Thicker than Water by Kerry Washington reflects on the award-winning actress’ life from her humble beginnings in the Bronx to her stardom in Hollywood as she begins to seek the truth in a long-held family secret.
Even as a young child, I felt that I was never who my dad needed me to be. I knew he really wanted a son and that they weren’t having any more children. I wondered if I could soften the blow somehow by being a daughter who was prettier, or smarter, or braver, or more successful, but even that didn’t work.
Kerry Marisa Washington was born in New York City, and her story focuses on the meaning of her middle name. Marisa translates to “girl of the sea” in Latin. She embodies her mermaid nature by swimming as a child with her cousins and neighbors at a government-subsidized cooperative housing building for middle-income families. When she swims, that is the time she feels the most free. She tries to hold onto that childhood freedom when she overhears her parents fighting at night. The tension between her parents over legal turmoil circulating her father’s real estate dealings makes her anxious. As she evolves from child to teenager, she absorbs her family’s troubles as the only child. The child her parents desired for so long after years of infertility. The child who lives in the shadow of a stillborn sibling who came years before her when her mother was married to another man. The child who is slowly growing older and finding her purpose.
What soothes the blossoming anxiety is acting. Kerry becomes a standout in middle and high school performances. Her mother worries about the lack of stability in a potential acting career. The only famous person they know is Jennifer Lopez, who taught Kerry dance at their local Boys & Girls Club, but according to Kerry, everyone noticed J.Lo’s charisma. To Kerry, she may not be cut from the same cloth. As a teen accumulating roles in school performances, she joins Mount Sinai Hospital’s Adolescent Health Center’s S.T.A.R. program, which educates and entertains children about the dangers of risky sexual behavior. She gets recognition when she plays the role of a girl who discovered she had been diagnosed with HIV/AIDS during a televised ABC town hall. She also nabs her Screen Actors Guild membership off a speaking role in an ABC after-school special. These could be viewed as moments of unintentional manifestation when she later becomes the first Black actress to lead a primetime TV drama in nearly 40 years on the same network in her role as Olivia Pope on Scandal.
Her love for acting is noticed by a mentor, who refers her to an agent for an audition for Interview with the Vampire. She loses the role to Thandiwe Newton. As a Black teen girl in high school, Kerry isn’t winning roles, but when Thandiwe Newton also nabs the role of Sally Hemings in another audition, Kerry heads to George Washington University in D.C. The university is not too far away from New York City, but Kerry’s growing anxiety evolves into an eating disorder.
She struggles with her binge eating for years, but upon graduation, she heads back home in hopes of nabbing roles with her college training. She gets her first big role in an independent film called Our Song about three Black young women in a marching band. She soon gets the pivotal role as Chenille, a teen mother balancing school in inner-city Chicago, in Save the Last Dance.
My biology had been their enemy. Consequently, I had learned to survive without a true relationship to it. I didn’t know my body; I couldn’t read its signs. I didn’t rest when I was tired, didn’t register when I was hungry, couldn’t decipher when I was full. Over time, my body became my enemy, and I couldn’t bear the discomfort of being fully present in my skin. I sensed that my embodiment scared my mother and threatened my dad. Presence itself—being fully alive and aware—became something to avoid. The fuel that had powered our family was pretending.
Over the last several years solidifying her TV and film success, the private star marries her husband Nnamdi Asomugha and raises two children while being a bonus mother to a stepdaughter. Scandal is coming to an end, and Kerry is exploring options with her production company, Simpson Street. Upon meeting Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. at an event, the renowned historian invites Kerry to be featured on his show, Finding Your Roots on PBS. But then her parents give her devastating news about her lineage, which forces her to question her identity and her past.
On the heels of Americans seeking discoveries within their DNA, the actress learns that her willingness to please her parents and feeling down when she thought she wasn’t the perfect child fueled so much of her anxiety. While handling these emotional fluctuations, she also chose a career filled with rejections that kept watering the seed in her mind that she wasn’t good enough. In her role as Olivia Pope, we see Kerry Washington portray this complicated woman with such poise that we may not realize how much energy goes into showing that poise to an audience. By telling her story, she seems more down-to-earth, despite her opportunities of acting arising so early in her life.
The memoir follows Kerry as she goes through the ups and downs of acting, a career she felt connected to as a preteen. Witnessing her work ethic while witnessing the countless rejections can be seen as inspirational for readers who are also in ambitious careers. Her first film did turn out to be an indie film darling and opened the door to her role in Save the Last Dance, but she had already been acting for more than a decade.
Overall, the memoirist does a wonderful job of connecting the trials and tribulations to finding solace in memories tied to buoyancy and freedom, especially with being one with the water. The liquid made up of hydrogen and oxygen makes one feel weightless, so when situations weighed on her, she thought about the feeling in the water. The thought of water didn’t fix everything, but realizing she had felt the feeling of freedom at one point helped her navigate the hardships. This book works well for readers and Scandal fans who are interested in inner child and teen healing, body positivity, career exploration, and genealogical discovery.
There was no family meeting to sit the kids down and prepare them psychologically for all these changes to come or to get them to weigh in on what they’d like to do and how they were feeling. Just as there wasn’t any discussion about the trauma of moving us away from all the family and friends we’d ever known in New York City and the people who looked like us. You go where your parents go and they’ll hear nothing of your unhappiness or fears or anxieties or, for god’s sake, your opinion.
Born in New York City, Carmen is raised as the daughter of a Dominican immigrant mother and a Chinese immigrant father. Her parents eventually divorce after a tumultuous marriage that leaves Carmen and her older brother, Alex, under the care of their mother, Lupe. After Lupe remarries quickly, the siblings are living with their White stepfather, Marty, in New Hampshire. Being a brown-skinned girl with a Chinese surname in predominantly White suburbia makes Carmen stand out. She feels uncomfortable with the microaggressions from her Catholic school teachers and classmates. As the family expands to adding four more girls, Carmen begins to see the pressure in the household with her mother spewing vitriol to her and her siblings.
As high school graduation approaches, she has to depend on her father to pay for college. Her tuition is expected to be paid by her father, who sells jewelry and other accessories to department stores in shady operations. Those operations lead to her father serving time in prison. With her father imprisoned and her stepfather unemployed, Carmen finds herself financing her college education and eventually finding her own independence. Her resourcefulness leads to an executive assistant position at Christie’s auction house back in her hometown of New York City. Her ambition eventually places her on the path to multimedia financial journalism.
After finding success in her career and heartbreak in a failed marriage, Carmen learns that her mother has been diagnosed with colon cancer. At this point, her mother and stepfather are divorced, and her stepfather has moved back to New York City. With her mother sick, her stepfather tells her that her father is not her father. She had noticed over the years that as her brother looked more Chinese like a Wong while her looks failed to head in the same direction. She brings the long-held family secret to her mother, who fights against the truth. After her mother dies, Carmen realizes there was more to the secret that defined her upbringing and forced her to question the past and present.
My Spanish was being displaced by French, the only language offered in school. It became harder to understand my beloved abuela as both English and French squeezed space in my brain, burying my Spanish deep, one shovelful of New Hampshire at a time. My English pronunciation was East Coast newscaster, just as my mother wanted, no Dominican-NYC flavor like my extended cousins, who’d taunt me with “You talk white!” My clothes were prim, proper, pastel eighties “good girl.” I looked like a forty-year-old accountant, not cool like my cousins. Code-switching became my destiny whether I liked it or not.
Once she learns the truth about her genetic biology, Carmen finds herself questioning her racial, ethnic, and cultural identity. With the memory of being a little girl who loved dressing up to go to Chinatown, she is no longer Chinese. Her last name is no longer accurate. The alienation she felt in her New Hampshire home growing up as Dominican-Chinese, different from her younger siblings, resurfaces. Realizing that she doesn’t have the same exact DNA as her brother, who arrived with her in the new version of the family household in New Hampshire, is heartbreaking and frustrating.
Like many housewives at the time, her immigrant mother believed the American Dream could be brighter with a White husband in White suburbia. This recurring theme throughout the story shows how a person who identifies with a particular ethnicity or more ethnicities can experience a different reality from even other immediate family members. In Catholic school, for example, a nun credits Carmen’s intelligence to being half-Chinese. The nun assumes this by taking Carmen’s surname and believing the stereotype of all Asians being smart. When she gets older, other people of color confuse her for being White or being Black. Her multiracial and multiethnic identity makes her wonder how her journey would have differed knowing her true racial and ethnic identities.
The theme of race, ethnicity, and culture resonates throughout her story with the truth about her DNA weighing heavily on every memory thread. If her mother was happy with the man believed to be her father, then would she have been removed from her diverse hometown of New York City? If her stepfather was her biological father, would she have been treated the same way as her stepsisters? How much of her life would have been different if she had known her paternity and ethnicity?
Overall, the memoir hits on the notes of other memoirs by women of color who have had their lives stamped by their racial and ethnic identities. These memoirs examine how their intersectionality impacted their growth from childhood to adulthood. This memoir could be useful to readers interested in adapting to new environments, learning about family history and heritage, and persevering as an eldest daughter and a woman of color.
Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson revolves around two adult siblings trying to decipher their mother’s deathbed confessions as they imagine her living different lives and identities.
Eleanor Bennett is dead. But before she died from cancer, she had recorded her deep-rooted secrets with the help of her lawyer-boyfriend, Charles Mitch. Charles brings the recordings to Eleanor’s two children, son Byron and daughter Benedetta, or Benny for short. Byron and Benny haven’t spoken to each other in years. An oceanographer on the rise, Byron doesn’t understand his younger sister’s decisions to not stay on the straight and narrow path their Caribbean immigrant parents set them on. Benny, a college dropout, is still trying to establish roots in her career and love life after some heartbreaking moments that she tried to share with her family but felt she was rejected. As the two siblings feel awkward around each other back home in California, they have to sit with Mr. Mitch and listen to the hours of recordings their mother left behind.
Eleanor Bennett was born Coventina “Covey” Lyncook. In the 1950s and 1960s on a Caribbean island similar to Jamaica, Covey loves competitive swimming with her best friend, Bunny. Covey’s father, Johnny “Lin” Lyncook, a Chinese immigrant on the island, owns a general store. He’s also a gambler, so Covey tries to focus on her schoolwork. Her mother is gone and has failed to reach back out to the family. To ease the missingness of Covey’s mother, Pearl, a family friend and the housekeeper, takes it upon herself to watch over Covey. Pearl helps the family while maintaining a successful baking business. Her most requested dessert is the wedding treat of black cake, which Covey learns to make.
Covey’s life is turned upside down when her father promises her hand in marriage to a known moneylender and murderer named Little Man Henry to settle a gambling debt. At 17 years old, Covey knows she doesn’t want to marry this 38-year-old criminal but rather spend her life with Gilbert “Gibbs” Grant, her boyfriend who wants to study abroad in the U.K. for a more promising future. When Little Man Henry falls dead at the wedding with the black cake with lilac icing barely touched, Covey makes a run for it to the waves. The storm brewing above should make the swim precarious, so when Lin finds Covey’s weighty wedding dress on the beach, he believes his daughter is dead.
With assistance, Covey gets to the U.K. to work as a nanny. She must keep a low profile, so she changes her last name since she is a suspect in the murder of Little Man Henry. But she wants more of a career. She enrolls in a nursing program with other Caribbean women. There, she meets a woman her age named Eleanor Bennett. A tragic turn of events forces Covey to become Eleanor to seek the career she wants. Feeling like she dodged another bullet, Eleanor arrives in a workplace where a violent incident and the aftermath change the trajectory of her life again bringing her to the U.S. with a husband and eventually a family.
Black cake is popular in English-speaking Caribbean countries where it’s considered a twist on Christmas plum pudding. It’s usually served on special occasions such as weddings and holidays. In the book, Pearl makes a living with and later without Covey’s mother providing black cakes as Covey becomes an apprentice. With being forced to change her life three times, Covey as Eleanor brings the recipe to her new homeland and teaches the recipe to her daughter. Benny carries an old plastic measuring cup in light of her mother’s death because it gives her comfort. Byron finds a bowl of fruits marinating for the black cake while searching through the kitchen. Their mother would marinate dates and maraschino cherries in rum and port every five years to bake a layer of black cake for her and Bert to enjoy a slice on every wedding anniversary. The dessert becomes a symbol for Eleanor’s children as they bridge her past as a young woman to the mother they always knew. When they learn about another family member, the siblings are determined to bake the black cake to enjoy the dessert their mother always held close to her heart.
Another theme in the book is the ocean. Though Covey leaves home to escape punishment for a crime, her best friend, Bunny, still defends her. Bunny eventually grows up to be Etta Pringle, a global swimming champion. Etta never forgot how Covey inspired her to take those long-distance swims on their island. When Covey as Eleanor becomes a mother, she instills her love of swimming into her children. While Benny loves to bake mainly because of the black cake tradition, Byron loves the ocean as he would surf with his mother. In the U.S., African Americans still deal with the stereotype of not being able to swim, mainly because of the country’s past of discriminating against them and other people of color by cutting off access to pools and waterways. But in countries where the population is predominantly of people of African descent, the waterways represent freedom and the residents are usually strong swimmers. This perspective of people of African descent who love swimming, and not only love the sport but also love the ocean, is refreshing to see as a part of Caribbean culture.
Overall, the book builds up tension well as Covey aka Eleanor tells her autobiography through audio speakers and the events swirl into more events as her children examine her every word and imagine her every situation. More stories have used the theme of the deathbed confession, but some of the characters are considered famous, so their autobiography is worthy of listeners. But this story stands out by featuring a young Caribbean woman, who lacks wholeness without her mother and is forced into an arranged marriage, and how she overcame sexism and racism to get what she wanted in the end though it looked different than what she would have expected. The story has been adapted into a TV series on Hulu. The book would entertain readers who are interested in family secrets and dynamics, oceanic power, and Caribbean history and culture.
⚠️ Trigger warning! The story and the post below have graphic references to topics such as sexual assault.
Black Cake on Hulu brings Charmaine Wilkerson’s debut novel to life through a cinematographic lens, showing the main character’s inner conflicts of hiding her identity multiple times to escape an arranged marriage that ends in murder.
The TV series opens with Covey escaping the murder scene in her wedding dress toward the ocean in 1960s Jamaica then shows 70-something Eleanor walking into the ocean with her surfboard, determined to get lost in the water. The girl and the woman are the same person. How Coventina “Covey” Lyncook, played magnificently by Mia Isaac in her youthful years, becomes Eleanor Bennett, played by Chipo Chung in her older years, makes the story within Black Cake full-bodied like the rich dessert that serves as its title.
For the quick synopsis (the book review can be found here), Covey is growing up in Jamaica as a competitive swimmer and the only daughter of Johnny “Lin” Lyncook, one of the only Chinese immigrants in the Black community. Her mother, Mathilda, left years earlier, so her mother’s friend and housekeeper, Pearl, helps raise her while earning money baking black cakes for weddings. When Lin runs into gambling issues that threaten his general store, he arranges for Covey to marry Little Man, a career criminal. Seventeen years old, Covey wants to keep swimming with her best friend, Bunny. She is also in love with Gilbert “Gibbs” Grant, a fellow competitive swimmer. When Little Man falls to his death during the reception right when Pearl’s black cake is being served, Covey makes a run toward the ocean. She is now a suspect in her husband’s murder. In the water, she is rebaptized as Coventina Brown on her way to England then Eleanor Douglas in Scotland then Eleanor Bennett in the U.S. Her two children, Byron and Benedetta “Benny,” spend the length of the story deciphering their mother’s deathbed confessions through audio files before discovering they have another sibling.
The overwhelming theme of the loneliness around hiding your true identity to escape a life choice someone made for you bleeds into most of the scenes involving the character of Covey. Her gambling father forces her into an arranged marriage with an older man known for his criminal activity, and now the girl who had dreams of taking over the world of competitive swimming is running for her survival. The criminal arrangement still leads her to a life of criminality that forces her to change and steal her identity to escape trouble.
In the second episode “Coventina,” Covey labors over a pot of Chinese fish soup at her clients’ family home. She is ordered to make fish and chips for the two children she cares for as a nanny, but the homesickness is too overpowering in London. While she has access to the kitchen, she makes the soup. The maid, who is also Chinese, smells the soup and tastes it. She recognizes the dish and questions Covey about how she learned to make the soup. Covey answers that her grandmother taught her without revealing she too is Chinese. The maid leaves with suspicions. Covey can’t afford to bond with the maid over their shared ethnic identity because she is hiding her entire identity. What if the maid is a Chinese woman from Jamaica? When Covey serves the children the soup, they are disgusted and upset that fish and chips are not being served as expected. Though she is homesick, Covey is embarrassed that she tried to bring a sense of home into someone else’s home, especially serving children without developed and diverse palates. The moment is smaller than the many pivotal moments, but it stands out in demonstrating Covey’s loneliness and homesickness in such a simple light. The dinner forces her to reexamine her fear of living within the Caribbean and Chinese communities in London and wonder if the next batch of immigrants who arrive on the next ship will recognize her and turn her in to the authorities in Jamaica.
The third episode “Eleanor” shows us how Covey becomes Eleanor after assuming the identity of her upbeat roommate Eleanor, played by Karise Yansen, who is killed in a train accident as they are traveling to live a new life in Edinburgh, Scotland. In the show, she has a hard time finding a job as a Caribbean immigrant while recovering from her leg laceration from the accident. She feels she has to hide even more. It mentally takes her back to the island where she is courting Gibbs, played by Ahmed Elhaj. Since she has a boyfriend, she wants Bunny to find one, too. But Bunny, played by Lashay Anderson, doesn’t seem interested in the local boys. She confesses that she likes Covey the way she’s supposed to like boys. Covey reprimands her friend to never repeat those words and advises Bunny to pretend to like a boy out of protection. Back alone in Edinburgh, Covey as Eleanor realizes the advice she had given her friend is the advice she needs for herself to survive.
In the same episode, Covey finds a secretarial job. Out of excitement in finding employment, she wears a light pink crocheted dress with pink heels topped with white flowers on her first day. Right away, her Scottish female colleagues seem to be annoyed by her presence and make comments about the brightness of her outfit. Covey is again reminded to hide. So, the next day, she arrives in an outfit with a drabber color. When she spots accounting errors, she tries to bring the problem to Beatrice, played by Anna Mawn, the ringleader of the women in the office. She gets angry at Covey for insinuating she has made a mistake.
But Covey doesn’t feel right about the mistakes in the account. She goes to her male boss, who seems understanding of the situation. He admonishes Beatrice for ignoring the mistakes and invites Covey to dinner with his wife. The trust between Covey and her boss makes her feel seen in a positive light. Then her boss reveals that he knows Covey is lying about her identity. He points out the lack of nursing education, a lie Covey used on her résumé as part of her new identity as Eleanor. With Covey afraid to confess, her boss sexually assaults her. Beatrice notices Covey in shock returning to their room in the office. She follows Covey into the restroom, where she explains the boss had assaulted her and the other women in the office, but they all needed the job. She tells Covey to clean herself up and return to her desk. Covey is visibly upset over the ordeal and how she let her walls down to the first person who showed her attention when she was supposed to be invisible.
Covey returns to London after having her daughter, Mathilda, as a result of the assault. As the seventh episode “Birth Mother” shows a pregnant Covey trying to stay under the radar at a church, she fights to be noticed to keep her daughter. But she fails when a couple swoops baby Mathilda in a quickie adoption arranged by the nuns. Covey is running after the car carrying her baby away, but she cannot keep up.
Since Edinburgh turned out to be a disaster starting with the tragic death of her roommate, Covey puts on her cloak of invisibility in the fourth episode “Mrs. Bennett” while walking the streets of London. She notices a protest across the street, and in a perfect moment of fate, she lays her eyes on her beloved Gibbs. He is yelling into a megaphone alongside protestors, but he stops when he lays his eyes on Covey. They immediately reunite and spend time together. But one day, a Caribbean girl notices Covey. She calls out to Covey, but Covey answers to Eleanor now. The girl asks about Eleanor’s whereabouts since it was reported that Covey had died in the train accident. Covey hides behind Gibbs and explains the stress and the loneliness of hiding in plain sight. Gilbert Bennett Grant becomes Bert Bennett while Covey becomes Eleanor Bennett.
The series shows a healthy portion of the recently past present and current present with Byron, played by Ashley Thomas, and Benny, played by Adrienne Warren, who are making sense of their mother’s story and realizing why both their parents had to change their names once they started their new lives in the U.S. But the dramatic sequence of events featuring Mia Isaac as young Covey tugs on the heartstrings more since the strong emotions of disappointment, loneliness, and despair lay within Covey’s past. Throughout the series, there are flashbacks to the relatively peaceful existence Covey lived in Jamaica, even after her mother, Mathilda, left the family in hopes of finding the promise of a better life in the West. The turquoise ocean, the lanky palm trees, and the golden sunlight of the island warm the screen every time, even at times when the story shows a rough scene. The cover for the series shows a young Covey running away toward the ocean at sunset from her deadly reception. How young Covey navigates a path she stumbled onto for the sake of living her life is the root of the storyline.
The eighth episode ends with adult Bunny, a world-famous competitive swimmer played by CCH Pounder, admitting to killing Little Man with a poison Pearl was preparing for the wedding to give Covey a chance at the life she wanted. Pearl decides it is too risky to use the poison, but Bunny sneaks it into Little Man’s drink. Covey’s three grownup children — Byron, Benny, and Mabel Mathilda, played by Sonita Henry — have joined Bunny, now known as Etta, to discover this revelation. But the TV storyline omits some of the book’s ending and opens to new possibilities of a second season.
Toward the end of the book, Etta leads Byron, Benny, and Mabel Mathilda to visit Pearl, played by Faith Alabi, in Florida. She would visit Pearl when she competitively swam in the state. Pearl is in shock that not only Covey was alive this entire time, but she raised a family with Gibbs. All the children remind her of Lin when they laugh. And Mabel looks the most like Covey, though she is considered White. Still in Florida, Etta also guides Covey’s children to their biological grandfather, who they learned with the revelations is Chinese and still alive in his 90s. After a tumultuous gambling past in Jamaica, his luck had turned in the U.S. through investments. He had a private investigator find Covey, who at the time was living as Eleanor Bennett in California, but he felt his daughter should’ve reached out to him. Though he left the island, most of the island at the time ended up in Florida instead of the U.K. in the late 1960s, so he believes Covey would’ve found him if she wanted to. These crucial reunions and meetings, for example, aren’t covered in the series, but they could add another element in a new season.
Another part of the book that failed to make it to the screen is Covey as Eleanor before her death going to see her old friend, renowned swimmer Etta Pringle, speak at a conference. Eleanor sits in the crowd, and Etta notices the face of her old friend who she believed died in a train accident in Scotland decades earlier. Eleanor gives Etta a note with a phone number. They discuss awkwardly a date to meet, but by that time, Eleanor is dead.
In the TV series’ fifth episode “Mother,” Byron gets arrested for beating Benny’s abusive ex-boyfriend on the street after Benny calls to be rescued. In the book, Byron’s girlfriend Lynette, played by Rebecca Naomi Jones in the show, calls Byron to notify him that she couldn’t make it to his mother’s funeral because her nephew had been involved in a police incident. Also in the book, Lynette gives birth to their son. But in the show, Byron finds out at the end that he will be a father when Lynette shows up to the funeral, so his parenthood can be explored in another season.
The series emphasizes a few events in the book. One example is Mabel Mathilda, who is a cultural food anthropologist who gets canceled for whitesplaining indigenous foods during a panel discussion. She is the daughter who reluctantly is given up for adoption. She was raised in a White family and not told about her adoption until Eleanor Bennett’s lawyer Charles Mitch, played by Glynn Turman, reaches out to her. Mabel is raising her son, Gio, alone, but she sends him to boarding school while she lives between London and Italy. This is shown on screen, but in the book, we see Mabel yearn for Gio to return home after noticing her neighbors’ son, who is the same age as Gio. Mabel’s husband died before Gio was born, but the series can dive deeper into Mabel’s life. The scene in the TV series where young Covey is running after the car belonging to Mabel’s adoptive parents is excruciating to the point that Mabel will have to deal with that image and bring it up with her family. She still also has to tell Gio that she is adopted, has met her biological siblings, and went to her biological mother’s funeral while lying about being on her book tour in the U.S. The show spotlights the personal lives of Byron and Benny since we meet them at the beginning of the series, while Mabel is introduced in “Mother,” therefore we have the abridged version of her reality.
Reminiscent of the visual reimagining of Natalie Baszile’s Queen Sugar by Ava DuVernay and Oprah Winfrey, Black Cake keeps its story mainly intact and gives moments more space to breathe and expand. Along with author Charmaine Wilkerson, Oprah is also an executive producer for Black Cake. Thanks to showrunner Marissa Jo Cerar’s book-to-TV credits, the series tells the story with dramatic cinematographic shots. The series is so exquisitely done, but it’s due to the novel being entertaining and heart-wrenching simultaneously with the tension pulsating on every page the way it’s pulsating in every scene.
*Given an advanced reading copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review*
Nigeria Jones by Ibi Zoboi follows the daughter of a Black revolutionary in Philadelphia trying to fulfill her mother’s wish for her to have a normal life.
Sixteen-year-old Nigeria is the daughter of Kofi Sankofa, an activist who has built his identity and his community around uplifting people in the African diaspora with his pro-African beliefs. Nigeria has always been in his shadow as his warrior princess who can practice shooting guns under the protection of the Second Amendment and organize the youth who seek guidance in their community household. She also takes care of her 1-year-old brother Freedom.
With her mother missing, Nigeria takes it upon herself to be that motherly figure to Freedom while trying to find answers of why her mother is no longer around. Her mother’s friend KD, a White woman, tells Nigeria that her mother wanted her to attend the Philadelphia Friends School, a Quaker high school. It’s the same school KD’s daughter Sage, who is biracial, attends. And Sage and Nigeria used to be close, but Kofi has driven a wedge between the families, not wanting someone White in his circle who could allegedly taint his daughter’s mind. Nigeria has been homeschooled her whole life with her education focusing on the African diaspora rather than European history taught in American schools. But if Nigeria’s mother wanted her daughter to go to school, then what is the problem?
While still upholding her responsibilities, Nigeria wanders into the high school her mother had hopes she would attend. At Philly Friends, she follows Sage and her cousin, Kamau, through hallways and in classrooms struggling to find the balance between her tailored education at home and the one presented to her at a predominantly White school. Her new environment welcomes new opportunities, like getting involved in the diversity, equity, and inclusion club and practicing for debate club with a White boy named Liam, who seems to understand Nigeria better than she thought he would. As she battles her father in attending the school, she finds herself tracing the events that led to her mother’s disappearance. Since it was her mother who registered her for the previous school year before she faded out of the picture, Nigeria feels she needs to better understand her mother’s whereabouts in order to accept the new life she envisions for herself.
The story touches on eldest daughter syndrome, a branch of the birth order theory that has taken over the internet. The eldest daughters are usually the ones with the most responsibility and the ones who receive the most blame. Nigeria is experiencing this phenomenon while also coming out of being the only child for 15 years. Though her father treats her as his version of the apple of his eye, Kofi smothers any chance for Nigeria to find her own path under his roof. She supports his teachings while not quite understanding the world outside her home. The father-daughter dynamic pushes Nigeria to seek her own world because her mother is no longer there to soften the blow of any tension between her and her father. Most teenagers are finding themselves around 16, but Nigeria’s journey feels more complicated without her mother and knowing that her mother had other plans for their lives.
Overall, the conflict between Nigeria and the Movement she grew up in makes this young adult novel more layered. The main character is a teenager who really hasn’t experienced the real world with being tied to a community house where she is homeschooled. She is striving to do something most kids her age already do: attend school, especially attend an excellent high school in order to attend an excellent university. But we see all these factors at home weighing her down to the point she doesn’t know how to escape, or she escapes with guilt. It’s a heavier read with the blend of racial and social justice elements that come up throughout the story, but it speaks to the teenage girl who feels like she is unable to think for herself because her life is being controlled at every turn.
Wildblood, which is out now from Macmillan’s Wednesday Books, takes us to the late 19th century and builds a unique story that serves as an extraordinary sophomore novel after weaving the thread of the Charlotte Brontë classic Jane Eyre into an Ethiopian retelling with her debut novel. Within These Wicked Walls earned the recognition of being a Reese’s Book Club Fall 2021 YA Pick.
The new young adult book centers on Victoria, an 18-year-old woman who was kidnapped at a young age and forced to serve as a guide within a tourist company that specializes in venturing into the jungle. Except the jungle has creatures that could be dangerous to mortals such as spirits that can snatch souls without remorse. Victoria is a Wildblood, meaning she has the magic to communicate with the creatures and, in her professional standing, can ensure the safety of tourists.
When a well-known Black gold miner named Laertes Thorn becomes a client with his rather large party, Victoria is tasked with her fellow Wildbloods to bring these foreigners to a mountain allegedly full of gold. The gold is a legend since survivors have never exited the jungle to tell the story of reaching the treasures.
On the trip like back at home, Victoria tries to remain a motherly figure to Bunny, a young Wildblood who cannot control his magic, and a girlfriend to Samson, a Wildblood who was kidnapped by the company after her. But new emotions arise as she finds herself falling for Thorn and battling her former love Dean, the main Wildblood in charge who seems like he’ll do anything to keep their abusive boss happy like saying yes to such a dangerous trip.
The fight for survival underlies the story that places Victoria in a spot where she’s trying to understand love from different angles and trust in her inherent magic.
Author Lauren Blackwood talks to she lit about how she came up with the story and the art of making sure the characters, the plot, and the tension remain engaging until the very end. Check out the conversation below:
she lit: The story’s main character, Victoria, is a Wildblood who possesses the magic to communicate with the precarious jungle. Her touring company kidnapped her at a young age to take advantage of her magic. How did you come up with this story and figure out how to convey the difficult subject of abuse?
Lauren Blackwood: I wanted to write a book about a girl finding her strength. Anytime I portray an issue or trauma I want it to be done sensitively and respectfully, but also honestly. I don’t think showing SA* on page is ever necessary—there are ways to get the message across without that type of triggering imagery. So with that in mind, I then let Victoria guide her own journey on the path that felt right for her.
she lit: While on the dangerous tour, Victoria finds herself tangled in a love cube with her partner Samson, her ex Dean, and her new client Thorn. Can you describe your writing experience with creating the tension between these characters?
Lauren Blackwood: You’re the first one to ever describe their situation as a love cube, haha! Writing relationships is my favorite thing, and I purposely wanted to use this book to explore different kinds of love. But I think the issue is that all three boys have different intentions for Victoria, which puts them in conflict with each other and with Victoria herself, who’s really just learning to live her life on her own terms.
Photo Credit: Terri LaShae
she lit: Victoria takes it upon herself to be a mother figure to Bunny, a younger Wildblood who rages with his magic. How would you describe this source of love for Victoria as a counterbalance to the love she’s getting from Samson and Thorn?
Lauren Blackwood: Victoria’s relationship with Bunny is more of that of a mother and child—she’s extremely protective of him, which is a love he doesn’t necessarily appreciate. It’s the opposite of her relationship with Samson, who in his own loving way tries to look out for her but ends up being a bit overbearing. So you have those two opposites of the spectrum, and then you have Thorn, who sits right in the middle. They have mutual respect and love for each other, and they don’t doubt each others’ abilities but look out for each other equally.
she lit: Greed is an overwhelming theme with Thorn and his team endangering their lives to mine gold in the Gilded Orchard that has never been mined by survivors. Can you explain the historical significance of making the team members Black and their desire to gain riches before the turn of the 20th century?
Lauren Blackwood: If you’ve read my debut Within These Wicked Walls, you’ll know I love writing about wealthy Black guys who have the freedom to do as they please. I suppose the historical significance is that when Black people owned business, all the staff would be Black because they weren’t welcome in white spaces—whatever business ventures white people were up to, Black people were usually doing it too and just not getting any credit for it. But honestly, I just wanted to write about Black people, regardless of history.
she lit: The book’s cover is vibrant, featuring Victoria in the jungle. Victoria looks a lot like you. How much input did you have in the cover design and the way the character is portrayed on the cover?
Lauren Blackwood: I wanted to write a character who looks like me (who’s Jamaican like me) because growing up there were never any fantasy novels about girls who shared my heritage. So, the only thing I really requested was to feature the Jamaican flag colors—black, green, and gold. The rest of the genius design was handled by my amazing cover designer Kerri Resnick and brilliant artist Colin Verdi. They interpreted Victoria perfectly, so I really didn’t have to say much.
“Golden Child” by Claire Adam follows the family of twin boys in Trinidad as money eventually rips the family apart. The story feels slow at times, but at the end when seeing the story in its entirety, it’s well-told exploring the haves and have nots within the family.
The story opens up to Clyde looking for his teen son, Paul. Clyde is trying to gather support from the neighbors to see where his son has gone. Paul has been told he’s mentally disabled because he lost oxygen during his birth. His twin brother, Peter, is the opposite, considered very bright and reasonable. Their doctor uncle, Uncle Vishnu, who was present at their birth, is the one who diagnoses these differences between Peter and Paul. As a doctor, Uncle Vishnu, invests in Peter’s education. Clyde fights to keep Paul with Peter in school though Paul is slow. Uncle Vishnu is the biological uncle of Joy, Clyde’s wife and mother to Peter and Paul. Joy also has a brother named Romesh, who has good jobs, and Philip, a famous judge. But there’s jealousy of why Uncle Vishnu financially supports Clyde and his family, the only ones who live in a very modest home, especially with Peter having the potential to leave the island for the pursuit of education and success.
With the story opening to a search for a character, the search feels longer than it should be until the story gets into the history of why Paul went missing. There are point-of-view issues with the beginning mostly belonging to Clyde then hopping to Paul to Peter to the brothers’ teacher, Father Kavanaugh. Some sentences may take a second to realize the point-of-view is not pointing to the right character. It’s just interesting how the point-of-view changes and why it changes because at times it felt like it didn’t need to change or the situation should’ve been told by another character.
The emphasis on the difference between the twin brothers is reminiscent of Abraham Verghese’s “Cutting For Stone,” especially with parallels of following a family of Indian descent in Trinidad where Verghese’s book is on a family of Indian descent in Ethiopia. The differences between the brothers are so heightened throughout the book, but the reader may pick up that there may be nothing wrong with Paul; he acts the way he does because he’s been told his whole life that something’s wrong with him. Paul’s actions propel the jealousy bubbling within the extended family that Clyde and Joy never put much attention on.
Overall, this story punctuates one of the main issues that tear families apart: money. And also shows how some are concerned with the money while others don’t see the concern, which could lead to a troubling sequence of events. It’s a good book for readers who enjoy literary fiction taking place in a country and focusing on a culture underrepresented in books.
“The Idea of You” by Robinne Lee is an unexpected well-conceived story about an older woman falling for a boy band member. It sounds like a fantasy ripped out of the tabloids, but it captures the complexities of such a relationship and how the world reacts to it.
Solene Marchand is dealing with the emotions before a 40th birthday when she gets stuck with taking her daughter, Isabelle, and friends to an August Moon concert with backstage access in Las Vegas. As the teen girls stay enamored on the British boy band, Solene finds herself flirting with the bandleader himself, Hayes Campbell. While living her life as an LA art dealer, Solene meets up with Hayes when he’s in town as he flies her out to where he is until they have a full-blown love affair that surprisingly develops into an authentic relationship. Except Solene feels the relationship threatening her art gallery business with her partner Lulit, her relationship with Isabelle, her relationship with her ex-husband Daniel who’s of course having a baby with a 30-year-old model, and her reputation in general with fans sending threatening messages via social media and postal mail. But Solene and Hayes try to beat the odds amid the craziness.I’ve been disappointed with some of the recent women’s fiction/romance books because in many cases the issues and characters become stereotypical and the storyline is forced into a happily ever after. This book actually shows the progression of a modern-day fairy tale relationship and the rockiness that comes with it. The ending is refreshingly unexpected yet emotional. The writing is fantastic, which again in other recent works seemed to be either missing or the only upside to the book.
What’s great about this book is the reader travels with August Moon, a fictional mashup of One Direction/The Wanted/and all those other recent boy bands out of the U.K., since Solene gets a first class ticket and hotel suite with Hayes everywhere. It covers Aspen, Miami, Malibu, Paris, Tokyo, the Hamptons and so many other destination cities, so it feels like you’re there admiring the scene though Solene and Hayes spend a lot of time in their suites. Also, the stakes of the romance are high. Not only are Solene’s relationships feeling the heat, but so are Hayes’ with one of his bandmates vengeful of destroying the romance and past hookups continually making appearances around the world.
Overall, there are great elements throughout the story, and the book is a great piece of women’s fiction with serving up the steamy sex scenes and drama on every corner. And Lulit is the best because she’s Ethiopian, and we’re rarely in books, especially books like these, so the whole time I envisioned her as me, and that was fun.
