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what's lit

‘The Perfect Find’ Lands New Home at Grand Central Publishing

Originally released under an indie publisher, best-selling author Tia Williams’ novel The Perfect Find is being re-released via Grand Central Publishing.

The top publisher released Tia’s latest novel Seven Days in June this summer. The book made The New York Times Best Sellers list and became Reese’s Book Club’s June selection.

Published in 2016, The Perfect Find came out under Brown Girls Books managed by authors ReShonda Tate Billingsley and Victoria Christopher Murray. Victoria currently has a NY Times best-seller out now called The Personal Librarian co-authored by Marie Benedict. On its website, the publisher says it’s not currently accepting submissions.

Tia’s book will be turned into an upcoming Netflix film starring Gabrielle Union, Gina Torres, La La Anthony, and Aisha Hinds. Announcing production wrapped last month on Instagram, Gabrielle also serves as a producer as she starts her own book tour for her second memoir You Got Anything Stronger? this month. In her Instagram post on Wednesday, Tia revealed the film is expected to be available for streaming next spring.

The new version of The Perfect Find will be on bookshelves Sept. 14, according to the author’s post.

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what's lit

Marketing Maven Bozoma Saint John Teases New Memoir

Bozoma Saint John, the chief marketing officer of streaming service Netflix, announced she has officially joined the author family at Penguin Random House.

In an Instagram post, she shared a snapshot of an email from the publisher welcoming her to the author portal, where she will access information such as her sales and royalties. She revealed her book, The Urgent Life, is coming out next year courtesy of Viking Books, a Penguin imprint.

“I’m really writing y’all,” she wrote Wednesday. “And then one day, you’ll see my vulnerable words in print 🤯 This is truly one of the scariest things I’ve ever done.”

On a recent podcast episode with broadcast journalist Catt Sadler, Bozoma says the book will focus on her journey of grief after losing her husband to lymphoma within six months of his diagnosis in 2013. She tells Catt that she used social media to share the journey with loved ones until they told her she should piece the content together for a book after her husband’s death. But she wasn’t ready.

“He’s been gone for seven years, and I feel like the time is right now,” Bozoma says. “I’m in a really great place spiritually, where the mantra that I live my life with now is to live life urgently, so the book is called The Urgent Life, which is really about the pace at which he lived his last months and we lived it together… It’s not about speed, it was about the intention, the intentionality of how we did it.”

The book does not have a public title page yet on the Penguin website, but comparative titles include actress Tembi Locke’s From Scratch, also a forthcoming Netflix series starring Zoe Saldana, and Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg’s Option B.

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‘Joy Luck Club’ Author Amy Tan Shares How Her Work Became an ‘Unintended Memoir’

Netflix

For Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, Netflix debuted a two-hour documentary about Chinese American best-selling author Amy Tan that focused on how her books became reflections of her life and her mother’s life.

After seeing immediate success with her debut novel The Joy Luck Club in 1989, Amy started a writing career that followed the story’s legacy of featuring two generations of American-born daughters and Chinese-born mothers.

The documentary follows Amy’s childhood where she loses her older brother and father both within six months of their back-to-back brain tumor diagnoses. Amy talks about feeling scared being left with her suicidal mother, who moves Amy and her younger brother to Holland from the San Francisco Bay Area. Once she returns to the U.S. for college, Amy reconnects with her best friend who was another child of the real-life Joy Luck Club, a small social group of Chinese American immigrants who met to discuss investment opportunities, play mahjong and cards, and feast at midnight with the kids.

Years later, Amy is making a career as a business technical writer and living with her husband. One day she receives a call from her brother that her mother had a life-threatening heart attack. She said she made a vow to God that she will spend more time with her mother and talk to her about her life in China. When Amy connects with her mother, she learns her mother experienced angina after an argument at a fish market. Her mother was fine, but the promise echoes and inspires her to sit down with her mother and discover her mother’s life in China.

“I started to ask her about her life, and I listened instead of saying, ‘I’m really busy now. I can’t listen to you,'” Amy says in the documentary. “I would listen to everything and that profoundly changed everything. I wasn’t fighting it anymore. And I learned a lot by simply being quiet and actually listen.”

The Joy Luck Club became an instant sensation resonating across cultures with the common thread of generational trauma.

“It gives you curiosity; you want to ask questions you want to understand and in the answers you get stories,” says author Isabel Allende in the documentary. “That’s what Amy has been doing. She observes her mother and her aunts and the culture and at the same time she totally belongs here. So it’s in the conscience, in the complexity that she finds her language, her inspiration.”

Four years later in 1993, the book became the first film to feature a majority Asian American cast. That success wouldn’t be repeated until 2018’s Crazy Rich Asians based on Kevin Kwan’s first book in his soapy series.

“Not to do any disservice to the amazing Asian American writers that came before Amy, but I think this is the first book that really crossed over into becoming a mainstream mass market success. It had such a huge impact on paving the way for other writers of color to tell their stories,” Kevin says in the documentary. He adds he saw the film five times in the theater growing up in Texas where all his friends were White, but he was proud to be able to show them “English-speaking contemporary Asians.”

The novel has also seen its critics who Amy says believed she had used ethnic tropes like starting the novel with a fake Chinese folktale to portraying the grandmother as a concubine who commits suicide. Except the tropes Amy is accused of putting in her book actually happened to her family and in her life, she says.

“When I was given this mantle for speaking for the Asian American community, suddenly there were these expectations. I started getting a lot of criticism. Some said I did it wrong, that I had created stereotypes and pandered to those,” Amy says. “Mothers speaking in broken English, or concubines who had killed themselves. These were stereotypes.

“In the beginning, I didn’t know what to say. I would be caught off-guard,” she adds, “but then I realized that they wanted really was role models. They wanted me to right the social wrongs, the social injustices and finally they had someone in the limelight who should now address that and not be pandering, so to speak, to the mainstream.”

Besides The Joy Luck Club, Amy is the author of seven other books, including memoirs and children’s books.

Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir is streaming now on Netflix.

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film reviews

Tia Williams’ ‘The Perfect Find’ Book-to-Film Attracts More Stars

Women’s fiction author Tia Williams‘ 2016 novel is evolving into a Netflix film amid the Hollywood COVID-19 disruption with the assistance of actress and producer Gabrielle Union.

The Perfect Find follows a 40-year-old single Black fashion magazine editor who’s at odds with her new boss. But when she finds love in the workplace with the videographer half her age, she learns it’s her boss’ son. Gabrielle will star in the Netflix/AGC Studios film as main character Jenna Jones and produce under her company I’ll Have Another, named in conjunction with her 2017 memoir We’re Going to Need More Wine.

According to Deadline, Niecy Nash and Keith Powers will join the cast with Numa Perrier joining as director. On the film’s IMDb page, it reads Keith will play Eric, the 20-year-old co-worker boo opposite Gabrielle’s character. Tia confirmed on her Instagram Thursday that Niecy will play Darcy, Jenna’s nemesis and Eric’s mother. The script’s head writer is Leigh Davenport, whose recent projects include Lifetime’s Wendy Williams: The Movie and BET’s Boomerang.

In pre-production, the film does not have a release date yet but is expected to be on Netflix.

The book was published by Brown Girls Books following Tia’s 2004 debut chick lit novel The Accidental Diva and 2007’s young adult series It Chicks. Her next novel, Seven Days in June, will be released in June under Grand Central Publishing.

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what's lit

‘The Claudia Kishi Club’ Shows Love to Beloved ‘Baby-sitters Club’ Member

Asian American creatives describe how Claudia Kishi of The Baby-sitters Club series defined their upbringings in the 1990s.

The companion documentary The Claudia Kishi Club from director Sue Ding premiered Friday on Netflix, a week after the latest rendition of The Baby-sitters Club topped the viewing list.

Birthed in 1986 by Ann M. Martin, The Babysitters Club followed five middle schoolers then eventually seven who start their babysitting business in the fictional Stoneybrook, Connecticut as they deal with family issues, boy issues, and school issues. Of the original four is Claudia Kishi, who is Japanese American yet broke the model minority myth by failing her classes and prioritizing her art and fashion.

This is the sentiment of the creatives who participated in the 17-minute documentary. Those creatives include Naia Cucukov, executive producer on The Baby-Sitters Club series and executive vice president of development and production at Walden Media, the series’ production company; Yumi Sakugawa, comic artist; Sarah Kuhn, author of the Heroine Complex series featuring Asian American superheroes; C.B. Lee, author of the middle grade Sidekick Squad series; Gale Galligan, the illustrator behind The Baby-sitters Club graphic novels; and Phil Yu, the creator of the Angry Asian Man blog.

Claudia Kishi has been played by Jeni F. Winslow for the 1990 TV series that aired on HBO, Disney Channel, and Nickelodeon; Tricia Joe for the 1995 motion picture; and now Momona Tamada for the new Netflix series.

In the 1980s and 1990s, girls of color looked for the girls of color that represented them the most on TV, films, and books. Claudia became the literary heroine to look up to for Asian American girls.

“Usually the Asian American character or the woman of color character is the one you sorta feel you have to be,” said Sarah Kuhn. “Like if you’re playing Harry Potter, then you have to be Cho Chang where I feel like Claudia is the one everyone seems to want to be.”

Also the limited representation, or faulty representation, made a lot of girls of color question their visibility.

“You don’t see mirrors of yourself, thinking I’m broken or I’m not normal or I don’t exist. These thoughts are kinda subconscious,” said C.B. Lee. They’re pervasive, especially when you go on thinking that the world—or when you perceive the world as a world without you in it.”

The faulty representation also came from the lack of women of color being in charge of these media projects with mostly White women controlling the narrative.

“There’s definitely that quality of othering for sure where you know a lot of these stories are being told from the perspectives of young White girls,” said Gale Galligan. “In terms of racial representation—how do I put this?—I noticed that most of the people were White.”

The Baby-sitters Club famously switched perspectives between the seven members by telling their backgrounds in all of their books. With her Japanese heritage, Claudia is always described by her Asian features, which the creatives in the documentary found as offensive language that struck a chord.

“They somewhat problematically described her as having ‘almond-shaped eyes’ and ‘jet-black hair’ and ‘super-beautiful skin’ though she eats tons of junk food,” said Yumi Sakugawa.

The members include Kristy Thomas, the bossy president and founder; Claudia the vice president; Mary Anne Spier, the shy secretary; Anastasia “Stacey” McGill, the fun New York City girl and treasurer; Dawn Schafer, the fun California girl and alternate officer; Mallory Pike, the writer and junior officer; and Jessica “Jessi” Ramsey, the ballerina and junior officer.

For redheads, Mallory is the picture of representation as Jessi is for Black girls. Mallory and Jessi were introduced into the club later into the series as eleven-year-olds, so they have limited appearances in the Netflix show that just focuses on the original members.

Claudia is the only one who owns a landline, so the meetings take place in her bedroom where the girls exchange candy and other junk food that Claudia provides. Along with being the artsy candy lover, she is a horrible student always competing with older sister, Janine, who exceeds in school and speaks Japanese.

Jade Chang, author of The Wangs vs. the World, wrote the sixth episode titled “Claudia and Mean Janine,” also the title of the seventh book in the series published in 1988.

The author and now TV writer will be a part of “A Celebration of Claudia Kishi” along with Momona Tamada, Naia Cucukov; Heather Jack, director of episode “Dawn and the Impossible Three,” and The Claudia Kishi Club director Sue Ding. Hosted by Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment, Gold House, Japanese American National Museum, and Netflix, the webinar will be held Monday, July 13 at 5 p.m. PST.

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what's lit

How June Diane Raphael Took A Page Out of Her Own Book

Photo by Eric Charbonneau - © Invision

Grace and Frankie actress and author June Diane Raphael announced on social media that she backed out of making a speech at Saturday’s Women’s March in Los Angeles after Black Lives Matter claimed it wasn’t invited to the event.

June Diane, who co-wrote the girlboss political book Represent: The Woman’s Guide to Running for Office & Changing the World, said in two tweets she’s reflecting on the impact of white supremacy on women’s rights issues.

Black Lives Matter LA tweeted Friday afternoon it hadn’t been invited to the Women’s March LA although the organization received invitations in previous years. BLMLA also added it failed to receive a response from WMLA about the lost invitation.

The WMLA said it didn’t invite BLMLA because of its focus on the election year, according to NBC News.

Women’s March has long been criticized by black women for being held on Martin Luther King Jr.’s Day weekend. Will the 300,000 who showed up to the LA march Saturday be at the MLK march—another civil rights event—on Monday in the Crenshaw District?

The first national march occurred Jan. 21, 2017, the day after Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration, with many black women holding signs blaming the 53% of white women who purported to have voted for Trump.

Last year, Women’s March co-chair Tamika Mallory saw backlash for supporting the controversial Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who has a history of saying remarks that have been viewed as anti-Semitic. The controversy overshadowed the 2019 march with Tamika leaving the board.

In 2018, BLMLA believed the WMLA included Zionists and individuals who supported the state of Israel “at a time when Palestinian women and girls were being killed,” BLMLA co-founder Melina Abdullah wrote in an op-ed over the 2020 exclusion. She added that same year the organization felt the Black Lives Matter-Youth Vanguard co-founder and black Muslim 14-year-old organizer, Thandiwe Abdullah, had been labeled an anti-Semite by WMLA for supporting Palestinian women.

The march attracted lower attendance across the country, according to multiple media reports. With the accusations around the Women’s March becoming anti-black and labeling top black activists as anti-Semitic for supporting other black activists or supporting a specific group of women, the movement may see more decline due to inclusivity of all women. The anti-Trump roots also make it uninviting to women who voted for Trump or identify as conservative and/or anti-abortion.

Released last September and co-written with policy adviser Kate Black, June Diane’s guidebook provides information to women interested in running for office with advice from women in office from major political parties.

Chapter 10 in the book, “What About Those Pesky Nudes I Took? And Other Questions About Life on the Internet,” discusses the worries a woman considering politics may have, such as social media gaffes, arrests, unpaid taxes, job firings and abortions. It also gives advice on how to handle these situations, with honesty being the best policy when situations explode.

“Your story is your story,” reads page 137. “Don’t let anyone else tell your narrative, your history, your experience differently than how you want it told.”

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what's lit

Reese Witherspoon Set to Bring Memoir ‘From Scratch’ to Netflix

Reese Witherspoon with "From Scratch" by Tembi Locke. Her production company, Hello Sunshine, will make the memoir into a Netflix limited series / Instagram

Actress Tembi Locke shared via Instagram that her best-selling memoir, From Scratch, will come to Netflix as a limited series with help from the queen of bringing books to the screen, Reese Witherspoon, and her production company Hello Sunshine.

In an Instagram post in which she shared the Variety article as the exclusive, Tembi also noted that she will be working with her sister, award-winning mystery novelist Attica Locke, who has earned TV producing credits in Netflix’s When They See Us and Fox’s Empire as well as the other major bookish Hello Sunshine project in the works, Little Fires Everywhere based on Celeste Ng’s best-selling novel. Tembi added she and Attica will be working alongside the series’ star, Zoe Saldana, and Zoe’s sisters.

Hello Sunshine’s Instagram post said the project will be done in partnership with Cinestar and 3 Arts.

Zoe will play Tembi’s role in the book that follows Tembi from her college semester abroad in Italy where she meets her future Sicilian husband Saro, their lives as a married couple in Los Angeles building their careers, and then Saro’s cancer diagnosis which leads to his untimely death and a reawakening for Tembi and her daughter trying to find purpose amid the loss. Read the she lit book review.

From Scratch was Hello Sunshine book club’s May selection.

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film reviews

Netflix Options Sarah Dessen Novels for Films

Pioneering young adult novelist Sarah Dessen will see three of her novels become films on Netflix as the streaming service announces the upcoming projects.

Sarah, who released her latest novel The Rest of the Story earlier this month, will turn the following books into cinematic pieces: Along for the Ride from 2009, which will be the first to see its onscreen adaption; This Lullaby from 2002; and Once and For All from 2017. Netflix provided summaries of each book below.

Along for the Ride

 

It’s been so long since Auden slept at night. Ever since her parents’ divorce—or since the fighting started. Now she has the chance to spend a carefree summer with her dad and his new family in the charming beach town where they live. A job in a clothing boutique introduces Auden to the world of girls: their talk, their friendship, their crushes. She missed out on all that, too busy being the perfect daughter to her demanding mother. Then she meets Eli, an intriguing loner and a fellow insomniac who becomes her guide to the nocturnal world of the town. In her signature pitch-perfect style, Sarah Dessen explores the hearts of two lonely people learning to connect.

This Lullaby

A New York Times bestseller. She’s got it all figured out. Or does she? When it comes to relationships, Remy’s got a whole set of rules. Never get too serious. Never let him break your heart. And never, ever date a musician. But then Remy meets Dexter, and the rules don’t seem to apply anymore. Could it be that she’s starting to understand what all those love songs are about?

Once and For All

After years facing brides with cold feet and badly behaved wedding guests, wedding planner Louna has become skeptical about romance and plans on remaining single during her last summer before college. Luckily, the busy wedding schedule provides plenty of legitimate excuses for Louna to avoid opportunities to meet potential dates. That changes when satisfying a particularly fussy bridal party requires hiring the bride’s brother, Ambrose.

No dates have been announced for the projects yet.

Sarah’s current novel The Rest of the Story centers on “big-hearted Emma Saylor, who reconnects with a part of her family she hasn’t seen since she was a little girl—and falls in love, all over the course of a magical summer.” Sounds like the perfect summer young adult read. Sarah’s first novel That Summer came out in 1996, making her one of the veteran young adult novelists still producing work today. (Author note: My favorite novels I read in high school by Sarah was Dreamland and This Lullaby mentioned above). According to her website, the New York Times best-selling novelist’s 14 books have been published in over 30 countries and have sold millions of copies worldwide. Her literary accolades include the 2017 Margaret A. Edwards Award from the American Library Association for outstanding contribution to young adult literature.

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Mystery Novelist Attica Locke Lends Writing Talent to Netflix’s ‘When They See Us’

Five teens from Harlem become trapped in a nightmare when they're falsely accused of a brutal attack in Central Park. Based on a true story. / Netflix

Acclaimed novelist Attica Locke joined a National Association of Black Journalists Los Angeles panel Wednesday in Hollywood along with actors Niecy Nash and Blair Underwood for their new Netflix series When They See Us, featuring the true-life stories of the boys who had become known as the Central Park Five.

Based in Los Angeles, Attica has written award-winning novels The Cutting Season, Pleasantville, Black Water Rising, and Bluebird, Bluebird, which was picked up by FX in 2017 for a TV series. A sequel titled Heaven, My Home will be out in September.

Attica Locke / Mel Melcon, Los Angeles Times

As a writer and producer, Attica said the Ava DuVernay project, which includes Oprah and Robert DeNiro as producers, was the highest outlet for her talent with the social justice aspect. The four-episode series available on Netflix this weekend surrounds the New York City case convicting five teenage African American and Latino boys over the rape of a white investment banker who received the moniker of Central Park Jogger. The 1989 event and the subsequent trials revived racial tensions within the city and country, infamously including an $85,000 New York Times ad from Donald Trump calling for the death penalty for the boys. The woman, who was later revealed to be Trisha Meili in a 2004 memoir, survived the attack though still experiences cognitive difficulties.

The case is now examined by journalism scholars who find the media coverage 30 years ago had a racial tinge with most articles never saying these boys—Antron McCray, 15, Kevin Richardson, 15, Yusef Salaam, 15, Raymond Santana, 14, and Korey Wise, 16—”allegedly” committed the crime, a necessarily placed word to let the masses know their innocence was probable. Terms such as “wolf pack” and “wilding” dominated headlines along with “bloodthirsty,” “animals,” “savages” and “human mutations,” according to the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit journalism and research organization. It added newspaper columnists such as New York Post’s Pete Hamill wrote the teens hailed “from a world of crack, welfare, guns, knives, indifference and ignorance…a land with no fathers…to smash, hurt, rob, stomp, rape. The enemies were rich. The enemies were white.”

In 2002, after the boys became men in prison from sentences ranging from 6 to 13 years, convicted murderer and rapist Matias Reyes admitted to the rape. His DNA matched the samples collected from the crime scene, and detectives said he knew details about the crime that was never released to the public. He’s serving a life sentence.

The next year, the five wrongfully convicted men filed a civil lawsuit against New York City for malicious prosecution, racial discrimination, and emotional distress. The charges against them were vacated, and they eventually received a $41 million settlement in 2014.

Reams of articles from the time were prepared by the When They See Us staff for the actors to know the real people they will play on screen, the panel said. Attica added that watching the actual “confession” videotapes from the boys, who say they were coerced into those confessions for a crime they didn’t commit, “fucked her up.” She said it was difficult to watch the children without their parents saying they were a part of the crime when their statements contradicted each other. Niecy brought up in the discussion that mental health hotlines were available to the cast and staff over the emotionally heavy material, adding she had never seen an emphasis of self-care on a production set.

In November, Attica led a social media campaign against the Mystery Writers of America’s decision to bestow a lifetime achievement award to Linda Fairstein, the Central Park Five prosecutor who pushed for the convictions of the teens and eventually became a successful mystery novelist. The literary organization rescinded the award for the first time in its history after it said many members were also against the decision.

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what's lit

The ‘Chilling Adventures of Sabrina’ Well-Read Black Girl Storyline

Netflix

Halloween weekend bingeing was at its height with the premiere of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina on Netflix, the latest incarnation of the beloved Archie Comics character, Sabrina the Teenage Witch. While Sabrina battles demons living in the mortal world as a half-witch, the show managed to insert a well-read black girl storyline.

Sabrina (Kiernan Shipka) is adjusting to high school in the mortal realm with her three friends, who are conveniently battling their own demons: Susie (Lachlan Watson) is being bullied by the football players for identifying as nonbinary, Harvey (Ross Lynch) is reconciling flashbacks of a demon he had seen as a child in his father’s mines, and Roz (Jaz Sinclair) is trying to read as many as books as she can before she loses her vision to a degenerative eye condition.

When a black girl appears onscreen in a recognizable story, I get excited. Especially when the comically sweet ’90s Melissa Joan Hart version of the TV series spent a season disastrously failing to make Sabrina have a black friend named Dreama. So seeing Roz in the new Sabrina was a great surprise, and even greater when she asked the school administration to incorporate Toni Morrison’s classic, The Bluest Eye, into the literature curriculum.

The administration says no. Of course, this upsets Roz. She asks Principal Hawthorne why students can’t read such a masterpiece, and the principal rattles off other books not allowed in the curriculum such A Clockwork Orange. Roz leads the gang to the school library where they look for books they feel should be there but can’t find them. The librarian tells them a “purge of bad books” had occurred years ago.

Devastated, Roz later confides in Sabrina and Susie that she’s losing her vision — the reason why she’s fighting for the books. But in a turn of events, Sabrina’s secret witch teacher Mrs. Wardwell helps the girls organize a secret banned book club. 

Schools across the country are still dealing with banned books. This year’s list of banned books can be found here. Many books are by marginalized writers with content surrounding race, culture, sexual orientation and other so-called controversial issues. This clever statement of a storyline spans a few episodes but eventually does get swallowed by the demon haunting of the characters.