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book reviews

Book Review: ‘Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm’ by Laura Warrell

Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm by Laura Warrell is a literary fiction novel that introduces us to a womanizing jazz musician and the females who cross his path, including his daughter. 

It’s 2013, and Circus Palmer is a 40-year-old trumpet player who takes gigs across the country but doesn’t like to plant roots anywhere. In the first few pages, he learns that Maggie, the woman who enthralls him, is pregnant. He tries to convince her to end the pregnancy; he can’t be rooted down to anything. And she shouldn’t root herself down since she’s a drummer. A child can’t fit into their musician-touring life. Maggie says she wants the baby, and she returns to drumming while Circus heads home to Boston. We meet his 14-year-old daughter Koko, who’s trying to navigate high school and control her fluctuating hormones. With Circus back in the picture, Koko still harbors the emptiness she felt for years living without him and living with her regretful, depressed mother, Circus’ ex-wife Pia.

While Koko and Pia are constants in Circus’ life, the jazzman finds himself constantly attracted to other women. He falls for a twenty-something waitress at a bar where he plays for gigs, for a mysterious woman on the train, for a woman who will do anything for him when he visits her in nearby Providence, Rhode Island. He comes across a woman he wanted to marry years ago while he witnesses the decline of the woman he did marry by the weight of taking care of their daughter and desiring love from him. All these women still don’t make up for losing Maggie and the child she may be carrying. As he wonders about that child, he realizes the need to focus on Koko as his daughter falls for boys who remind him of himself. Though his dream of recording an album still lingers in the background, his womanizing cripples his ability to assume the fame he swears he can taste. 

Unpeeling the layers of the womanizer and the women hurt by the actions make for an absorbing story. It switches between perspectives with the trail of women Circus leaves in his wake. Even meeting the women who spend one night with him show how his carelessness can feel magnitudinous to the women he hurts. Koko detects the pain he is causing other women because her mother lives with the pain on a deeper level. So, the added thread of a teenage daughter hungry for love seeing her father also hungry for love gives the story more depth. And Circus, of course, doesn’t put two and two together about how his actions affect Koko or his career. He thinks his womanizing helps him stay away as a father in case he messes up parenthood and helps him stay creative with his music when a muse disappears. Yet, the dependence on women derails his future, as he lives in a pattern of unfulfilled opportunities.

Overall, the book introduces characters who are intriguing as they sift through their emotions after welcoming Circus or re-welcoming him into their lives. Watching the characters come into their feelings on the pages make the story memorable as if you know the characters. The smoothness of the details about their everyday lives also hops off the page.

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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. 

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Book Review: ‘Five Little Indians’ by Michelle Good

Five Little Indians by Michelle Good

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


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

Five Little Indians by Michelle Good introduces us to Canadian indigenous young adults freshly out of country-mandated “Indian schools” and their struggles to find their footing in an unrecognizable outside world.

Set in the 1960s, the novel first takes us to Kenny, a determined boy who likes running away from the Mission School. The school is run by the Catholic church as Sister Mary and Brother John strike fear into the students who live there permanently after being taken away from their parents in an attempt to “assimilate” them into Canadian society. When Kenny notices his friend Howie is unresponsive sleeping in bloodied sheets, he knows Howie has been hurt by Brother. He can’t take the abuse anymore even though the one bright light for him is sneaking notes to a girl named Lucy, whose latest punishment leads her to having her head badly shaven and wearing a sign that reads she’s a liar. Kenny decides to take the risk again to run away and find his fisherman uncle who can lead him to his mother.

Fast forward to a sixteen-year-old Lucy being pushed out of school since she’s reached the age of departure. The school puts her on a bus with a one-way ticket to Vancouver where she’s searching for her old friend Maisie. Lucy doesn’t know where her family is anymore, so Maisie is her best bet to stay with until she figures out what to do in the real world. Because she’s depending on an old letter with Maisie’s address, Lucy tries to find Maisie after getting off the bus in town. The harrowing experience puts her in danger until she finds Maisie, who seems stable in her new life after Indian school.

A few years out of school, Maisie has a job cleaning a filthy motel. It’s the only job she could get without any training. She hooks Lucy up with the same job. Maisie has a restaurant spot and knows where to get anything she wants, a quality Lucy admires. She also has a boyfriend, Jimmy, who’s also indigenous but his parents escaped to Seattle when the Indian school mandates went into effect, so he doesn’t understand Maisie’s experiences. Nobody seems to understand what Maisie went through. Unbeknownst to Lucy, Maisie self-medicates the only way she knows and lives a double life.

Once Lucy gets on her feet years later, she’s a nurse and a mother. She’s now the teacher when she takes in Clara, fresh out of Indian school. With her own trauma of seeing a friend die at school, Clara uses her energy to help raise Lucy’s baby daughter Kendra, named after her father Kenny. A string of gigs leads to Clara doing advocacy work for other indigenous adults who want to take legal action against the teachers they dealt with in Indian school. Her work takes her on a wild adventure that brings her to an elderly woman named Mariah, who uses the traditions she’s always known to take care of her home and her community.

Weeds. She remembered George telling her once that Indians were like weeds to the white people. Something to be wiped out so their idea of a garden could grow. He told her weeds were indigenous flowers.

One of the people Clara helps turns out to be Howie, the boy Kenny thought Brother killed when he didn’t wake up. After surviving Brother’s abuse, Howie bulks up his muscles and seeks his version of revenge. Clara advises Howie on how to stay out of trouble and find ways to handle the abuse that she’s all too familiar with. Howie reunites with Kenny, who has dipped in and out of everyone’s lives. It’s how Kenny deals with his inner demons. The older everyone gets, the more they realize their emotional well-being is a lifelong battle.

Over the past few years, the horrors of Indian residential schools have resurfaced through newly discovered mass graves and other records in Canada. Administered by the Canadian government and local churches, the schools started in the 1880s with the mission to educate indigenous children on Euro-Canadian and Christian values to assimilate in the greater Canadian society. The last school closed in 1996. That means there are countless living survivors dealing with the trauma similar to that of the characters in the novel. The author, who is of Cree ancestry and a descendent of the Battle River Cree and a member of the Red Pheasant Cree Nation, earned her law degree at age 43 to dedicate her legal career to assisting residential school survivors.

In January, Canada promised to devote $40 billion to the global fund that contributes to paying survivors harmed by residential schools and severe underfunding of First Nations family services. The government acknowledges the discovery of mass graves on top of the COVID-19 pandemic and economic recovery has further harmed survivors.

The characters in the novel are living in a time when mental health is not general awareness, and they’re looking for ways to survive without real skills. They also deal with the blow of not connecting properly with their families after years away from them. So, they’re creating their own families with each other and the friends they meet along the way. When Clara becomes involved in the American Indian Movement, for example, she depends on several friends to help her with her activism, but she mostly depends on her dog, John Lennon. Their bond is heartwarming, and it shows how an unofficial emotional support pet can lift her spirits despite the situation.

Being in the literary fiction genre, the novel describes the surroundings and the lives of the characters in vivid detail necessary to developing the story and moving it forward. The author does a great job of interconnecting their lives at different points where you have the reunion of Kenny and Lucy, for example, but it’s not as picture-perfect as you would hope with Kenny dealing with his own demons while Lucy uses her time constructively to build a career and a home for their daughter.

Overall, it’s difficult to explain the magic of this book. It opens readers’ eyes to a time in history that’s been buried in general knowledge and now is being revealed more through tragic news and the long-awaited government response. It’s upsetting to read what the characters are experiencing at their school and to know that their experiences can be a true reflection of real-life people who attended those schools against their will. With the author’s own advocacy for residential school survivors, the novel displays layers of the characters’ developments as they finish adolescence and enter adulthood barely knowing their own culture while discovering their own selves.



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Book Review: ‘Dominicana’ by Angie Cruz

Dominicana by Angie Cruz

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Book Review: ‘The Vanishing Half’ by Brit Bennett

The Vanishing HalfThe Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett is a riveting tale of two Black sisters who are so light-skinned that one decides to pass as White while the other accepts who she is. It delves into race and complexion but also into family ties ruptured by one person leaving the family by choice.

Desiree and Stella Vignes are twins living in Mallard, Louisiana, a town purposely populated by light-skinned Blacks. Desiree, the more outgoing and outspoken twin, conjures up a plan for her and Stella to leave town at sixteen. They sneak away from their home and end up in bustling New Orleans in 1954. They find work until one day Stella disappears without a trace.

The novel moves ten years forward with Desiree making the journey back to Mallard with her young daughter Jude. The townspeople notice right away how dark-skinned Jude is. When Desiree returns to her mother, she tells her she hasn’t seen Stella in years.

Unbeknownst to her family who she kills off when anyone asks about their whereabouts, Stella is making a life in Los Angeles with her husband Blake and young daughter Kennedy. Except Stella is living a lie: She is passing for White. Her struggle to keep the secret haunts her as she’s known around their White neighborhood in Brentwood as sometimes being moody and quiet. When a Black actor and his family fight to buy a home in the neighborhood, Stella worries her life will be ruined since she’s avoided her own people for so long to avoid her cover from being blown. Putting her Karen tendencies to the side, she decides to make friends with the Black mother living across the street from her and they become fast friends—something neighbors start gossiping about.

Years later, Jude heads to UCLA with the goal to find Stella. She doesn’t tell her mother that she thinks the missing twin is in LA, but she stumbles upon Kennedy and makes the connection that it’s her cousin. The two try to be family as Kennedy is conflicted about who she is, now knowing that her mother has been lying her entire life.

The literary fiction novel jumps timelines intersecting the twin sisters and their separate lives with their daughters who know the emotional strain the separate lives have brought upon the family. It’s reminiscent of Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng with the writing and storytelling style through characters’ various secrets. It’s definitely a graduation from the author’s debut novel The Mothers, which is a great debut novel also diving into secrets within a contemporary community.

At the end, the author says she was inspired by Imitation of Life, more the 1959 film rather than the novel by White Jewish author Fanny Hurst, who came under fire at the time for stereotypical presentations of the Black mother character as a Mammy figure and her light-skinned daughter as a tragic mulatta passing as White. The “passing” technique has left holes in Black families since the end of slavery, and it’s a topic that’s still relevant today as people may or may not defend their ethnicities based on their looks. With the conversation of race, this novel is a good choice under the anti-racism reads to emphasize how some people give up their old lives as one race for new lives under another race due to the opportunities they feel they couldn’t get before.

Overall, it’s an engrossing piece interlacing the lives of two sisters who don’t know where the other is because one becomes obsessed with dodging obstacles surrounding race until she evolves into a new person with a new past that subtracts her bloodlines.

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Book Review: ‘My Year of Rest and Relaxation’ by Ottessa Moshfegh

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh tells the story of a young woman who decides to spend the year 2000 holed up in her apartment and isolated from the world. She tries to hide from her life, but her best friend keeps bothering her and so does her feelings for her pseudo-boyfriend and for her recently deceased parents.

The nameless narrator is living in that glam NYC Sex and the City setup at the turn of the millennium unfazed by the excitement. She has her friend Reva who she seems to loathe for being upbeat about the future. Reva tries to keep her friend engaged with the world, but her friend is not having it. When Reva experiences a loss, the narrator still can’t find enough empathy to be selfless in the situation. She remains a curmudgeon with the thoughts of her father and her mother dying within months of each other still haunting her. Other than Reva, she only really contacts Trevor who’s usually sleeping with another woman when she calls and acts like he doesn’t have time for her like she doesn’t have time for Reva. To vent her problems, she goes to her aloof therapist who dishes out questionable treatment methods. Finally, the narrator takes extreme measures to really get the rest and relaxation she wants without the distractions after seeing Reva and Trevor move on without her. When she’s satisfied, she finds herself emerging from her submersion as the city is hit with the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The narrator is that great unlikable character who acts in ways that are upsetting and annoying yet it’s understandable. Though the book came out a few years ago, the book is enjoying a resurgence as the world grips with the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic and being forced into weeks of “rest and relaxation.” It also shows that excitement for the future at the turn of a new decade, like now in 2020, and how all that hope can go down like it had in 2001 because of a national traumatic event. The narrator is working hard to ignore the news and enjoy TV reruns while laying on the couch like many are now with the worry around the novel coronavirus. She has everything going for her: her Columbia University degree, her art gallery job, and her rent-control Upper East Side apartment, but she can’t handle it and wants to escape the life she’s unsure she wants.

Overall, the story is well-written and highlights the unlikable character and her selfish desperation. It’s an interesting read for today’s times as 2020 is becoming a year of rest and relaxation for some who choose to see the widespread quarantine that way.

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Book Review: ‘Such a Fun Age’ by Kiley Reid

Such a Fun AgeSuch a Fun Age by Kiley Reid
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid is a tale about a millennial black woman who gets caught between her white boss and her white boyfriend after a racial incident while on the job leaves her vulnerable. Though the book rides on the racial divide, it fails to make the characters likeable and the main character is riding in the backseat of her own story.

Emira Tucker is partying with her friends when she gets a call from a couple, the Chamberlains, she regularly babysits for. She ditches the party while in her party clothes to save toddler Briar from her parents as they deal with an unexpected situation in their home. With an upscale grocery store down the street, Emira decides to take Briar there to buy time. Being a black woman in a skimpy dress baby-sitting a young white girl rings the alarm for one customer. Soon, the security guard is asking Emira why she has custody of Briar, assuming some type of kidnapping. The event escalates then cools off when Mr. Chamberlain shows up.

Emira doesn’t want to talk about the event, but the wife and mother, Alix Chamberlain, a well-to-do lifestyle expert, wants to take Emira under her wing by offering Emira more gigs and getting other ways for her to take care of things around the house. Emira doesn’t pick up on any changes because she’s desperate for money.

Soon, Emira meets Kelley, a white guy she remembered seeing at the store during the incident. In fact, he taped the incident and tries to convince Emira to approve its release. She doesn’t want to. Kelley then goes out of his way to date Emira, and they become an item. But it turns out Alix and Kelley have history with each other that dates back to high school when they were dating until a racial profiling incident ends their relationship.

With Kelley thinking he knows Alix’s motives around Emira with Alix growing up with black nannies, he also may have a motive of his own with only dating women of color. As they bicker about who will reveal themselves to Emira, Emira is oblivious to everything going on around her, including not taking the lead on her own life with being reduced to just baby-sitting Briar as a college graduate.

After the secrets between Alix and Kelley are revealed, Emira takes note and eventually finds her happy ending. But it takes too long for Emira to wake up. She doesn’t want the video of the incident to get out, but she’s not vocal enough expressing her concerns about safety if the video surfaces publicly. Because the incident fades more and more throughout the book and then pops up again, her character personality gets faded, too. She’s a Temple University grad, but she’s baby-sitting and doesn’t know what she wants to do with her life at 25 years old. Many black women college graduates have more direction, so this part of the story falls flat. Why is she not ambitious? Why is she half-awake? If the why is there, then that also falls flat.

Also, I don’t know a lot of black women who would subject themselves to being that close to a white family that they work with. Even at 25, that’s something they would handle delicately if ever in that situation. Emira’s devotion to Briar mirrors that of Aibileen in Kathryn Stockett’s The Help, where the “you is kind, you is smart, you is important” speech that Viola Davis voiced as the character onscreen to the little white girl she’s responsible for is still a running joke.

Emira comes alive with her friends, but there’s too much focus on the Ebonics within their interactions to the point their conversations have no meaning; they’re just using a blaccent to be using a blaccent. On Good Morning America for a Black History Month literary segment, author Kiley Reid said, “As I’ve been touring, a lot of black women have said, ‘This is the first book I’ve read where I hear me and my friends talking,’ so I’m so glad they can hear themselves in it.” Black women readers told me NOT to read this book. They couldn’t explain why, just shook their heads no.

It’s hard to explain why we needed this to be the story that brings up race and privilege. The issues are dropped into the storyline but among unlikable, stereotypical characters who don’t know how to play with those themes. With a future film coming out, this book can come off stronger like Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere, where those themes are more emphasized onscreen, making the story more entertaining.

Overall, this book is hard to decipher as a story that’s relatable and necessary to strike the conversation the publisher is pushing in its marketing strategy for readers to have.

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Book Review: ‘The Revisioners’ by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton

The RevisionersThe Revisioners by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“Well, she’s coming over a bit,” I say.
They look up from their food at that, a mix of concern and shock wrinkling their faces.
“Coming by to do what?” Link asks. She has set her fork down.
“Just to talk, she’s lonely.” I already regret saying as much as I’ve said. There was no need to is all. “She can’t have a baby,” I add.
“I could prepare my bath with white women’s tears,” Link says.
“Not just yours but all of ours,” Theron adds.

The Revisioners by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton compares the lives of a single biracial mother who goes to live with her white grandmother in current times and her black great-great-great grandmother who befriends her new white neighbor in the 1920s. What they both learn is that they shouldn’t have trusted the white women because at the end of the day their unapologetic blackness will always cause division.

In 2017, New Orleans native Ava recently left her husband, lost her paralegal job, and is now raising her teen son, King, alone. To cut costs and save money, she accepts an invitation from her white grandmother, Martha, to live in her family mansion. Ava’s black mother, Gladys, warns her daughter to not live with the grandmother she barely knew because her white father was barely there and neither was his family. Ava takes Grandma Martha’s invitation as a way to fix the past between them and start anew. She takes care of her aging grandmother but notices microaggressions against her and her son that she struggles to ignore. As she adapts to her new life, she sees King doing the same, including falling for a white girl at his school. When Grandma Martha’s actions (and admissions) go too far, Ava rethinks her living situation.

In 1924, Ava’s maternal ancestor, Josephine, is dealing with her son, Major, getting married to Eliza, a woman she’s unsure about because of how the couple treats Major’s son from another marriage, Jericho, differently. While Josephine helps take care of Jericho while her son and his new wife adjust to their new home, a white woman stops by her door. It turns out to be a new neighbor named Charlotte, a mousy woman who’s obviously being beaten by her husband. She wants Josephine to help her conceive because she heard rumors of Josephine being able to manifest, or “revision,” such events and they happen. Because she feels pity for the woman, Josephine invites Charlotte into her home. They meet regularly and share baked goods until Charlotte, upset she can’t carry a baby to term, turns her back on Josephine by secretly joining the Ku Klux Klan. Charlotte’s connections then threaten Josephine’s family when a land dispute erupts between the neighbors.

In 1855, young enslaved Josephine is realizing her Revisioner powers with her mother and father teaching her. On the plantation, she becomes a play partner for the owner’s daughter, Miss Sally. Josephine shows her powers to Miss Sally, who eventually asks if she could help her mother conceive. When Missus gets pregnant, Miss Sally is gracious and she and Josephine get closer to the point where Josephine reveals she wants to use her power to be free. Miss Sally laughs, but Josephine keeps the rest of her secret that her parents and another mysterious slave, Jupiter, are preparing to flee.

Both the relationships Ava and Josephine strike with the white women in their lives end up in disaster. Early in the book, for example, Grandma Martha accidentally bumps into a lamp that’s the only heirloom Ava has from Josephine. Though Grandma Martha doesn’t know it’s Josephine’s lamp, the author weaves in the distrust the characters feel for each other over deeply rooted racial issues. Gladys doesn’t feel comfortable with Ava living with Grandma Martha and would rather have her daughter live with her and study to become a doula like her, like Josephine. From the start, Josephine’s friends and family explain to Josephine that she shouldn’t become friends, let alone trade niceties, with Charlotte, as evidenced in the quote above.

Overall, the book shows the history of a bloodline shared by strong black women, with a few having a soft heart for women outside of their race that leads to a hard-learned lesson. They learn though they share a womanly connection it could mean nothing due to racial differences. It reads smoothly flowing through the parts of Ava and the two parts of Josephine, where we see her as a child slave and as a free woman. It’s an interesting story, especially with the juxtaposition of Ava and Josephine living a century apart in the same place and dealing with the same problems but with different outcomes.

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Book Review: ‘Grand Union’ by Zadie Smith

Grand Union: StoriesGrand Union: Stories by Zadie Smith
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Grand Union: Stories by Zadie Smith is an offbeat story collection that dives into the lives of various characters from the U.K. to New York. The author’s literary fiction style sometimes shines in certain stories and fails to deliver in others.

The longer stories resonate stronger because the characters are established better, with some even having chapters. “Sentimental Education” is about a college couple where the young woman is trying to find herself sexually while she becomes annoyed by her boyfriend’s attention to his recently jailed best friend. “Miss Adele Amidst the Corsets” surrounds a drag queen’s shopping trip to a department store to find a version of an old corset; the corset has changed and so has the store’s management. “Downtown” sounds like it has more personal reflection from the author as the narrator details an everyday adventure in New York City from noticing the movements of an artist to dropping the kids off at school. “Big Week” features a recovering alcoholic as we follow him from meeting his son at the bar, picking up a professional woman at the airport for his new job as a driver, and reuniting with his ex-wife as he moves out.

Stories like “The Dialectic” and “The Lazy River” are similar to “Downtown” with describing what sounds like Zadie’s real moments, but they describe the setting and characters mostly without having a tangible plot. Other stories like “Kelso Deconstructed” and “For the King” have an overflow of conversation and character descriptions that buries the plot.

Overall, it’s an interesting short story collection because there isn’t a central theme; it’s her random stories, many previously published in magazines, placed together in one book. Some stories stand out while others don’t.

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Book Review: ‘Sabrina & Corina’ by Kali Fajardo-Anstine

Sabrina & Corina by Kali Fajardo-Anstine is a brilliant short story collection surrounding indigenous and Latina characters in Colorado. From the first story to the last story, the book follows the lives of several women who are trying to keep family and history a priority.

“Sugar Babies” is the introductory story showing two classmates trying to care for a pretend baby made of sugar that brings up feelings for the girl who’s trying to develop a relationship with a mother who had abandoned her. “Cheeseman Park” has a young woman staying with her mother and meeting another woman in the same apartment complex who appears misunderstood by their neighbors as they bond in the nearby park. “Remedies” emphasizes how hard it is to incorporate blood ties into the family when a mother brings in her daughter’s father’s other child by another woman into the home and deals with a head lice problem that turns her life upside down. “Tomi” features a woman getting out of prison and bonding with her nephew while figuring out her new surroundings as the neighborhood changes. And the neighborhood changes also comes up in “Galapago” when a grandmother, being pushed by her granddaughter to move away, faces a home invasion. The namesake story, “Sabrina & Corina,” examines the dwindling relationship between two cousins and how one finds relative success and the other experiences the ultimate downfall.

The stories amazingly concentrate in the greater Denver area, showing the Latinx and indigenous female experience we don’t really see in fiction, especially from the perspective of an author who was bred within that culture. There is a struggle for the characters to remain in their homeland where generations before them had settled as they handle the gentrification, family, and discrimination. A consistent theme is the woman’s role in her family and how her relationships with her family dictate all her relationships. They are daughters, granddaughters, sisters, cousins, aunts, mothers, grandmothers figuring out their roles in their current situations.

Overall, the stories are well-structured and thought-provoking. I listened to the book on audio where the voices changed as if to give the indigenous and Latina narrators the opportunity, but it was unnecessary; one narrator throughout the book would’ve worked better to make the transitions more seamless.

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book reviews

Book Review: ‘Saint X’ by Alexis Schaitkin

Saint XSaint X by Alexis Schaitkin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

*Received an advanced copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review*

“Saint X” by Alexis Schaitkin is a novel that centers around a young woman who sees the man suspected in her older sister’s murder years later. Though from the younger sister’s perspective, there are snippets exploring the lives of others who found themselves connected to the murdered college girl.

The novel starts on the picturesque island of Saint X, where the Thomas family is enjoying their summer vacation. While 7-year-old Claire stays with her parents most of the time, her 18-year-old sister Alison runs off and hangs out with the other college-age kids at the resort. Except on the last night Alison doesn’t return. Claire senses something is wrong and tells her parents. A search leads to Alison’s body found in shallow water nearby. Devastated by the loss and the infamous stamp of Alison’s demise, the family returns to New York and eventually moves to Southern California. Claire becomes Emily, using her middle name for a new identity to separate herself from her sister’s well-known murder. Emily returns to New York to work in publishing only to see one of the men accused of Alison’s murder from the island. She begins to follow him and develop a friendship while still sorting out her grief and contemplating on the woman she became in the shadow of the sister she barely knew.

The writing is so seamless and poetic where it captivates the reader, making the book a possible quick read. It’s about a murder mystery with the family behaving the way anyone would expect, but the emotional angles are wrapped under the actions, especially with Claire aka Emily. Other characters get their own chapters such as the suspects who claim innocence and the tourists at the resort who had noticed Alison at some point during their stay and now feel an unwanted connection to her murder.

Overall, it’s a book that will keep your attention and does a good job of unpeeling characters’ layers amid the aftermath of a traumatic event.

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Book Review: ‘The Water Dancer’ by Ta-Nehisi Coates


The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“The summoning of a story, the water, and the object that made memory real as brick: that was Conduction. What I might do with such a power was not my immediate concern, so much making it through that day.”

Tales of magical realism and the harsh reality of the Atlantic slave trade becomes intertwined in “The Water Dancer” by Ta-Nehisi Coates. It tells the story of a man trying to recall memories of his long-lost mother and escape enslavement on a dying tobacco plantation in Virginia owned by his white father. Coates’ first novel moves slowly through the overuse of prose but emphasizes the decision of freedom and what it exactly means to the different characters.

Hiram Walker’s mother had been sold off years ago by his white father, Howell Walker, and Hiram wants to remember his mother. Other slaves in the community, called the Tasked, tell him he has this power to conjure the memory of his mother through the water.

The story really starts with Hiram riding over a bridge with his white brother, Maynard, where they fall into the water. Maynard doesn’t survive, and everyone is surprised Hiram survived in the water so long. He returns to his father’s plantation, but eventually decides to run after he’s blamed for Maynard’s death. Hiram runs with the girl he loves, Sophia, but they’re captured.

After weeks of torture, he’s returned to Corinne Quinn, a wealthy white woman who was betrothed to Maynard. It turns out Corinne is a part of the Underground aka the famous Underground Railroad. Hiram joins the effort, always wondering of Sophia’s fate and of the purpose of his powers as he figures out what it means to be really free.

Hiram seeking freedom and expecting everyone Tasked wants his version of freedom, regardless of who’s left behind, is an interesting concept that plays throughout the novel. It focuses on the division of families and how it was a fact of life, and if someone ran away, they would have to create a new life in the North and research where their loved ones had ended up. Not knowing the fate of a loved one haunts Hiram with his mother, an underdeveloped character that keeps getting mentioned yet there’s no sense of who she is. It’s reminiscent of Cora in “The Underground Railroad” by Colson Whitehead because Cora’s mother had escaped but never sent for Cora, so there is anguish toward the mother; she’s not present, but the reader feels her impact.

This book made me appreciate Whitehead’s book more because the characters are better developed there. Hiram in Coates’ book tells the story in first-person narrative, but there are personality elements missing; he’s mostly stoic. He’s one of those narrators who falls behind other characters though we follow his actions.

The freedom definition theme saved the book. The magical realism gets muddled until the end where the history of African folklore related to water comes up. Though it’s brought up a lot, the water dancing leading to what you need isn’t believable enough, like the folklore isn’t fitted correctly to this story.

Length-wise, It’s a 400-page book that could’ve been done closer to 300 pages. Slavery in the Americas will always be a fascinating topic because of the legacy of not acknowledging its profound generational impact. The history itself in many cases overshadows a fictional story.

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Book Review: ‘Golden Child’ by Claire Adam

Golden ChildGolden Child by Claire Adam
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“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.

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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what's lit

‘Little Fires Everywhere’ Rounds Out Casting for Hulu Adaptation

Kerry Washington and Reese Witherspoon star and produce the Hulu adaptation of "Little Fires Everywhere." Instagram

Celeste Ng’s best-selling novel, Little Fires Everywhere, is gearing up for its TV debut as casting decisions are being finalized.

According to Deadline, the last major character from the book, Bebe Chow, has been casted and will be played by Chinese actress Huang Lu. Joshua Jackson, originally of Dawson’s Creek fame and recently of When They See Us, was also one of the last to round out the cast and will play Bill Richardson, the workaholic attorney patriarch of a family in crisis when the novel opens up to his youngest daughter, Isabella, missing as their home burns. Intricately weaving the tale of the Richardsons with matriarch Elena and the four children and their relationship with their new vagabondish tenants, Mia Warren and her daughter Pearl, the story also evolves into a custody fight between another two mothers that has divided Elena and Mia along with the 1990s Shaker Heights, Ohio community.

Before the novel was released in 2017, Reese Witherspoon bought the rights, which she had first done with Gone Girl. It has become her specialty: to buy the rights for television and film purposes before the book hits shelves. This time it will be with her Hello Sunshine brand, most known for its monthly book club. Currently starring in the second season of HBO’s Big Little Lies, which already reached the deadly ending of Liane Moriarty’s novel of the same name, Reese is working on the Little Fires Everywhere project with Scandal star Kerry Washington.

This will be Kerry’s first major project with her production company, Simpson Street. It was behind her most recent Broadway play, American Son, which is the debut of playwright Christopher Demos-Brown and directed by Tony Award winner Kenny Leon.

Celeste, Reese, and Kerry will be executive producers for the eight-episode limited series. According to IMDB and Deadline, the casting for the major characters are complete.

Elena Richardson will be played by Reese Witherspoon.

Mia Warren will be played by Kerry Washington.

Pearl Warren will be played by Lexi Underwood.

Bill Richardson will be played by Joshua Jackson.

Izzy Richardson will be played by Megan Stott.

Lexie Richardson will be played by Jade Pettyjohn.

Trip Richardson will be played by Jordan Elsass.

Moody Richardson will be played by Gavin Lewis.

Bebe Chow will be played by Huang Lu.

Linda McCullough will be played by Rosemarie DeWitt.

Restaurant manager (where Mia and Bebe work) will be played by Paul Yen.

Little Fires Everywhere landed at Hulu following a multiple-outlet bidding war and will also be under the umbrella of ABC Signature Studios along with Hello Sunshine and Simpson Street. Liz Tigelaar (Casual, Life Unexpected), Lauren Neustadter, Pilar Savone and Lynn Sheldon will all executive produce. Award-winning mystery novelist Attica Locke is also one of the writers, as seen in the show’s Instagram account, fresh from working on Ava DuVernay’s When They See Us.

“At Hello Sunshine, we strive to shine a light on female-driven stories that are rooted in inspiration, emotion and truth – all of which form the bedrock of Celeste Ng’s ingenious work,” Reese said in the March 2018 Hulu press release first announcing the project. “Hulu has a rich history of transforming groundbreaking literature into groundbreaking television, and we are confident that their talented team will use this story to spur a long-overdue dialogue around race, class, and what it means to be a mother. With Kerry Washington, Liz Tigelaar and now Hulu, Hello Sunshine has brought together a dream lineup of creative collaborators, and we are privileged and humbled to have the opportunity to work with them to bring this important project to life.”

“As producers, we at Simpson Street are so proud to be part of this team to tell this extraordinary story inspired by Celeste Ng’s phenomenal novel and we are thrilled to be embarking on this journey with Hulu,” Kerry said in a press release. “As an actress, I am floored to have the opportunity to work alongside Reese Witherspoon exploring the rich themes of this story playing these dynamic characters.”

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Book Review: ‘The Farm’ by Joanne Ramos

The Farm by Joanne Ramos
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“The Farm” by Joanne Ramos is a suspenseful novel around surrogates impregnated by embryos belonging to the uber-rich confined to a farm in upstate New York. But the main character feels she’s being deceived by the farm’s staff and comes to the conclusion her presence there may mean something more sinister.

Jane is a young mother who’s living in a dormitory in New York mostly with other Filipina women, including her cousin Ate. They both take care of 6-month-old Amalia to the best of their abilities with their surroundings. But Ate is a well-known baby nurse constantly recommended for her newborn sleeping method. She’s able to connect Jane with a job with a family, but Jane ruins that opportunity with her motherly instincts. So Ate suggests Jane should be a surrogate mother at this resort called Golden Oaks, where she will receive a bonus for delivering a healthy baby for a very rich family. Jane leaves Amalia in Ate’s care as she embarks to the resort for 9 months. At Golden Oaks, ambitious Mae is running the resort as it’s still in its trial run with the investment of an aging Chinese billionaire, so she’s gentle with Jane, which makes Jane question if she’s carrying the billionaire’s baby. But Mae’s forced kindness is part of the system, Jane learns from her newfound friends, Lisa, who’s in her third surrogate pregnancy at Golden Oaks, and Reagan, also a first-timer who comes from money but wants her own independence for her art career. As Jane confides in her new friends, she finds herself getting in trouble and risking her future paycheck. She tries to lay low until she senses something is wrong with Amalia. Then she is desperate to leave the premises and see her daughter.

This novel does an excellent job with mild suspense as in it plays on motherly instincts and how they can be tested and what a mother would do if she gets a read on a situation.

It also shows the plight of many immigrant women who find work in baby nursing, cleaning, and other jobs as servants of rich families. This story focuses on the Filipina community in New York. Jane arrived in the U.S. when she was a teenager only to live with her mother in California who let relationships with men run her life. When Jane later leaves her husband Billy with Amalia in tow, the only person she can rely on is her older cousin, Ate aka Evelyn, who despite experiencing success in the Manhattan baby circuit still lives in a dormitory with other Filipinas struggling to find steady work since she sends her money to her four grown children in the Philippines, including a disabled son.

Class is another issue. While Jane and Ate work for rich families, Reagan comes from a rich family. Yet she doesn’t know what she truly wants with all the opportunities she has received. She seems to be spiteful about her friend, Macy, who’s black and considered at the top of her game in investment banking though she had a rough upbringing. They both went to Duke, but Macy is in another stratosphere compared to Reagan. As Mae runs Golden Oaks, she’s constantly feeling pity for Jane because of her circumstances as a low-income single mother yet knows she has the power to hold things over Jane’s head with the paycheck for the baby.

The book appears long, but the story is engaging with the situations inside the farm and outside the farm along with backstories of the characters, so this piece of literary fiction is well-conceived.

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Book Launch: ‘Little Fires Everywhere’ by Celeste Ng

With so many concerts going on around the LA area Friday night, I decided to look for an event more my pace. Luckily, on Facebook I found Celeste Ng was scheduled to speak and sign books at Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena. Her newest novel Little Fires Everywhere had been gaining momentum on the best-seller lists, and since I recently read and enjoyed Everything I Never Told You, I went to the event to get insight on the author’s work and writing process.

In Little Fires Everywhere, a suburban mother is dealing with her house burning down amid her seemingly perfect life and trying to piece together what sparks ignited the blaze. The story takes place in Shaker Heights, Ohio — the author’s second hometown — and at the event she spoke about the “metaphorically rich” planned community and how rules shape it. She used the example of how residents couldn’t leave trash cans out on the curb for collection; it was too messy, so the city had golf carts go in the back of residents’ houses to fetch the trash to bring it up the driveway to the truck at the curb.

This fascinated me. In the book jacket, her bio reads she grew up in Shaker Heights — where she said she lived from 10 to college — and Pittsburgh. Recently I had just realized I spent half my childhood in Chicago and the other half in Sacramento. The most recent novel I’m working on surrounds a teenage girl secretly becoming a mermaid at a nightclub in Chicago, but I based the character’s neighborhood on my original neighborhood of Rogers Park that had such an idyllic quality that it didn’t feel like it was in Chicago, and from Celeste’s description maybe more like Shaker Heights. And I too had moved to Sacramento at age 10 up to college. Chicago has more personality, of course, but maybe Northern California suburban living might creep up into a later story.  

Celeste also discussed her writing process and how the idea of her latest novel  germinated in 2009 but the actual writing didn’t come until after 2014’s Everything I Never Told You. So the characters evolved in her head, so she encouraged writers to not be so consumed with how long the story is taking to get on paper and then the long road to being published. She even praised how Sweet Tarts and other candies got her through writing, with a tweet about Sweet Tarts catching the attention of the company that sent her a package. Like many writers, she worked at home, the library, and cafes, which felt inspiring since it felt like I could create a great novel though I spent so much time writing it in all the same places near me.

The event drew a packed room with about 75 or so people braving rush hour traffic. I bought the hardcover book and got it signed, but I choked when I met her because I wanted to tell her about my author aspirations. Sometimes, I can get my words out when meeting authors quickly at book signings and sometimes not, but she was polite and I’m looking forward to reading the novel soon.