Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Underground Railroad, was another Mocha Girls Read book club selection. The novel follows Cora on her Odyssey-like journey to escape slavery traveling a magical realistic underground railroad. “Here was the true Great Spirit, the divine thread connecting all human endeavor – if you can keep it, it is yours. Your property, slave or continent. The American imperative.” – page 80 It begins in Africa following the first slaves as they were stolen and brought over to America. From […]
Who knew buying a small town on eBay would lead to finding your purpose in life
I had the fortune of visiting The Ripped Bodice to see Beverly Jenkins speak about her new historical romance novel, Breathless. After the event, I was kindly invited to join the LA chapter of Mocha Girls Read book club. I’m so thankful Ms. Jenkins and my favorite bookstore introduced me to a lovely book club group! Having an in-person book club kept up my motivation to read more books to review for Cannonball Read. 🙂 Bring on the Blessings by Beverly Jenkins was the February selection and much needed palette cleanser […]
Untold Stories Unearthed
Politics in any form is hard for me. I avoid confrontation and disagreement like the plague, so almost everything to do with politics makes me go running for the nearest blanket to hide under. But one of my Political Science students brought me a book catalog from a trip she went on, and The President’s Kitchen Cabinet was in it. I love food and anything to do with it, and looking at the history of politics through the lens of a thing I enjoy made this […]
They Didn’t Want to Leave, They Definitely Couldn’t Stay
“I was leaving the South/To fling myself into the unknown…./I was taking a part of the South/To transplant in alien soil,/To see if it could grow differently,/If it could drink of new and cool rains,/Bend in strange winds,/Respond to the warmth of other suns/And, perhaps, to bloom.” – Richard Wright
Just say yes!
There are things Beverly Jenkins does really, really well, and two things that I like much less about her work, that were all evident first when I read Topaz and appeared here in Indigo. So let’s get this compliment sandwich going! This book is about Hester Wyatt, a freed former slave and operator on Michigan’s Underground Railroad. She’s decidedly non-romantic after seeing how passion and love led her father to take on the shackles of slavery to be closer to her and her mother, only […]
In which I endorse a recent NPR romance recommendation
Listed as an honorable mention for Beverly Jenkins in NPR’s recent 100 recommended romances list, I gave Topaz a try as it covers two bases I haven’t much encountered: Westerns and African-American hero/ines. All things considered, I liked Topaz very much; though, admittedly, I found the prose to be lacking in sophistication (which is what knocks off the fifth star.) Still, Jenkins obviously has her finger on the pulse of what makes a romance successful. Katherine Love is a newspaper reporter in the late 19th […]