Tag: AOC

memoir

Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More- Janet Mock

Stephanie2 Comments

So here’s an issue. I accidentally misread a Book Riot 2019 Read Harder Challenge task as a book by a trans or nonbinary author, when the task is actually a novel by a trans or nonbinary author (Hi, I’m Stephanie. I read stuff…). And because I misread it, I picked up Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More by Janet Mock (Atria Books, 2014). As it turns out, my reading of River of Teeth by Sarah Gailey also counts as a novel by a trans or nonbinary author, so this wonderful book that deepened my understanding of what it means to grow up and exist as transgender, is just gravy. 🙂 (Side note: this would also count as the task of an #ownvoices book set in Oceania; Janet Mock is native Hawaiian and black and spends the majority of her childhood and adolescence on the island.)

Janet Mock was born Charles, but although she didn’t have the words to explain how she felt, she knew that something wasn’t quite right with how the world saw her. Sports, roughhousing, crew cuts, none of these fit the way Janet saw herself; she wanted glamour, beauty, femininity. Her desire to be female predated the trauma she suffered via her parents’ divorce, her mother’s absence, both parents’ drug use, and two years of molestation by her father’s girlfriend’s teenage son (obvious content warnings for this; the description is fairly graphic). Living with her father was difficult; he didn’t understand the child he saw as being overly feminine and tried everything he could to repair what he perceived as misguided. Back home in Hawaii, the land of her birth, Janet (who began going by Janet at, I believe, age 13) found a more accepting family and culture. Her mother and siblings didn’t always get it right, but they tried, and Janet was able to surround herself with friends who loved and accepted her as she was.

This didn’t make Janet’s path to womanhood an easy one, however. There were still teachers at school who othered her and refused to stand up for her when students harassed her (there’s no excuse for this, and reading this made me SO angry for her. I was privy to a teacher turning her back on a classmate bullying a disabled student when I was in high school. I was utterly incensed, and yes, I stepped in and spoke up, loudly. Me, the person who rarely said a single word in class, EVER. The bully looked shocked and shut the hell up immediately. Moral of the story? Don’t be like that teacher). In order to pay for the expensive gender reassignment surgery, Janet, like so many transgender people, engaged in sex work (there’s a content warning here for violence). She still had years of personal growth ahead of her, to work through her earlier trauma and unlearn all the negative ways she’d learned to think about herself, but Janet Mock has grown into a beacon of strength and insight and self-acceptance. If I can ever afford to take whatever Master Class in confidence that she neeeeeeeeeeeds to be teaching, I would so be there. Her poise and determination are incredible, and I wish I had even a thimbleful of what she has.

If you’ve never read a book about being transgender before, this would be a good place to start. Ms. Mock explains a lot of the very basics of what it means to be trans (her preferred term) and what trans people go through in order to live what their souls know is true. She does a lot of this in a manner of, “I later learned that many trans people…”, which helps the reader to feel they’re not alone in learning something new, that even she had things to learn, which I think would be helpful if someone is looking to expand their knowledge of this topic. She also explains the Hawaiian concept of mahu, third gender persons, which fascinated me. Not everything is as binary as some societies demand, and I so love learning about different ways of viewing the world (I also love learning about Hawaiian culture and history, so the fact that this was set there and Ms. Mock is native Hawaiian made me so happy to read!).

What a moving story about a remarkable woman who has had to work so hard just to be herself. 🙂

Visit Janet Mock’s website here.

Follow her on Twitter here.

fiction · middle grade · YA

Summer of the Mariposas- Guadalupe Garcia McCall

Stephanie2 Comments

Another task on Book Riot’s 2019 Read Harder Challenge is to read an #ownvoices novel set in Mexico or Central America. I always read through the suggestions, make note of what looks interesting, and then check to see what’s available at my libraries. Summer of the Mariposas by Guadalupe Garcia McCall looked like an interesting choice, and it was available at the library in the next town over, so onto the list it went.

Odilia and her four sisters (Juanita, twins Velia and Delia, and Pita, the youngest) are out swimming at their forbidden swimming hole when they discover a dead man floating in the water. They don’t want to call the authorities, because that would mean constant surveillance of their beloved swimming hole; telling their exhausted, overworked, newly single mother would only get them in trouble, because they weren’t supposed to be swimming in the first place. Instead, the girls decide to load up their father’s car (he left a year ago, he’s not using it anyway) with the body and drive it to the dead man’s home address in Mexico, which they discover on the ID stuffed into a pocket, along with a stack of cash.

But it won’t be a simple trip. A ghostly weeping woman known as La Llorona informs Odilia that this is going to be a journey that will transform all of them. She gives Odilia a magical ear pendant to help her along the way, and the girls set off towards adventure. When dropping off the body doesn’t exactly herald the reception they thought it would, they continue on to their abuelita’s house, meeting a witch, a fortune-telling blind woman, a warlock disguised as a donkey, a seriously creepy pack of owls, and a chupacabras. La Llorona appears on and off throughout the story to guide them, and the Aztec queen Tonantzin offers magical assistance through the gifted ear pendant, but what they really find throughout their journey is the strength of their bond and the deep love that exists between them and their mother.

Phew. There’s a LOT going on in this book. The inside flap of this book pitches this as ‘a Mexican American retelling of The Odyssey,’ and I think a big part of the reason I failed to connect to this book is that it’s been…somewhere around twenty-four years since I had anything to do with that particular piece. I really wish I’d been able to draw the parallels between the stories, but it’s been far too long. I also lack any kind of background in any Mexican or Aztec folklore, so that definitely didn’t help. Had I been more fully versed in these things, I think reading this book would have been a different experience and I would’ve felt more connected and more deeply invested.

It’s a lovely, well-written book, although I had to seriously suspend my disbelief in the beginning to accept that the sisters would all just pick up and leave with what seemed like no concern for how their mother would react to them having left without even a note. And that’s not even considering the fact that the girls were seemingly okay with riding in a stuffy car in the summer heat with a waterlogged dead body. Talking owls and donkeys, sure, I’ll buy that; teenage girls chill with sitting next to a dead body for a lengthy car ride? Mmmm, no. The relationship between the girls and their grandmother is lovely, however, and their reunion with their mother and eventual showdown with their father are both handled extremely well. And I absolutely adored the bits of Spanish sprinkled throughout the story (there’s a glossary in back), and the chance to see Mexico through the sisters’ eyes.

So this wasn’t quite the book for me, but if you enjoy retellings, stories of bonding between sisters, and stories with magical and fantastical elements, it may be the book for you!

Visit Guadalupe Garcia McCall’s website here.

Follow her on Twitter here.

fiction · middle grade

Ahimsa- Supriya Kelkar

Stephanie4 Comments

I love books set in India. It seems like such a diverse, complex place, and the Indian authors I’ve read always do such a wonderful job of surrounding me with the sights and sounds and colors of their country. And the descriptions of the food are almost always enough to send me running to my favorite local Indian restaurant (fun fact: when I was pregnant with my daughter and suffering from hyperemesis gravidarum, which is basically ‘morning’ sickness that can kill you, I was reading a book set in India and the descriptions of food had me feeling like I could actually eat that food and not be sick. And it was true! It was only a small amount, really, but it was delicious and that made me so, so happy, because I could barely eat anything else at all). All that to say that in the Book Riot 2019 Read Harder Challenge, one of their suggestions for a children’s or middle grade book that has won a diversity award since 2009 was Ahimsa by Supriya Kelkar, and I was happy to discover that one of my local libraries had it waiting on the shelves for me.

It’s 1942 and India is still under British rule (and once I picked this book up, I realized I’d gone from one book about colonization to another…). Mahatma Gandhi has asked families to give one family member each to the fight for freedom, and ten-year-old Anjali is horrified to learn that it’s her mother who will be that one person. While the movement is centered around ahimsa, or non-violence, Anjali knows people who have died and can’t imagine losing her mother. Her becoming a freedom fighter means big changes for the family, starting with discarding all the clothing made from the Indian cotton that the British spun in England and sold back to Indians at a high price, in favor of wearing only homespun Indian garments. Anjali isn’t happy about this at all, nor is she thrilled when her mother begins working with the Untouchables, the people of the lowest caste. Because it’s not just the British who need to change; Indian society must make changes of their own, as Anjali and her family learn.

This is a story of one step forward, two steps back, as it seems every story about the struggle for freedom is. Anjali’s parents make mistakes and eventually correct themselves and grow; Anjali begins to question things she’s been taught her entire life to be true. While Anjali is Hindu, her best friend Irfaan is Muslim, and though their differences have never been an issue in the past, they become a source of strain as Hindu-Muslim tensions rise under the struggle for freedom from colonial rule.

This is a fascinating look at India in its final years of British rule, as seen through the eyes of a child and her family who are learning to question everything. It’s lovely and intense and frustrating and frightening all at the same time. Anjali is a typical headstrong ten-year-old who is forced to grow up a little too quickly thanks to the times, and her parents are inspiring, both for their dedication to the cause of a self-ruling India and for their growth and their ability to admit when they’re wrong. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything set in this particular time period in India, so Ahimsa opened my eyes to both the struggle for freedom and that gap in my knowledge (and I’m definitely interested in learning more). This would be a really great parent-child read-aloud for anyone interested in India (or for homeschoolers doing a unit study on the country). It’s a complex book, and while I think I would have enjoyed at when I was younger, I think a lot of it would have gone over my head.

If this review isn’t up to my usual standards, I apologize. I was all ready to write this up on Monday and then my daughter started throwing up…and then I started throwing up. It’s been pure misery around here, and even sitting up for too long is exhausting (and I’ve got two more reviews to write). I haven’t gotten any reading done because holding the book has been too difficult! Like I said, MISERY. I’m ready to feel better soon! Needless to say, I probably won’t be running off to my favorite Indian restaurant quite yet, mostly because even just walking across the room makes me dizzy and out of breath. Maybe when I get better. 🙂

Do you find that there’s a particular country you just really love reading about? I’d love to hear about it!

Visit Supriya Kelkar’s website here. (And she has a new book coming out in 2020 that looks AWESOME, so I’m looking forward that!!!)

Follow her on Twitter here.

fiction · YA

On the Come Up- Angie Thomas

Stephanie6 Comments

How badly did I want to read On the Come Up by Angie Thomas? I put my name on the list as soon as this appeared in the library’s catalog. On Saturday at 3:14 pm, I received the email that my copy was waiting for me on the holds shelf.

By 3:33 pm, I had that book in my hands.

I only live 1.8 miles from the library, but I had just gotten up from a nap. Didn’t care. When the library summons me, I go, and I go in a hurry when it’s Angie Thomas waiting for me.

Set in the same neighborhood as Thomas’s debut novel, The Hate U Give, On the Come Upfocuses on Bri, a sixteen year-old who dreams of becoming a rapper. Her father, who was murdered when Bri was young, was an up-and-coming rap artist who had just begun to taste success, so the rhymes Bri fills her notebooks with run deep in her blood. But Bri’s not about capitalizing on her father’s name; she’s out to make it on her own merits. Times are tough at home, though; her mother, who’s in recovery from the addiction that nearly ruined everything after her husband died, has just lost her job, leaving Bri’s older brother Trey’s pizza place job the family’s sole source of income. Aunt Pooh, who serves as Bri’s manager alongside dealing drugs, has gotten her a place at the local rap battle, and thus begins everyone knowing exactly who Bri Jackson is.

Nothing is ever that simple, though. Bri’s got trouble at school from the security guards who seem to treat the black and brown kids more harshly than the white ones, and when the song she writes and records to protest the injustice of it goes viral, Bri gets more attention than she bargained for. Some of it’s positive- Supreme, a producer who knew her father, is interested in helping her grow her career- but some of it comes from a local gang that takes her lyrics as a front against them, and suddenly Bri’s not sure she’s projecting the image of who she really is. Can she stay true to herself and the kind of music she wants to make while still saving her family from poverty and making it out of the Garden?

Ms. Thomas tackles a lot of issues in this novel- poverty, racism, addiction, friendship, strained family relationships, grief, the constant stress and stressors of life in an impoverished community- but they’re never thrown in the reader’s face in an overwhelming manner. Rather, she lets you get to know each character, fall in love with them, and lets the pressures build as the characters live their lives. It’s such an amazing change from the YA that I read growing up, where the authors would basically punch you in the face with whatever message they were trying to convey. Ms. Thomas’s voice is so fresh, so immediate and authentic, that it imbues each character with such energy that they practically leap off the page. Please, someone tell me this is going to be made into a movie, because I will see that thing twice.

Each character in On the Come Up has their own distinct personality (which, you’d think that’d be a given in all novels, but it’s really not). I’ve read plenty of books with large casts where I had to stop and try to remember who that guy was, or refer to my notes to remember the girl that was speaking. Not so at ALL in this book. There’s no mistaking Sonny for Malik, no interchanging Curtis with anyone else, no struggle to remember who Shana was again. Every single character is easily identifiable by their own traits and mannerisms, and the description is never once overdone here. And Ms. Thomas is a master of dialogue. It’s the way the characters speak, both with each other and Bri’s inner dialogue, that makes this story feel like the cool side of the pillow on a summer evening. I only hope that one day, my own writing is as real as this.

I wasn’t sure how on earth Ms. Thomas could ever manage to follow up The Hate U Give– second novels are notoriously difficult, even without your first being the smash success THUG was- but On the Come Up is utterly brilliant and just as amazing. She thanks someone in the acknowledgements for believing in Bri and her story, even when she was struggling to write, but the finished product comes off as gloriously effortless. This book is just. so. good. My brain was going full on teenage-girl-screaming-at-the-Beatles-on-The-Ed-Sullivan-Show fangirl levels throughout the book. Angie Thomas has sealed the deal for me with On the Come Up; I will read absolutely anything she ever writes from now until the end of time.

I may be about the last book blogger to have read this, but it was absolutely worth the wait, and I’m thinking I should get in line now for whatever it is she writes next, because I’m an Angie Thomas fan for life now.

Check out Angie Thomas’s website here.

Follow her on Twitter here.

nonfiction

Between the World and Me- Ta-Nehisi Coates

Stephanie3 Comments

BookRiot suggested Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me as a book by a journalist or about journalism, #5 on their Read Harder 2019 Challenge. I’d been wanting to read Coates for ages now, and this seemed like an excellent place to start.

I’m not even sure what I can say that would even begin to do justice to this beautiful, painful little book. Written as a letter to his teenage son, Mr. Coates covers a wide range of topics: the danger of making ones way through life in a black body; the fear he feels for his son when teenagers like Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin and his friend Prince Carmen Jones wind up dead on the street with no consequences for the people who kill them; the breathtakingly cruel history of slavery, and the trauma and consequences of that history that still resound in our justice system and in everyday lives of black people; and the story of how he became the man he is today.

Mr. Coates conveys his anger, his frustration, his pain, and his wonder at his son and being a father in such eloquent, moving language that had I wanted to write down the most meaningful quotes, I would’ve ended up copying out the entire book, and if I had wanted to underline the parts that touched me deeply, angered me, made me think, there would’ve been a line under every piece of text . This starts on the very first page and doesn’t end until the last, with the imagery of sheets of rain a haunting metaphor for the grief one feels when we look around and are able to see all the trauma White America has inflicted and continues to inflict on people with black skin. I am deeply, deeply ashamed and angered. We should be so much better than that, but we actively choose not to be, and it’s infuriating.

This is an important book, and although I have yet to fully engage with audiobooks, I feel as though this would make a stunning one. Mr. Coates’s impassioned words deserve to be voiced out loud, as so much of the book reads like the most powerful speech you’ve ever heard. If you’ve enjoyed this as an audiobook, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

I think this is a book everyone will be handed in school, if not now (as it should be), then in the future. It deserves to be read widely, repeatedly, until its words are engraved on our souls, until we finally GET IT, and then even more so that we never forget.

View Ta-Nehisi Coates’s writing at The Atlantic here.

indie

Call Numbers- Syntell Smith

Stephanie1 Comment



When I was asked to review Syntell Smith’s novel Call Numbers, a workplace drama set in a branch of the New York Public Library, I was intrigued. What kind of drama could librarians and their staff possibly have? A LOT, as it turns out!

Robin Walker has just been transferred to the 58th Street Branch of the New York Public Library. What he doesn’t know is that he’s been placed in the open job that was supposed to go to a page, a pregnant teenager who desperately needs the money and benefits. This immediately sets Robin at odds with quite a few of the other employees, who set out to enact their revenge. Robin’s fiery temperament ensures that he won’t make things easy for them, and the drama will touch every part of the library and every member of the staff.

If you only ever pictured librarians and library staff as cardigan-wearing noise-hushers, this will definitely expand your perception. Call Numbers features multiple fistfights (that result in collarbone fractures and shattered kneecaps, cracked ribs, concussions, and head and spinal trauma, among other injuries), a scheming head librarian who’s not afraid to game the system and elbow his way into monetary success for his branch, and the enemy of a library page being dangled off a roof. There’s an employee committing insurance fraud, multiple verbal altercations between staff, backstabbing, scheming, strategizing, and at least three minor characters who are at or close to seven feet tall. You’ve never met library workers like this before!

Mr. Smith has created an elaborate world in the rowdy 58th Street Branch. There’s little character description in the beginning, and at times I had some difficulty keeping the characters straight, especially since quite a bit of the novel is heavy on dialogue. It took until I was over halfway through the book before I could keep everyone straight, which was the point where I could relax while reading and appreciate the over-the-top behavior of Robin and his fellow coworkers. I welcomed the truce and eventual reluctant yet sincere friendship between Robin and Tommy in the weeks after their fight, and the crush Lakeshia, a young page, had on the several-years-older Robin was especially well-handled, both in terms of sensitivity to Lakeshia’s youth and her blossoming emotion. Her constant peeking across the room at Robin, peering around the corners of shelves, and nervousness every time she came near him was true-to-life and treated respectfully, which made her character enjoyable to read and probably my favorite.

Tucked in between the massive power struggle of the employees at 58th Street are literary quotes and bits of history (the story takes place in 1994), both from the past and current day to the story, which added a little extra to my reading. I had to take a quick Internet break when one character, in an attempt to intimidate another, dropped a name I didn’t recognize. While I knew about the 1991 riots in Crown Heights, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen specific names named, so I appreciated the detour this took me on so I could learn more. Call Numbers ends in a cliffhanger, so expect more from Syntell Smith and his boisterous band of library staff in the future!

Call Numbers will be available on June 21, 2019. Huge thanks to Mr. Smith for allowing me to read and review his work!

Follow Syntell Smith on Twitter here.

Check out his Facebook page here.

Visit his writing on Facebook here.

fiction · YA

When Dimple Met Rishi- Sandhya Menon

Stephanie1 Comment

Do you ever feel like you’re the last person on earth to read a certain book? When Dimple Met Rishi by Sandhya Menon has been on my radar for ages now, but when it first appeared, I was deep into reading down my massive Goodreads TBR list and didn’t want to deviate from it too much in case I lost momentum (so glad I’m getting to the end of that project!). And although I was crazy backed up with books last week, this book still managed to find its way into my library pile, because I have zero self-control at the library these days (I mean, there are worse places to not be able to say no, right?).

Dimple Shah has never felt like she fit in. Not at school where she gravitates toward tech stuff, not with her family, where her mother is fixated solely on finding her the Ideal Indian Husband (and not at all on Dimple’s potential for a fabulous career as a programmer). It’s a surprise to her when her parents allow her to attend Insomnia Con, a computer coding camp held at a university during the summer between the end of her senior year of high school and the beginning of her college life at Stanford. Dimple’s ready to take on the coding world, creating an app that will change lives and that will get her some attention from her coding inspiration, Jenny Lindt.

Rishi Patel is a traditional rule-following eldest son, bound and determined to live out his parents’ dreams for him even if it costs him his own dreams. Family means something, right? Not that his younger brother Ashish gets that. But Rishi, whose talents are better suited to art, is off to Insomnia Con. He’s on a mission…one that Dimple isn’t at all aware of, and that will begin with her throwing iced coffee in his face. After a rough start, Dimple and Rishi set a few ground rules that allow them to develop at least the start of a friendship, one that slowly blossoms into something else. But Dimple has plans, plans that don’t involve marriage (maybe not ever!), and she’s not entirely sure if Rishi is the kind of guy who can let her be herself…or even fully be himself.

When Dimple Met Rishi is about identity, the one we’re born with, the one our family assigns us, and all the different identities we wear and develop through life. I was surprised to see the negative reviews of this on Goodreads. While Dimple could be abrasive at times, I have yet to meet a person who can’t (I, ahem, kind of have an enormous sarcastic streak that catches some people off-guard, because I appear so nice and sweet!). And other reviewers are constantly mentioning Dimple bemoaning how she’s not like other girls. I didn’t read that at all. What I saw in Dimple was a girl who struggles with what she feels her mother and her community expects from her, someone who feels pressured and trapped into a role that she knows doesn’t fit who she is- and when we feel trapped, sometimes we lash out. I saw a girl who felt alienated because there weren’t many other girls into tech where she was (I’m sure that varies wildly by where you live), and whose family background made her different from the majority of kids around her at school (there’s a scene with Rishi where Dimple is so pleased that they can talk about their mothers and how he just gets it, without needing an explanation, and I found her relief at that charming). I understood Rishi’s sense of duty to his parents, even at the cost of his own dreams, whereas some of the reviews called him weak. It may be that I’m older; as an adult, as a parent, our lives are so often about sacrifice (sacrificing sleep, sacrificing your own health, sacrificing your own sanity to watch ANOTHER episode of LoudScreamyCartoonShow) that Rishi didn’t seem unrealistic to me. And the Aberzombies, well… I remember those kids well from high school. They existed. They were loud, obnoxious, acted as though the money their parents had earned made them better than everyone else… Yeah. I didn’t find them off the mark whatsoever.

Maybe this is just a case of readers bringing different things to the story. Maybe I would’ve read this different when I was younger; maybe the readers who dislike it on Goodreads would understand Dimple differently as they grow older. Each story is really a million different stories, isn’t it? A million different stories, and all of them valid.

While I would’ve liked to have seen was Dimple and Rishi working a little more on their app, although I just figured that took place off-screen. A few more scenes of them hard at work would’ve fit well with Dimple’s drive to improve her coding skills. But overall, I enjoyed this. I always enjoy reading stories with Indian characters (whether living in India or Indian by heritage); it’s a beautiful culture and learning more about it never fails to move me in some way. So this worked for me, and I’m honestly a little surprised at the vitriol I’m reading in so many Goodreads reviews.

Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts, because I’m feeling like I seriously missed something, in regards to those other reviews (although a friend of mine read and rated it four stars, so that makes me feel better!).

Check out Sandhya Menon’s website here.

Follow her on Twitter here.

black history · nonfiction · space

Hidden Figures: The Untold True Story of Four African-American Women Who Helped Launch Our Nation Into Space- Margot Lee Shetterly

Stephanie7 Comments

Hidden Figures: The Untold True Story of Four African-American Women Who Helped Launch Our Nation Into Space by Margot Lee Shetterly has been on my radar for a while. It’s been front and center on bookstore tables, on display at the library, and I think I’ve seen it on just about every book blog out there. And don’t forget the movie, which was wonderful (and I’m usually not a fan of anything dealing with space. Too many chances for things to go wrong and for the astronauts to get lost up there. Anxiety!). I’d always planned on reading it, but I never thought I’d get to it so soon (more on that later).

During World War II, the NACA (the agency that would eventually become NASA) needed calculations done for the research and construction of new aircraft, and a large number of those doing the calculations (by hand, of course!) were black female mathematicians. Making what was a good salary at the time, these women worked long days, often into the night, churning out packets of sophisticated equations, often without full knowledge of what they were working on or what the final results of the project ended up being. And they did it all in a world that, up until this point, had steadfastly refused to acknowledge their talents and successes solely due to the color of their skin.

Ms. Shetterly tells the story of women like Dorothy Vaughan, Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, and Christine Darden, painting a picture of their lives both before and after coming to the NACA, and the times they lived in. Even as these women were filling pages after page with face-melting math, black soldiers in uniform were being spit on by their fellow Americans and being refused service in restaurants. As they calculated trajectories and handed in the scores of math that would make military victory (and eventually space flight) possible, people who looked like them were still being told to sit at the back of the bus. Before coming to the NACA, one of the women featured made less as a teacher than the white janitor who cleaned her school (something like $850 per year; the starting salary at the NACA was $2,000). The discrepancy between what these women had to offer and how their ‘grateful’ nation treated people who looked like them is nothing short of infuriating, and for that reason alone, this book is a must-read.

But the book goes beyond that and celebrates the lives of women who were remarkable by any standards, and even more so due to the fact that they were able to rise far beyond the limits their country set for them. This is a story of exceptional accomplishment in the face of institutional adversity, and it’ll force you to examine exactly what we as a country are throwing away, what we might have had but chose not to, when we do things like underfund schools and condemn children in impoverished neighborhoods to subpar education.

So many times during this book, I had to stop and seethe at how hard the women had to struggle in order to access what they needed to be able to contribute to society. What on earth are we thinking when we make things more difficult for people to access education? And on that note, quite a few times I had to read certain sentences multiple times in order to get the basic gist of what Ms. Shetterly was saying. Math and science were never my thing (hence the book blog and not, say, an illustrious career in a STEM field), but whew, the complexities of what the women in this book were doing every single day were utterly mind-blowing. Man, am I glad that there are people out there who can do that kind of stuff, and I wish our country invested more in education so that the accomplishments of the women of Hidden Figures were without the fierce battle it took for them to get there.

I picked this book up on Friday thanks to the library book discussion group I attended on Thursday (which was AWESOME!!!! I loved it so, so much and I’m already signed up for next month). The librarian who led it was talking about BookRiot’s 2019 Read Harder Challenge, and while I’ve normally shied away from most challenges in the past, with the exception of this year’s Modern Mrs. Darcy Challenge, attending this discussion gave me the confidence to take on the Read Harder Challenge. If I don’t complete it, that’s okay, and at least I’ll have read some amazing new authors and books along the way, but I’ve got my eye on the goal here. Reading Hidden Figures was my first read for this, and it checks off #6, a book by an AOC set in or about space. I’m off to an amazing start.

Have you read Hidden Figures? How do you deal with the anger and frustration you feel when you read about how our country has treated and still treats people of color?

Visit Margot Lee Shetterly’s website here.

Follow her on Twitter here.

fiction · historical romance

Destiny’s Embrace- Beverly Jenkins

Stephanie7 Comments

‘Okay,’ I said to myself as I walked through the library. ‘I have enough books at home, I’m going to read a few from my own shelf, I’m not going to check any books out this time.’ And then I walked by the display of books by black authors for Black History Month. And all my resolve went up in a puff of smoke and a blur of motion as I snatched up Destiny’s Embrace by Beverly Jenkins.

In my defense, I’ve wanted to read one of Ms. Jenkins’s books ever since I saw her in Love Between the Covers, a documentary on romance novels and authors and the industry surrounding them (if you haven’t seen this, it’s wonderful). I enjoyed everything she had to say and looked her up on my next library trip. At the time, my library only had her work in ebooks and I wasn’t reading those at the time (long story why, but it involved being frightened of losing my momentum for reading down my Goodreads TBR list), but she’s never fallen off my radar. And now, she’s on it in a big, big way.

The year is 1885. Thirty-year-old Mariah Cooper, the daughter of a mean-spirited, abusive hag, lives in Philadelphia, where she works as a seamstress in her mother’s shop and is occasionally courted by the weak-willed Tillman Porter. When her mother goes too far, Mariah flees to her aunt’s house across town, and within weeks she’s on a train bound for a new life as a housekeeper in California. She’s determined to become her own woman, leaving the browbeaten, unloved version of herself behind for good.

Logan Yates lives and works on the profitable ranch he owns with his loving stepmother and brothers. Sure, his house smells- and okay, looks- like a barnyard, but that’s just the bachelor way, isn’t it? Alanza, his stepmother, takes the liberty of hiring a housekeeper. Enter the lovely Mariah, and she and Logan cannot butt heads fast enough. Each decision to be made is one they can spar over, and Logan can’t stop thinking about his alluring new employee. He’s made it clear that he has no interest in marriage, now or ever…but Mariah may have changed all of that for good.

It’s been a long time since I read a historical romance novel, but this was just plain fun to read. There’s enough steam to make it spicy, but the sex scenes aren’t terribly graphic. Ms. Jenkins’s style never veers into the purple prose I remember reading in the romance novels of my youth; there are no long, drawn-out descriptions of clothing or scenery, just enough to create a crystal-clear image in the reader’s mind of the beautiful California ranch land Logan owns and the finely-sewn blouses and skirts Mariah has created. Her female characters are strong but not so over-the-top that they’re not believable for the times they live in. While this is a typical romance in that it ends happily (and don’t we all need that so badly these days? Heavens knows I do), there are several things that make this stand out, including a scene in which a small parade of local men come by the ranch to propose to Mariah, and another outside a jewelry store, after another woman notices Mariah’s (happy) tears and inquires after her. That one brought tears to my eyes as well. But what stood out most…Let me backtrack a little.

The stigma around romance may have faded a bit over the years, but be assured, it hasn’t left entirely, and that’s something I learned in my own home last night. Upon noticing my copy of Destiny’s Embrace on the kitchen island, my husband squinted at it, then said, “Whose book is that?”

“Mine,” I responded.

He laughed. “That’s what you’re reading these days? I would’ve thought you’d be reading something more intellectual.”

Before I could bean him in the head with a rock like Mariah did to Logan, he left to attend to our daughter, leaving me to mentally scoff, Okay, man who reads comic books.

Which is entirely my point. There’s nothing wrong with comic books, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with romance novels. Not everyone needs to read, say, a calculus textbook at all times; it’s totally okay to read for straight-up entertainment if that’s what you’re looking for and what you need at the time. Reading is reading, and anything that gets anyone reading is a wonderful thing. The joke is really on my husband here, because I learned a lot from this book, including about

  • Calafia, the fictional warrior queen often depicted as the Spirit of California
  • James Beckwourth, the fur trapper and African-American pioneer who discovered the mountain pass in the Sierra Nevadas between Reno, Nevada and Portola, California
  • William Leidesdorff, who helped found what became San Francisco
  • Estabanico/Estevanico, one of the first African-born men to reach the continental US
  • Biddy Mason, a nurse and midwife who also founded the First African Methodist Episcopal Church in Los Angeles.

I never learned about any of those people in school, so if this is what a non-intellectual book looks like, I’ll be over here, buried under a pile of non-intellectual books, plenty of them with Beverly Jenkins embossed on the front.

The other really great thing about this book is that it’s changed the way I think towards historicals, or at least some historicals- or maybe even historicals back when I last read them. I think I’m more willing to give them a chance, and I definitely want to read more historicals by authors of color, because that’s a perspective that I need more of in my reading life. I’m halfway tempted to head back to the library and dig through that Black History Month display again…but I’m going to have to hold off, because today’s library trip yielded another stack of books.

So much for reading from my own shelves, again.

Are you a fan of historical romance? Have you read Beverly Jenkins? If you can recommend other historical romances by authors of color, I’m listening (and scrawling down the names, and checking my library’s website)!

Visit Beverly Jenkins’s website here.

Follow her on Twitter here.