When I saw the title, Lorraine: The Girl Who Sang the Storm Away, I assume it was going to be a fictionalized story of a famous singer. But it turns out to be a fun story about a grandfather, granddaughter and overcoming fear with the song in your heart. The fact that the characters are black and in a non-traditional family setting is never brought to the forefront of the story. It is just “there” which makes this a nice book for anyone. Ketch […]
The Dance of the Violin
The Dance of the Violin is a delightful story about a young boy who loves music and finds a way to always play. And will use anything to make music: pots and pans and even rubber bands. This is when his family buys him a violin. One day he tells everyone he has to partake in a contest. It will be his first, but even so, he tells his teacher he must play this one piece of music, even though it is one of the […]
The Most Beautiful Song
Khalida wakes up one night to a special song playing in her inner ear. She tries capturing it right then on the piano, but she is told to go back to bed. She hears it again at school. But is told to go back to class. However, when she has a moment to play it, she cannot remember it. But finally, when the time is just right, she can give her song to everyone. As someone who considers herself a poet, I know the frustration […]
“Let’s be clear, a lot of people met because of cocaine.”
Lizzy Goodman opens Meet Me in the Bathroom with this quote from NME writer Conor McNicholas: “Everybody is living through their own golden age, but you only realize it afterward, so start living it now.” Get to the end of this book, read the first chapter again, and that quote makes perfect sense. MMITB is Goodman’s wistful love letter to her New York City. What I mean by her New York City is that, as she establishes early in the book, people move to NYC because it’s […]
Daddy Played the Blues
There are a few books that have that OMG starting sentence. Daddy Played the Blues has one with: “I was six years old the day we left the farm in Mississippi,” Our heroine Cassie is not really the focus of the book. But Music is. Blues music in fact. In a fiction format we learn about a family that packed up everything they owned in their truck with her Daddy, Uncle and Mama in the front and Cassie and her two brothers in the back. […]
Black girl poetic magic
Electric Arches is collection of poetry by Eve L. Ewing. Her poems muse on the black experience. She reveals painful moments of racism she encounters and add in handwritten font her imagined replies to the N-word. She writes odes to her musical heroes in “Appletree [on black womanhood, from and to Erykah Badu] and “On Prince”. Each poem describes how their music touched her soul. She uplifts the ordinary with her words adding a fantastical gloss of wonder. “so in this world, grease is a compliment, no […]
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