Too Good Not To Talk About - Shattered Illusions by Leigh Hershkovich

There has only been one other time that I introduced a book to my readers before I was finished with the book.  This is going to be the second time.

I "met" this young author through the wonders of technology.  She and I were students together in a Modern and Contemporary American Poetry class offered through Courera.  It was the dedication of our professor, Al Filreis of the University of Pennsylvania, in creating a true learning community and discussion group that brought me and this young author together. Through connections on our course facebook page and the global realization that this community of writers, poets, artists, and lovers of the aesthetic, was embarking on a life-changing journey.

It has been months since our class ended and we have maintained contact through emails and facebook.  She is a lovely young woman who is courageous and determined.  I say that because her culture almost expects young woman of her age to be married and on child one or two by the ripe young age of twenty.  Her twin is already married and enjoying life in Israel so it is not without confidence and chutzpah that Leigh embarked on a journey to be true to her gift from G-d and her desire to use that gift to reach a world.

She is a teacher and living in New York, is surrounded by a colorful cast of characters that I am sure infused her imagination as she huddled in her apartment to write into the wee hours.  She sent me her draft and at my first reading of a few pages, I knew she was onto something wonderful.  My recent candidacy for local office prevented me from diving in before her printing deadline and I decided her work was worth me having the real thing in my hand.  An e-book would not do this justice and my older eyes could not savor the characters on the Kindle alone.

Not to be disappointed, my copy came in the mail on the last day of school.  My little ones were jumping up and down with glee that I received a package and on Friday when I opened it, I was also jumping up and down to hold in my hands the dreams of someone who has become dear to me.

Shattered Illusions is blowing all expectations, Amazon.com has already sold out! It is a fantastic debut novel and is so well-written.  This book captures your attention from the first sentence.  It flows so smoothly, like a latte in the morning.  It a wonderful read.

With a maturity beyond her years, Leigh has fully realized an eclectic cast of characters that each has an authentic voice in this murder mystery set in who-ever-heard-of-small-town-Louisiana. I can close my eyes and see the "twenty six miles" that make it up and as an avid coffee queen, would lament the only coffee shop in town.  I am intrigued and taken in and spent Sunday at the pool devouring half this book.

Summer is unofficially kicking off and some of you are thinking what can you do.  Read Shattered Illusions by Leigh Hershkovich.  It will not disappoint.

Who Does She Think She Is?

Just this morning I uttered that time-used mama phrase, “Who does she think she is?” in reference to my tween daughter who was feeling herself just a bit too much.  It is probably my relationship with her that made me look into the future and glance back into the generations past as I read Benilde Little’s latest novel, Who does She Think She Is?.

It was almost by happenstance that I read this book last week. 

We live in a townhouse, 1900 feet, downsized from our 3500 foot house across state.  That means we have boxes, tables, chairs, and lots of books in our garage.  I was in the garage, just before an Earth Day recycling event, trying to find any stray electronics when I stumbled upon this crate of books that moved from house to house. My books are connections to me, whether I read them or not, and are precious assets that I have a hard time parting with.  The Earth Day celebration also included a book donation and as I was looking through the crate, I found this book.  I remember purchasing it two years ago at the Greater St. Louis Book Fair, held annually at the end of April in the Macy’s parking lot.  I remember I was drawn to the contemporary storyline and the hope that the tasteful cover promised. I put it on my “to read” pile and a month later, picked it up when I was between assignments.

I was not disappointed. 

First person narration is one of my favorite points-of-view.  To me it feels like I am having a conversation with the protagonist and am able to connect to their story.  This book gave me the unique gift of hearing from three generations of women and finding connections in each of their stories, understanding why each one behaved the way they did.  It is also perhaps because my daughter is fully into her tween  years and in her stretch for her personhood, sometimes pushes a few of her mama’s buttons.  Mother-daughter stories continue to pull me, perhaps because I lost my mother when I was only four and there is a part of me that fantasizes about what the possibilities of that relationship.

The three women could have easily been friends or family members, I recognized myself in the mother and heard my aunts in the the grandmother.  My daughter is not old enough to be the daughter in the story, but I have sons who could be her contemporaries.  I applauded her bravery to make a choice for true connection and not just for security, to buck tradition and follow a path she created for herself.  I also smiled at the affirming self-giving the mother encountered and the full-circle life journey of the grandmother who decided she could finally shed the cloak of the past to embrace the uniqueness of her legacy.

My criticisms of the book center on three things, first, the editing could have been a little tighter with some of the misplaced words and spellings.  Second, my head was spinning with all the brand name references that it made me wonder if the author was getting a kickback, and third, it seemed the story ended a bit too tidy in the last few pages, the author bringing all the disparate stories together in a neat little bow.  It could be that she was facing a deadline or that she had developed a triad as much as she could without the danger of making this a trilogy.

I was satisfied with the week I spent with her and the characters will stay with me because I relate to them, the contemporary setting, and the understanding that this life journey has so many universal elements.

This was an excellent book and one that I would highly recommend for a quick summer read.  I live in Kirkwood and have joined the summer reading program, it is one that I am recommending on that site as an easy breezy book that will truly satisfy.

Cricket Promises by Keturah Israel

Remember the tumultuous years of growing up? The swirl of emotions and the new feelings? The anticipation of those "coming of age" moments like first bras, first periods, and first kisses? Remember feeling like you would just ddddddiiiiiieeee if that boy didn't carry your books between classes, if your friends didn't like your new outfit - even if it wasn't the designer duds, or if you were always left a wall flower because you weren't pretty enough?  Remember challenging your parents because you were no longer a little darling but were staring to have opinions of your own and thought you were just grown enough to express those opinions, to test those boundaries? Remember thinking your parents were too strict and not fair if they didn't let you do something your friends were doing?

If you remember any of those things, then Cricket Promises is a great visit back to those tender moments of your young teenage years.

I found myself, in the throws of a school board election, longing to have time to just sit and read, my time with Cricket Promises stretched through speeches, forums, and advertising meetings with my campaign manager.  In the middle of it all, I had this sweet gem of a book tucked into my briefcase for stolen moments to step into the lives of Eve and her sister Genesis, her parents, and her friends.

The setting felt very familiar to me, the time felt like the generation when I grew up when parents were ok with children walking over to a friend's house and when cell phones were limited to the Jetson's.  It was a time of newness and a time of discovery, a time that will never come again.

Keturah's writing is gentle and new, a bit simplistic, but then it is written as a 13-14 year old girl, in her voice, and she does an honest rendering of what she would have thought from her confusing feelings for her friend Rachel to her excitement about her first boyfriend Angel to the demons she fought through mental illness.

Have you ever bared your heart and soul with your best friend, believing and knowing that at least there was one person in the world who understood you, who knew you, and who loved you for yourself? I felt that while reading this book and immediately found myself back in Jefferson City, MO and Benton Township, MI experiencing my coming-of-age all over again.

Israel offers us a gift, as well, with her entry into the self-published and self-promoted writing by black women.  She has taken the courage to own her character and fully develop them without the hypersexualized covers or storyline promoted by the majority-owned publishing houses.  Keturah deals with sensitive subject matter in an honest, open, and thoughtful manner.  I knew the stories and the scenes she depicted without the need for the graphic language or gratuitous scenes.

This was an enjoyable little book that is being share with women across the country.  She doesn't provide a reading guide for book clubs and as such, invites  you, the reader, to step inside the many nuggets of truth and discover the deeper meaning of keeping that promise.

I want my daughter to read this book and will hold it on the shelf for her a while so she can be a little older and not feeling like she is being naughty for the bad language.  Israel does not use foul language to be shocking, but writes as an urban teen and perhaps some of the language they use around their peers, but never around adults.  She allows her young protagonist to develop fully as a character and as a person, giving us glimpses into the triad story told through Eve's voice.

You are invited to step into this story and hear her what she has to say.

Mourning in African Literature Circles

REPOST FROM HOPE FOR AFRICA

BREAKING NEWS: Chinua Achebe is Dead!

Tragedy has befallen the land. The iroko has fallen. The Eagle On The Iroko, Prof. Chinua Achebe, is dead.

Chinua Achebe, one of the world’s most celebrated writers and author of the classic novel Things Fall Apart, is dead.
He died last night in a hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. Professor Achebe had been sick for some time.

He was 82, having been born on November 16, 1930, and had been in hospital in recent days.

Achebe is best known for his classical novel Things fall Apart. His last book, There Was A Country: A Personal History of Biafra, is still making waves.

Until his death, Prof Achebe was the David and Marianna Fisher University Professor and Professor of Africana Studies at Brown.

“Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe is known the world over for having played a seminal role in the founding and development of African literature. He continues to be considered among the most significant world writers. He is most well known for the groundbreaking 1958 novel Things Fall Apart, a novel still considered to be required reading the world over. It has sold over twelve million copies and has been translated into more than fifty languages.

“Achebe’s global significance lies not only in his talent and recognition as a writer, but also as a critical thinker and essayist who has written extensively on questions of the role of culture in Africa and the social and political significance of aesthetics and analysis of the postcolonial state in Africa. He is renowned, for example, for “An Image of Africa,” his trenchant and famous critique of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Today, this critique is recognized as one of the most generative interventions on Conrad; and one that opened the social study of literary texts, particularly the impact of power relations on 20th century literary imagination.

“In addition, Achebe is distinguished in his substantial and weighty investment in the building of literary arts institutions. His work as the founding editor of the Heinemann African Writers Series led to his editing over one hundred titles in it. Achebe also edited the University of Nsukka journal Nsukkascope, founded Okike: A Nigerian Journal of New Writingand assisted in the founding of a publishing house, Nwamife Books–an organization responsible for publishing other groundbreaking work by award-winning writers. He continues his long-standing work on the development of institutional spaces where writers can be published and develop creative and intellectual community.”
 

Not An Urban Queen - Rants of a Bibliophile

I eagerly spend time in bookstores.  They are part of my life, real books, even though my family purchased the Kindle Fire for me for Christmas, there is something about real books.

The day all the kids were back in their respective classroom, I found myself at the mall, at the bookstore, working.  I decided to walk the aisles and see if their were any new titles.

My genre is black female literary works so of course, I was in a Barnes and Noble in a heavily populated diverse area of the metro and thought, surely, they will have some works by true literary writers.  Much to my dismay, their "African American" section was a simple 2-foot encap with titles that resembled an entry in the soft-porn category.

I ranted about this issue before and have talked about it with my friends.  I am a modern, middle aged (finally admitting that), educated, upper income black woman who works at home and loves to read.  I have never lived in the ghetto, don't walk around in a thong, and have never slung diamonds around, been in a video, or wear a weave.  Where are the books for people like me who love to read?

When I looked at that endcap, I shook my head and thought, it's 2013, we have to have better.  Not just for me, but for everyone, for the power of words to transform thought, for the message it sends to my young daughters, for the image it sends to the general public.  Why are publishers only putting out this trash and passing it off as literature?

I am not alone in my assessment, especially when thinking about strong black female protagonists.  It is the same for some television experiences, most notably the one called Girls.  It is set in Brooklyn without any people of color in the cast or as extras.  That is virtually impossible in New York, I've been there, I see a rainbow everywhere.  Is it because the media giants want to white wash out the experiences of black and brown women? Or is it because they think white women will not watch the show or read the book if the central character is a black woman?

Shondra Rhimes, the Gen X writer, seems to have broken through the gate with her compelling dramas.  She created Grey's Anatomy, Private Practice, and now Scandal, with a strong multi-cultural cast and fully developed black female protagonists.  I thought surely there is room for this same phenomenon in literature.

The same holds true for YA fiction, most of the books do not reflect the heritage, rhythm, or nuance of my tween girls.

I love books and want my daughters to have the same experience.  We have them almost literally in every room of our house. They are the reason I keep looking, keep trying, keep reading, keep reviewing, hopefully, to demonstrate that we are out here, an educated audience that appreciates the power of storytelling and the magic of great research brought to life.  And oh, something beyond just the antebellum era (slavery or free people) or the 1940s...modern women have rich lives that should be reflected in literature.

Just as I was becoming a bit dismayed with the reading options available to me, my son's girlfriend showed me how to load up my Kindle Fire.

There is hope!  There are some great books being written - independently - about richly developed characters and full lives by women of color.  They are taking the ownership back from the publishing house gatekeepers who are primarily younger white men and women - and defining the landscape with their voices.  I am looking forward to exploring some of the new titles including Cricket Promises by Keturah Israel and Shatthttp://leighhershkovich.blogspot.com/2013/01/everybody-wants-to-rule-world.htmlered Illusions by Leigh Hershkovich (while not a black woman, she is a young Jewish woman who dared convention), as well as all the ones I identified as my 2013 reading list.

Maybe next time I visit the bookstore there will be something there for me because I am not an urban queen.

2013 Book List

Habari Gani! It is the first day of Kwanzaa, Umoja, and in a time of unity of the culture, race, and nation, I am thinking about what I've been doing here the last few years - reading and reviewing black female literature.

It is also the day after Christmas when many reviewers are either listing their best books of 2012 or preparing their 2013 list of must-read-books.

I am doing the same.

I am still determined to give light and voice to the words written by black female authors or those about black female authors.  But I have also decided to expand my repertoire a bit this year by including literary works by my sisters in writing.

Two books I am excited to read in 2013 include Shattered Illusions by my young Jewish friend - Leigh Hershkovich.  Her book is listed on Goodreads and you can find out more about her through  her blog.

The other one I am excited to read is by my cousin.  It is still a manuscript, but will be a moving story about the interracial love story that is her parents.  Our Creole family is by nature a mixed heritage family, her story is set in California during the time of the Civil Rights Era and what it was like growing up being biracial in a time that so desperately wanted to identify as one or the other.

In addition to these two works, I am planning to read and review the following

1. Daughters of the Dust by Julie Dash - a story about the women and people in the Gullah Islands

2. The Book of Night Women by Marlon James - a story about a woman born on a Jamaican sugar plantation at the end of the eighteenth century (ode to a black man telling the story of black women!)

3. Kindred by Octavia Butler - she is a classic and must be included in any review of black female literary works, this story is set somewhat contemporary times - 1976 - and has a bit of an out-of-body time travel back to slavery time - going back in order to go forward.

4. Colin Channer: The Girl with the Golden Shoes - a novella by Russell Banks - interesting WWII setting in the West Indies about a fourteen year old who is set on changing her destiny

5. Miss Ophelia by Mary Burnett Smith - another coming-of-age novel about how one young girl remembers a rural Virginia summer.

6. The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna - set in contemporary Sierra Leone, this book is written by an African sister about a country at war and a quest to rebuild love and life.

7. Texaco  by Patrick Chamoiseu - a story about the one hundred and fifty years of Caribbean history and the mix of slavery told through the voice of an older daughter of a freed slave.

8. More by Austin Clarke - a story of a Barbadoian immigrant living abroad and feeling the emotional tug between two worlds.

9. Boundaries by Elizabeth Nunez - set in modern times in the midst of reality TV, this is a story about a Caribbean immigrant and the world of publishing African American works, how can an immigrant understand the story?

10. Rising From The Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class by Larry Tye - an non-fiction ode to my late grandfather who was a member of the Sleeping Car Porters, this book is an exception to my literary work on this site but right in line with what I read in my book clubs.

11. Stranger At The Gates by Tracy Sugarman is a classic non-fiction recount in writing and drawing about the deep south during Freedom Summer, the summer of my birth.

12. Love in the Driest Season: A Family Memoir by Neely Tucker will round out my planned year with a loving and moving story about a foreign correspondent in 1997 Zimbabwe, the world of AIDS, and the orphans left behind.

I read a variety of books with my CFUH Book Club - fiction and non - that are not often reviewed on this site but are deeply moving in the learning and discussion of how the two dominant races can move forward in my little suburban community.  We read together 10 months of the year, taking time off for Spring Break and for our annual pot-luck where we present, debate, and decide on the next years' reading list.

In my Ladies Over Forty Book Club, we read a variety of works by male and female authors, primarily works with a black protagonist.  We enjoyed reading and discussing together monthly.

If you are deciding what to do differently in 2013, consider reading a really good book.

A Lesson Before Dying

I am taking a brief step away from my black female literary reviews to discuss a book I read as part of my CFUH Book Club.

We have met each month since the summer of 2008 to read books across genres that have helped us facilitate discussions on race, class, ethnicity, and diversity in our little community that was struck by an unspeakable tragedy.

It is that tragedy that was a part of our minds and my depression yesterday.

A Lesson Before Dying is not a happy book.  It is deeply human in the emotions evoked by the haunting prose of Ernest Gaines.  He took us back in time to 1946-47 rural Louisiana, the back country where the plantations were still supreme.  We all thought Ernest Gaines was channeling his own experience as a young man in the form of Grant Wiggins, the one room school house teacher whose aunt basically guilted him into "making a man" out of Jefferson who was sentenced to die.

I appreciated Gaines' form and the short chapters, it would have been too much to take had the prose been longer than a few pages, the 31 chapters were short and sweet.  I hurt for Grant's dilemma of being stuck and Jefferson's emotional state of being stuck.

Hate and injustice was what put them both in that situation and in some ways, still fills the air we breathe in 2012.

I was just so exhausted from it all when I walked into book club last night.  When is it enough!

The powers-that-be, the lucky ones that my husband told me last night was no such thing, were the ones who sat on that jury of twelve white men and condemned an innocent man to death because a white man died at the hands of other white men, but someone had to pay.

Why do they hate us so much?  The underlying question of issues of race and class.  Why can't we all just live and exist? Why do they want to destroy our esteem and sense of being?  Why was constantly being grappled with throughout the book and throughout history.  Why?

Ernest Gaines expertly did what all good writers hope to do - strike a chord with readers and leave them thinking about the work long after they closed the book.

A Lesson Before Dying is ultimately a lesson in living, we strive on and keep on and hope on and eventually live on.