#BookReview: The Returned by Jason Mott

Given a chance, who wouldn't want a few more minutes with their loved ones?  If a deceased friend or relative showed up on your doorstep, complete as they were prior to death (but not all zombie like), would you welcome them back into your home and life with no questions asked, or would you be skeptical of them?

When Harold and Lucille Hargrave's eight year old son, Jacob, shows up at their door, Lucille doesn't care how it happened, she's just glad he's there. Harold, on the other hand, is more than a little skeptical.  They buried their only child in 1966, now here they are over 40 years later and while they have aged, he hasn't.  He's very much alive and he's very much the same eight year old he was so many years ago.

The Returned, as the government has taken to calling them, are popping up all around the world.  There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to who returns and who doesn't.  At first they're welcomed back, but for reasons known only to them, the government begins to round them up and place them in modern day internment camps.

When I first started reading this, it reminded me of the USA show, The 4400, from a few years ago.  In that show, the returned hadn't died, they'd simply disappeared years ago.  Upon returning, they came back with powers that weren't always immediately apparent.  They were almost a superhuman species.  In this first book in what I've learned is a series, the returned don't seem to possess any powers.

It's an interesting concept, one that seems to keep popping up in movies and television.  In fact, the book is being made into a series called The Resurrection, coming in 2014, developed by the author and Brad Pitt.  Though I was hesitant to read this initially, I was drawn in enough by book one to seriously consider giving the rest of the series a try.

352pp
Published: August 2013
Disclaimer: Copy of book received from publisher, opinions are my own.

#BookReview: Kitchen - Banana Yoshimoto #BP2W (Japan)

I knew when I started this challenge that there might be some books I wouldn't get because of cultural differences.  Two weeks in and I've come across that first book.  I really wanted to like Kitchen, but it was strange and otherworldly.  It was a huge hit in Japan though, so perhaps it's just me.

Though the book has one name, it's actually two short stories.  The first, Kitchen, tells the story of Mikage.  Most people have a favorite room in their house and for Mikage, it's the kitchen.  However, it's more than just her favorite room, it's where she feels most comfortable.  So when her last living relative dies and she's offered a chance to move in with a classmate and his crossdressing father, she gladly accepts, based on the level of comfort she feels in their kitchen.

In the second short, Moonlight Shadow, young Satsuki mourns the loss of her boyfriend.  Though she's comforted by the presence of her deceased boyfriend's brother, who dresses in the school uniform of his deceased girlfriend, she longs to see Hitoshi again.  An encounter with a stranger on her morning run offers her that opportunity, but only if everything goes according to plan.

Both stories dealt with death and crossdressing men.  I don't even know what to do with that honestly.  I've not read anything else from the author, so I don't know if these are focused on in her other works.  It just seems strange that both topics would play such prominent roles within the same book.

152pp
Published: 1988

In 1603, after decades of civil warfare, the Tokugawa shogunate (a military-led, dynastic government) ushered in a long period of relative political stability and isolation from foreign influence. For more than two centuries this policy enabled Japan to enjoy a flowering of its indigenous culture. Japan opened its ports after signing the Treaty of Kanagawa with the US in 1854 and began to intensively modernize and industrialize. Following three decades of unprecedented growth, Japan's economy experienced a major slowdown starting in the 1990s, but the country remains a major economic power. In March 2011, Japan's strongest-ever earthquake, and an accompanying tsunami, devastated the northeast part of Honshu island, killing thousands and damaging several nuclear power plants. The catastrophe hobbled the country's economy and its energy infrastructure, and tested its ability to deal with humanitarian disasters. - CIA World Factboo

Location: Eastern Asia, island chain between the North Pacific Ocean and the sea of Japan, east of the Korean Peninsula 

Size: 377,915 sq km, slightly smaller than California 

Population: 127,368,088 

Ethnic groups: Japanese 98.5%, Koreans 0.5%, Chinese 0.4%, other 0.6%. Up to 230,000 Brazilians of Japanese origin migrated to Japan in the 1990s to work in industries; some have returned to Brazil (2004)

Languages: Japanese

Theme: Kimigayo

#BookReview: Colored Sugar Water - Venise Berry

I remember thinking a few months ago that I missed the writing of authors like Venise Berry.  Then I re-read Colored Sugar Water during a read-a-thon and wondered what exactly it was that I was missing.  The book was okay, but I think I oversold myself on the story line before.  Maybe I liked her other books, So Good and All of Me, but this one? I found myself giving it the ultimate side eye on several occasions.

Colored Sugar Water is Lucy Merriweather's story.  The granddaughter of a Louisiana healer, Lucy believes in a little of everything, from fortune telling to voodoo to God.  Lucy, the regional manager of a successful chain of fitness centers, is stuck in a stable, but boring, relationship with Spencer, a McDonald's franchise owner.  Spencer is dependable, but far too predictable for Lucy.

Adel Kelly has been Lucy's best friend since their college days.  Married to Thad, who's always on the brink of the next great idea, Adel is tired of carrying the weight of their household on her shoulders.  At her age, she should be thinking about having babies, but if Thad doesn't get it together, she'll be raising any future kids as a single mother.

When the two happen across a late night commercial for psychics, Lucy dares to call the number, even as Adel warns her not to.  Before she knows it, Lucy is caught up in a whirlwind romance with Kuba, the man that answered the phone, and Spencer and Adel are both losing the Lucy they used to know.

This book started off fairly decent and then it evolved into Christianity versus voodoo versus the supernatural.  It just didn't work for me.  I prefer to keep my genres separate.  I know that when I pick up a Tananarive Due book, I'm going to get vampires and what not.  When I picked up this book, there was no indication that Venise Berry was going to try to take me there.  If I had realized that before I started reading, I probably wouldn't have picked it up.

272pp
Published: December 2001

 

Theme: Nightmares by Dana Dane

#BookReview: Just Wanna Testify - Pearl Cleage

Before I ever picked up Just Wanna Testify I read several tweets and posts on Goodreads about how it was unlike anything Pearl Cleage had written before, and that that wasn't necessarily a good thing.  So you can understand why I was hesitant to pick it up.  I'm so glad I ignored the tweets and ratings and read it myself. I LOVED IT!

I'm going to tell you upfront  that Cleage has brought vampires to the West End.  For those not familiar with her work, the West End is an area of town that Cleage has created.  Made up of hard working men and women, it's protected by the otherworldly Blue Hamilton.  Blue and his security crew keep criminals and a bad element out of the West End, offering women and children a safe space.  Married to Regina and father to Sweetie, he's as content as any man can be.  And then the vamps show up.

So before you go into this "I don't do vamp lit and I'm not going to read this" tirade, much like the one I went on, let me tell you what this book is not.  It's not vamp lit.  There's no Sookie Stackhouse and friends coming to take on the vamps.  There's no Bill or Eric trying to prove that not all vamps are bad.

Instead, there are the Mayflower sisters (perhaps Cleage's hat tip to Anne Rice's Mayfair witch family of the same name and same state), natives of Louisiana, international top models and tomato drinking vampires.  The Mayflowers arrive in town under the pretense of a photo shoot, but they're really there for something much more important to the survival of their breed.  And that's as far as I'm going with the synopsis.

Sure, the vamps could have been a turn off, but very rarely does Cleage get it wrong, so readers should have known she was going to bring it sooner or later.  And bring it she does. Now let's talk about the message in the book.

Readers that put the book down too early missed the message and should kick themselves for giving up so soon.  Actually there are three messages.  The first is that black women have historically stood by black men no matter how badly they've treated them and should continue to do so, though not to the detriment of themselves.  The second message is that black men have got to be accountable for themselves and other black men.  It's not enough to say you've made it and not reach back to help someone else, especially the generations that come after you.  And the third message is that love changes everything.

Could Cleage have just written an essay with these three messages and called it a day? Sure, but she didn't. These are things I took away from the book. Maybe I'm right, maybe I'm as wrong as two left shoes.  To be sure, you should pick up a copy and read for yourself.

What did you like about the book?
Duh, the messages.

What didn't you like about the book?
The models didn't really have to be vampires.  They really could have been any otherworldly creature or a regular human devoid of emotion,  so the decision to make them vampires is somewhat confusing.

What could the author do to improve this book?
I'd say stay in her own lane and leave the supernatural to others, like Tananarive Due or the late Octavia Butler, since her readers seem to have a problem with it.  On the other hand, Blue and Abbie have always been supernatural beings, so perhaps she should have refreshed reader's memories upfront and eased them into the concept of vampires in West End.

256pp

Published May 2011

Theme: I Want to Testify by The Parliaments

#BookReview: Camileon - Shykia Bell

Camile has always been taunted by her classmates, that is, when they notice she's around.  Often overlooked by everyone, Camile has struggled to make it through life with only her mother as a constant companion.  She's determined to make it on her own, but when her mother falls ill, the perfect world that she's constructed for Camile starts to crumble around her.

A mysterious stranger introduces herself to Camile while she's visiting her mother in the hospital and suddenly Camile has the friend she's always dreamed of.  Akalina is everything that Camile is not.  She's outgoing and not afraid to stick up for herself.  Camile is so grateful to have a shoulder to lean on that she's willing to overlook Akalina's borderline psychotic personality.

I can't say enough about how good this book is.  It's Tananarive Due's Blood Colony meets Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse series minus the vampires.  It's so rare that you run across sci fi books featuring characters of color, that it's refreshing when it happens.  When the author approached me on Twitter about reading Camileon, I was a bit hesitant, but only because I've been sent some really, really bad books courtesy of the Twitterverse (see my review of My Husband's Fiance).

I was pleasantly surprised to find that this book was exceptional and apparently overlooked in the sci fi realm.  I turned to fellow readers Dren from Dren's BSpot and Marq from Love to Read for Fun as this genre is really more of their thing than mine and neither of them had heard of it.  I did find myself having to re-read some passages to fully comprehend the scene, but I suspect that it was only because the world of sci fi lit is something with which I have limited contact.  I'm looking forward to reading the next book in this series.

244pp
Published July 2008

Theme: She's Strange by Cameo

Author of the Month - Tananarive Due

Tananarive Due — pronounced tah-nah-nah-REEVE doo — is the American Book Award-winning author of several books, ranging from supernatural thrillers to a mystery to a civil rights memoir. Blood Colony (released in June 2008), is the long-awaited sequel to her 2001 thriller The Living Blood and 1997’s My Soul to Keep, a reader favorite that Stephen King said “bears favorable comparison to Interview with the Vampire. Blood Colony continues the saga of African immortals with healing blood.

Due also collaborates with her husband, novelist and screenwriter Steven Barnes. They recently sold their screenplay adaptation of her novel The Good House to Fox Searchlight studios. In the summer of 2007, Due and Barnes published their first mystery, Casanegra: A Tennyson Hardwick Novel, which they wrote in collaboration with actor Blair Underwood. Publishers Weekly called Casanegra “seamlessly entertaining.” The series continued with In the Night of the Heat and From Cape Town with Love, scheduled for publication in May 2010.

The Living Blood, which received a 2002 American Book Award, “should set the standard for supernatural thrillers of the new millennium,”said Publishers Weekly, which named The Living Blood and My Soul to Keep among the best novels of the year. The Good House was nominated as Best Novel by the International Horror Guild.The Black Rose based on the life of business pioneer Madam C.J. Walker, was nominated for an NAACP Image Award. My Soul to Keep and The Good House are both in film development at Fox Searchlight.

Due’s novel Joplin’s Ghost blends the supernatural, history and the present-day music scene as a rising R&B singer’s life is changed forever by encounters with the ghost of Ragtime King Scott Joplin. Due also brought history to life in The Black Rose, a historical novel based on the research of Alex Haley – and Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights, which she co-authored with her mother, civil rights activist Patricia Stephens Due. Freedom in the Family was named 2003's Best Civil Rights Memoir by Black Issues Book Review (Patricia Stephens Due took part in the nation’s first “Jail-In” in 1960, spending 49 days in jail in Tallahassee, Florida, after a sit-in at a Woolworth lunch counter).

In 2004, alongside such luminaries as Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison, Due received the “New Voice in Literature Award” at the Yari Yari Pamberi conference co-sponsored by New York University’s Institute of African-American Affairs and African Studies Program and the Organization of Women Writers of Africa.

-excerpts above from Tananarive Due's website

My personal favorites from Ms. Due are The Black Rose and the Tennyson Hardwick series. Her writing really brought Madame C.J. Walker to life for me and I appreciate the Hardwick series for the covers with Blair Underwood's naked back! I'm also a big fan of The Good House and The Blood Colony series. I'm usually too much of a chicken to venture into the supernatural, but her writing is just too delicious to resist.

Do you have a favorite by the author?

#BookReview: Eden, Ohio - Shawne Johnson

Eden, Ohio is a fictional town founded by twelve runaway slave families. The founding mother, Eliza, feels a great responsibility to the town and its residents and passes that responsibility down to her first born daughter, Eliza. Through intuition, home remedies and a connection with a higher power, the Elizas have managed to keep Eden, Ohio a safe place for the families, until the day white families arrive intent on taking over. The outcome of the battle that ensues has lasting effects on several generations to come and it will take the return of a lost son to make things right again.

On a side note, I thought the editing in this book was horrible. In several instances there were verbs missing. I couldn't tell if this was intentional or not. It seemed as though there were two different styles of writing conflicting throughout the book and it would have been simpler if the author had picked one and stayed with it. The missing verbs were not a part of the dialect, which would have been understandable, but were instead, part of the narration.