikora gives birth to a son and finds herself still in conflict with her mother over circumcising her son. It reminds her how her father left her mother for a second wife because her mother kept having miscarriages. With her newborn son, Zikora still checks her phone to see if Kwame will check in.

The story goes through all the layers of pregnancy for Zikora and the women in her family. From the miscarriages, abortions, illnesses, and deaths, the story shows a woman genuinely worried about the process and the aftermath – raising her son alone. How pregnancy takes a backseat to the obsession with work ethic plays a role as Zikora is climbing the corporate ladder but so is Kwame, who decides to walk away from the situation. Zikora feels her promotion is threatened because she chose to have a baby. Everything she has worked for is now hanging on a balance due to her natural desire to start a family. How pregnancy is viewed as a negative continues with the stories that haunt Zikora from her family and friends. What others say is the happiest moment of her life is marred by stress and confusion of how she will survive pregnancy and childbirth and how she will care for her son.

Overall, the story reveals the angles of pregnancy and shows the impact on one woman who’s trying to make sense of the experience. The wrong timing, the unplanned parenthood, and the wrong partner plagues Zikora’s pregnancy as she tries to see past those concerns and enjoy her baby.

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Book Review: ‘On Her Own Ground’ by A’Lelia Bundles

On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker by A’Lelia Perry Bundles
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Self Made also known as On Her Own Ground by A’Lelia Bundles is an engrossing biography about Madam C.J. Walker, the Black woman behind a million-dollar hair care empire who became a Black History Month fixture yet the story of her life and rise to success is largely still shrouded.

Born Sarah Breedlove in Louisiana, Madam C.J. Walker lived in poverty for decades with marrying as a teenager after her formerly enslaved parents died, dealing with abusive marriages, then making pennies as a washwoman. At the time, she, like many other women, are dealing with severe hair loss, most likely due to the lack of daily cleanliness with the scarcity of water and soap. A hair care entrepreneur named Annie Turnbo helps Sarah grow her hair. With the success, Sarah makes her own products to help women grow their hair. She does everything in her power to hobnob with the wealthy in Indianapolis, where she ends up as the place to start her business with her third husband C.J. Walker and daughter Lelia from a previous marriage. One of the main people she tries to connect with is Booker T. Washington, the civil rights speaker, who believes Madam C.J. Walker’s hair care products are meant to straighten Black women’s hair to conform to Eurocentric beauty standards. It’s one of the fabrications about Madam C.J. Walker that she created the products, including the straightening comb, to straighten kinks out. This biography tries to decipher how this lie followed Madam C.J. Walker’s career as it derives from a newspaper article where a White reporter wrote the products are for straightening Black hair to be more like White hair.

The book is drenched in details. A’Lelia Bundles, an experienced journalist, is the great-great-granddaughter of Madam C.J. Walker, named after the daughter Lelia, who later goes by A’Lelia when she becomes a Harlem socialite. With the journalism aspect, there’s context on top of context describing the historical, geographical, and socioeconomic conditions around Sarah and her career as she moves around the country to grow her business. Indianapolis is the city of choice during the Great Migration for Sarah to make it the business birthplace until the blossoming Harlem in New York City becomes the spot as the home of Black excellence. A lot of these details had been omitted in the shortened bios that people are given about Madam C.J. Walker, so it’s refreshing to get the whole story along with the thousands of obstacles that this history-making entrepreneur endured, which is a main aspect missing from those bios.

Annie Turnbo Malone, the hair care entrepreneur who may have inspired Madam C.J. Walker to start her own business, is portrayed in the Netflix series as a nemesis. In the story, there is conflict between the two women as competitors, but it’s not all-encompassing like the TV series made it seem. In the series, Annie Turnbo Malone is turned into a fictional character who is color-struck and upset that Madam C.J. Walker is finding more success. Most never heard of Annie Turnbo Malone, and the TV series messes up her image as a nemesis rather than a natural business competitor since she’s also a part of Black history, particularly when it comes to entrepreneurship. Annie Turnbo Malone also had a monstrously large business spanning states and a résumé reflecting philanthropy. The biography clears up the relationship that Netflix chose to construe for dramatic purposes.

The book also shows how Madam C.J. Walker and her daughter A’Lelia worked so hard to get the business off the ground and running that their physical health deteriorated. Both women died relatively young from hypertension and not being able to control it because they refused to slow down. They both had similar marriage problems with Madam C.J. Walker’s title being named after her third husband she was only married to for about six years, which turned out to be crucial years in the business hence her title. A’Lelia also had three short-lived marriages like her mother. Surprisingly, the marriage tumult doesn’t seem to derail the women’s ambitions as the company grows and takes young Black women under their wings to spread the success.

Overall, the biography is very well-researched and elaborately tells the full story of a Black woman seen as the grandmother of the modern-day billion-dollar Black hair care industry. The book was originally published as On Her Own Ground in 2001 and casually renamed Self Made after the Netflix series of the same name.

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Book Review: ‘His Only Wife’ by Peace Adzo Medie

His Only WifeHis Only Wife by Peace Adzo Medie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

*Given an advanced reading copy from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review*

His Only Wife by Peace Adzo Medie dives into African family relations that can arrange an marriage yet destroy it at the same time.

The story opens with Afi, a twentysomething struggling seamstress and failed student living in Ghana, preparing for her wedding. Without her husband, whom she never met. Going through with the marriage because of her shortcomings, Afi also wants to please her mother who wants to please Aunty Faustina Ganyo, a wealthy woman in the community who has her hands on everything―and likes it that way. Afi knows her mother never recovered from her father’s death, and now the head of their extended family is her stingy Uncle Pious. But Afi’s mother has received a lot of help from Aunty, and Aunty offering her favorite son Elikem “Eli” Ganyo to Afi to marry is the ultimate gift.

Moving away from her small village of Ho to the big city of Accra, Afi lives in a luxury apartment. Without her husband, whom she still has never met. It turns out Aunty set up Afi with Eli because she doesn’t like Eli’s Liberian girlfriend Muna. Not only is Muna not Ghanaian, but she’s too tall, has a manly shape, and a “roasted coffee beans” complexion, and she smokes cigarettes, drinks alcohol, and refuses to connect with the family and culture, according to the Ganyos. Plus, the daughter Muna had with Eli is battling sickle cell anemia, and they had already lost a child due to the same illness, so the Ganyos see Muna as a threat to their family line. But they also said Eli will leave Muna for Afi, who is light-skinned and Ghanaian, exactly what the Ganyos prefer for Eli’s wife. As Afi and Eli finally get close, Afi realizes that she still lives in the apartment while Muna lives in the mansion. She fights to get in the mansion, and when she does, she thinks the fight for Eli’s affection is over. But it’s far from over.

Afi is a young woman who doesn’t come from money and has had her education hopes dashed after failing entrance exams twice. But her luck changes once she becomes a wife with money and a career thanks to her connections to a rich family. This novel shows the evolution of a woman who learns the sacrifices to find love and reach her dreams are based on a choice that was made on her behalf at her expense. The ties to the Ganyos threatens Afi and her mother, who desperately wants to keep Aunty happy since Aunty gave her her job and her humble home after her husband died. Afi’s mother depends heavily on Aunty, which means Afi needs to depend on Aunty and her every word. Afi is torn between what she wants from Eli, her allegedly lawful husband, and how her demands could impact her mother, her uncle, and other members of her family back at home where the Ganyos reign over the territory. The tug of war between her family and in-laws puts Afi in the middle, and she eventually decides to put herself first.

Overall, the story flows well with Afi becoming stronger only because she has to fight her family in the fight for love.

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Book Review: ‘Paper Gods’ by Goldie Taylor

Paper Gods: A Novel of Money, Race, and PoliticsPaper Gods: A Novel of Money, Race, and Politics by Goldie Taylor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Paper Gods by Goldie Taylor is a political thriller centered in Atlanta where characters pretend to be sweet as syrup to the public and wicked in private.

Equipped with degrees from Spelman College and Harvard Law, Atlanta mayor Victoria Dobbs is a force to be reckoned with. Her shiny life with her cardiac surgeon husband Marshall Overstreet and their twin daughters, Maya and Mahalia, after poet Angelou and gospel singer Jackson, is enviable. When her mentor Congressman Ezra Hawkins is shot dead by a sniper in the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, Victoria finds a red origami dragon beside Hawkins’ body. She takes it and tries to decipher the meaning since she’s seen one before. But Hawkins’ position is up for grabs, and Victoria wants it. As she announces her run in the special election, uber-wealthy White men Virgil Loudermilk and his cousin-brother Whit Delacourte look for their own candidate to snatch Victoria’s power. It turns out mostly Loudermilk’s actions have sinister origins, connected to a committee of White politicos arranging for Democratic Black politicos to hold city positions like mayor but not state positions like governor, reserved for mostly White Republicans. The forced racial divide in politics has piqued the interest of veteran reporter Hampton Bridges as he’s been pursuing the story for years. His snooping has placed him on the blacklist for Victoria, Loudermilk, and Delacourte. He’s also been a victim of a suspicious car crash with his latest college-age girl in the front seat that raises more concern. While everyone is trying to hide their secrets and dodge threats, they are making sure they protect their best interests no matter who gets killed in the process.

This novel explores the dual identity most politicos presumably live with. Mayor Dobbs, for example, is the impeccable Black woman worthy of likeability, but she’s also pulling strings behind the scenes to make sure she stays on top. Loudermilk and Delacourte remain top lawyers at major companies throughout the Atlanta region while pulling the strings in overall state politics. Everyone’s hands in this story are dirty and get filthier by the page. The amount of scandal that multiplies for each character makes it a page-turner, especially as characters get killed or almost killed. What incites character empathy is how the characters try to protect their families, with many members having the Southern-style double first name.

Overall, the novel is an entertaining take on the fictional political atmosphere that reads like a smooth investigative magazine piece. The author is the editor-at-large at The Daily Beast, so she uses many of the characters’ last names as their main names, meaning it’s written with journalistic flair. Read this book before the John Legend-produced ABC series starring Nia Long comes out. Also, the audiobook is hard to follow with the plethora of detail, especially all the names, and popular reader Bahni Turpin’s voice doesn’t vibe with the material.

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Book Review: ‘Luster’ by Raven Leilani

Luster by Raven Leilani
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

*Won book in a Goodreads giveaway*

Luster by Raven Leilani is an amazing debut novel that uses masterful verbosity to illustrate the evolution of a millennial Black woman character as she navigates through many obstacles to figure out what she wants to do with her life.

Twenty-something Edie is trying to figure out her purpose. She works at a publishing house but hasn’t fulfilled her passion for art to the fullest extent out of fear of failure. Love is not the goal as she stumbles through sexual partners, including co-workers. She wants a real connection, but when she gets fired over inappropriate sexual relations in the office, she finds herself in the arms of the digital archivist Eric. Not only is he distant, but he’s also married. Edie goes to a party at his house where she meets his wife, Rebecca, a pathologist. Now that Edie doesn’t have a secure job and is on the verge of eviction, Rebecca invites her to stay in the home. Edie soon meets Akila, the Black adopted daughter that Rebecca and Eric neglected to mention. She’s drawn to being a mentor to the young girl because Akila is a reminder of her younger self as she deals with flashbacks centering on her toxic family upbringing. She’s also drawn to finding out more about Rebecca, who keeps scheduling activities for them to bond as she strives for normalcy in her open marriage. As Edie grows closer to Akila, an unarmed Black woman and police situation occurs at the suburban New Jersey home that makes Edie quickly realize how she will always be an outsider in the home of her flaky boyfriend and his wife.

The writing is so elaborate but likable. The way the main character describes situations with her suicidal Seventh Day Adventist mother and her veteran atheist father to past sexual relationships to adventures with Rebecca in the autopsy room at her hospital workplace sticks with the reader. The brilliant writing slows the story progression, but when the plot climbs to the climax, it’s a satisfying result. Many issues are brought up in the one character such as career doldrums versus true ambition; quick sexual hookups versus extending them into disengaged long-term relationships; parental loss after surviving parental trauma; and being Black in a White family that doesn’t comprehend the experience of being Black. There are similarities to Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age with the coming-of-age modern-day tale of a millennial Black girl failing to make the best decisions, but the execution of this story and its elements resonates stronger.

Overall, the novel is a standout from the writing to the story development to the complex characters, though it’s a book where some readers may not like the heavy situations or the heavy wordage.

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Book Review: ‘Saving Ruby King’ by Catherine Adel West

Saving Ruby KingSaving Ruby King by Catherine Adel West
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

*Given an advanced reading copy from the publisher via NetGalley*

Saving Ruby King by Catherine Adel West is a story about a young woman trying to figure out how to live with the abuse from her father when the community, especially their church, believe her father killed her mother.

Ruby King’s mother Alice is shot dead in her South Side Chicago home after returning from Calvary Hop Christian Church. This of course devastates Ruby but also worries her as she’s now stuck living in the house with her abusive father, Lebanon. Seen as the rough-around-the-edges guy, Lebanon is known to beat his wife, so in the eyes of the church community, he may have something to do with Alice’s murder. But at the time of the murder, he was at his bakery, so police believe it’s a robbery gone wrong. He keeps busy by visiting his sick mother Sara in the hospital. Ruby, on the other hand, is trying to stay calm though her best friend Layla thinks otherwise. Layla asks for help from her pastor father, Rev. Jackson Potter, but he’s not quick to help Ruby. This perturbs Layla, who entrusts others to help her get Ruby out the house. In her desperate struggle to save her friend, Layla discovers buried secrets between her family and Ruby’s family that causes her to question everything, including who killed Alice King.

Because Ruby is 24-years-old, a bona fide adult, the story at first doesn’t explain why she feels she has to stay with her father after her mother is killed. Why can’t she stay with Layla? It does a good job of showing Ruby slow to act in her grief while Layla speeds up her efforts. The desperation differs between the two friends with Ruby feeling she can handle the abuse and Layla wanting to end the abuse as soon as possible. Another storyline develops between Lebanon and Sara, who is very cruel to her son. Lebanon tries to figure out why his mother is the way she is, which becomes one of the buried secrets that turns the story upside down, but also shows the destruction he passed down to his household. The generational trauma and pain is so heavy on the Kings where abuse thrives in their home while the Potters ignore theirs and become successful leaders in the church. But Lebanon’s past took him to prison for another murder that Jackson was present at, so who killed that person becomes another mystery within the story. The inanimate object that plays a huge role in this story is the church. The author gives the church its own perspective as if the walls can talk—and listen.

Overall, the story unveils layers at different parts to explain why Ruby is pressured to stay home with Lebanon and his abuse, why Layla is so headstrong to save Ruby, and why Alice’s murder comes down to the buried secrets that changed the characters’ hearts.

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Teen Magazine Posts Tweet Tagging Wrong Black YA Author

A magazine for teen girls mistakenly confused two Black young adult authors in a tweet that took six hours to come down.

Middle grade author Karen Strong chronicled the Twitter debacle on Sunday after noticing Girls’ Life Magazine had tweeted about a giveaway of the YA best-seller A Song Below Water by Bethany C. Morrow. Except the social media team behind the magazine’s account tagged the author as Dhonielle Clayton, also a well-known YA author.

Dhonielle tweeted that she didn’t write the fantasy YA novel. Bethany quote-tweeted the tweet.

The magazine deleted the original tweet and soon put out a statement on the mishap.

Soon after the apology, the magazine posted a tweet similar to the original one with correcting the author’s name.

The mistake still resonated on book Twitter, especially among Black women writers, who said it’s another example of legitimate media outlets not tagging the correct Black person, in this case the author as Bethany C. Morrow whose name is on the cover.

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#PublishingPaidMe Reveals Pay Discrepancies Between Black and White Writers

Going into the third week of protests over the police killing of George Floyd, book Twitter went down another road in revealing the racial bias in publishing.

A Blade So Black and A Dream So Dark author L.L. McKinney started the #PublishingPaidMe Twitter hashtag on Saturday to invite White authors to share the advances they received on their books to give Black authors insight on what they received for theirs.

Writer’s Digest shares this definition of an advance versus a royalty:

An advance is a signing bonus that’s negotiated and paid to the author before the book is published. It’s paid against future royalty earnings, which means that for every dollar you receive in an advance, you must earn a dollar from book sales before you start receiving any additional royalty payments.

Though L.L. tweeted she made the hashtag to discover numbers from only White authors, Black authors and other authors of color decided to share their numbers.

One author is Dhonielle Clayton. Her debut fantasy young adult novel The Belles that published in 2018 is seen as inspiration in the multicultural fantasy YA genre. She shared she only received a $45,000 advance for her book though it was in one of the hottest genres at the time amid the publishing industry’s alleged push toward diversity and inclusion with adding more authors of color on their rosters and books featuring characters of color.

In a quote tweet from White YA novelist Laura Sebastian, Zoraida Córdova, who also writes fantasy YA, said she received $7,500 for Labyrinth Lost, which features Latinx characters inspired by her Ecuadorian roots. She added it’s her best-selling book yet. Laura, the author behind the Ash Princess series, tweeted she had received six-figure deals for each book in each of her three trilogies, the next two with debut novels set for 2021.

Laura later tweeted she received backlash for putting up such high numbers and was accused of distributing “sexual favors.” Battling the sexism online, she added she wanted to be an ally and share her reality.

Myriam Gurba, the queer Chicana memoirist behind Mean and the main campaigner to spread awareness on Jeanine Cummins’ White narrative version of the Mexican immigration story in the best-seller American Dirt, said she just earned $3,000 for Mean.

Nigerian-American novelist Nnedi Okorafor who specializes in literature highlighting Africanfuturism and Africanjujuism said she wouldn’t share her numbers but offered the alternative of not taking advances and just receiving royalties. From her tweet, she implies that royalties put more money in her hands in the long run, especially for her award-winning novella trilogy Binti.

The #PublishingPaidMe hashtag is an eye-opening account of how authors who are not White and cisgender may be lowballed for their work, the work readers pay for and check out from libraries, actions that produce a lot of money for publishers.

This conversation may trigger a long-term movement in the publishing industry, where publishers have the opportunity to divide budgets more equally instead of basing sale projections on the myth that diverse stories don’t sell well. Even with the success of books such as Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give and Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age, that myth still lingers, especially when these Black authors and very few others made news with their advances.

Jesmyn Ward, who won the National Book Award twice, tweeted Monday that her publisher did not want to give her $100,000 for her next book after Salvage the Bones received the award.

Mary Karr, Robinne Lee, and Lilliam Rivera were a few of the authors to respond to Jesmyn’s claims. In a series of tweets, Jesmyn clarifies how her other works fared like Men We Reaped and Sing, Unburied, Sing, which was her first book to earn a $100,000 advance.

L.L. added in multiple tweets that there will be continuation in the discussion where Black authors will be asked to share information.

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book reviews

Book Review: ‘My Sister, the Serial Killer’ by Oyinkan Braithwaite

My Sister, the Serial KillerMy Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite describes the contentious relationship between two sisters through the older sister who’s tired of cleaning up after her irresistibly beautiful younger sister’s murderous mistakes.

The story starts with Korede getting a call from her younger sister Ayoola to help clean up after the murder of her current lover. Korede obliges since this is the third man whose body they had to hide after Ayoola murdered them in what she calls self-defense. Though Korede justified the previous murders because she had met the men and deemed them disgusting, she’s unsure about this third man. She never met him, so she doesn’t know if she should believe Ayoola, who can be classified as a serial killer since this killing is number three. As Korede tries to suppress her suspicion, Ayoola keeps popping up even at Korede’s place of work where the man Korede likes takes a liking to Ayoola. Now Korede worries that this man and other men who keep falling under Ayoola’s spell may show up dead, so should she protect her sister or divulge the secret to stop more killings?

This book moves smoothly within Korede’s thoughts on how to approach her relationship with her sister and wondering if her sister’s actions are a result of her beauty or their family’s past. Korede is constantly in dilemma mode, which makes the book exciting, as Ayoola’s killer looks lead to disaster with Korede exhausted of cleaning up the messes.

Overall, it’s an entertaining read with an interesting twist on a young woman whose man-eating ways go too far and the sister trying to understand the phenomenon and stop the madness.

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book reviews

Book Review: ‘The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls’ by Anissa Gray


The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls by Anissa Gray
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls” by Anissa Gray is being marketed as “The Mothers” x “An American Marriage” with mothering at the root of family deterioration as two members are imprisoned for a crime that has angered the community.

Respected restaurateurs Althea and Proctor Cochran are in prison over allegedly misusing donated funds for a flood in their town of St. Joseph, Michigan. As their reputation becomes tarnished, their teen twin daughters, Baby Vi and Kim, have to stay with Althea’s youngest sister Lillian. Another sister, Viola, lives in Chicago away from the family drama while a brother, Joe, lives a few towns away with his family as a church pastor. The Butler siblings – Althea the oldest, Viola, Lillian and Joe – lost their mother when they were young with their father becoming a traveling pastor barely home. Their mother’s premature death weighs like a cloud over them because of the circumstances they each dealt with living without their mother.

Althea married Proctor and found success at their restaurant. Lillian, who’s taking care of her nieces, is also taking care of her late ex-husband’s grandmother, Nai Nai, who’s Chinese and they still have interracial tension. Viola is breaking up with her wife Eva while dealing with the resurgence of the eating disorder she developed in adolescence. Joe, who’s had a strained relationship with his sisters, wants the nieces to stay with him and his family because he feels with religion he has the most stable household. Their father died years earlier, but his neglect still weighs on them. As they all battle their own demons, Kim is falling down a path of trouble until her implosion forces the family to unite to save her and Baby Vi.

Most of the book measures at three stars. The scenery doesn’t change much; the reader is either in Lillian’s home, which is the family home inhabited by their demons despite all the refurbishments, and the prison, mostly where Althea is. Incidents such as how Althea met Proctor when they were kids at her mother’s funeral are replayed often along with particular verses from her mother’s Bible. Kim is the twin who keeps finding trouble while Baby Vi’s character doesn’t seem that developed as she’s characterized as the twin who doesn’t stir any trouble. Proctor also fades in a way as the reader mostly gets the sense of his character from the letters he’s writing to Althea. The story really revolves around the Butler siblings while there’s still a focus on the twins, and since they are the children of the imprisoned parents, it would’ve been nice to see perspective chapters from them, too. All the chapters are first-person narratives from the sisters: Althea, Viola, and Lillian, while the other set of sisters, Kim and Baby Vi, need chapters. Even Joe needs a chapter to explain his feelings about his sisters compared to just his sisters’ feelings toward him.

Overall, it’s a complicated family story where ghosts from yesterday resurface amid the temporary loss of two members. The title and cover make the book stand out, but the title seems overdramatic for the story. Ravenous and hungry are synonyms and care and feeding are close in meaning in this context, so the title also gets too wordy.

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experiences

Book Launch: ‘More Than Enough’ by Elaine Welteroth

Elaine Welteroth. Photo: Renell Medrano.

Elaine Welteroth, who reached prominence as the first black Teen Vogue editor and now as a Project Runway judge, stopped in Los Angeles Thursday for her book tour and discussed why she wrote the women empowerment memoir to an estimated 400-member audience.

What appeared to be a well-read black girl magic rally at the California African American Museum in Exposition Park started with the cheerful announcement that Elaine’s book had notched itself to the coveted New York Times Best Sellers list. She was then introduced by her former Teen Vogue colleague and friend Lynette Nylander, who conducted the fireside chat.

Right away, Elaine began reading from Chapter 16 in More Than Enough: Claiming Space For Who You Are (No Matter What They Say), which is dubbed “Disturbing the Peace,” which starts with a quote from Audre Lorde and describes how Elaine returned to work from a Christmas vacation from Rwanda for a surprise racial interaction. Her hair was braided into Senegalese twists down her waist—the first time she came to a corporate setting in an overly ethnic hairstyle—and a white female colleague in disbelief asked how her hair had allegedly grown feet over a short amount of time.

This question is sometimes posed to black women who decide to add synthetic or real hair to their braids for a new look to celebrate their heritage, so Elaine took it in stride after an inner dialogue berating the beauty industry for neglecting what is considered beautiful to women of color with telling the woman, “Oh, you of all people must know these are extensions.”

That set the tone for the evening: Elaine describing her humble background in the San Francisco Bay Area as a first-generation college graduate to a high-ranking editor in a magazine media empire. Starting her career in the beginning of the recession, she said she felt the weight of being “black, young, and female,” the trifecta of the media industry teeming with racism, ageism, and sexism.

“We all live in a 180-character world where we are scrolling each other’s success stories every day, and we’re only getting the shiny slice, we’re only getting the prettiest picture, we’re only getting the clearest caption,” she said. “I felt like I owed this community more than I can fit into a caption on Instagram about the most universal aspects of the success story. The parts that get left out from the messy relationships that so often intercept with how we show up in our careers.”

At 32, she said she feared her audience would doubt she was ready to write a memoir, even as her own brother echoed this sentiment soon after she submitted a manuscript questioning her reason to pen an “autobiography.”

“I wanted to throw the plate in his face,” she said of the interaction over a Christmas vacation while he was washing dishes in the kitchen. “I was so emotional because that was the very question that threatened to keep me from doing this and leave it to be my family—it’s always family—that are your harshest critics. At the time, I was so emotional I can only think to say, ‘They don’t even call it autobiographies anymore, you asshole!'”

A round of laughter erupted from the audience, but she continued with the true translation of that moment.

“Then later I really sat with it. I don’t blame my brother for asking that question. That’s the patriarchy talking. We’ve all been conditioned by this mindset that tells us, ‘Your stories are not valid if you look like me.'”

The two-hour event brought up more gems from Elaine’s book like her decision to attend a state university because the boy she was dating was supposed to be there but turned out to be in jail and how on her first Ebony photo shoot she had a serendipitous moment with the hairstylist who happened to be friends with her aunt.

Eso Won Books, the main black-owned bookstore in Los Angeles, was the official bookseller at the event.

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book reviews

Book Review: ‘Gingerbread’ by Helen Oyeyemi

GingerbreadGingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

“Gingerbread” by Helen Oyeyemi takes the dessert’s role in fairy tales and turns it into a convoluted story between two families and one girl seeking the truth about her father.

Harriet Lee is a teacher but has a specialty in making gingerbread and sharing it whenever she can. Her daughter, Perdita, yearns to eat the gingerbread, but she has celiac disease. Soon Perdita makes a life-threatening decision, and Harriet realizes it’s because her daughter wants to know who her father is and where Harriet’s homeland of Druhástrana is since it can’t be found on a map. While Perdita recuperates, Harriet tells her daughter the family history and how she ended up making gingerbread as an expertise. The tale starts in the farmlands of Druhástrana and heads to London where Harriet becomes a star gingerbread maker with a group of girls, including her friend Gretel. These girls seem to be used for child labor to create the desserts for mostly hungry men. Eventually Harriet and her mother, Margot, move in with the rich family, their distant cousins the Kerchevals, who brought Harriet into the gingerbread world and their destinies intersect and result in Harriet’s independence.

First, this book starts describing the characters and their histories quickly and then it becomes a rabbit hole of overdone character development that doesn’t feed the story. When you hear about a novel like this based on the legend of gingerbread in fairy tales, this is not what you expect. The story can be followed, but there’s too much detail that doesn’t move the story forward. For example, groups of characters are introduced from the Parental Power Association to Perdita’s talking dolls to the Kerchevals, where there are several people named but not all the characters are developed enough to add anything to the story.

Overall, the story collapses into too many other stories that may be hard to follow for some or may not be interesting enough.

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book reviews

Book Review: ‘Queenie’ by Candice Carty-Williams

QueenieQueenie by Candice Carty-Williams
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“Queenie” by Candice Carty-Williams surrounds a protagonist going through a breakup and myriad other situations that send her on a downward spiral. It’s one of the first new adult novels I’ve read where mental health is brought into the storyline for a woman of color who’s on a dangerous path to destruction, yet it’s relatable and comical at times.

“Bridget Jones’ Diary” meets “Americanah” is how the publishers are describing this novel since Queenie is a 25-year-old, 2nd-generation Jamaican Brit struggling to get over her boyfriend, Tom. Some reviews complain about Queenie’s obsession with Tom since he’s white, but she’s a millennial who thought she found her soul mate and has a dating preference. The story opens to Queenie in a clinic where she learns she’s had a miscarriage, even with her IUD in use. But she can’t go home and tell Tom, and he’s tired of the lack of communication, so he asks Queenie to move out of their apartment. She ends up renting a room while trying to get ahead in her journalism career. She pitches stories but keeps getting distracted by her colleague, Ted, who seems persistent in workplace flirtation. But Queenie believes she and Tom would get back together with her friends Darcy, Kyazike, and Cassandra trying to convince her otherwise. While fending off Ted, Queenie falls into a one-night stand habit with men from OKCupid and other places who have objectified her body as a BBW. All her bad decisions around men explode in her face. The explosion then stimulates her anxiety until she has a breakdown where she has move into her grandparents’ home and ask for professional help to get her life back on track.

The novel opens up to Queenie’s miscarriage, so there’s a theme of making bad sexual health decisions with unprotected sex and multiple partners within a short amount of time. Also, there’s a theme of bigger black women being objectified for only sex due to their size and race. Queenie feels she’s not worthy of a relationship, especially when she deals with non-black men; the reason why she chooses men outside her race coming up later in the book. Mental health surfaces through her depression and anxiety with the roots of her pain stemming from her own mother’s bad decisions around men. Depending on her religious Jamaican family, we see the first- and second-generation issues from immigration that linger with Queenie being the first to graduate from college but unhappy that the career of her dreams is stalling because she’s a black woman seeing her white colleagues moving forward.

Overall, the book may slowly grow on the reader since it’s one bad decision after the next, but once Queenie’s layers come undone, there’s a deconstruction of why she’s making these decisions. And these actions could be interpreted as “wild” and “promiscuous” for a woman of color, opening up to judgment, but many women period like men deal with sex and love differently, especially in their 20s. That’s why this novel stands out for portraying a very imperfect character. Though you might not agree with her actions, there’s a level of realistic growth in Queenie identifying, understanding, and rectifying her issues.

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book reviews

Book Review: ‘Tiffany Sly Lives Here Now’ by Dana L. Davis

Tiffany Sly Lives Here Now

Tiffany Sly Lives Here Now by Dana L. Davis

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


“Tiffany Sly Lives Here Now” by Dana L. Davis is a wonderfully complex YA novel about a girl from Chicago dealing with her mother’s death who moves to California to be with her biological father when there’s another man claiming to be her father.

The story starts with Tiffany Sly, a 16-year-old from Chicago, arriving at LAX in Los Angeles to meet the father she never knew. Instead a driver is there to pick her up to whisk her away to Simi Valley where her wealthy doctor father and his family lives. During the ride, Tiffany’s anxiety revs up and has been up since her mother died from cancer. Once she arrives at the home, she meets her new stepmom and four other sisters she didn’t know about. After meeting her father, who’s fair-skinned with blue eyes, she’s doubtful about the genetic connection with her dark brown skin. Then she recalls how another man, whom she believes she looks like including the complexion, had showed up at her apartment in Chicago the day before claiming to be her father, too. He even threatens legal action in a week, so Tiffany has a week to see if her California life will work in that matter of time before coming clean to her new family.