Wednesday, January 31, 2018

#BookReview: MOUTHS DON'T SPEAK by Katia D. Ulysse

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Synopsis: No one was prepared for the massive earthquake that struck Haiti in 2010, taking over a quarter-million lives, and leaving millions of others homeless. Three thousand miles away, Jacqueline Florestant mourns the presumed death of her parents, while her husband, a former US Marine and combat veteran, cares for their three-year-old daughter as he fights his own battles with acute PTSD.

Horrified and guilt-ridden, Jacqueline returns to Haiti in search of the proverbial "closure." Unfortunately, the Haiti she left as a child twenty-five years earlier has disappeared. Her quest turns into a tornado of deception, desperation, and more death. So Jacqueline holds tightly to her daughter--the only one who must not die.

Review: It's difficult to read Katia D. Ulysse's Mouths Don't Speak without drawing comparisons to two recent works of fiction set in Haiti: Roxane Gay's An Untamed State and Dimitry Elias Léger's God Loves Haiti. Mouths Don't Speak feels a bit like a combination of both and it works well. But where An Untamed State shocked readers with its brutality and God Loves Haiti gave readers a firsthand view of the immediate aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, Mouths Don't Speak doesn't have the same brutality and the results of the earthquake are seen from a distance.

When the book opens, Jacqueline is safe at home in Baltimore frantically trying to get through to her parents back in Haiti. For weeks she hungers for news, watching TV day and night as she continually tries to reach home. During this time we find Haiti was never really home for Jacqueline, having been shipped off to boarding school in her early years. And the parents she's desperate to hear from are more of a thorn in her side than a rose in bloom.

As Jacqueline sinks deeper into despair, her husband Kevin becomes a more central figure. He keeps the household running, becomes the caretaker for their three-year-old daughter, Amber. So at first, you think Kevin has it all together, but he's battling his own demons, a result of his own time in Haiti.

Ulysse introduces a lot of interesting characters and story lines that could have fallen flat with other authors, but the writing and the characters feel personal to her. She knows what will shock her audience and how to ease them into difficult scenes and situations. There are no minor characters within her pages because each and every person and line they speak plays a role. I can't wait to see what she does next.

224 p.
Published: January 2018
Disclaimer: Copy of book received from publisher; opinions are my own.

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Click to purchase

Friday, January 26, 2018

New Books Coming Your Way, January 30, 2018

The Darkest Child by Delores Phillips
432 p.; Fiction/African-American

Pakersfield, Georgia, 1958: Thirteen-year-old Tangy Mae Quinn is the sixth of ten fatherless siblings. She is the darkest-skinned among them and therefore the ugliest in her mother, Rozelle’s, estimation, but she’s also the brightest. Rozelle—beautiful, charismatic, and light-skinned—exercises a violent hold over her children. Fearing abandonment, she pulls them from school at the age of twelve and sends them to earn their keep for the household, whether in domestic service, in the fields, or at “the farmhouse” on the edge of town, where Rozelle beds local men for money.

But Tangy Mae has been selected to be part of the first integrated class at a nearby white high school. She has a chance to change her life, but can she break from Rozelle’s grasp without ruinous—even fatal—consequences?

The Wedding Date by Jasmine Guillory
320 p.; Fiction/Romance

Agreeing to go to a wedding with a guy she gets stuck with in an elevator is something Alexa Monroe wouldn’t normally do. But there’s something about Drew Nichols that’s too hard to resist.

On the eve of his ex’s wedding festivities, Drew is minus a plus one. Until a power outage strands him with the perfect candidate for a fake girlfriend…

After Alexa and Drew have more fun than they ever thought possible, Drew has to fly back to Los Angeles and his job as a pediatric surgeon, and Alexa heads home to Berkeley, where she’s the mayor’s chief of staff. Too bad they can’t stop thinking about the other…

They’re just two high-powered professionals on a collision course toward the long distance dating disaster of the century—or closing the gap between what they think they need and what they truly want…

This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America by Morgan Jerkins
272 p.; Essays

Morgan Jerkins is only in her twenties, but she has already established herself as an insightful, brutally honest writer who isn’t afraid of tackling tough, controversial subjects. In This Will Be My Undoing, she takes on perhaps one of the most provocative contemporary topics: What does it mean to “be”—to live as, to exist as—a black woman today? This is a book about black women, but it’s necessary reading for all Americans.

Doubly disenfranchised by race and gender, often deprived of a place within the mostly white mainstream feminist movement, black women are objectified, silenced, and marginalized with devastating consequences, in ways both obvious and subtle, that are rarely acknowledged in our country’s larger discussion about inequality. In This Will Be My Undoing, Jerkins becomes both narrator and subject to expose the social, cultural, and historical story of black female oppression that influences the black community as well as the white, male-dominated world at large.

Whether she’s writing about Sailor Moon; Rachel Dolezal; the stigma of therapy; her complex relationship with her own physical body; the pain of dating when men say they don’t “see color”; being a black visitor in Russia; the specter of “the fast-tailed girl” and the paradox of black female sexuality; or disabled black women in the context of the “Black Girl Magic” movement, Jerkins is compelling and revelatory.

All the Women in My Family Sing: Women Write the World: Essays on Equality, Justice, and Freedom edited by Deborah Santana
336 p.; Essays

All the Women in My Family Sing is an anthology documenting the experiences of women of color at the dawn of the twenty-first century. It is a vital collection of prose and poetry whose topics range from the pressures of being the vice-president of a Fortune 500 Company, to escaping the killing fields of Cambodia, to the struggles inside immigration, identity, romance, and self-worth. These brief, trenchant essays capture the aspirations and wisdom of women of color as they exercise autonomy, creativity, and dignity and build bridges to heal the brokenness in today’s turbulent world.

Sixty-nine authors — African American, Asian American, Chicana, Native American, Cameroonian, South African, Korean, LGBTQI — lend their voices to broaden cross-cultural understanding and to build bridges to each other’s histories and daily experiences of life. America Ferrera’s essay is from her powerful speech at the Women’s March in Washington D.C.; Natalie Baszile writes about her travels to Louisiana to research Queen Sugar and finding the “painful truths” her father experienced in the “belly of segregation;” Porochista Khakpour tells us what it is like to fly across America under the Muslim travel ban; Lalita Tademy writes about her transition from top executive at Sun Microsystems to NY Times bestselling author.

This anthology is monumental and timely as human rights and justice are being challenged around the world. It is a watershed title, not only written, but produced entirely by women of color, including the publishing, editing, process management, book cover design, and promotions. Our vision is to empower underrepresented voices and to impact the world of publishing in America — particularly important in a time when 80% of people who work in publishing self-identify as white (as found recently in a study by Lee & Low Books, and reported on NPR).

Smoketown: The Untold Story of the Other Great Black Renaissance by Mark Whitaker
432 p.; History

Today black Pittsburgh is known as the setting for August Wilson’s famed plays about noble but doomed working-class strivers. But this community once had an impact on American history that rivaled the far larger black worlds of Harlem and Chicago. It published the most widely read black newspaper in the country, urging black voters to switch from the Republican to the Democratic Party and then rallying black support for World War II. It fielded two of the greatest baseball teams of the Negro Leagues and introduced Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers. Pittsburgh was the childhood home of jazz pioneers Billy Strayhorn, Billy Eckstine, Earl Hines, Mary Lou Williams, and Erroll Garner; Hall of Fame slugger Josh Gibson—and August Wilson himself. Some of the most glittering figures of the era were changed forever by the time they spent in the city, from Joe Louis and Satchel Paige to Duke Ellington and Lena Horne.

Mark Whitaker’s Smoketown is a captivating portrait of this unsung community and a vital addition to the story of black America. It depicts how ambitious Southern migrants were drawn to a steel-making city on a strategic river junction; how they were shaped by its schools and a spirit of commerce with roots in the Gilded Age; and how their world was eventually destroyed by industrial decline and urban renewal. Whitaker takes readers on a rousing, revelatory journey—and offers a timely reminder that Black History is not all bleak.

Black Fortunes: The Story of the First Six African Americans Who Escaped Slavery and Became Millionaires by Shomari Wills
320 p.; History

While Oprah Winfrey, Jay-Z, Beyoncé, Michael Jordan, and Will Smith are among the estimated 35,000 black millionaires in the nation today, these famous celebrities were not the first blacks to reach the storied one percent. Between the years of 1830 and 1927, as the last generation of blacks born into slavery was reaching maturity, a small group of smart, tenacious, and daring men and women broke new ground to attain the highest levels of financial success.

Black Fortunes is an intriguing look at these remarkable individuals, including Napoleon Bonaparte Drew—author Shomari Wills’ great-great-great-grandfather—the first black man in Powhatan County (contemporary Richmond) to own property in post-Civil War Virginia. His achievements were matched by five other unknown black entrepreneurs including:
  • Mary Ellen Pleasant, who used her Gold Rush wealth to further the cause of abolitionist John Brown;
  • Robert Reed Church, who became the largest landowner in Tennessee;
  • Hannah Elias, the mistress of a New York City millionaire, who used the land her lover gave her to build an empire in Harlem;
  • Orphan and self-taught chemist Annie Turnbo-Malone, who developed the first national brand of hair care products;
  • Madam C. J Walker, Turnbo-Malone’s employee who would earn the nickname America’s “first female black millionaire;”
  • Mississippi school teacher O. W. Gurley, who developed a piece of Tulsa, Oklahoma, into a “town” for wealthy black professionals and craftsmen” that would become known as “the Black Wall Street.”
A fresh, little-known chapter in the nation’s story—A blend of Hidden Figures, Titan, and The Tycoons—Black Fortunes illuminates the birth of the black business titan and the emergence of the black marketplace in America as never before.










Friday, January 12, 2018

#BookReview: THE PERFECT NANNY by Leila Slimani

Synopsis: When Myriam, a mother and brilliant French-Moroccan lawyer, decides to return to work, she and her husband are forced to look for a caretaker for their two young children. They are thrilled to find Louise: the perfect nanny right from the start.

Louise sings to the children, cleans the family’s beautiful apartment in Paris’s upscale tenth arrondissement, stays late whenever asked, and hosts enviable kiddie parties. But as the couple and the nanny become more dependent on each other, jealousy, resentment, and frustrations mount, shattering the idyllic tableau.

Building tension with every page, The Perfect Nanny is a riveting exploration of power, class, race, domesticity, and motherhood—and the debut in America of an immensely talented writer.

Review: The Perfect Nanny is delightfully creepy read you won't want to put down once you start it. Told mostly from the points of view of Myriam and Louise, it's the story of how everything goes right until it goes wrong, except the book starts with exactly what went wrong and when. The rewind effect works here because there's no spoiler waiting for you at the end. You know upfront what you're up against and if you choose to keep reading, that's on you.

The author goes into a lot of detail about what Louise looked like, much more so than any other character. We know Myriam is French-Morrocan, but we're never told Paul's race or nationality. But Louise is white, not just white but porcelain white. She's a small dainty woman, fastidious in how she dresses and presents herself. She prepares meals, the children love her, she gives Myriam and Paul their pre-children lives back. She is, as the title says, the perfect nanny.

Paul's interactions with Louis are interesting because it seems he sees the cracks in her porcelain facade long before Myriam does, which isn't surprising. While Paul has always had the freedom of escaping the house daily to go work, Myriam has spent the last few years at home with the children. Wouldn't you avoid looking at what was directly in front of you if it meant you could continue to pursue the career you missed so much?

Because the reader already knows how the story ends from page one, it's not too shocking when we finally come to the scene of the crime. I appreciate the author taking time to go beyond that scene and telling us what happened next, though I would have liked more follow up on Paul and Myriam. The Perfect Nanny is the perfect read for those who love plot twists and creepy little women.

240 p.
Published: January 2018
Purchase: The Perfect Nanny: A Novel

Wednesday, January 10, 2018

#BookReview: SUMMERTIME by Adrienne Thompson

Synopsis: J'Nay Walker is a talented singer, driven toward success by a promise she made to her late mother. One gloomy day, on the tail of some disappointing news, tragedy strikes, threatening not only to derail her plans, but to end her life. As a result, she soon finds herself on an unlikely journey, but is she ready for an unlikely love?

Review: The saying good things come in small packages could not be truer when it comes to Adrienne Thompson's Summertime.  Set in present day Arkansas, our protagonist is a waitress at her family's restaurant by day and an aspiring songbird by night. The restaurant, started by her grandmother in the 30s, is run by her no nonsense aunt who also allows J'Nay and her cousin to live in the boarding house the same grandmother started.

A freak accident at work sends J'Nay from 2015 Little Rock, Arkansas to 1930s New Orleans. Similar to The Wiz, J'Nay (now known as Junie) meets characters that look like her family and friends, but they have different names and occupations. One person in particular strikes her fancy, a young Dizzy Gillespie. So while Junie isn't quite sure how she traveled back in time and why she's there, she's grateful for every minute she spends with the young musician and her family and friends.

This is my first read from Thompson and she packs a lot into 104 pages, but it's all quality. In a short time, she gives readers multi-dimensional characters, well thought out story lines and a thirst for more of her work. I happened to catch Summertime while it was free last week, but I would have gladly paid for it had I known I would love it as much as a I did.

104 p.
Published: June 2015
Purchase: Summertime (A Novella)

Friday, January 5, 2018

New Books Coming Your Way, January 2 & 9, 2018

Mouths Don't Speak by Katia D. Ulysse
224 p.; Fiction

No one was prepared for the massive earthquake that struck Haiti in 2010, taking over a quarter-million lives, and leaving millions more homeless. Three thousand miles away, Jacqueline Florestant mourns the presumed death of her parents, while her husband, a former US Marine and combat veteran, cares for their three-year-old daughter as he fights his own battles with acute PTSD.

Horrified and guilt-ridden, Jacqueline returns to Haiti in search of the proverbial "closure." Unfortunately, the Haiti she left as a child twenty-five years earlier has disappeared. Her quest turns into a tornado of deception, desperation, and more death. So Jacqueline holds tightly to her daughter--the only one who must not die.

A State of Freedom by Neel Mukherjee
288 p.; Fiction

In this stunning novel, prize-winning author Neel Mukherjee wrests open the central, defining events of our century: displacement and migration. Five characters, in very different circumstances—from a domestic cook in Mumbai, to a vagrant and his dancing bear, to a girl who escapes terror in her home village for a new life in the city—find out the meanings of dislocation and the desire for more.

Set in contemporary India and moving between the reality of this world and the shadow of another, this novel of multiple narratives—formally daring, fierce, but full of pity—delivers a devastating and haunting exploration of the unquenchable human urge to strive for a different life.

The Perfect Nanny by Leila Slimani
240 p.; Fiction

When Myriam, a mother and brilliant French-Moroccan lawyer, decides to return to work, she and her husband are forced to look for a caretaker for their two young children. They are thrilled to find Louise: the perfect nanny right from the start. Louise sings to the children, cleans the family’s beautiful apartment in Paris’s upscale tenth arrondissement, stays late whenever asked, and hosts enviable kiddie parties. But as the couple and the nanny become more dependent on each other, jealousy, resentment, and frustrations mount, shattering the idyllic tableau. Building tension with every page, The Perfect Nanny is a riveting exploration of power, class, race, domesticity, and motherhood—and the debut in America of an immensely talented writer.

The Widows of Malabar Hill by Sujata Massey
400 p.; Fiction

Perveen Mistry, the daughter of a respected Zoroastrian family, has just joined her father’s law firm, becoming one of the first female lawyers in India. Armed with a legal education from Oxford, Perveen also has a tragic personal history that makes women’s legal rights especially important to her.

Mistry Law has been appointed to execute the will of Mr. Omar Farid, a wealthy Muslim mill owner who has left three widows behind. But as Perveen examines the paperwork, she notices something strange: all three of the wives have signed over their full inheritance to a charity. What will they live on? Perveen is suspicious, especially since one of the widows has signed her form with an X—meaning she probably couldn’t even read the document. The Farid widows live in full purdah—in strict seclusion, never leaving the women’s quarters or speaking to any men. Are they being taken advantage of by an unscrupulous guardian? Perveen tries to investigate, and realizes her instincts were correct when tensions escalate to murder. Now it is her responsibility to figure out what really happened on Malabar Hill, and to ensure that no innocent women or children are
in further danger.

The Boat People by Sharon Bala
352 p.; Fiction

When a rusty cargo ship carrying Mahindan and five hundred fellow refugees from Sri Lanka’s bloody civil war reaches Vancouver’s shores, the young father thinks he and his six-year-old son can finally start a new life. Instead, the group is thrown into a detention processing center, with government officials and news headlines speculating that among the “boat people” are members of a separatist militant organization responsible for countless suicide attacks—and that these terrorists now pose a threat to Canada’s national security. As the refugees become subject to heavy interrogation, Mahindan begins to fear that a desperate act taken in Sri Lanka to fund their escape may now jeopardize his and his son’s chance for asylum.

Told through the alternating perspectives of Mahindan; his lawyer, Priya, a second-generation Sri Lankan Canadian who reluctantly represents the refugees; and Grace, a third-generation Japanese Canadian adjudicator who must decide Mahindan’s fate as evidence mounts against him, The Boat People is a spellbinding and timely novel that provokes a deeply compassionate lens through which to view the current refugee crisis.