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Book Review: ‘Linden Hills’ by Gloria Naylor

She Lit Book Club Pick: Linden Hills by Gloria Naylor

Linden Hills by Gloria Naylor

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Linden Hills by Gloria Naylor explores the rise of a Black suburb and how the residents sacrifice so much to live at the lowest elevation to flaunt their wealth.

The community of Linden Hills was created by Luther Nedeed’s “double great-grandfather” who has the same name. The rumor around town is the original Luther Nedeed sold his wife and six children into slavery to get the money to buy the hilly land that nearby White residents found unlivable. But the original Luther Nedeed set out to build a community that lasted generations with the current Luther Nedeed approving all the residents with a contract. If the residents fail to live up to the terms in the contract, then they’re asked to leave the elusive Linden Hills. But residents keep coming to the master-planned community the moment they amass enough money. They also try to get closer to Nedeed’s grand cabin and the funeral parlor he owns. If their home is closer to the man who pulls the strings in town, then they’re considered the most important residents in town as well.

The story follows two twentysomething handymen, Lester and Willie. Lester lives in Linden Hills proper, but on the edge of town in a small home that doesn’t meet the standards of most of the homes in the area. Willie lives outside of Linden Hills with his family in low-income housing. They team up to fulfill jobs around Linden Hills to multiply their money for holiday gifts, with Willie opting to stay with Lester the week leading up to Christmas. But something doesn’t sit well with Willie. He’s noticing the quirks of the average Linden Hills resident.

Willie and Lester work the wedding of the year of Winston Alcott, a rising businessman who feels he must get married to succeed in Linden Hills. Or that’s what Luther Nedeed is telling him. When Willie and Lester listen to Luther Nedeed talk on stage at the wedding, Willie gets a bad feeling about the man who serves as the face of Linden Hills.

The more jobs the handymen do in the span of five days, the more they come across Luther Nedeed. As Luther’s eerie presence marks the scenes where they work, the situations with the residents Willie and Lester are helping seem to worsen. Willie tries to make sense of it as he and his friend witness the ultimate sacrifice residents take to live up to Linden Hills’ expectations.

With chapters split into full days from Dec. 19 to Christmas Eve on Dec. 24, the book becomes unputdownable with easing into the narratives of neighbors weaved together through the eyes of Willie and Lester. We meet characters desperate to keep their economic stature in order to move on up in Linden Hills. The higher on the hill, the higher the respect, but in this case, residents want to move down to the center of the hill where the Nedeed cabin and mortuary sits. They don’t realize they’re physically being dragged downward instead of upward.

The downward pull is supposed to represent hell for these residents. They’ve signed their names to contracts to keep homes until infinity, but if they break any rules, then the contracts are nullified by Luther Nedeed himself. The book adapts the 14th century epic Inferno by poet Dante Alighieri, which depicts nine circles of hell: limbo, lust, gluttony, greed, wrath, heresy, violence, fraud, and treachery. The Linden Hills residents are socially climbing so high that they don’t realize downfall is the only place left to go when the obsession for riches and power overcomes them.

A theme in the book is the absence of women. There are several references to funerals happening in Linden Hills of women and husbands who had lost their wives years prior. We meet Laurel Dumont, a successful woman separated from her husband. She summers in Linden Hills as a child who loves to swim with her grandmother. But the moment Luther Nedeed finds out Laurel’s husband has filed for divorce, he threatens to take away her home because it wasn’t in the contract for her to live in the home without her husband. Also an interwoven perspective is that of Luther Nedeed’s wife, who nobody ever sees because she’s trapped in the basement. Luther Nedeed carries on business in town and lies about his wife’s whereabouts, knowing that nobody will investigate further because of the power he possesses over the town and its residents. He creates a patriarchal society without anyone realizing it because they’re so consumed by their financial worth.

Overall, the novel gives us a chilling look into a fictional Black suburb built on wealth and how residents only care about accumulating more wealth to move closer to the most powerful resident. The characters are blind to their obsession with money and to their worship of Luther Nedeed. Author Gloria Naylor started writing this book for her master’s thesis examining the Black middle class at Yale University under the guidance of Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. Linden Hills is a stark difference from her award-winning debut novel The Women of Brewster Place but maintains the narrative of a community making sense of the socioeconomic elements that went into its creation. The way she describes Linden Hills as a haven for Black residents is in reality a different kind of hell shows the duality of how we see our communities. It could be safe, but your life could be in danger because of other circumstances that you may have overlooked in search of calling a place home.



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Book Review: ‘Carefree Black Girls’ by Zeba Blay

Carefree Black Girls: A Celebration of Black Women in Popular Culture by Carefree Black Girls Zeba Blay

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


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Carefree Black Girls: A Celebration of Black Women in Popular Culture by Zeba Blay examines how a viral hashtag focused on Black females living their truths forces the author to revisit periods of pop culture history where the notion of being a carefree Black girl actually comes with some hard truths.

Yet the culture that Black women pour talents and their creativity into, the culture that emulates Black women, steals from Black women, needs Black women, is the same culture that belittles Black women, excludes Black women, ignores Black women.

Culture critic Zeba Blay coined the phrase #carefreeblackgirl in 2013 as “a way to carve out a space of celebration and freedom for Black women online.” She studies how the hashtag evolved in the chapter “Free of Cares,” starting with a phrase of the early twentieth century: “I’m free, white, and 21!” This phrase became a Hollywood catchphrase between the 1920s and 1940s with Black journalists at the time criticizing the phrase as perpetuating White supremacy since being White equates freedom, which is the untrue experience to groups who are not considered White. Though the term falls out of vernacular, the author sees the phrase still play out today from Sex and the City to the modern-day Karens quick to call the police on anyone who’s Black. And even the phrase “carefree Black girl” takes a life of its own where it seems to easily be bestowed upon lighter-skinned, thin Black actresses such as Zendaya and Yara Shahidi while Black critics argue Black females will never have the comfort to be carefree in a Eurocentric society. The phrase even derives from fellow Black writer Collier Meyerson’s Tumblr blog called “Carefree White Girls” that featured White female celebrities from Taylor Swift to Zooey Deschanel who epitomize the “deification of white womanhood.”

The first chapter “Bodies” explores how the Black female body is berated constantly from the Middle Passage to the present. Lizzo and her body is the highlight of the chapter, particularly a moment in April 2020 when the pop star was twerking for a charity “dance-a-thon” hosted via social media by Diddy to raise money for people affected by COVID-19. Once Lizzo begins twerking, Diddy tells her to stop because the watchers need family-friendly entertainment, especially on Easter Sunday. Later in the Instagram live special, reality TV star Draya Michele, who’s thinner and lighter-skinned, begins twerking without any protest. Many think it’s fatphobic for Lizzo to be told to not twerk in public. Others berate Lizzo all the time for revealing her body on social media every chance she gets. The author also shows how Lizzo announced she would be participating in a smoothie detox and points out how White female fat-positive bloggers accused Lizzo of being fatphobic.

The conversation on Lizzo turns to the 1990s portrayal of Countess Vaughn on the hit show Moesha about a Black girl growing up in South Los Angeles. Countess played opposite pop star Brandy’s Moesha as best friend Kim Parker. Her weight becomes a constant punchline, many realize after reliving the show twenty years later when its August 2020 debut on Netflix alarms Black Twitter as tweeters share the collective disgust. The author even calls out the desexualization of fat Black women in entertainment. She points to the portrayal of Kelli, played by Natasha Rothwell, on HBO’s Insecure, where explicit sex scenes are a constant but never feature Kelli. The character talks about her sexual romps, but we never see them or meet her lovers. In the recent series finale, Kelli announces she’s having a baby with a character the audience barely knows because her romantic love growth is never shown on screen compared to the other three main female leads.

The author puts a recent moment like Lizzo’s twerking for COVID-19 relief under a microscope and another moment from a generation ago about Kim Parker’s treatment from her so-called friends on her weight. Then there’s self-reflection as the author views how hard it is to accept her own body thanks to the Eurocentric beauty standard where her body, Lizzo’s body, Countess’ body are unacceptable, and the fact that they are living in their body is too much for many people to accept.

In “Strong Black Lead” playing on Netflix’s name for Black programming, the author details her mental health struggles including suicide attempts and suicidal thoughts. (The book comes with a trigger warning in the beginning.) What she was going through materialized in her writings at the time as she pondered how she was really helping readers then with sharing her draining experiences. It makes her think of other Black women in her life who have struggled but are determined to “stay strong.” The strong Black female trope is examined with calling out somewhat beloved characters such as Kerry Washington’s Olivia Pope on the Shonda Rhimes-helmed political TV drama Scandal to Viola Davis’ Aibileen Clark in the film The Help that many view as problematic with the White savior theme.

Overall, the book is like reading viral pop culture tweets coming from Black Twitter and getting the context that you may never think to reference as the reason why you would like such tweets. The content dives deeper with making comparisons between famous Black women living the height of celebrity now to those who lived at the height in yesteryears. The author shows how the battle is the same, rooted in underappreciation for the Black female’s talent whereas a non-Black female’s talent may receive better treatment over her weight, her age, her appearance. It’s amazing to see the author tie in so many current events with past events and pick them apart to study the relevance and the definition of being a carefree Black girl.

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Book Review: ‘Crying in H Mart’ by Michelle Zauner

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


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Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner is a grief memoir detailing the author’s journey in grappling with the death of her mother while suppressing the fear of losing the only tie to her Korean culture in America.

What makes this memoir beautiful is the descriptions of the food being used as examples to show readers the depth of Korean culture for the author, who identifies as biracial with a Korean mother and a White American father. Her mother’s cancer prognosis motivates Michelle, a twentysomething musician holding down odd jobs in Philadelphia, to move back home to Oregon to help care for her mother. As the author goes into caretaker mode with her father unable to handle the stress, she finds herself questioning if her mother dies, will her connection to Korean culture die.

The main way her mother is able to highlight her Korean culture in America is through food and venturing to Korean grocery stores. That’s why the book starts off with Michelle shopping and eating at H Mart, a Korean supermarket chain, after her mother dies, trying to piece together meals she had shared with her mother throughout her life with the right ingredients. But seeing other people sit with their families in the dining area and cruising the aisles for dish must-haves makes the author cry every time as she navigates her culture without her mother.

I closed my eyes and let my tears flow. I tried to envision us together again in Seoul. I tried to envision the mung bean batter sizzling in grease, meat patties and oysters sopped and dripping with egg, my mother explaining everything I needed to know before it was too late, showing me all the places we’d always assumed we’d have more time to see.

Growing up in Oregon, the author stays by her mother’s side as her father travels for work. Michelle and her mother take biannual trips to Korea to stay with family and absorb culture in the homeland. Being American, Michelle is seen as more rebellious, even as a child, a trait that escalates in her teenage years, upsetting her parents. The stain of adolescence lingers in the background as Michelle experiences her family as an adult and soon as an unexpected caretaker.

My mother had struggled to understand me just as I struggled to understand her. Thrown as we were on opposite sides of a fault line—generational, cultural, linguistic—we wandered lost without a reference point, each of us unintelligible to the other’s expectations, until these past few years when we had just begun to unlock the mystery, carve the psychic space to accommodate each other, appreciate the differences between us, linger in our refracted commonalities. Then, what would have been the most fruitful years of understanding were cut violently short, and I was left alone to decipher the secrets of inheritance without its key.

This memoir has raw moments around the author seeing her mother deteriorate quickly to stage IV squamous-cell carcinoma and searching for joy amid the process. As her mother is dying, she puts on her chef’s hat and leans on YouTube to guide her through recipes for traditional Korean dishes such as doenjang jjigae, described as “a rich, hearty stew filled with vegetables and tofu” that her mother had loved serving, and jatjuk, a porridge made of pine nuts, rice, salt, and water, perfect to serve to the sick. While her mother tries to keep food down, Michelle works in the kitchen to perfect her Korean dishes to preserve the culture her mother taught her.

Of course, like in most families, there is drama around who can care for her mother the way she needs as a Korean woman in America. The author finds herself butting heads with one of her mother’s Korean friends, who seems to know everything to do to make her mother comfortable. Her father is largely absent, unable to accept his wife is dying on the cusp of retirement; a fantasy full of travel is dashed by cancer. And at 25 years old, Michelle is trying to stabilize her life as a musician and maintain her relationship with her partner, as she worries what her life will be like without her mother.

Overall, the memoir illustrates the elaborate details we all experience in our own cultures, but the art of writing customs that are practiced and the foods that are eaten elevates the story. The balance of bittersweet is on every page, as the author deals with her mother dying but also experiences a renewed interest in diving into her Korean culture. It’s the uncertainty of being able to carry on the culture without the parent who taught you the culture that hops off the page. Despite the story leading up to the grief of losing a mother, the memoir ends on a hopeful note that as long as the roots are planted, they stay within you and the loss empowers you to nurture those roots.

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Book Review: ‘Bone Black’ by bell hooks

Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood by bell hooks

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Bone Black by bell hooks is a raw narrative of a Black girl navigating a world that seems to not be able to accept who she is.

bell hooks’ girlhood memoir starts in the countryside of Kentucky where the author is given a keepsake from her late grandmother and sensing the talk around why she gets the beaded purse when she wasn’t her grandmother’s favorite, nor her mother’s favorite. The book opens with a foreword emphasizing how the author’s behavior as a Black girl among six daughters and a son in a poor family came off as rebellious as she pushed against the frustration her family felt for not being able to understand her behavior.

She was sent to bed without dinner. She was told to stop crying, to make no sound or she would be whipped more. No one could talk to her and she could talk to no one. She could hear him telling the mama that the girl had too much spirit, that she had to learn to mind, that that spirit had to be broken.

The main theme throughout the memoir is the loneliness she feels within her family. She is considered the bad girl in the house, and that accusation eats away at her though she tries to conceal it through finding her comfort in raising her voice. She asks her family for a Black doll. Instead of happiness that she wants a doll that looks like her, she’s met with aggression; the White dolls are cheaper and easier to find. But somehow she gets her Black doll, Baby. This example shows bell’s young self fighting for what she wants, something that shouldn’t be a hassle, but her family processes her asking for a Black doll as a hassle. And those conflicting perspectives make bell look like the “problem child.”

She wants to express herself—to speak her mind. To them it is just talking back. Each time she opens her mouth she risks punishment. They punish her so often she feels they persecute her.

Backtalk is a cornerstone of one of her books, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black , that explores the concept as a way to silence people, especially people of color, who have been taught to stay quiet and not talk to others with equal authority. In her memoir, her family targets her for backtalk, but she feels she’s just expressing her thoughts. Because of her tongue, her family brands her in essence an “old soul,” or how she puts it as an “old woman born again in a young girl’s body.” How she speaks seems to scare her family, according to her, to the point she is believed to be a witch. That leads to her being given a book of fairy tales that describe old female characters as cannibalistic and evil. But a book in her hands transports her to another world, a world where she doesn’t have to be with her family. And reading so much inspires her to start writing.

Loneliness brings me to the edge of what I know. My soul is dark like the inner world of the cave—bone black. I have been drowning in that blackness. Like quicksand it sucks me in and keeps me there in the space of all my pain.

The color black is a recurring theme. Not necessarily about race, but more about the darkness she feels as being treated like she’s too different to understand. “Bone black” is a color she learns about in art class. She defines it as “a black carbonaceous substance obtained by calcifying bones in closed vessels.” To burn bones into ash is like disappearing altogether. Her art teacher allows her to paint with all the black she wants. Her mother doesn’t allow her to wear black because it’s a color only for women. bell rebels against this notion, but it becomes a point of contention between her and her mother. While her mother may not think it’s appropriate for a girl to wear black, bell thinks she should be able to express herself the way she wants.

Overall, the memoir, told mostly in third person, observes everyday acts and unpeels the trauma of a Black girl trying to use her voice when it’s restrained by others. The restraint becomes overwhelming, as in she knows her faith in believing her voice could be stomped out, and that conjures feelings of invisibility and unimportance. Instead of her voice being valued, it’s devalued with her family saying she’s too weird, incomprehensible. Though it’s set in the 1950s and 1960s in rural Kentucky, the pain points of being misunderstood, being silenced, being depressed, being poor, being female, being Black resonate beyond its time, unfortunately since these issues remain commonplace for many children in American households. The writing is simple, but every word conveys more meaning than what meets the eye.

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Book Review: ‘Sometimes I Trip On How Happy We Could Be’ by Nichole Perkins

Sometimes I Trip On How Happy We Could Be by Nichole Perkins

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Sometimes I Trip On How Happy We Could Be by Nichole Perkins is a meaty biographical essay collection following a writer through her family trauma, romance drama, and the pop culture threads that color every moment.

Images of white girls in love came easily, but everywhere I turned, Black girls were warned.

“Fast” examines the adolescent woes of being a girl labeled by her hormones and where they lead her. The author talks about the warnings that lurked around every corner, seeing the caution her sister Izzie had to take coming of age in the 1980s to their mother starting the family in high school. When the author’s classmates become pregnant barely out of middle school, she writes about seeking distance from her pregnant friends and desiring love like the White girls she noticed finding love onscreen in the films she watched with Izzie.

In another early chapter called “The Women,” the author illustrates her relationships with the main women in her life: Izzie, their mother, her great-grandmother Muh’Deah, and her aunt C. She paints these women with extraordinary detail of life’s mundaneness such as Muh’Deah brushing her hair “using a pink Goody brush with white bristles” and recalling the first time she saw the matriarch herself let her hair down for a male neighbor. Her aunt C drives with both feet in case she has to press the brake for an emergency, but when she takes Nichole to the bookstore, the author for once doesn’t feel judged by her book choices and that means the world to her amid her parents’ divorce.

I didn’t want to bring any more attention to my lack of breasts or whatever else I thought was the marker of moving into womanhood. So when junior high hit, and my parents finally divorced, about three years after Control came out, I started adding more and more black clothing to my wardrobe.

The author’s fashion evolution starting in black is inspired by Janet Jackson, according to the chapter “Janet Jackson and the All-Black Uniform.” Janet’s 1986 independence anthem Control becomes the soundtrack of her parents’ fights as her mother plays the eponymous album’s lead single constantly. The pop star’s all-black uniform choice catches the author’s attention, and she adopts it as her own uniform as she hides her changing body to feel comfortable. Then she notices Janet evolve as an artist via adding colors into her wardrobe. How the author goes over her family’s situation to her own situation playing to the tune of Janet’s iconic song stresses the pop culture impact in her life.

The television show Bones helped pull me from an especially aggressive depressive moment in my life, but Frasier is what I use as a regular antidepressant.

Bingeing TV is a theme in two separate chapters where she discusses how the two mainstream shows targeted to mainly White audiences—one a comedy and the other a drama—helped her through transitions that also include health issues from living with irritable bowel syndrome after being treated for a ruptured spleen. Even in “HBCUs Taught Me,” she absorbs lessons from the 1988 Spike Lee film School Daze and the 1987-1993 NBC sitcom A Different World that brings her to Dillard University in New Orleans, despite being a Nashville native growing up adjacent to HBCUs Fisk University and Tennessee State University.

As she revisits her family life and her home life in different stages, the author is honest about her misadventures of finding love and being afraid she’ll never find it. “My Kameelah-Ass List” examines the lengthy list of qualities she wants in a man, inspired by Real World cast member Kameelah Phillips in the reality show’s 1997 season in Boston. The author writes how Kameelah had 200 items on her list in what she wanted in a man, including his weight and not having children. So the author goes about making her own list, which eventually turns into an internet chatroom magnet for opinions on judging a man with a list when a woman may not live up to the man’s standards either. Kameelah, now an ob-gyn who recently celebrated her 10th wedding anniversary, may have been successful with her list, but the author, on the other hand, only got to 86 items she wanted in a man that she lists in the book.

Overall, the blend of topics are entertaining and eye-opening as she dissects what she learned from her experiences and how societal misconceptions affect those experiences like with her familial relationships, romantic relationships, and friendships in real life and online. The narrator expresses through the essays her fear of not getting everything she wants, but as she ages, that fear morphs yet doesn’t impede her growth. From a Black girl from Nashville who grew up to be a writer, the stories are relatable as they convey her growing pains.

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Book Review: ‘Unfinished’ by Priyanka Chopra Jonas

Unfinished: A Memoir by Priyanka Chopra

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Read more book reviews like this on my blog shelit.com

Unfinished by Priyanka Chopra Jonas is a memoir that delivers insight on the global star’s upbringing before and after fame in the U.S. and India.

Priyanka’s story starts in India where she is a regular seven-year-old, the daughter of military doctors. Naturally when her younger brother is born, she acts out with another sibling in the house. That leads to her being sent to boarding school, where, after the abandonment subsides, she learns how to live independently with her classmates and with decorum. The opportunity eventually leads to going to high school in the Midwest then New York with her aunt and cousins. She gets her first taste of American culture, which of course comes with bullying over her skin color and race. Americanized, she returns to India for her final year of high school, where she exchanges her midriff-baring style for tunics and pants. Now her brother doesn’t want her in the house and sends her photo to be in the Miss India competition.

She prepares for the unpreparable: representing a country that wins global beauty pageants on a regular basis. Without formal knowledge, she and her family string together whatever they can to help her learn to compete on the national level with other young, smart, beautiful women. Her dedication leads to her being crowned with the intention to represent India at the Miss Universe pageant. Though she flubs the final question, she still wins the pageant, securing India back-to-back wins. Since Bollywood film projects want a pageant queen, the woman who had aeronautical engineering goals is now blinded by the entertainment industry that eventually takes her abroad to her leading role in ABC’s Quantico.

Her family is an important part of the story. She is close to her parents who are portrayed as loving and supportive; she even acknowledges that her parents may be more unique than others. A series of botched surgeries to treat cancer takes the life of her father, and she expresses the toll of the grief of seeing her father suffer then recover then suffer again. She also describes the close relationships to her aunts, uncles, and cousins, and how it’s their culture to take care of each other, which affords her the opportunity to go to high school in the U.S. Her marriage years later to pop star Nick Jonas, ten years her junior, is told, where she explains how their courtship just happens naturally and results in a quick, extravagant wedding.

Her Western fame that includes simulating sex scenes sparks backlash in her home country. An insensitive terrorist storyline involving Pakistan on Quantico puts her in the line of the fire again. When she first entered the U.S. entertainment scene as a singer, a gig with the NFL reignites the racism she dealt with in high school. She is accused of getting a nose job when a sinus surgery goes wrong that leads to multiple surgeries fixing the bridge of her nose. The constant criticism motivates her to tackle it head-on, she says, pointing out the hurt of being in the public eye while living out her wildest dreams.

Overall, it’s a celebrity memoir that feels like it’s missing some depth, but learning about the international star and her rise on another continent is interesting as so is learning about her experiences in the U.S. as a teen from India and how that prepared her for the global pageant scene and her acting career.



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Book Review: ‘Hooked’ by Sutton Foster

Hooked: How Crafting Saved My Life by Sutton Foster

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


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Hooked by Sutton Foster dives deep into the Broadway and TV star’s poignant moments punctuated by her love for crafting and how it helped her stay sane.

Known for her head-turning Broadway starring roles and her turn in sexy bookish TV series Younger where she plays a 40-something passing as a millennial, Sutton Foster has written a memoir about her rise in entertainment and how crocheting helped along the way. Growing up in the South then the Midwest, she moved often with her family that included her older brother Hunter, also a Broadway veteran; their agoraphobic mother, and their father who seemed to be under the thumb of his wife’s undiagnosed mental health condition. Though her mother doesn’t want to face society, Sutton and her brother are placed in youth theater to exercise their energy. They fall in love with the theater, and we go on the adventure of seeing Sutton evolve into a professional actor at seventeen. She goes on her first tour in her senior year of high school for a musical, where she grows homesick amid battling catty girls who despise her energy. After dropping out of Carnegie Mellon, she finds herself lost trying to figure out her next step, so she journals and crochets. She eventually returns to her theater work where her risk of being the understudy of the Broadway run of Thoroughly Modern Millie leads to her becoming the lead and winning her first Tony Award.

The crafting is threaded throughout her story. She describes some of her hardest moments and how crafting became therapy. A chunk of her latter story surrounds her fertility hardships. While deciding on adoption, she is honest about the anxiety of becoming her mother and not becoming a mother in case the birth mother decides to keep the baby. All those swirling emotions motivates her to sew a blanket for her potential daughter. She stops at one point when she hears a friend fails to secure the baby she intended to adopt; crocheting the blanket when her adoption is up in the air is too much to bear.

Another underlying theme of the memoir is Sutton’s relationship with her mother. She learns crafting from her mother, recalling a stitched Strawberry Shortcake bookmark she received.

That was during the peak of my obsession with the red-haired cartoon character. I had coloring books, figurines, and even a garbage pail, all store-bought. I find it so moving that my mother took the time to meticulously stitch that sweet girl in her poufy pink bonnet and white frilly apron into existence. She added my first and last name in red thread and a row of hearts in pink and green, then finished the piece with a calico border. I don’t recall my mother saying “I love you” often. But I do know that she poured her love for me into that bookmark.

The palpable pain jumps through the author’s voice and on the pages of the book of how she had a difficult relationship with her mother and how that impacted the entire family dynamic and followed her onstage. She talks about how her mother only saw her once on Broadway while her high school drama teacher flew to see her perform on several occasions. Her mother didn’t acknowledge her brother’s eventual wife or talk to her brother for years because the couple had lived together before marriage “in sin.” After her mother’s death, Sutton soon starts her own family in fear she will become the mother she had. She also witnesses her father coming out of his unintended shell and living the life he always wanted.

Overall, the crafty memoir hits the emotional nerve mostly with the author’s relationship with the stage and the family she loves. The crocheting adventures and recipes seem to be a bit detached from the story. This is really a story of following your dreams. Sutton even has a few run-ins with her idol, Broadway and TV actress Patti LuPone, and conducts an interview featured in the book. So while you may want to head to your local craft store and learn to crochet to reduce anxiety like the author, you’ll connect more with her inspirational backstory.

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Book Review: ‘Bamboozled by Jesus’ by Yvonne Orji

Bamboozled by Jesus: How God Tricked Me into the Life of My Dreams by Yvonne Orji

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


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Bamboozled by Jesus by Yvonne Orji is a comedic memoir designed for the reader to recognize the little miracles that help you on your path.

The star of HBO’s Insecure, Yvonne Orji takes her love for Jesus Christ to new heights by sharing some of her profound moments that led her to Hollywood from growing up in suburban Maryland to Nigerian parents. She shares the wisdom she obtained from these minor and major blessings and how they kept her motivated to reach her dreams.

Being bamboozled by Jesus is low-key, the most frustratingly amazing thing you’ll ever experience. It ain’t always sexy, but it is always worth it. But don’t feel bad for wanting to tap out midway through. Even Jesus looked for an exit strategy. He straight up asked God, If there be any other way, let this cup pass me by. In other words, Fam, this ain’t it!

Her dreams of becoming a doctor are shaped by her parents’ medical careers but watching her aunt recover from an ectopic pregnancy motivated her even more. Until she fails organic chemistry in college. Yet college is also the place she realizes she isn’t as connected with Jesus the way she thought she was being raised Catholic. This stabilizes her religious path, where she famously promises to stay a virgin until marriage. Though she knew being a doctor was not in the cards, she still pursues a career in public health, which takes her to Africa for work. When she returns to the U.S., she is determined to break into entertainment with a move to New York City then to Los Angeles, where in both places she receives shelter and transportation from friends and acquaintances practically free of cost. She wins small screenwriting and stand-up comedy gigs that grow in momentum and leads to a tryout for her breakout role as Molly on Insecure.

The author’s religious schtick is sometimes entertaining and sometimes perplexing. Amid describing her transitions, she recounts Bible stories, more in a ratchet retelling that has you questioning if that’s what you read in the holy book or what she calls Da Good Book. But she’s trying to be funny and relate it to modern times, so it’s hard to fault her with that attempt. When she auditions for Insecure, she prays for the role but worries her prayers will clash with other actresses’ prayers since they too were Christian. But is it Christian to pray for others to be eliminated from the competition?

The cultural references take a backseat to the religious theme. Though she says she’s leaning into her “Nigerianness,” it would’ve been nice to get more of a setting of her upbringing in the U.S. juxtaposed with her family annual trips to Nigeria. And she makes a few wisecracks toward Ghana, which may be taken as funny or offensive depending on your ethnicity.

Overall, the book’s inspirational message gets tangled in the repackaged biblical stories and random references to drive her point home like that blurb about basketball player Jeremy Lin’s Linsanity phase. The concept is interesting, but it comes off as overdone in this case where the reader has to stay on their toes but may have lost the depth of the content. The book may be more enjoyable if you know your holy book stories à la the Bible versions and your pop cultural references to understand how the small steps lead to the bigger picture.

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Book Review: ‘Passing’ by Nella Larsen

Passing by Nella Larsen

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


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Passing by Nella Larsen follows two fair-skinned Black women who reconnect as friends but sense danger every moment they spend together because one decides to pass as White and the other fears the consequences of her friend’s secret life.

White people were so stupid about such things for all that they usually asserted that they were able to tell; and by the most ridiculous means, fingernails, palms of hands, shapes of ears, teeth, and other equally silly rot. They always took her for an Italian, a Spaniard, a Mexican, or a Gypsy. Never, when she was alone, had they even remotely seemed to suspect that she was a Negro. No, the woman sitting there staring at her couldn’t possibly know.

Irene Redfield goes into the Drayton in Chicago to escape the heat. She gets into the fancy hotel due to her complexion. She’s assumed White, so she keeps her head down and sips her tea. Until an unfamiliar woman comes up to her calling her by her childhood nickname ’Rene. It takes more conversation for Irene to realize she’s talking to Clare Kendry. They grew up together until Clare’s drunken father died and Clare was sent away to live with relatives. There, she began to pass as White leading her to have a White family who doesn’t know she’s Black. When Irene learns Clare is living her life as a White woman, she’s taken aback by the revelation. Irene lives in Harlem with her Black family, and walking into the Drayton is the only time she passed for White.

Catlike. Certainly that was the word which best described Clare Kendry, if any single word could describe her. Sometimes she was hard and apparently without feeling at all; sometimes she was affectionate and rashly impulsive. And there was about her an amazing soft malice, hidden well away until provoked.

As they try to rebuild their bond, they have trouble figuring out how each other fits into their lives. Irene can’t risk Clare being around her, her Black friends, and even her White friends in case someone realizes she’s passing. And Clare can’t risk anyone finding out she’s Black. The will-they, won’t-they friendship notches up when Clare shows up at Irene’s home in Black Harlem wondering why her friend hadn’t answered a letter she sent. That’s when Clare admits she misses the Black community and asks Irene to introduce her to the Redfields’ social circle. Irene obliges but knows Clare’s true racial identity could be exposed. She feels an inkling of guilt as opportunities open up for her to reveal Clare, whose charisma has sucked the air out of every room Irene is in. One major opportunity does open up, but as Irene wrestles with the idea to take it, she realizes Clare is already in grave danger.

The danger and fear rises in the portrayal of Clare’s marriage and Irene’s marriage. Clare’s racist husband John Bellew calls his wife Nig, a shortened version of the n-word he gave her in response to her tan. This repulses Irene and forces her to understand the danger not only outside in the world Clare has to deal with but the danger sleeping beside her at home. With Bellew’s temperament, the reader gets the assumed vision of Clare’s marriage that she purports as a perfect union.

On the other hand, Irene’s doctor husband, Brian, tells her to not get involved with Clare’s dangerous antics. We also see Irene’s desperation to read Brian’s distant emotions. He seems unhappy with their home life and the racist world they live in. When Clare enters the Redfields’ lives, Irene is hesitant to invite Clare to social functions whereas Brian, originally repelled by Clare, now is too eager to accompany Clare. This makes Irene even more fearful for her marriage and fearful for what she is capable of in imploding Clare’s life.

Sitting alone in the quiet living room in the pleasant fire-light, Irene Redfield wished, for the first time in her life, that she had not been born a Negro. For the first time she suffered and rebelled because she was unable to disregard the burden of race. It was, she cried silently, enough to suffer as a woman, an individual, on one’s own account, without having to suffer for the race as well. It was a brutality, and undeserved.

Overall, the novel’s two main characters warring internally with themselves and each other over their racial identity brings other issues into the light. The story examines a friendship that isn’t meant to be reestablished as Irene, whose voice resonates more, and Clare, whose voice remains buried, question their race and the circumstances it has put them in. The novel, written in 1929, is in the same vein of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby yet doesn’t have the same stature in American literature. It shows two Black women instead striving for riches with Clare presenting herself as a White woman married to her White international banker husband as they prepare to send their daughter to boarding school in Switzerland; and Irene deciding to identify as Black in Black Harlem with her Black doctor husband and two sons and still having the means to afford a maid. Clare senses that Irene may not have as much money as her, but at least she has the freedom to be herself. It’s the themes of what is considered a luxurious life and what sacrifices have to be made in order to live that life that resonates a century later.

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Book Review: ‘You Got Anything Stronger?’ by Gabrielle Union

You Got Anything Stronger?: Stories by Gabrielle Union

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


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You Got Anything Stronger? by Gabrielle Union picks up right where we leave off from her first autobiographical story collection and takes us on her adventure of learning from life’s most impactful moments.

Her 2017 memoir We’re Going to Need More Wine made headlines with the author’s admission of losing count of her numerous miscarriages. The second book begins with her fertility struggles and her decision to choose surrogacy. She takes us down the journey of selecting the right surrogate mother and how many women look for a surrogate by targeting Black and Brown women’s wombs to house their fetuses, which informs her decision of who will be the best vessel for her daughter Kaavia James.

The chapter highlights her continuous fertility struggles, including her adenomyosis diagnosis that comes after her in vitro fertilization attempts never worked successfully. And she addresses the hardship of trying to get pregnant while her basketballer husband Dwyane Wade had a baby with another woman during a time she calls a bad place in their relationship before marriage. She talks about the pain of not birthing a child as her partner can conceive a child—a topic she says she didn’t feel comfortable discussing in her previous book. We also revisit her rape in college when she was working at a Payless ShoeSource by following the aftermath and healing process as she stays glued to watching the 1992 Summer Olympic Games in Barcelona.

Surprisingly, one of the poignant chapters is a heartfelt letter dedicated to Isis, Gabrielle’s pivotal character in the 2000 cheerleader flick Bring It On. Isis leads the East Compton Clovers to victory after finding out the Rancho Carne Toros led by Kirsten Dunst’s character Torrance have copied the all-Black cheerleading team’s moves for years. The actress goes into the awkwardness of being the only Black person at the audition rehearsing stereotypical slang. Once she nabs the role along with Clover characters named Jenelope, Lava, and LaFred, played by the R&B girl group Blaque, Gabrielle finds herself every day editing the script to subtract the slang she knows wouldn’t come out of Isis’ mouth. She even reveals how she worked out a storyline for Isis to go to a top university, but it didn’t make the cut. Twenty years later, Isis is a mainstay on the top movie villains lists every year, a downer for Gabrielle who felt she let down Black teen girls by not making sure Isis deserved role model status. This motivates her to become a better role model for her daughters Kaavia and Zaya.

Her relationships with her daughters are interlaced in the stories. While she talks about her journey to mothering Kaavia, she also talks about her journey in understanding Zaya’s gender and sexual identity. She is a supportive stepmother with going to the school administrations whenever the family moves due to Dwyane’s basketball career to explain Zaya’s preferences. Those preferences evolve until Zaya realizes she is a transgender girl. And with that evolution comes the family’s evolution in creating a safe space for Zaya and asking others to do the same.

Stories with heartache sit between comedic chapters like when Gabrielle takes a laxative before going to the strip club that turns into a night in the strippers’ dressing room with a cold compress on her forehead to when her younger sister gets drunk off frozen limoncello at Thanksgiving that Gabrielle made after seeing Danny DeVito blame his televised drunkenness on the alcohol.

Overall, the memoir is another well-written collection of stories from different times and themes throughout the author’s life. Via the audiobook, her voice comes alive with the storytelling and the brilliant choice of words.



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Book Review: ‘Misfits’ by Michaela Coel

Misfits: A Personal Manifesto by Michaela Coel

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


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Misfits by Michaela Coel is a smart quick read where the actress, screenwriter, and producer narrates her rise in entertainment by recognizing the people she classifies as misfits while also noticing how moths always seem to make an appearance on her journey.

How many other potential artists with stories we want and need have we lost for the sake of financial profit; have we lost to thoughtless education systems, thoughtless nurturing, thoughtlessness? Why are we platforming misfits, heralding them as newly rich successes while they balance on creaking ladders with little chance of social mobility? I can’t help usher them into this house if there are doors within it they can’t open.

The hourlong book starts with Michaela ready to kill a moth interrupting an informal Stranger Things screening in her flat with her friends. Instinctively, she sprays moth killer. Once her friends gag at the odor, she realizes her sense of smell is gone. That same year in 2018, she’s invited to the MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh TV Festival where she not only vocalizes her story but analyzes the elements that propelled her to unexpected stardom.

The author intersects lepidopterology throughout the key moments that contribute to her career in entertainment from dropping out of college a few times to taking a chance on a virtually White theater school, then writing her own play and performing it, and seeing that play become her first TV show, Chewing Gum.

The term “misfit” can be cross-generational and crosses concepts of gender or culture, simply by a desire for transparency, a desire to see another’s point of view. Misfits who visibly fit in will sometimes find themselves merging with the mainstream, for a feeling of safety.

Race and class define the story. The daughter of an immigrant single mother, Michaela attends a youth theater for free. She’s the only Black girl there. As an adult, the lack of diversity remains the same at her theater school. But when she writes the play that becomes the U.K. Netflix series Chewing Gum, she realizes the pattern continues on the industry level where she had to make sure the majority Black cast received the same treatment as the White actors.

During that show, she admits her business dealings weren’t clear to her. She eventually declines that newsworthy million-dollar offer from Netflix for her next show that evolves into HBO’s I May Destroy You. While working long hours on her second show, a night out for a break becomes the impetus for the future award-winning series as she is accosted by a flashback that makes her realize she had been raped. It’s then she finds herself leaning on the misfits she met inside and outside the industry to help her in the healing process and the storytelling process.

Overall, the personal manifesto highlights the author’s most meaningful memories describing where she is now and uses interesting symbolism from misfits to moths. Because of the length and substance, it’s a good choice for readers trying to stick to their annual reading goals or looking for something short and sweet.

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Book Review: ‘Dominicana’ by Angie Cruz

Dominicana by Angie Cruz

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


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Dominicana by Angie Cruz is a coming-of-age literary fiction novel about a Dominican girl in the 1960s who’s forced into a marriage to get her chance to live in the United States, but the American dream comes with more sacrifices than she expected.

Ana Canción is growing into her own. She loves her family composed of her parents, three siblings, and two cousins, and helps them on their dying farm in the Los Guayacanes area of the Dominican Republic. Except her family needs to sell some land to the entrepreneurial Ruiz brothers, who mostly live in New York City. Ana’s mother convinces Ana to marry middle brother Juan to seal the business deal and have an opportunity to live in the U.S. As the obedient daughter who witnessed her older sister Teresa suffer the downfall of having a child with a no-good man, Ana says yes to a marriage proposal that’s been on the table since she was eleven years old, even though she’s falling for Gabriel, her first crush:

One kiss and suddenly I’m una mujer. Not a niña or jovencita but a woman. I touch the mirror to understand how it happened without warning, but with the hot-pink dress on, the girl who had never been kissed is gone. I am Ana, about to be married and to travel to America. Juan Ruiz is expected before noon.

On the way to New York, Juan buys Ana a ceramic doll at the airport she calls Dominicana. By the time they get to their apartment in Manhattan on 168th Street and Broadway, Ana realizes that the doll is the only constant. Juan works most of the day in the garment business and comes home smelling like another woman’s perfume. He becomes violent when Ana isn’t the perfect homemaker, always cooking, cleaning, helping with Juan’s side hustle, and staying home as an undocumented immigrant who doesn’t know English. Juan’s side hustle is selling men’s suits out of their apartment. Ana figures out a way to overcharge and keep some of the profits for herself, hidden in Dominicana. But upon expanding her world, she loses her money and feels desperate about starting over again.

To make matters worse, Ana discovers she’s pregnant. She needs her own money. Juan’s younger brother César comes to her rescue. While Juan sorts out business affairs in the Dominican Republic, César, who also works all day and comes home smelling like another woman’s perfume, takes it upon himself to be the husband he knows Ana doesn’t have. They form a bond that seems indestructible until Juan returns home.

Every detail of a regular life juts out in a way that’s still interesting in this historical fiction novel reflecting the journeys of Dominican women coming to the United States in the 1960s when the island was on the brink of civil war. Seeing the world unfold from her window, Ana even witnesses Malcolm X’s assassination at the Audubon Ballroom next to her building.

It’s a snapshot of immigrant life in American history that’s rarely told in American literature. The story follows a pattern from other novels such as Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, which takes place in London with a woman from Bangladesh brought there by a much older husband, of the teen bride-turned-housewife dedicated to serving the husband who works all day while she doesn’t get the love she deserves until she finds it elsewhere. But the story also features domestic violence and rape as Ana is fifteen and Juan thirty-two, more than double her age. Ana feels stuck in a new country and in a promise to financially support her family. The weight is heavy of being the chosen daughter of a poor family from a poor country where she has the chance to make life easier for everyone by sacrificing herself for the cause.

Overall, the reader sees Ana’s growth from shy teenage girl to determined mother-to-be looking for ways to escape her marriage without causing harm to her family. Throughout the book, Ana thinks about her family as tragedy strikes amid her home country sinking into war. Her dedication to her family is strong as she depends on one Ruiz brother to save her from another.

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Book Review: ‘Mexican Gothic’ by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


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Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia is a slow burn novel that takes place in a mansion tinged with supernatural forces where the main character is trying to diagnose her cousin’s mysterious illness and the settings that made her sick.

Noemí Taboada is a wealthy socialite living in 1950s Mexico who wants to pursue a master’s degree in anthropology. Her father, an entrepreneur in the ink industry, promises Noemí he will fund her education if she visits her newlywed cousin Catalina. The destination is High Place, a Gothic mansion high up a mountain in a remote town that belongs to Catalina’s in-laws, the Doyles. When Noemí arrives at the mansion, she finds Catalina is ill.

A disturbing letter from Catalina claiming she is being poisoned by the Doyles forces Noemí to make the long-term visit to check in on her cousin, who lost her parents at a young age. So Noemí enters the High Place believing her cousin is putting on the theatrics for attention. Then, Noemí meets the Doyles. There is Catalina’s husband, Virgil, who makes Noemí uncomfortable right off the bat. Florence Doyle, Virgil’s aunt and the drill sergeant of the house, chastises Noemí for questioning the rules like seeing the sickly Catalina at her convenience. Howard Doyle, Virgil’s father, appears at the first dinner and remarks on how Noemí has darker skin and hair color than Catalina. After making a mental Post-it note on the microaggression, Noemí answers that her cousin is half-French. This leaves a bad taste in her mouth. The only ally Noemí has is Francis Doyle, Virgil’s younger cousin, who appears gentle enough to get along with.

After having a chance to survey Catalina, Noemí notices the illness has overtaken her cousin with strange symptoms. The doctor working with the Doyles keeps medicating Catalina and assuring Noemí nothing else can be done. Noemí doesn’t buy that. She sneaks out into the town and tries to get a doctor to come to High Place. The one doctor she finds is afraid to get involved with the Doyles’ matters. A medicine woman in town claims to know Catalina and had given her natural remedies before Catalina was confined to High Place. From the townspeople and the Doyle grounds, Noemí discovers that hundreds of miners died during an unexplained epidemic from the family’s silver mining heyday amid the start of the Mexican Revolution.

Piecing together the strangeness of the Doyles and their home, Noemí forges on her quest to save her cousin. Except she is having hallucinogenic visions and doesn’t quite feel like herself. She confides in Francis more and more for help until they figure out the magnitude of the engulfing presence that defines the family and their surroundings.

Not a fan of thrillers, but this historical fiction novel set in Mexico weaves the social sciences and the physical sciences together to create a perfect storm of extreme tension between Noemí and the Doyles sans Francis. Though there is a supernatural element, there is also the lure of how the Doyles live and where they live. Noemí realizes the house would draw a fairy tale-loving Catalina in:

It was the kind of thing she could imagine impressing her cousin: an old house atop a hill, with mist and moonlight, like an etching out of a Gothic novel. Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, those were Catalina’s sort of books. Moors and spiderwebs. Castles, too, and wicked stepmothers who force princesses to eat poisoned apples, dark fairies cursing maidens and wizards who turn handsome lords into beasts. Noemí preferred to jump from party to party on a weekend and drive a convertible.

The book is also part romance with Noemí trusting Francis as the days go on as the only person who can help her with Catalina. Even though he’s a Doyle, he takes a liking to Noemí and looks for ways to help as the youngest member of the family who’s grown accustomed to how everything functions and doesn’t know if he wants to poke the bear of what’s lurking around them.

Overall, the suspenseful ending solves the mystery of what’s ailing Catalina, and the reason is complicated like the journey to discovering the secret. Again, the unique setting in place and time elevates the story and the complexity of the characters.

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How Dawnn Karen’s ‘Dress Your Best Life’ Guides You Through Your Post-Pandemic Wardrobe

Photo by Artem Beliaikin from Pexels

Fashion psychologist Dawnn Karen wants people to feel confident in their clothes.

Her self-help book, Dress Your Best Life: How to Use Fashion Psychology to Take Your Look—and Your Life—to the Next Level published by Hachette Book Group’s Little, Brown Spark imprint, came out the same time the COVID-19 pandemic took hold of society and forced us to stay home. That means we exchanged our business attire for loose-fitting athleisure to feel comfortable in our living space-turned-workspace. But now that many of us are returning to the office amid delta variant fears or expecting to return eventually, her fashion psychology curriculum can be applied to the current era.

Sweatsuit to Pantsuit

During the pandemic, many of us may have been suffering from repetitious wardrobe complex, which is what the author defines as wearing the same clothes—or versions of the same clothes—over and over again. That means our tie-dye sweatsuits and other forms of athleisure that we zhooshed up as much as we could for the Zoom calls have kept us in a loop.

Staying at home subtracted the decision fatigue many of us dealt with when it came to selecting five office-friendly outfits for five workdays. Dawnn Karen tells readers to avoid this fatigue when you’re faced with too many options for what to wear and buy, which in turn makes you feel often overwhelmed and paralyzed in making decisions you later regret. Buyer’s remorse, anyone? To get ready for the physical office, she suggests taking the time to sense any discomfort with an outfit that you probably hadn’t put on since March 2020.

Mood is central to our outfit selection, according to Dawnn Karen’s fashion psychology. Before approaching your closet in the morning or the night before, she advises to practice mood illustration dressing, or meditating briefly by matching your outfit with how you are feeling. Feeling upbeat? Wear that pop of color.

Feeling down? Wear that comfortable skirt. Or take another step to practice mood enhancement dressing, or to choose what you wear to modify your mood for the better. It’s a tactic to wear the most office-appropriate attire that will make you feel the most confident, e.g. the not-so-sky-high heels or the cardigan for the air conditioning, especially if returning to the office after a year and a half and feeling the weight of pressure to return to work.

“When you thoughtfully assess your emotional state and then dress to respect or match it,” she writes. “The goal here is not to transform or challenge yourself with clothes but to embrace, accept, and honor yourself exactly where you are.”

Stressing Over Dressing

For women, fashion situational code switching may have plagued our former workdays, particularly when you had to put on the pantsuit, preferably designer or name brand, to compete in the office when you would rather wear jeans and a nice top. Switching your attire up for the social setting can be stressful and can extend to the hair and makeup routine where you feel you have to wear your hair a certain way or tone down your makeup.

Fashion identification assimilation and fashion incongruence could be two issues reflective of the times. The former is when you use style to fit in with or blend into a cultural or social group, the author writes, when the latter is when your ideal dress and perceived dress are incompatible. You may want to wear the comfortable clothes that you’ve been wearing for months at home, but it might break the workplace dress code. Then you might think those black leggings you wore at home can be mistaken for black slacks in the office, but that is most likely a no-go. More employees are expecting rules on lax office wear post-pandemic, business insiders forecast, while some employees may return to an unchanged model.

A focal accessory can bring comfort, the author describes as an item that holds psychological value and may be worn repeatedly. It can be worn with your work and outside-of-work outfits. She advises to start small such as with a family heirloom necklace pendant, which can bring the warmth of protection in spirit.

Comfortable in Your Skin Again

“In my experience, the best way to get off the retail therapy treadmill and break the cycle of buying, regretting, then buying some more is mindfulness,” Dawnn Karen writes in the chapter she named “The Science Behind Shopping.”

Need new threads? This book can help you figure out your wardrobe upon emerging from our forced stay-at-home lives. More Americans are purging their closets for multiple reasons from expired trends to weight gain, according to the Associated Press, as we slowly return to normal.

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Book Review: ‘Seven Days in June’ by Tia Williams

Seven Days in June by Tia Williams

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Seven Days in June by Tia Williams follows two best-selling authors who reunite on the New York literati circuit years after a high school fling that left them scarred. It’s a sophisticated romance still accompanied by a happily ever after.

Manhattanite single mom Eva Mercy is a former best-selling novelist whose Black vampire romance series à la Twilight still excites fans via the interwebs. By chance, an author drops out of a panel event, and Eva gets the last-minute invitation to fill the spot. That’s where she sees fellow, still-successful best-selling novelist Shane Hall, a mysterious intellectual who makes women and men alike swoon. Eva tries not to swoon because it turns out she and Shane went to high school once in D.C. and spent a week of debauchery in a mansion during their senior year. They meet up for a day in New York where the deep-rooted chemistry overtakes them. The day blends into another one and another where they start catching up about what went wrong when they were teenagers. Eva thinks Shane, who was a foster child and drug dealer at the time, abandoned her at her lowest point, but she learns that another force divided them. As they try to rekindle what they had as adults, Eva and Shane must combat their demons to accept the love that was severed so many years ago.

This is Tia Williams’ most complex work yet. Known for centering her novels on Black women in New York working in media, the author adds more layers to Eva’s character and Shane’s character not common in a lot of women’s fiction and romance novels. In adolescence, the main characters are dealing with substance abuse, self-harm, unstable homes, and missing parents. In adulthood, the age-old traumas return with them realizing how reflective their behaviors are when they interact with each other and the kids in their lives like Eva’s Gen Z daughter Audre and Shane’s mentee Ty. The character and storyline complexity blends well with the ubiquitous pop culture references the author loves to add to her novels.

Also, this is the first novel the author makes her main character an author as well when her previous novels’ main characters are beauty and fashion editors like her former day job life. Switching up the career choice also shows more depth with Eva translating her healing process through her books and Shane doing the same with his. Another element of the novel is Eva living with her invisible disability of suffering from debilitating migraines that worsen with barometric pressure. This also reflects the author’s life. She has given this trait to her first novel’s main character from The Accidental Diva, but this time around in Seven Days in June she makes Eva feel the everyday pain and impact and gives Audre the fear of seeing her mother chronically ill. The migraines also contribute to Eva’s writer’s block and how she’s struggling to deliver the 15th book of her famous series that is getting the film treatment with some hiccups along the way.

Overall, this novel is an excellent summer beach read that’s definitely a page-turner the deeper you get into the book. Tia Williams’ last novel from 2016, The Perfect Find, is in production with Gabrielle Union for Netflix. This novel also has silver-screen potential, especially with the book-to-film subplot that brings up diversity and inclusion in Hollywood projects.



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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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