Tag: hachette books

Categories
book reviews

Book Review: ‘Thicker than Water’ by Kerry Washington

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. 

Categories
book reviews

Book Review: ‘A Love Song for Ricki Wilde’ by Tia Williams

A Love Song for Ricki Wilde by Tia Williams takes a supernatural direction when a florist falls for a man who is cursed to live forever. 

Ricki Wilde is the youngest daughter in a wealthy Atlanta family that takes their funeral business seriously. Except she loves floral design and uses that passion for the funerals and social media clout. Her sisters and her mother think it’s a crying shame that Ricki wants to play with flowers all day instead of taking leadership roles in the undertaking empire. She prepares a business plan for a flower shop, but it’s rejected. She wonders about her next move. One day, she comforts an elegantly dressed widow named Ms. Della. Upon hearing Ricki’s story, Ms. Della offers her the first story of her brownstone in Harlem. Since Ms. Della just lost her husband, she didn’t want to be entirely alone. The first story had been vacant for years, but it’s the perfect place for a flower shop.

In Harlem, Ricki opens her shop. She finds out that the brownstone was the site of a famous Harlem Renaissance nightclub. As she searches around the property, she sees a man her age who disappears mysteriously. She even notices the scent of night-blooming jasmine in February, which is unusual because it’s not the flower’s season. That’s also mysterious. While trying to unravel the mystery of the location, she needs to keep her business afloat. Via Instagram, she highlights different flowers at different locations throughout the neighborhood to boost business. Her heightened visibility leads her to find the mysterious man. 

Ezra Walker has been looking for Ricki forever. And Ricki feels a supernatural pull to Ezra. She has tea parties with Ms. Della upstairs and confides in her celebrity friend, Tuesday Rowe, about her newfound love interest. Ricki learns more about Ezra as she falls deeper in love with him. But he has a secret. He’s a perennial. Not the plant that returns every year, but a person who has been cursed with immortal life. Once upon a time, Ezra was an up-and-coming pianist during the Harlem Renaissance who escaped the segregated South after his family was killed by Jim Crow terrorism. He was cursed by a dancer at the nightclub that used to be housed in Ricki’s brownstone. The only woman who could break his curse is Ricki. Ezra had been writing a song for nearly a century that he could only play for Ricki. If they are still together by Leap Day, then Ricki will be cursed with immortal life as well.

The author loves to weave pop culture references into her stories, and this story doesn’t disappoint. It also seemed like she had been pressured by an industry that loves romantasy to inject that magic into a modern-day love story, and it works seamlessly. The fantasy sprinkled into the romance doesn’t overtake the story despite the plot leaning more toward fantasy. The groundedness in reality is still strong. The term “perennial” for an immortal person also seems to be up for debate as a flowerlike word choice by the author, instead of an official dictionary definition. 

Another aspect of the romantasy is the historical element of the Harlem Renaissance and its documented and undocumented culture. Stories still emerge about the 1920s era, where African American society flourished in New York City. The story is set in a brownstone that was a nightclub where sultry sin and artistic influence occurred inside and outside its walls. The setting remains a century-old dream for many people like Ricki and Ms. Della, who develop an intergenerational friendship that supports each other in their transitions, as Ricki finds love after leaving home and starting a business, and Ms. Della finds love after the death of her husband. Harlem feels like a magical place all on its own. 

Overall, the love story stretches over pages with positive energy, though the ending is likely predictable for readers who know to expect the happily ever after by dissecting every character’s relationship with each other. 

Categories
she lit newsletter

Investing in the Success of Black Authors

SHE LIT: Investing in the Success of Black Authors💰

Logo

Searching for books by Black female authors this month? Take a look at authors we’ve featured

Black woman writing on a pad in front of a computer.

Lower financial investment remains a hurdle in publishing industry’s diversity pledges

We are in our third Black History Month since June 2020 when the Black Lives Matter movement ignited over the murder of George Floyd on the streets of Minneapolis by a police officer. The publishing industry responded, like many other industries, by examining the statistics of their employees as well as the contributors including the authors, illustrators, and translators.

Three years ago, publishers hired nearly 75% White employees and represented 75% White authors. Those numbers are still about the same because of money.

The percentage of White employees hasn’t changed much since publishers have revealed their diversity statistics, according to PEN America, the nonprofit dedicated to speech freedom. Its latest report finds Penguin Random House’s employees are 74% White, Macmillan’s 70.5% White, and Hachette’s 64.6% White. They lead the Big Five alongside Simon & Schuster and HarperCollins.

The nonprofit ultimately blames the historical practice of having an overwhelming White employment and how it correlates to an overwhelming amount of White authors being signed to publishing contracts. Though more Black authors are getting publishing contracts since 2020, the cracks in shattering this glass ceiling are not yet visible.

Shortly after the Black Lives Matter movement boomed in 2020, young adult author L.L. McKinney started the #PublishingPaidMe campaign that set Twitter on fire. She asked White authors to share the advances. Some Black authors shared their advances. The discrepancy in thousands of dollars surprised readers. The White authors made tons more money, even hundreds of thousands of dollars more, when Black authors who seemed as well-known as them barely received a fraction of their advances.

In the report that was released last fall, Black publishing employees and executives expressed their concerns of obtaining titles by Black authors and being pigeonholed into a marketing ploy to sell “Black books.” And sometimes those Black authors are expected to just produce books about race and ethnicity when they may have ideas outside of those subjects.

“Such typecasting is not only presumptuous but also creatively limiting,” the report reads. “What if, say, a Black editor wants to work on books about cats, or cars, or science, or electoral politics? Or a Hispanic publicist wants to promote a book about classical music?”

That means a Black author’s earning potential could be diminished over the expectation of what a publisher thinks they should write compared to what they want to write. After all, the publisher has the power to reject a project on any basis it chooses.

Every book needs money to make money. The marketing and publicity budgets are calculated based on the viability of a book’s shelf life upon release. The books that have more promise receive more money, and most of the time that means books by celebrities. They are considered an automatic cash cow, especially when they have thousands and millions of social media followers expected to buy the books.

Now that the celebrity has built-in power to sell a book, the publisher invests more to make sure even more money could be made. So, the average author at an imprint may not receive what they need for proper marketing and publicity when competing with celebrity authors. And if that author is Black, then they may be shortchanged the most.

Advances, which are payments to signed authors in advance of their books being published, are tied to the marketing and publicity budgets. An advance is paid against future royalties. That means for every dollar an author receives in an advance, they must earn a dollar from book sales before they receive any additional royalties. Black authors could take longer to earn out their advances. If it takes too long, then their chances of being published again could be impacted.

“A budget is a moral document… When we talk about diversity, we need to understand what that means financially and in terms of decision-making power,” says Elizabeth Méndez Berry, vice president and executive editor at One World, in the report.

In the last year, we saw a cyberattack cripple Macmillan’s ability to sell books and a still-unresolved union strike rock HarperCollins. The authors who didn’t have the best resources in place are suffering the most with these unfortunate events in publishing. HarperCollins’ union is striking over alleged failure by the publisher to pay cost-of-living salaries and focus on diversity and inclusion. They are fighting for investment in their talents as well as in the talents of authors of color and LGBTQIA+ authors.

This Black History Month we must examine and appreciate Black literature but also think about the literature we’re missing because the publishing industry is early in the process of dismantling its historical structure to mainly uplift and invest in the literary talents of White people.

shelit.com blogger Kibby Araya.
Check out past newsletters!

What we’re highlighting

Penguin Random House U.S. CEO steps down

After the failed attempt to acquire competitor Simon & Schuster for $2 billion last year, Madeline McIntosh plans to leave her position as the U.S. chief executive of Penguin Random House. She served in the position at the largest U.S. publisher since 2018. A departure date was not shared.

Her former boss and global Penguin Random House CEO, Markus Dohle, left the publisher in December. Nihar Malaviya has since assumed the position of interim global CEO.

HarperCollins announces layoffs amid union strike

The largest unionized book publisher will lay off 5% of its staff in North America by June, according to HarperCollins CEO Brian Murray. Some workers were laid off this week as well as last fall. Since November, the HarperCollins Union has been on strike, taking to social media and to the streets of New York to protest mostly low wages.

The publisher started mediation with the union this week after the announcement of the rolling layoffs.

Phenomenal Media partners with Hachette to diversify books

A year after launching its book club, Phenomenal Media recently announced its partnership with Hachette Book Group to create Phenomenal Media Books. The partnership will contribute to the development and acquisition of literary works written by underrepresented authors in the nonfiction and fiction genres.

The media company that started as a political and cultural merch brand by Meena Harris, the niece of Vice President Kamala Harris, will have its book division publish works across Hachette imprints Grand Central Publishing and Little, Brown Books for Young Readers.

“We were thrilled to see the positive reaction to our launch of Phenomenal Book Club — clearly people are looking for more stories from authors who, too often, do not receive the spotlight from the publishing industry,” said Meena, Phenomenal’s founder and CEO. “Phenomenal Media Books will provide new avenues for discovering those authors and positioning their works for success.”

New York town seeks to be a literary destination spot

Hobart, New York has eight indie bookstores on its Main Street and hosts several book festivals a year, according to a story by The New York Times. One of those bookstores is unstaffed and depends on the honor system for cash from customers. With a population of 400, the town in the Catskills of upstate New York has been known as Hobart Book Village since 2005. Beside book festivals, the town also holds semiannual book sale events each year, making it a place perfect for literary tourists.

February book club selections illuminate Black stories

What we’re reviewing

Brandy and Maya Angelou in Moesha.

When Maya Angelou Shared Her Wisdom on Moesha

The Vanishing Act by Brit Bennett

The Vanishing Half Dominates the Charts Amid #BlackStoriesMatter Movement

What we’re watching

The 1619 Project on Hulu

The 1619 Project on Hulu

The award-winning literary journalism project brought to us by Pulitzer Prize winner Nikole Hannah-Jones and The New York Times is a must-see docuseries on Hulu. The 1619 Project has six episodes with four streaming available now. Oprah Winfrey also serves as an executive producer.

Want your book and bookish news to be featured? Write us at shewrites@shelit.com.

Forward this newsletter to friends!
]]>
Categories
what's lit

Tamera Mowry-Housley Describes How Making Friends Is Like Drinking Wine

Sister, Sister star Tamera Mowry-Housley is promoting her new memoir that resonates on the vein of Gabrielle Union‘s memoirs with incorporating the significance of drinking wine and learning lessons.

In her first TV stop on the book tour, Tamera spoke to Jericka Duncan, Nate Burleson, and Tony Dokoupil on CBS Mornings Tuesday about You Should Sit Down for This: A Memoir About Life, Wine, + Cookies. She told the co-anchors she hopes readers will understand her words of wisdom, or what she calls “Tameraisms.”

“The one thing that I want people to take away is that I didn’t live this perfect life,” she said in the interview. “They usually see me, and they’re like, ‘Tamera, you’re always so happy. You always look very joyful.’ And the thing is I choose to be happy. My circumstances do not define me.”

Tamera was 15, along with her identical twin sister Tia Mowry, when they became breakout stars on the WB sitcom Sister, Sister. After that early success, Tamera and Tia starred in movies together as adults like Seventeen Again with their young brother Tahj Mowry, and Twitches, a Black Halloween Disney classic that spawned a sequel. The sisters also filmed a popular reality TV series on the now-defunct Style Network.

Over the years, the sisters have carved out their own independent paths. Tamera went on to be a co-host on The Real for six seasons and won an Emmy Award with the panel that included author and comedienne Loni Love. She has been busy working on Hallmark and Lifetime productions, including a starring role in the film Girlfriendship that debuted last Saturday on the Hallmark Channel under its Mahogany brand.

Calling herself an “old soul,” Tamera said she felt self-conscious at a young age with feeling wiser than her years. She’s now embracing her “gift.”

“I wanted my readers to know you may have a rough start, but you just have to move forward and push through, but you also—I always say—you can’t cheat at life,” she said. “It doesn’t come easy. You’re not going to grow as a person if you don’t look at your trials or ‘negative’ experiences and face them head-on. The book is about growth. The book is about my wisdom that I have learned along the way.”

Going off of the book’s subtitle, she talked about how she chooses her friends like how she chooses her wine. She co-owns a family winery in Napa with her husband, former Fox News correspondent Adam Housley.

“For me, wine is very subjective, but now owning a winery and tasting lots of wine, I don’t want to waste my experience and my taste buds on bad wine. It’s the same thing with friends,” she said. “You eventually either change your environment or your environment is going to change you, another Tameraism that’s not in the book.”

The book is out now from Legacy Lit, a Hachette Book Group imprint.

Categories
book reviews

Book Review: ‘Acne’ by Laura Chinn

Acne by Laura Chinn tells the story of the television writer/actress’ tumultuous childhood and young adulthood and how her struggles were reflected in a severe case of acne. 

Laura Chinn created and starred in the 2019 Pop TV sitcom Florida Girls (think Broad City with Florida Woman adventures) that unfortunately received the ax during the Covid-19 pandemic. The entertainer, who has written for shows like The Mick and Children’s Hospital and acted in shows like Grey’s Anatomy and My Name Is Earl, actually was born in the Los Angeles area where she lived with her “hippie” parents and older brother Max. Though her mother is White and her father is Black, she doesn’t get a sense of her biracial identity until she’s eight-years-old. She never noticed the concept of race since everyone in her house has a different complexion. While Max has brown skin and is often confused for “Mexican or Hawaiian,” Laura has fair skin and dirty blonde curls, so she’s considered outwardly White. Growing up in La Crescenta, she is homeschooled with other kids in her neighborhood. Her childhood is disrupted when her mother announces the family is moving to Clearwater, Florida, the best place for Scientologists like themselves after Los Angeles. Laura, Max, and their mother move to Clearwater while their father stays behind to tie up loose ends. 

Laura’s father never moves to Clearwater as Laura navigates her new preteen life in a new place. She starts to notice red pimples erupt on almost every surface of her face. How can this be? She and her family eat a strict healthy diet. Her father blames his genetics for the acne since he says he had the same skin condition as a teen. Scientology tells Laura and her family that internal toxins are clogging her pores. She tries to cleanse the acne that is putting a damper on her social life as she befriends girls like Tori who also have lopsided family situations. 

At thirteen years old, Laura is going through the abandonment issues stemming from her father’s decision to not join them in Clearwater. To make matters worse, Max moves back to Los Angeles and stays with their father. There, her brother is diagnosed with a brain tumor. He has to have a surgery that he may not wake up from. Laura and her mother fly from Tampa to Los Angeles to be by Max’s side. He survives the surgery at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, but he has a mountain of health issues that keeps Laura and her mother in a hotel as they witness her father parading his barely-adult, chicken nugget-addicted girlfriend Chardonnay around the intensive care unit. Laura returns to Clearwater alone to go back to school. She gets picked up by her mother’s alcoholic boyfriend Joe who drops her off at home with some money for food. 

In the short time of raising herself as her parents deal with Max’s cancer diagnosis, Laura is stealing and drinking alcohol with Tori and other friends who are already having sexual relations with boys at school. Laura’s acne is still on a volcanic level as she uses makeup to cake up her face and go on living her unsupervised life. Then Max’s cancer progresses in other parts of his brain, so the family who again tap into their Scientologist teachings to find alternative healing methods decide to move to Tijuana for a form of chemotherapy not approved in the U.S. Laura drops out of the ninth grade to join her family in Mexico. 

After realizing she’s better off finishing her education rather than helping Max who has their mother as a caregiver, Laura moves back to Clearwater to finish her freshman year. This time, Joe moves in, but Laura is still raising herself de facto. Due to the miracle of Accutane, teenage antics progress like her losing her virginity.  

Accutane had healed my face, neck, chest, and back; it seemed like a wonder pill until, like with all pills, the side effects kicked in. First it was dry skin, then peeling skin, then every day I would shed my entire face like a snake. My lips were painfully cracked and bloody, so for the third time in my life, I didn’t smile for months. Then my vision started to get weird. 

Her quick-fix cure makes her think she has cancer like her brother, whose diagnosis came from blurry vision, but she doesn’t. She develops suicidal thoughts while on the medication and while watching her friends find boyfriends she can’t seem to attract. She’s realizing her neighborhood is full of dysfunctional people, including the woman next door who burns her house down to cover up her husband’s murder, as her own mother and brother return to Clearwater unchanged by the failed treatment in Mexico. Laura has to put aside her acne and adolescence to help her mother care for her dying brother, but she still finds herself caring more about what her friends are doing and how her skin is doing. 

The older she gets, the more she sees being a high school dropout is not enough. Her father agrees and invites her to live with her half-sister and her niece in Woodland Hills, a section of Los Angeles. Laura finally feels like she’s being supervised but again she can’t help but think what’s going on in her Clearwater social circle. She eventually moves back to Clearwater. Then she gets her GED and tells everyone she’s going to be a famous actress in Hollywood, so back to Los Angeles she goes. But she breaks her arm, so that means back to Clearwater. Despite what’s going on with her family and friends and her face, she has a knack for acting that slips behind the pages. 

Once she permanently stays in Los Angeles, makeup artists on sets complain about her acne. Thanks to her father, she heads to the Church of Scientology Celebrity Centre to undergo a rehab experience to clear up her acne. She feels imprisoned by her acne. It’s not until she realizes all the physical and metaphorical losses she has experienced over the years had somehow manifested into an extreme case of acne.

Now I forgive with a deep intensity and a passion. I take all the money, effort, and time I was putting toward microdermabrasion, facials, and benzoyl peroxide and I put it all toward learning how to forgive. I honestly wish I could bottle forgiveness and sell it; I’d put Proactiv out of business in a week. 

If you ever watched Florida Girls, you will see the comedic messiness there in the pages of Laura’s memoir except her real-life version of events seem more depressing as she details her life as a teen practically unmonitored because of her brother’s unthinkable disease. Her friends experiment and indulge in drugs and sex at a very young age that the peer pressures stunt their growth. The conflict of being a selfish teenager while having to care for her family is deeply realized since most teen girls would be the same way with wanting to focus on boys and controlling their acne to avoid what’s going on at home. 

We see Laura’s mother as the main caregiver for Max despite her alcoholic boyfriend turned husband in the house and her ex-husband unable to cope with his son slipping away. Laura helps as much as she can, especially when her brother’s health deteriorates to the point he is blind, deaf, and immobile. It’s heartbreaking to see the transition of her athletic, skateboard-loving brother becoming a very sick young adult who can’t take care of himself. With her life divided between two places that can be difficult to survive in, Laura sees more tragedy within her family and her friend group as she tries to establish herself in Hollywood. 

Overall, the memoir connects the dots on a common skin condition that has been relegated to teenage hormonal activity. The author spends her lifetime digging deeper for the reason why her face is covered in pimples on top of pimples, quickly recognizing that her friends who are the same age as her are not dealing with the exact issue but they do have their own issues. It takes years for her to classify acne as her visible issue as she overcomes abandonment and loneliness growing up in an interracial, Scientologist, bicoastal, divorced family. Her love for acting, even in the book, is weaved in and out because her environment is overwhelming her. It’s impressive that she, like many people who had announced they were heading to Hollywood to be a big star, actually overcame the obstacles to achieve her dream that’s still in incubation. 

Categories
she lit newsletter

When Book Banning Turns Violent

SHE LIT: When Book Banning Turns Violent

View this email in your browser

Logo

📚 Subscribe to deep lit, she lit’s paid deep dive content on bookish content 📚

Photo by ready made: https://www.pexels.com/photo/composed-books-on-white-marble-background-3847626/

Safety concerns for writers of banned books take spotlight amid Salman Rushdie attack

The freedom of speech through writing is being examined this week after award-winning novelist Salman Rushdie was stabbed multiple times at an event where he was speaking about his work.

A week ago today, The Satanic Verses author was stabbed while on stage at the Chautauqua Institution, a nonprofit education center in western New York that regularly invites authors and other creatives to provide lectures. Currently jailed, the assailant reportedly planned the attack after reading two pages of the author’s controversial 1988 novel. The novel provoked the Iranian leader in 1989 to deliver a fatwa ordering anyone the right to kill the author and his publishers.

Despite feelings toward the book’s content and the author’s alleged behavior toward his ex-wife Padma Lakshmi detailed in her memoir, the literary community is shocked by the violent attack over a banned book as freedom of speech seems to be increasingly under threat for writers.

Organizations such as PEN America came out in support of Salman Rushdie. Suzanne Nossel, CEO of PEN America, wrote in a statement: “We can think of no comparable incident of a public violent attack on a literary writer on American soil.” The statement also revealed that the author had emailed the organization that day to “help with placements for Ukrainian writers in need of safe refuge from the grave perils they face.”

PEN America pushed the hashtag campaign #StandWithSalman, which has so far included messages of support from Stephen King and Jeffrey Eugenides. The organization held an event Friday morning with writers reading Salman Rushdie’s works on the steps of The New York Public Library.

Meanwhile, The Satanic Verses reached top spots on the Amazon.com and USA Today best-sellers list. I bought the Kindle version of the novel on Amazon after seeing the long library waits on my Libby app. Raised in a Christian and Muslim household, I wondered about the Islamic themes in the novel, a work of fiction that takes a group of Quranic verses about three pagan Meccan goddesses.

Historians who study religion believe the Islamic prophet Muhammad took the advice of these goddesses believing they were messages from God and preached those messages to his followers. Then the archangel Gabriel appeared and told Muhammad those were not messages from God but from Satan. This religious story is disputed, hence the global controversy around The Satanic Verses that has led to deaths and injuries for many of the novelist’s translators and publishers since the declaration of the fatwa.

When news of the attack broke, some social media users pointed out Padma Lakshmi’s account of her marriage to Salman Rushdie, a short-lived union out of a longtime relationship that many people are learning about now. After seeing Padma speak at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books in 2016, I audio-read her memoir Love, Loss, and What We Ate and recall how her endometriosis diagnosis contributed to their divorce.

Padma, the Top Chef host who brilliantly interweaves her love for food into her life story, shares her thoughts on the famous author, calling him an Indian Hemingway who attracted her “in the soul-sucking intellectual desert that L.A.” was for her.

“Recently I could remember my husband complaining that I rarely wanted to make love, and when I did it was only after we had been drinking. He felt justifiably rejected,” she writes. The second chapter brings up their decline in intimacy due to her reproductive disorder but paints the respected novelist Salman Rushdie as an inconsiderate spouse frustrated by the lack of sex.

Yes, intimate details about two renowned individuals spilled onto the pages of a memoir, but those passages were also brought up in the discussion of last week’s attack. Her tweet revealing her ex-husband’s improving condition almost gained 20,000 likes.

The Satanic Verses shooting up best-seller lists 34 years after it was published shows readers still stand by freedom of speech. At the time of its publishing, the novel had been banned in multiple countries with significant Muslim populations including Iran.

The trend of buying banned books is happening to more recent releases like Ibram X. Kendi’s Antiracist Baby that peaked on best-seller lists after Texas Sen. Ted Cruz decried its antiracism message during the confirmation hearings in March for Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

When people want to attack books, readers are more likely to buy the books. The purchase can be out of curiosity for the content that’s being banned. Why don’t they want me to read this? In the case for The Satanic Verses, it takes a story from a holy book and reimagines that story in a fictional way interwoven with magical realism.

How the book is classified as fiction must be reiterated since the three-decade upheaval makes it seem like the book is nonfiction. There has been debate about how to approach religious texts classified as nonfiction that can be considered anti-Jewish, anti-Christian, anti-Muslim, or against a particular religion and be misconceived by readers for truth when there are inaccuracies. But this isn’t the case here.

Because Salman Rushdie had a fatwa on him, his safety has been a concern for over 30 years. But with so many books being banned, we have to wonder how high the concern is for other authors’ safety that could be at risk over their decisions to openly discuss their works in public.

she lit editor + chief content creator

Check out past newsletters!

What we’re highlighting

Penguin Random House, ViacomCBS execs testify at trial

The latest in the blockbuster antitrust trial between the U.S. Department of Justice and Penguin Random House in its bid to buy Simon & Schuster featured the Penguin Random House CEO and ViacomCBS corporate strategy officer taking the stand this week.

Penguin Random House CEO Madeline McIntosh explained at the trial how the publisher gives advances to authors and how it doesn’t have the power to grant which books become best-sellers, according to Publisher’s Weekly. She calls the publishing process about selecting books based on profit and loss reports “highly subjective.”

Alex Berkett, chief corporate development and strategy officer at ViacomCBS, testified that the parent company of Simon & Schuster wanted the publisher to go to a good “home.”

Elizabeth Acevedo shares title page of first adult novel

Young adult extraordinaire Elizabeth Acevedo, who has received acclaim for her first three novels, announced she submitted her first adult novel for editing. The author behind The Poet X, With the Fire on High, and Clap When You Land posted on Instagram a photo of a Word Doc on her computer screen with the title Family Lore.

In the post, she says she spent the summer focused on finishing the book that required her to tap into a “creative force on another level” in order to enjoy “crafting and blossoming a new self and a new body of work.”

What we’re reviewing

"I'm Glad My Mom Died" by Jennette McCurdy

Book Review: I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy

What we’re reading

What we’re watching

Apply for bookish job

Want your book and bookish news to be featured? Write us at shewrites@shelit.com.

Forward this newsletter to friends!
]]>
Categories
book reviews

Book Review: ‘Red Clocks’ by Leni Zumas

Red Clocks by Leni Zumas is a layered, multi-perspective story following the lives of four women in the Pacific Northwest who find themselves questioning the feelings they have about motherhood as the U.S. starts implementing restrictive reproductive laws. 

The characters are labeled as their occupations. First, we have Ro, known as the biographer. She is in the process of writing a biography of a lesser-known 19th century female polar explorer named Eivør Mínervudottír. Still in mourning over her brother’s death, Ro gets up every day and teaches history at the local high school. Sometimes, she starts her mornings off at a fertility specialist’s office since she is trying to get pregnant in her late thirties with the assistance of a sperm donor. 

“When Congress proposed the Twenty-Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and it was sent to the states for a vote, the biographer wrote emails to her representatives. Marched in protests in Salem and Portland. Donated to Planned Parenthood. But she wasn’t all that worried. It had to be political theater, she thought, a flexing of muscle by the conservative-controlled House and Senate in league with a fetus-loving new president. Thirty-nine states voted to ratify. A three-quarters majority… She couldn’t believe the Personhood Amendment had become real with all these citizens against it.” 

The Personhood Amendment was just ratified by Congress giving every fertilized egg the constitutional right to life, liberty, and property. This federal law also bans abortion in all 50 states with providers at risk of being charged with second-degree murder and abortion seekers at risk of being charged with conspiracy to commit murder. In vitro fertilization is also banned as the transfer of an embryo from laboratory to uterus is considered illegal. 

Another law, Every Child Needs Two, is taking effect soon where two parents with a valid marriage license are the only eligible people to adopt children. Single, unmarried people like Ro will soon be prohibited from adopting children. Her plan for motherhood has always been delayed as she was searching for her soulmate, but these laws have quickened her actions. She’s getting tests frequently to see if her body can carry a baby to term with a sperm donor. But her chances of getting pregnant are low. And now she wonders how much time she has to rush her adoption application to get a child before she’s not allowed to. 

“You can’t say it was rape or incest—nobody cares how it got into you.”

Mattie, known as the daughter, is a student in Ro’s class. A stellar student, she finds out she’s pregnant. Her best friend, Yasmine, had been in the same situation right when the Personhood Amendment went into effect. The situation Yasmine was in destroys their friendship, so Mattie feels lonely as she looks for ways to get an abortion secretly, whether that means crossing the border into Canada or getting help from the mender. 

“American intelligence agencies must have some nice dirt on the Canadian prime minister. Otherwise, why agree to the Pink Wall? The border control can detain any woman or girl they “reasonably” suspect of crossing into Canada for the purpose of ending a pregnancy. Seekers are returned (by police escort) to their state of residence, where the district attorney can prosecute them for attempting a termination. Healthcare providers in Canada are also barred from offering in vitro fertilization to U.S. citizens.” 

The mender, or Gin, is a traditional herbalist who lives away from society in the forest where her family has been known to make concoctions that treat ailments for centuries. When the Personhood Amendment goes into effect, Gin is still helping women with their abortions like she had always done, like her family generations before her had always done as reproductive care. When Mattie walks through her door, she feels a tinge for the sense of motherhood she gave up. Soon after, she is in a courtroom on trial for administering an abortion to another woman who ends up in the hospital with serious injuries. 

Then there’s Susan, the wife. She is the wife to Didier, another high school teacher who happens to be work friends with Ro. Battling the fatigue of raising two younger children, Susan is tired and feels unappreciated by Didier, who likes to come home after dinner with his work buddies without giving her a heads up. Their marriage is fraught with friction that only Susan senses as she goes through her daily housewife chores. She wonders what it would be like to abandon her marriage and her children for another man, even with the Every Child Needs Two law looming. 

In the background of all these contemporary perspectives is the long-gone explorer Eivør Mínervudottír, who according to biographer Ro, goes on all-male expeditions after rejecting marriage at age 19. Male domination follows Eivør as she constantly educates the men she’s venturing into the Arctic with. Though we don’t sense any longing for children or becoming a mother from her, Eivør’s femaleness still leads to her demise in a world where her rights were always restricted. 

“The girl is a mirror, repeating, folding time in half. When the mender had the same problem, she didn’t solve it how Temple told her to. Terminations were lawful then, but the mender wanted to know how it felt to grow a human, with her own blood and minerals, in her own red clock.” 

From the quote above, we learn “red clocks” is a term for the uterus, the organ that carries babies up to nine months in pregnancy and sheds its lining every month for a period. The organ is the biological clock for women, always running on a schedule for the purpose of reproduction. 

Mattie wants to stop the clock in order to continue her studies and to go off to college. Even though she was careful, even though her friend Yasmine was careful, pregnancy still occurred, and pregnancy in their teenage minds is shameful and destructive. On the other hand, Ro wants to get the clock fixed. She desperately wants a child, and when she learns that her star student Mattie is pregnant and needs assistance in getting an abortion, she can’t help but feel the complicated feelings. She can’t get pregnant while the teenagers who are in her face every day can easily get pregnant and not want to be pregnant, not want to have a child.

Complicated feelings come up for Gin when Mattie approaches her makeshift clinic for assistance. When abortion was legal, Gin used her red clock to give birth, but she didn’t keep the baby. Though she helps other females with their abortions, something about Mattie’s case strikes a chord with Gin. On another end of the spectrum, Susan gave birth to her first child when she was finishing up law school. The regret of not fulfilling her career goals because she had to start a family knots up inside her. Her red clock worked when she wasn’t ready, but now she’s wondering what life would’ve been like if it had not worked efficiently and she wasn’t tethered down to a husband and children. 

How the characters’ lives intersect is awe-inspiring because their stories reflect the complexity of reproductive decisions. It’s not easy to have a baby, and sometimes the woman with the red clock is the only one factored into the equation. Feelings change about motherhood where we see Ro putting the pedal to the metal to beat laws that would restrict her decision on motherhood to Susan who already has kids but now feels anchored to a marriage she no longer wants.

One underlying factor throughout the narratives is the characters are all dealing with the loss of a person or the sense of family that is surfacing more as they make their decisions on bringing a baby into the mix. The mourning seems to be louder at this stage in their lives and shows how even when family is perceived as important, depending on where you stand with your family, there is still insurmountable stress as the person wanting to expand the family.

Overall, this novel is very timely as the U.S. deals with anti-abortion laws and the overturning of the history-making Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that almost hit its 50-year milestone. Regardless of the pro-choice, anti-abortion, or in-between supporters, the story parallels real life well with the attention on reproductive laws and how those changes can affect all women, like the characters in this small fishing town in Oregon where its proximity to Canada means nothing. The rhythmic flow of the story helps open up the characters’ narratives, though minor characters’ narratives sometimes get lost in the interweaving. At the center, still, is how political and personal decisions on reproduction can wreak havoc in changing times. 

Categories
what's lit

Noname Celebrates Opening of the Radical Hood Library

Book Club Headquarters - Radical Hood Library / Instagram

Indie rapper and book club innovator Noname announced the opening of Book Club Headquarters: Radical Hood Library in Los Angeles Saturday.

In a flyer, the library asked for donations of new and used books preferably written by Black and Brown authors, especially novels and children’s books. The library is a “black led organization that was created to service black/brown folks,” according to its book.clubhq Instagram account. Online, books can be checked out through the library’s Libib account.

The opening was an RSVP’d event. The library’s address has yet to be revealed publicly.

The daughter of a Black-owned bookstore owner, Noname started the Noname Book Club in 2019 to highlight “reading material for the homies” by exposing Black and Brown readers to books of today and yesterday that explore intersectionality. The book club now has 12 metro chapters across the U.S. and a prison program that delivers book club selections to incarcerated peoples.

Every month, Noname picks a book and a book club member aka “homie” picks one. Socially distanced in-person and virtual meetings are ongoing this month for September’s books: Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness by Da’shaun L. Harrison, Heavy: An American Memoir by Kiese Laymon, and The Skin I’m in by Sharon G. Flake.

Categories
book reviews

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.

Categories
what's lit

‘Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’ Stars Karyn Parsons and Daphne Maxwell Reid Talk Writing Life

The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air co-stars Karyn Parsons and Daphne Maxwell Reid spent Saturday talking about their literary ventures at the National Black Book Festival on Facebook Live.

Known for playing the iconic wealthy Black girl Hilary Banks on the hit ’90s NBC sitcom, Karyn has enjoyed a second career as a novelist and biographer managing a nonprofit geared toward bringing Black stories to life for kids. Daphne played the second rendition of Hilary’s mother, Vivian Banks, also known as Aunt Viv to star Will Smith’s character. She also mentioned her self-publishing experience.

Karyn, the founder and president of Sweet Blackberry Foundation focused on literary education, discussed her 2019 debut novel How High the Moon, a middle grade historical fiction novel set in the Jim Crow South.

“My mother grew up in Charleston, and she always talked about how happy her childhood was, how great everything was,” Karyn said during the panel. “Always a positive light. It took many years when it finally dawned on me the time that she grew up in and the location. So I started asking more questions.”

After pushing for more information, she said her mother grew up in a small town outside Charleston, South Carolina. The idea of the book came from her imagining if she grew up in the same location in the 1940s as a preteen Black girl. She added she was able to weave into the novel the true story of George Stinney Jr., a Black 14-year-old boy who was convicted and put to death in nearby Alcolu for allegedly murdering two White girls. He was exonerated in 2014, 70 years after his execution.

Along with the release of How High the Moon, Karyn also wrote a new children’s book titled Flying Free: How Bessie Coleman’s Dreams Took Flight with illustrations by R. Gregory Christie. It will be released in December.

The publisher of both books is Little, Brown Young Readers under the Hachette Book Group.

“I was just writing all day now that I didn’t have a show,” Karyn said about her writing hobby blossoming post-Fresh Prince. “I guess I was always writing, but I never thought of myself as a writer because I always thought of myself as an actor.” She added that a friend she had met after her famous TV role had become a literary agent and convinced her to write a novel to complement her work with Sweet Blackberry.

Her passion to bring Bessie Coleman, the first African American female licensed aviator, started with a Kickstarter project for an animated short that debuted last year at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, New York.

Daphne, who has self-published four photography books and a cookbook, said she’s working on her memoir.

“I’m still not a writer; I compile,” Daphne said. “What I started doing was taking photographs. I started this photographic journey, and from this journey, I was talking about the prints that I was making and what the relationship of the prints had to life. I was doing presentations before groups and talking a lot about the experience of taking the pictures. And finally I said, ‘I keep repeating the same thing over and over again,’ so let me write it down.”

Her photography books focus on doors from all over the world. “I was trying to encourage people to look at the details in their life. That was my main focus, so I wrote.”

Though she took the self-publishing route, Daphne said she may look for an agent for the memoir she’s working on.

The two actresses are not the only ones from the Fresh Prince world to become authors. Show producer and writer Maiya Williams, whose name also appears in the iconic green graffiti font in the intro, also became a middle grade author.

Karyn and Daphne can be seen on TV again with the Fresh Prince reunion airing Thanksgiving weekend on HBO Max.

Categories
what's lit

Publisher Flubs Quarantine House Tweet by Forgetting Authors of Color

Photo by Prateek Katyal from Pexels

Little, Brown and Company shared a quarantine house tweet Monday morning to its almost half a million followers, but it was quickly met with criticism after sharing six houses with all white authors. After most of the responders asked the publisher to delete the offensive tweet, the publisher later did just that and apologized for its oversight. But this incident added fire to the continuous discussion on diversity and inclusion in the publishing industry.

The quarantine house tweet trend has taken over the social media network with users grouping well-known people in a particular industry in so-called houses and asking their followers to pick a number, a house they would want to be quarantined in. The trend is supposed to be a viral uplifter amid the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic where most people are staying home in quarantine. But the fun feel of this tweet backfired.

A few authors and other tweeters quickly noticed that none of the houses featured authors of color. The publisher responded that it purposely highlighted its roster of authors, which isn’t diverse.

Some responders mentioned that the Hachette Book Group imprint is associated with authors of color such as: Attica Locke, who is currently a writer on the Hulu series Little Fires Everywhere promoting her recent book Heaven, My Home; Walter Mosley, who won the Los Angeles Times Robert Kirsch Award Monday; Malcolm Gladwell, the well-known intellectual with a recent book called Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don’t Know; and Marie Kondo, whose new book Joy at Work: Organizing Your Professional Life came out last week. Walter and Marie later were promoted on the publisher’s timeline along with press articles about their work.

Dawnn Karen, the author of Dress Your Best Life: How to Use Fashion Psychology to Take Your Look—and Your Life—to the Next Level, and Leslie Gray Streeter, the author of Black Widow: A Sad-Funny Journey Through Grief for People Who Normally Avoid Books with Words Like “Journey” in the Title, are two black women authors with upcoming books within the imprint. A promotional tweet for Leslie’s book was shared by Little, Brown and Co. and another one was retweeted, so the social media promotion for authors of color ramped up after the quarantine house tweet was taken down.

Little, Brown and Co.’s admission that its author roster was not diverse should force the publisher to take diversity more seriously like Flatiron Books promised to do after the backlash around Jeanine Cummins’ best-selling novel American Dirt. The diversity issue in publishing also coincides with #DVpit Twitter pitch party for marginalized authors looking for literary agent representation next week on April 22 and April 23.