Ricki Wilde is the youngest daughter in a wealthy Atlanta family that takes their funeral business seriously. Except she loves floral design and uses that passion for the funerals and social media clout. Her sisters and her mother think it’s a crying shame that Ricki wants to play with flowers all day instead of taking leadership roles in the undertaking empire. She prepares a business plan for a flower shop, but it’s rejected. She wonders about her next move. One day, she comforts an elegantly dressed widow named Ms. Della. Upon hearing Ricki’s story, Ms. Della offers her the first story of her brownstone in Harlem. Since Ms. Della just lost her husband, she didn’t want to be entirely alone. The first story had been vacant for years, but it’s the perfect place for a flower shop.
In Harlem, Ricki opens her shop. She finds out that the brownstone was the site of a famous Harlem Renaissance nightclub. As she searches around the property, she sees a man her age who disappears mysteriously. She even notices the scent of night-blooming jasmine in February, which is unusual because it’s not the flower’s season. That’s also mysterious. While trying to unravel the mystery of the location, she needs to keep her business afloat. Via Instagram, she highlights different flowers at different locations throughout the neighborhood to boost business. Her heightened visibility leads her to find the mysterious man.
Ezra Walker has been looking for Ricki forever. And Ricki feels a supernatural pull to Ezra. She has tea parties with Ms. Della upstairs and confides in her celebrity friend, Tuesday Rowe, about her newfound love interest. Ricki learns more about Ezra as she falls deeper in love with him. But he has a secret. He’s a perennial. Not the plant that returns every year, but a person who has been cursed with immortal life. Once upon a time, Ezra was an up-and-coming pianist during the Harlem Renaissance who escaped the segregated South after his family was killed by Jim Crow terrorism. He was cursed by a dancer at the nightclub that used to be housed in Ricki’s brownstone. The only woman who could break his curse is Ricki. Ezra had been writing a song for nearly a century that he could only play for Ricki. If they are still together by Leap Day, then Ricki will be cursed with immortal life as well.
The author loves to weave pop culture references into her stories, and this story doesn’t disappoint. It also seemed like she had been pressured by an industry that loves romantasy to inject that magic into a modern-day love story, and it works seamlessly. The fantasy sprinkled into the romance doesn’t overtake the story despite the plot leaning more toward fantasy. The groundedness in reality is still strong. The term “perennial” for an immortal person also seems to be up for debate as a flowerlike word choice by the author, instead of an official dictionary definition.
Another aspect of the romantasy is the historical element of the Harlem Renaissance and its documented and undocumented culture. Stories still emerge about the 1920s era, where African American society flourished in New York City. The story is set in a brownstone that was a nightclub where sultry sin and artistic influence occurred inside and outside its walls. The setting remains a century-old dream for many people like Ricki and Ms. Della, who develop an intergenerational friendship that supports each other in their transitions, as Ricki finds love after leaving home and starting a business, and Ms. Della finds love after the death of her husband. Harlem feels like a magical place all on its own.
Overall, the love story stretches over pages with positive energy, though the ending is likely predictable for readers who know to expect the happily ever after by dissecting every character’s relationship with each other.
⚠️Spoilers ahead! Read the book and/or watch the film on Netflix.
⚠️ Trigger warning! The story and the post below have graphic references to topics such as sexual abuse, self-harm, violence, and eating disorders.
Jessica Knoll’s chilling debut novel rocked the best-sellers lists in 2015. Another women’s fiction book about a magazine editor who wants to take on New York City in designer duds, but this version has a twist. Well, several twists that give the borderline unlikeable character a reason for her behavior.
At the time, many readers hated Ani FaNelli, the main character of Luckiest Girl Alive heart-wrenchingly played by Mila Kunis as an adult and Chiara Aurelia as a teenager. Every thought of imperfection runs through Ani’s mind. She is thin because she heads to the gym to ensure every morsel of food is negligible from her dieting and occasional binge eating. She likes BDSM sex; the torture turns her on. She is obsessed with Gucci belts, Rolex watches, and the generational wealth of an engagement ring from her blue-blooded fiancé with a lofty Manhattan business career. She has everything, yet she’s unhappy about everything.
In the film, her thoughts are narrated aloud by Mila. The first three minutes of the film show her holding two knives to consider if they’re worthy to be on her wedding registry. Then we see the blood dripping from the blades. She shakes her head to get rid of the image. Throughout the entire film, it’s difficult to stray your eyes away from the screen because there are numerous visions and flashbacks of the multi-tiered incident that forever wrinkles the threads of Ani’s seemingly perfect life.
Ani is redeemed by the visual representation of her as an adult and as a teenager. Ani used to be TifAni FaNelli, a girl who needed tuition to attend the private Brentley School in the suburbs of Pennsylvania. She makes friends with the outcasts and the popular kids, similar to the comedic classic Mean Girls, but in Luckiest Girl Alive, the friendships feel darker.
One night after a dance, Ani leaves with her popular friends to a house party. She drinks, like all the other kids are drinking. But she blacks out. When she comes to, she can’t move, but a boy is raping her. Then she passes out again. Another boy desecrates her body. She soon finds the strength to get up, but a third boy rapes her anyway. She fights him off to run out of the house and to a gas station where her English teacher takes her to his house so she can avoid her mother.
These events happen in the book. When the book came out, people wondered how the author could come up with such a horrible story that unfortunately happens more in this society than we would like to acknowledge. It took author Jessica Knoll a year to share her story of being raped by three boys at a party as a high school student, as a minor, as a girl.
Nonprofit organizations RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network) and Sandy Hook Promise reviewed the scripts for the sexual assault and gun violence content, and an intimacy coordinator was on set to support the cast and crew, the author told Vanity Fair.
What comes after the rapes in the story is even more violent. Ani’s outcast friends also had their own stories of humiliation executed by the same boys who had raped Ani. They get upset with Ani for not standing up, until they realize they hadn’t stood up for themselves. Without Ani’s knowledge, they bomb the cafeteria at lunchtime and start shooting select kids. This takes place in 1999, the same year the country was horrified to see the mass school shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado.
Ani fends for herself going through the school looking for her popular friends who are being targeted. Her friend armed with a rifle hands her the weapon to shoot the boy who had raped her when she was conscious. Dean, played by Carson MacCormac as a teen and Alex Barone as an adult, is crying for his life. Ani can’t do it. Arthur, played by Thomas Barbusca, kept pushing her to fight back, stop protecting her rapists. He shoots Dean at the waist. Ani stabs Arthur to death. She wanted to stop the control of being told what she should do about her trauma and stop the bloodshed triggered by her trauma.
When the public memorials begin, Ani is turned away with her mother, played by Connie Britton, because she was accused of having relationships with Dean and two of the boys who were killed. That’s when her mother first hears Ani had been raped. Her mother berates her for drinking at the party, laying the blame on Ani for the rapes, but says she will attain a lawyer.
Ani’s relationship with her mother is still strained as they prepare for her luxurious wedding 16 years later. Her mother doesn’t want to relive the situation. She hates that Ani blames her for making Ani stay at the Brentley School after the multiple incidents in order to get into the best college. She hates that Ani blames her for the slut-shaming; it’s not her fault Ani developed faster than other girls. What was she supposed to do with a curvy daughter accused of being involved in a school shooting because the daughter had been raped while drinking at an off-campus party? She wants Ani to ignore the past and focus on the present.
The emotions of the school shooting are rawer than ever as an independent documentarian, played by Dalmar Abuzeid, keeps reaching out to Ani to convince her to discuss the nation’s “largest private school shooting in history.” As the documentarian tries to get Ani on board, Ani watches Dean’s interviews on the TODAY show and other shows as he paints himself purely as the wheelchair-bound victim and continues the allegation that Ani knew the school shooting was going to happen. Getting famous off his memoir, Dean signs onto the documentary. So does Ani, as long as she doesn’t see Dean.
Jessica Knoll / Image: Sabrina Lantos
When she sits down for the interview taped at the staircase of the Brentley School, Ani tells her side of the story. She says she didn’t know her friends had plans to kill classmates over what happened to her and what happened to them. Her rapes became inconsequential to the coverage the public was fed about the shooting. During her interview, Dean starts wheeling himself toward her. She leaves, feeling unprotected again. The documentarian chases her outside and says her story will help other women. She says the women seem to be fine without hearing her story.
Back in Manhattan, Ani is a senior editor at a women’s magazine similar to Cosmo, but she has received an offer from The New York Times. She decides maybe her story could be told in her own way, so she writes a draft essay. Once her boss, played by Flashdance legend Jennifer Beals, skims the essay, she tells her own story of being raped by a high school boyfriend. The essay is not intense enough, she argues. Ani is too afraid to reveal her rapists and describe the nitty-gritty, including her true emotions. That will help women. Not surface-level bullshit.
Ani goes back to the drawing board by dropping in on one of Dean’s book tour stops in the city. Afterward, Ani approaches him about pushing the lie that she was involved in the shooting. Dean says he’ll stop pushing that lie if she keeps quiet about the rape. The power dynamics are in full range, where a man is believed over a woman, a boy is believed over a girl, especially a girl depicted as a slut after being sexually assaulted. Ani pushes that Dean should admit he had raped her when they were 16. He finally admits it, reluctantly, as if he’s tired of hearing that allegation. Satisfied, Ani walks away and makes sure her iPhone recorded their conversation.
Meanwhile, Ani arrives at her rehearsal dinner on Nantucket. She gets word that her new and improved essay will run in The New York Times. Her best friend from college, played by Justine Lupe, is thrilled for her. Ani’s fiancé Luke, played by Finn Wittrock, does not have the same reaction. Like Ani’s mother, he’s tired of hearing about the 16-year-old traumas, especially at their wedding weekend. Why can’t they be happy on the happiest of days? Why does Ani have to keep bringing up her traumas that always need unpacking? Ani admits that Luke was a box to check off on her list of a perfect life. She was a “wind-up doll” that said whatever she needed to say around him. After realizing that she needs to keep healing with a partner supportive of that healing, she calls off the wedding.
Back in the city, Ani is getting emails from women touched by her essay. They had been sexually assaulted, too. They were familiar with their assaulter or assaulters, too. They didn’t report the assault or assaults, too. They weren’t believed, too. Then another female reporter accosts Ani on Fifth Avenue and complains she didn’t have to ruin Dean’s reputation. After all, Dean has done so much for the community. Ani tells her to fuck off.
The film follows the novel, which is published by Simon & Schuster, almost to a T. In the end credits designed like the original paperback with bright yellow font against a wilting black rose that turns into a blooming red rose, the author is listed as the screenwriter and executive producer. For the author to have such a strong presence over the film, it brings a unique energy to the project.
Jessica Knoll fought to remain the screenwriter for the film, unlike many other authors who do not have the experience of writing screenplays. She may not have had the experience, but she knew she had to have ownership of how the story will play onscreen. The dedication is apparent as one of the better book-to-TV projects available on streaming now. She makes an early cameo in the elevator with Mila’s Ani on the way to work.
The cinematography, as in every scene is flawless, tells the story in different time periods, in different places exquisitely. We see the little things that annoy Ani, that would annoy many perfectionists, like a loose thread hanging from a steering wheel. We also see the simulated rapes and shootings that are very hard to watch, especially knowing it’s fiction based on true events.
Because of the graphic images, reviewers from top news outlets have said the film is unstructured. The film packs a lot with a heavy punch. The film is not fodder for true crime, another complaint in some of these reviews. It’s about a traumatized woman whose flashbacks are getting worse as a classmate’s memoir is selling and a documentary is forthcoming based on her traumas and void of her voice. She is not healed in the end despite the high readership of an essay about the traumas. It’s not a story representing every woman in the #MeToo movement. It’s one story that has many parallels to the author’s real-life story.
Watching the film is more intense than reading the book. Like we said above, the book had readers hate Ani, but watching two actresses play Ani in the throes of her traumatic experiences we first learn about in the book gives a more fine-tuned visual. If you were not affected by the story through the book, you will be affected by the story through the film. It’s a complex portrayal of a triggering story that came from the author’s own experiences. It was never an easy story to digest, but it was a story people were willing to read.
Coming off the heels of the historic US Open where we saw tennis legend Serena Williams bid goodbye to the sport, Penguin Random House and its Ballantine Books imprint was in the throes of promoting Taylor Jenkins Reid’s new novel, Carrie Soto Is Back. The publisher even had a pop-up at Wimbledon over the summer.
The novel focuses on a retired tennis champion who sees her record about to be broken by a younger player, so she feels she must come back to defend her record. Book influencers expressed concern about these characters being women of color trying to defeat each other. Many of these influencers say it’s problematic that a White author pit a Latina title character against an Asian character.
“Carrie Soto Is Back is a story of a Latina tennis player written by a White woman, which we’ve been here before many times,” Tomes and Textiles book influencer Carmen Alvarez said in a reel published on Instagram and TikTok to her combined nearly 60,000 followers. “You’d be surprised to find out that Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Carrie Soto Is Back has more untranslated Spanish than any book I ever read, even by Latinx authors.”
White authors who center stories around Hispanic and Latine characters tend to get higher paychecks and more marketing dollars compared to Hispanic and Latine authors who write authentic stories about their communities and cultures, she adds. She likens the tennis novel to the American Dirt controversy in 2020 where Jeanine Cummins, who later identified as White Latina, wrote a immigration novel that performed well in sales despite the lack of immigration stories by Hispanic and Latine authors getting the same publishing attention.
Book influencers brought up the issue of Taylor giving voice to another Latina main character in her popular 2017 novel The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. This half-historical fiction novel follows a Latina actress, who passes as White by dying her hair blonde, as she becomes a Hollywood legend. At the end of her life, she plucks a biracial journalist, who is half-Black and half-White, to write her tell-all. It turns out Evelyn and her husband each carried their own queer love affairs in an agreement to not reveal their sexual orientation.
Though the well-paced book gained prominence and favorable reviews, the criticism started to surface since the author, who is White, created a secretly queer Latina main character, a biracial character, and other characters who are queer and non-White. Those allegations are resurfacing with the recent release of Carrie Soto Is Back, featuring another Latina main character.
BookTuber Jesse Morales-Small is the voice behind Bowties and Books and identifies as an “Afro-Chicano book nerd.” They created a video about not being excited about this book despite the major marketing push and voiced concerns about the racial dynamics in the novel.
“You came out of retirement because an Asian woman broke your record. You’re like, ‘I must come out and uproot my life.’ Bitch, just sit down and relax,” they said in a video from March.
“I’m worried about how the story might go,” they continue. “This narrative of this White woman coming out of retirement, so that she can reassert her record over an Asian woman, I don’t know…It’s just with the story being written by a White woman, it makes me feel weird.”
This is before readers realized Carolina “Carrie” Soto is Argentinian American and the opponent threatening her record is Nicki Chan, who is British Chinese. Carrie’s manager during the comeback is Gwen Davis, a Los Angeles-bred Black woman.
Another problem associated with mentioning women of color is White female authors tend to emphasize these characters’ beauty, which they do not do with their White female characters. Because White women are considered the standard gold of beauty and attraction, it becomes a problem when the author brings up the issue when describing a character of color.
Here’s an example of when we’re introduced to Gwen, again a Black woman who is living in the aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles Riots/Uprising and currently dealing with the racially tense O.J. Simpson murder trial as the city is reeling from the January 1994 Northridge earthquake. These impactful events are not referenced except a small O.J. trial mention in a fake media report, which is a huge oversight in relation to the characters with LA roots. Carrie’s comeback and perception of women are all that matters:
“I turn toward Gwen as she sits down on the sofa next to me. She’s in her late fifties, dressed in a red pantsuit and mules. Sometimes I wonder if she’s in the wrong field; she’s too striking, too glamorous to be the one behind the scenes… Something about that Gwen doesn’t care what her assistant wears in the office while she, herself, looks like a runway model makes me like them both even more.”
So, Gwen is a Naomi Campbell-type because any other Black woman wouldn’t fit the narrative of a tough manager. At this racially turbulent time in Los Angeles, a native-born Black woman would have been impacted by these events to some degree, as well as a Latina like Carrie. They wouldn’t be so worried about their looks unless those looks were under a criminal attack.
Nicki, Carrie’s sworn enemy, is also said to be beautiful on more than one occasion. Here’s a scenario where Carrie meets Nicki’s eyes as they sit in the audience of a match before they spar in the French Open. All Carrie can think about is how Nicki looks:
“Her long, broad body is unmistakable. Her strong, muscular arms. Her wide shoulders. Her long black hair. Nobody ever talks about it much—which is telling—but Nicki Chan is gorgeous. Showstoppingly gorgeous. A round face with high cheekbones, full lips.
“Other women in tennis—blond women with big boobs and long legs—often get modeling contracts at age seventeen. They show up on the cover of men’s magazines within a year or so of hitting the court for the first time.
“But not thicker women, like me. Or dark-skinned women like Carla Perez or Suze Carter. Not women who are British Chinese, like Nicki, or downright scary in their intensity like her either. Not the women who aren’t skinny and white and smiling.”
When characters of color are central to a book, some type of struggle tied to racial and cultural identity has to come up because for people of color that’s everyday real life. So, not receiving an adequate background on Carrie Soto only that her father came from Argentina for tennis opportunities and her mother died young shows the lack of deeper understanding of representing an Argentinian American woman who becomes one of the top athletes in the world in the 1980s.
To Tomes and Textiles’ Carmen’s point, there is a lot of untranslated Spanish interweaved with English. This is to make sure the reader gets what’s going on without translating the Spanish. If you’re around enough nonnative English speakers like myself, they usually do not weave English with their native language so often, especially when talking to a family member, because that’s not natural. English will come up for words that are only in English, such as a brand name like Kleenex or Starbucks. So, the use of Spanish looks gimmicky.
Overall, the book is unfortunately a snooze. Authors put themselves in their characters’ shoes by doing extensive research, but in this case Carrie’s story is not entertaining enough. It takes place on another timeline, but tennis stars Gabriela Sabatini, who is Argentinian, and Mary Joe Fernández, who is Dominican, would be able to tell us eye-opening stories about competing in professional tennis as Hispanic and Latine women in the 1980s and 1990s.
March 24th marks what would’ve been Erica Kennedy’s 52nd birthday. The promising author, who published two novels entrenched in media and entertainment through two multicultural female characters, died in 2012. Ten years after her untimely death, her novels Blingand Feministaremain pillars in the modern-day establishment of the “chick lit” and “bitch lit” genres for Black and multicultural readers that shouldn’t be forgotten.
Born in 1970, Queens native Erica Kennedy Johnson worked in entertainment and fashion journalism with writing clips for New York Daily News, Vibe, and InStyle. She blogged at the now-defunct xoJane and other sites that dominated the female-centric blogosphere in the mid-2000s. Writing and commenting on entertainment gave her a platform as she amassed over 4,000 followers on her personal Twitter—a number in 2012 that would’ve paved the path for Black Twitter stardom. Her last tweets defend President Barack Obama against conservative attacks and give us a play-by-play of Scandal episodes. Famous film critic Roger Ebert even listed Erica as a tweeter to follow and tweeted about her death, directing users to Erica’s writer-friend and memoirist Bassey Ikpi’s now-private blog.
Erica’s writing chops sprouted from her fashion publicity résuméworking at Tommy Hilfiger and from her upbringing in what she coined the “hip-hop glitterati” with mogul Russell Simmons and Puff Daddy before leaping into the literary world with her 2004 debut novel that reportedly earned her a $500,000 advance.
Bling follows Mimi, a half-Haitian and half-Italian twenty-year-old from Ohio who arrives in New York City with her two best friends as they audition as their R&B girl group Heartsong. Looking beyond the poorly named group that was Mimi’s brainchild, fortysomething record label executive Lamont Jackson only sees Mimi as the answer to his prayers of climbing to the top of Triple Large Entertainment, known for churning out rappers. Mimi meets with Lamont alone and gets signed to the label as a solo star.
To give her the industry-standard look, Lamont assigns her the ultimate glam squad: He introduces her to Lena, an entertainment lawyer’s spoiled daughter; Kendra, Lamont’s on-and-off girlfriend who happens to be a supermodel; and Mama Jackson, Lamont’s mother who adores Kendra and treats her as the daughter she never had because she’s ready for a daughter-in-law. But the magnetization between Mimi and Lamont makes them the hottest couple in the industry. Mimi, also known as the “Haitian Mami,” begins work on her album while Lamont tries to clean house in preparation for their meteoric rise that may not look the way they expect.
“I’m not all decked out in bling. I recognize the absurdity of driving around in a powder blue Bentley. I do have to worry about paying bills.”
The satirical novel has 500 pages of deliciousness where the reader is transported behind the scenes watching characters who resemble real R&B and hip-hop stars of yesterday and today. Each section of the novel is titled as a disc with chapters named after hip-hop hits. More details even include the naming of Mimi’s debut album track list complete with the namedropping of real-life producers like Rodney “Darkchild” Jerkins as contributors.
The main character, whose birth name is Marie-Jean Castiglione, goes by a nickname that R&B-infused pop diva Mariah Carey adopted publicly a year later during her The Emancipation of Mimi reign. Having the stark age difference also feels Mariah-like since she was twenty-years-old when she fell for the record label executive Tommy Mottola after a similar Cinderellaesque discovery.
Coincidences make the book feel authentic in its world-building and character-building, which are points of difficulty for every writer: trying to make the world they’re describing in words feel as real as possible that the reader easily transports there mentally and lives in the world seeing the action from the outside.
Bling was published by Miramax Books, a publisher created by brothers Bob and Harvey Weinstein to turn books into movies through their film production company Miramax Films. The book’s film rights had been sold to Miramax Films, according to the book’s original printing. Miramax had been affiliated with The Walt Disney Company until 2005, leaving Miramax Books to be folded into Disney’s publishing arm Hyperion.
Of course, Miramax experienced its downfall when co-owner Harvey Weinstein’s sexual assault allegations came to light in 2017, with two allegations evolving into convictions. Miramax is now owned by beIN Media Group and Paramount Company. The Weinstein brothers had created their own imprint again after Miramax Books’ sale, called Weinstein Books, which had been dissolved by Hachette Book Group in 2017 again after Harvey Weinstein’s sexual assault allegations ignited the #MeToo revolution.
“The thing I admired so much about Erica is that she deferred to no one. Shortly after Miramax optioned her first novel Bling, she called me at The Hollywood Reporter, and we were talking about the deal’s press coverage. I was able to get a photo of Erica in the paper—a beautiful one, natch. But she was outraged that Variety ran a photo of Harvey Weinstein instead of her. ‘It’s not like he wrote the book,’ she deadpanned. And I just had to laugh. She was right, of course. Most people would have been satisfied to take second billing to an Oscar winner. But not Erica. And that was the kind of hutzpah that so defined her for me.”
That being said, will we ever get the Bling movie? Will Gabrielle Union or another book-to-screen lover adapt the novel to film, especially after living in a post-Empire world? Bling‘s film rights are still owned by Erica and Miramax, the U.S. Copyright Office record shows.
The book itself looks like it hasn’t been published on a large scale since its hardcover and paperback releases in 2004 and 2005, respectively.
Erica’s author profile hasn’t been updated by Macmillan, which published her 2010 sophomore novel that earned the certification of “bitch lit” highlighting a female character wanting it all and pushing whoever and whatever out the way.
Published by Macmillan‘s imprint St. Martin’s Griffin, Feminista, from its title, is meant to stretch out the typical “chick lit” mold featuring a character in her thirties vying for career elevation and trying to ignore the biological clock yearning for a man.
Sydney Zamora is an entertainment journalist for Cachet looking for a promotion as her publication underpays her. Like Mimi in Bling, Sydney identifies as biracial with a White mother and an Afro-Cuban father. Sydney drops thousands for matchmaker Mitzi Berman, but her hard shell repels potential matches. While on assignment, she meets Max Cooper, a department store heir who wants to prove himself as an executive. They butt heads, and their aspirations get tangled into each other. The fact that he’s an eligible bachelor that Mitzi tries to rein in doesn’t phase Sydney. But in a happily-ever-after, Sydney and Max eventually fall for each other.
What makes Feminista a different type of “chick lit” romance novel in general is the character is fighting with herself to stabilize her career and lifestyle only to yearn for the male partner that female professionals can’t dream of because they’re too busy taking over the world. That’s the definition of being a feminist many women take on, so Sydney struggles to figure out if she’s losing her feminist status if she conforms to societal pressure even if that pressure could translate into love and happiness that will enhance her life.
“Female ambition was something I really wanted to explore. Even in 2009, there are so many women who are not comfortable being the boss. I got a lot of money for my first book and I remember a male friend said, “Wow, you must have a great agent!” I said, “Yes, that’s why I hired him.” But I still felt guilty about having the money. I’m loathe to even admit that but it’s true.”
Seeing these Black, multiracial, multicultural female characters at pivotal ages striving in realistic Manhattan while pushing toward their career and love goals invited a more diverse readership. These books came out in the mid-2000s when novels by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus of The Nanny Diaries fame, Lauren Weisberger of The Devil Wears Prada fame, and Plum Sykes of Bergdorf Blondesfame reigned supreme on the best-sellers’ lists by White women featuring fictional White women.
In a Q&A with The Frisky, Erica says she decided to make her starring ladies multiracial, “so anyone could see what they wanted to see in her,” in reference to Sydney from Feminista. The novel has an illustrated cover depicting characters that can be misconstrued as White, Erica says, but it came from a black-and-white illustration with a splash of color.
Erica wasn’t alone in drawing non-White readers into the “chick lit” audience. At the time, Tonya Lewis Lee and Crystal McCrary Anthony co-wrote the Gotham Diaries following the intersection of circles within the Black elite of Harlem. They shared the spotlight with Erica of being on The New York Timesbest-seller’s list. Another writing duo, Charlotte Burley and Lyah Beth LeFlore, wrote Cosmopolitan Girls about two Black women who think each live an enviable life under the lights of New York City. All the authors posed for a photo at the Bling launch party at the now-closed NYC nightclub Lotus in June 2004.
Danyel Smith, also an entertainment journalist and former Vibe editor, wrote Blissin 2005, a music-themed novel like Bling with Mariah Carey, now an author herself, contributing a review on the front of the book. And lastly Tia Williams had her first novel The Accidental Diva debut in 2004 but last year’s runaway hit Seven Days in Junemade her a rising literary star.
Authors like Tia Williams and Danyel Smith, whose successful podcast Black Girl Songbook will be translated into a nonfiction book called Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop coming out April 19, are finally receiving their flowers with their newer work.
When Erica died in 2012, Black female writers who knew her as a friend and an acquaintance wrote moving tributes, hinting at her mental health struggle possibly being the reason for her demise. The sisterhood of support in recognizing her unique creativity but also recognizing her and their own depression created a strong presence online. There wasn’t a cause of death announced, her family asking for privacy.
“My hope is that the next black author gets six figures for this kind of book. I just want to be home in sweats and glasses, writing.”
Our ever-evolving literary landscape brings to mind how Erica was eligible in having the same accolades such as having her book seen on screen or selected by a celebrity book club. But leaving her work behind, we can only spread the word on what she gave us—whether her books are considered likable enough with their range of online reviews—since they’re worth reading and imagining pieces of ourselves within the pages she wrote.
Seven Days in June by Tia Williams follows two best-selling authors who reunite on the New York literati circuit years after a high school fling that left them scarred. It’s a sophisticated romance still accompanied by a happily ever after.
Manhattanite single mom Eva Mercy is a former best-selling novelist whose Black vampire romance series à la Twilight still excites fans via the interwebs. By chance, an author drops out of a panel event, and Eva gets the last-minute invitation to fill the spot. That’s where she sees fellow, still-successful best-selling novelist Shane Hall, a mysterious intellectual who makes women and men alike swoon. Eva tries not to swoon because it turns out she and Shane went to high school once in D.C. and spent a week of debauchery in a mansion during their senior year. They meet up for a day in New York where the deep-rooted chemistry overtakes them. The day blends into another one and another where they start catching up about what went wrong when they were teenagers. Eva thinks Shane, who was a foster child and drug dealer at the time, abandoned her at her lowest point, but she learns that another force divided them. As they try to rekindle what they had as adults, Eva and Shane must combat their demons to accept the love that was severed so many years ago.
This is Tia Williams’ most complex work yet. Known for centering her novels on Black women in New York working in media, the author adds more layers to Eva’s character and Shane’s character not common in a lot of women’s fiction and romance novels. In adolescence, the main characters are dealing with substance abuse, self-harm, unstable homes, and missing parents. In adulthood, the age-old traumas return with them realizing how reflective their behaviors are when they interact with each other and the kids in their lives like Eva’s Gen Z daughter Audre and Shane’s mentee Ty. The character and storyline complexity blends well with the ubiquitous pop culture references the author loves to add to her novels.
Also, this is the first novel the author makes her main character an author as well when her previous novels’ main characters are beauty and fashion editors like her former day job life. Switching up the career choice also shows more depth with Eva translating her healing process through her books and Shane doing the same with his. Another element of the novel is Eva living with her invisible disability of suffering from debilitating migraines that worsen with barometric pressure. This also reflects the author’s life. She has given this trait to her first novel’s main character from The Accidental Diva, but this time around in Seven Days in June she makes Eva feel the everyday pain and impact and gives Audre the fear of seeing her mother chronically ill. The migraines also contribute to Eva’s writer’s block and how she’s struggling to deliver the 15th book of her famous series that is getting the film treatment with some hiccups along the way.
Overall, this novel is an excellent summer beach read that’s definitely a page-turner the deeper you get into the book. Tia Williams’ last novel from 2016, The Perfect Find, is in production with Gabrielle Union for Netflix. This novel also has silver-screen potential, especially with the book-to-film subplot that brings up diversity and inclusion in Hollywood projects.
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.
From left, Loretta Devine, Whitney Houston, Angela Bassett, and Lela Rochon in "Waiting to Exhale."IMDb
Today is the 25th anniversary of Waiting to Exhale‘s cinematic debut, a film that brought a never-before-seen look into the ’90s grown Black female experience. The timing coincides with author sisters Attica and Tembi Locke embarking on a project to bring Terry McMillan’s best-selling novel to TV. Currently in pre-production, the series is following in the footsteps of the 1995 film and adding the TV binge element to screen.
Mystery novelist and Empire screenwriter Attica Locke and her sister, memoirist and actress Tembi Locke, are under a script commitment with ABC and Empire creator Lee Daniels to bring the story to TV, according to Deadline. The entertainment website also noted in November that Terry McMillan will serve as a consulting producer. It’s been 25 years since Waiting to Exhale sparked a cultural phenomenon among Black female viewers who wanted to see their stories onscreen.
The film Waiting to Exhale starred the late singer Whitney Houston as Savannah, a TV producer who longs for a married man; Angela Bassett as Bernadine, a mother of two whose husband is leaving her for a White woman; Loretta Devine as Gloria, an overweight single mother who owns a hair salon; and Lela Rochon as Robin, an executive trying to elevate from mistress to wife. The story and film is set in Phoenix, Arizona, a city known for a low Black population but symbolically represents a phoenix rising from the ashes and starting over.
In Dorothy Butler Gilliam’s 2019 memoir Trailblazer: A Pioneering Journalist’s Fight to Make the Media Look More Like America about being the first Black female reporter at The Washington Post, she discusses the cultural impact of the film that opened in theaters on Dec. 22, 1995. She recounts the moment with her friend and Post executive, Joyce Richardson, and quotes her saying:
“‘Just like the friendship of the characters Gloria, Robin, Savannah, and Bernadine, our get-togethers lifted us up when we were down, helped us network, gave us shoulders to lean on, advice when we needed it, and a safe place to share the good and bad times,” she said. “Each of us could connect with the issues that these women had in one way or another.'”
The novel became a No. 1 best-seller and the film hit No. 1 on Christmas weekend 1995, dominating over Disney and Pixar’s first computer-animated venture Toy Story, Jumanji, and Grumpier Old Men.
The book’s characters are trying to figure out their relationships with men, which impact family, faith, and career, but it brings them closer as a way to de-stress. Friendship between women over men troubles is a common theme in works, but Waiting to Exhale incorporates the Black female perspective, which in 1992 was rare in contemporary literature.
With the 2000s HBO series Sex and the City still in reruns based on a novel by Candace Bushnell, the stories don’t age with time. But with Black women as the stars during a time when 47% of Black adults are single in a dating-app world, according to recent data from the Pew Research Center, the new show could resonate on a higher level than it did 25 years ago.
How the new version of Waiting to Exhale will be perceived in the #MeToo era, where women are looking for female friendships but may not be bonding over men trouble, has yet to be seen.
Amid the #BlackStoriesMatter movement sparked by the George Floyd protests, Terry McMillan tweeted earlier this year that she wasn’t getting the same amount of interest for her 2020 novel, It’s Not All Downhill From Here.
Attica Locke released her latest book, Heaven, My Home, last year. She’s also worked on the Netflix miniseries When They See Us about the Black men formerly known as the Central Park Five. Her sister, Tembi Locke, is an actress and wrote a grief memoir, From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home, about moving forward without her late husband. The memoir, a former Reese’s Book Club pick, is on track to become a film on Netflix with the aid of Hollywood bookwoman Reese Witherspoon.
*Given an advanced reading copy from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review*
The White Coat Diaries by Madi Sinha is a fun mishmash novel that has a healthy dose of romance drama, family drama, and career drama.
Dr. Norah Kapadia is the daughter of a renowned cardiologist who died when she was a child in a car accident. So she wants to live up to his name, but it’s been difficult with her mother still mourning years later struggling with depression and diabetes. Norah’s brother and sister-in-law lay the guilt on her for not helping with her mother. Once she starts her residency, Norah quickly finds herself falling for her supervisor, Ethan. They start going out. Norah is falling hard, and she thinks Ethan is too until she discovers he may or may not be sleeping with another doctor. But when a patient on Norah’s watch dies unexpectedly due to Ethan’s advice, Ethan asks Norah to lie for him. Her feelings for him cloud her judgment. As she constructs the lie, she tries to figure out if Ethan is worth the possible obliteration of her medical career. But more mistakes along the way end up with her making sacrifices she didn’t expect.
The pressure to meet your career goals while being bogged down by family needs feels authentic, especially with Norah’s mother experiencing health issues and Norah being a doctor who helps when she can but can’t be on call 24/7 just for her mother. She has other patients! And she learns the importance of patient ethics as the book shows the stress of residency life and how patients’ well-being can still slip between the cracks when the doctors are not paying attention. While the doctors are worrying about patients, their own well-being is deteriorating, and they stay together all the time which leads to sexual tension. This story shows how hormones can lead to the wrong decisions as Norah, a virgin due to never having time for a social life, is still figuring out what it means to even be in love.
Overall, the novel is a page-turner since Grey’s Anatomy-like medical romances feel rare in the women’s fiction genre. The author is a doctor herself, so the ups and downs Norah is dealing with as she starts her career strikes a chord in the love, family, and friend departments.
“Black Girls Must Die Exhausted” by Jayne Allen centers around a 30-something professional woman who learns her fertility is on a quick decline, making her examine her romantic relationship, friendships, and family relationships to see if she’s ready to start a family.
Tabitha Walker is a 33-years-old TV reporter living in Los Angeles who finds out at the beginning of the novel that her eggs are drying up at a faster rate, and she needs to act on preservation methods such as egg freezing. After finding out the news, she’s in a tailspin with being stopped by the police as she heads to work. This situation doesn’t snowball into an important element of the story until the end where she has to report on an officer-involved shooting against a young black male. She’s up for a promotion at work but at odds with Scott, a white male reporter also vying for the same position. On her free time, she hangs out with her grandmother, Granny Tab, whom she’s named after, at the nursing home. Tabitha also hangs out with her friends, Alexis and Laila. Alexis is married to her high school sweetheart, who has a history of cheating, with two young boys while Laila, also a journalist but in the print realm, is juggling several lovers.
The story lacks depth though it contains elements that could’ve gone farther. For example, Tabitha still deals with the trauma of her father abandoning the family when she was younger for his new family with a white woman. The race of her stepmother is emphasized along with Granny Tab being white, but it’s not explored deeper like how it has affected Tabitha being black and the woman who helped raise her to be white. There is a conversation here and there, but it’s on the surface. The story also seems outdated. Tabitha doesn’t know about infertility health coverage, but it’s been advertised so much more in the past few years with companies reaching out to women in mobile clinics and upping social media ads. These fertility startups are using technology to advance knowledge yet that’s not mentioned. Other plotlines seem 10-years-old even with Tabitha approaching her man about the topic of children a year-and-a-half too late; millennial women usually ask the pertinent questions as quick as possible in the dating app world. On the author’s website, the book is compared as an updated “Waiting to Exhale” and “Girlfriends,” but it doesn’t feel like it’s that updated. Also as a journalist, Tabitha’s career doesn’t seem authentic since we barely see her working in the field—very essential as a TV reporter especially along with the partner photographer—until the end, which is weird since the entire book she’s worrying about a promotion. Again, it goes with scraping the surface of a plotline without building it.
Overall, the story sails through to the end bringing up elements that are not explored the way they could be. The first-person narrative sometimes gets too heavy, even just in the first chapter, where the setting feels misconstrued because Tabitha is going on and on about her life, including unnecessary repetitions. This book needs some reworking to emphasize the storyline and to subtract the over-mentioned details, but it’s a somewhat entertaining summer read.
Received a copy from NetGalley for an honest review
“The Favorite Sister” by Jessica Knoll, who arrived on the scene in 2015 with her debut best-seller “Luckiest Girl Alive,” is an enthralling sophomore novel that doesn’t quite meet the stature of its predecessor but stands on its own.
The story surrounds the “Goal Diggers,” a reality TV show starring successful millionaire millennials like Brett, the mastermind behind SPOKE, a bicycle fitness startup, who just brought Kelly, her older single mother sister on board with the show, along with her beloved niece, Layla. But Brett is dead. This is not a spoiler because it’s in the first paragraph, so the story builds up to how Brett died and how the spotlight contributed to it. She’s dealing with the blowback of her twisted relationship with her frenemy, Stephanie, a top memoirist and novelist, and Jen, a vegan food entrepreneur. In the background are the other cast members such as Lauren, an entrepreneur with a forgettable company; Jesse, the 40something executive producer and show creator, and Vince, Stephanie’s brawny yet empty-headed husband.
The premise in itself sounds frivolous since it’s around a reality TV show, but the characters are withering by the moment from their narcissism and the secrets behind the lives they choose to present on camera. At first, the characters and their lives and careers get entangled in each other with the excess descriptions and witty language, but as the story progresses, the characters who emerge from the verbose debris are Brett, Kelly, and Stephanie. They each get more chapters than the other characters who fade as supporters to the story.
I like Stephanie the best. She’s the lone black woman on the show, but she’s hyperaware of her race and gender and how it affects her reputation. For example, she spends a lot of time constantly pointing out the flaws of her castmates and how it’s impossible to support other women because she’s 34 and will term out of the show for her age. The concept, done in a way buried with trendy verbiage referring to every pop culture reference out today, is something to ponder. Along with the issues of domestic violence, body shaming, single mother shaming, vegan shaming, infidelity, race, eating disorders, and others interlaced in the plot. All of these are thought-provoking issues yet the mask of reality TV world may or may not conceal the seriousness of these issues for the reader.
Mentioning Stephanie as the black woman on the show raised by a single white mother and married to a white husband, the book had diverse characters rare to find in a traditional chick lit novel written by a white female author. At the end, Knoll admits her first novel didn’t really show any diversity and seeing it there and in Hollywood made her want to add more unique characters to this book. Other examples include Brett being a lesbian, Layla being biracial, Jen being vegan cancer survivor, Lauren being an alcoholic, the castmates choosing their trip of the season in Morocco for charitable reasons, etc. The characters show depth with realizing what’s at stake because of what makes them different.
When I started this book, I had a difficult time keeping up with the characters. I actually stopped reading it to read other books due to time restraints, and I thought I wouldn’t return to it. But I had to find out what happened to Brett, and I’m glad I picked it back up. With a fresh perspective, I absorbed the story and the characters popped off the pages. So this book is great for someone who loves those women-oriented reality TV shows like the “Real Housewives” franchises and guiltily imagine things going too far. It’s a more elevated beach read because of the setting mixed with the issues successful women face.
“The Pisces” by Melissa Broder is a surprisingly refreshing twist on a character falling in love with a mythical creature and it blowing up in her face.
(Read on audiobook so some names might be spelled incorrectly with comments on the mediocre performance by the author) After a breakup with a longtime boyfriend while floundering on her doctoral project in the Phoenix desert, Lucy switches out her environment to head to sunny beach paradise Venice, California to dog-sit for her older sister. As she sort of bonds with the sickly foxhound Dominic, she nurses her heartbreak with a support group. The group bores her but she finds a friend in Claire, who in her awful accent convinces Lucy to try Tinder since she herself prefers a “harem” of men amid her pending divorce. Lucy decides a harem might be what she needs too, but it turns to uncomfortable situations such as sex on a hotel bathroom floor and sex in a cramped car. But to find solace, Lucy goes to the rocks at the beach and one night the perfect man appears. The lovemaking is amazing, and as they become closer, Lucy finds out Theo, whose voice needed male narration because the author’s voice made him come off even more feminine according to how she described him, is a merman. As Lucy tries to figure out how to fit Theo into her life such as dragging him in a wagon to her house where Dominic senses something funny about the merman, she believes he’s the medicine for her pain until Theo inflicts even more pain. First of all, there are a lot of bad reviews on this book. I worried about reading it since I couldn’t get into the author’s last best-seller. But the rawness in this book makes it stand out. There will be criticism over the very flawed character Lucy, who at 38, is still lost and acts more like she’s 28. She lost her mother when she was young. She’s taking almost a decade to work on a dissertation on Sappho. She’s looking for a quick fix after her relationship falls apart. She’s not responsible enough to care for a dog. Her journey, though messy most of the time, seems authentic. Also, Claire, who Lucy freely takes advice from, is also battling her own demons with depression.
The book spends a lot of time establishing Lucy’s environment and the characters in it, but many of the characters don’t really last such as the university community or the Tinder dates. So it takes time to get to the merman erotica parts, and the merman needs a bit more believability, but he does come off as a possible figment of Lucy’s imagination as she becomes so enthralled with him that she’s willing to lose it all to be with him, as in she battles the focus of all merman/mermaid tales of if she’s going to live underwater to follow her heart or stay on land. This book has deeper elements to it if you can look beyond the graphic sex scenes and questionable mythical creature description.
The novel became a No. 1 best-seller and the film hit No. 1 on Christmas weekend 1995, dominating over Disney and Pixar’s first computer-animated venture Toy Story, Jumanji, and Grumpier Old Men.
