Tayé Foster Bradshaw's Bookshelf

I eagerly started this book by Bernice L. McFadden .  Having read and reviewed some of her other work, knew I was in for an emotional, provocative, and thoughtful experience. Glorious left me wondering if life in America will ever change as I wrestled with themes of love, loss, anger, hate, guilt, and injustice. Still intrigued by the telling of women's stories, especially those of writers, I expected it to be different.  Perhaps McFadden was attempting to get me remember that not all truth is told.  I think she has invited me to look at older people differently, to realize they have lived a life that we  should cherish and remember. Turning page after page, I had these images of the women in the stories and felt like I was gathering snippets of information loosely centered around the life of Easter Venetta Barnett, the protagonist and briefly celebrated fictional writer dubbed E.V. Gibbs.  In journeying with her from Waycross, Georgia to Harlem, New  York, back to Waycross,

Time reached through my winter holiday and deposited within my soul the life of a brave young girl who will live with me forever.  I admire her and cherish her love for words, for writing, her daring and her quest, her heart and her living. Never ever will I underestimate the powerful storytelling of a 552 page book to completely stop all activity in me until reaching the soulful last words. This book will both haunt me and fill me, just as the times it was set in both haunt and fill the survivors, on both sides of the power of words, the survivors lived to tell the tale. The Book Thief sat on my shelf, along with other curated tomes, waiting for me to have a moment to pick her up and relish in her words.   Holiday break offered just such an opportunity. The movie came out and that, along with a previous book I read, felt like I needed to read them before seeing a producer or director's interpretation of the writer's intent. Waiting was not disappointing. Death c