Sex, Lies and Sensibility

Finished July 17

Sex, Lies and Sensibility by Nikki Payne

I ordered this book because I loved her earlier book Pride and Protest so much. This one didn't flow as well as that did and there were some minor editing issues. Payne is a good writer, and I will definitely read more from her. 

Nora was an excellent track and field athlete, competing and winning at the college level, until she did a very stupid thing and allowed her boyfriend to make a sex tape of them. Her father was angry at her after that, and she'd got a job to support herself. She'd lost her track scholarship, and didn't finish college. She also took refuge in watching HGTV endlessly to avoid fixing her own life. 

Now her father has died and she has arrived at his funeral. As she is ushered to a private room, she discovers that her mother was her father's mistress, and that he had a wife and stepdaughter. She, Shenora, and her sister Mary-Anne (Yanne) and their mother Diane don't have ownership to their home or any of her father's other assets. What they have been left in the will is a unmaintained house and property in Maine called Barton Cove. The property is in foreclosure and the full outstanding loan is required to be repaid by Labor Day of the next year. If they can pay off the amount due in time, they get access to an Estate Improvement fund in the seven figure range. 

Yanne and Nora decide to take on the estate and find unexpected partners in a native run tour group who is headed up by Ennis Freeman (Bear). As Nora puts her HGTV learned skills to work with the help of Bear's local contacts and Yanne expands her baking repertoire, the two find themselves becoming part of the community, and learning about local environmental issues and other politics. 

I liked the bringing together of two racial groups here, the black women and the indigenous community. I also enjoyed that Bear knows of Nora for her athletic prowess, not the embarrassing video and values her in ways she hadn't expected. 

This is a loose retelling of Sense and Sensibility, but brings in modern day issues and realistic plotlines. A fun read. 

Friday Black

Finished February 10

Friday Black: Stories by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

This dark collection of stories had me both wanting more and needing to take breaks from reading. This is the debut collection for the author, and draws on his own experiences as a black man in the United States for some of his themes. The collection contains twelve stories, with some characters reappearing in other tales. 

The first story, The Finkelstein 5, draws on racism, white privilege, miscarriage of justice, and frustration at all these societal flaws. The second tale, Things My Mother Said, touches on poverty and religion. The third, The Era takes us further into dystopia with revisionist history, genetic selection, and bullying. Lark Street deals with abortion, relationships, and the onus on women. The Hospital Where has elements of pain and wonder set around healthcare and the things we do for our dreams. Zimmerland makes racism and violence a form of entertainment where there are no consequences. Friday Black takes us to a surreal dystopian version of Black Friday sales, where bodies are swept to the sides as sales take precedence. The Lion & The Spider takes African folklore, family responsibility, and takes us to the backroom of retail. Light Spitter has elements on incel culture, school shootings, and trying to change outcomes. How to Sell a Jacket As Told by Iceking brings us back to the characters and world of Friday Black on a less dark day. The following story, In Retail, is in the same world, but from a different point of view. The final story, Through the Flash, is set in a world where the days reset over and over, death and violence are ever present, and the characters are aware of it, and hope for a glitch in the system. 

These are dark stories, offering little hope for the future, but also stories that are gripping and captivating. Many of them relate to the world even more today than when they were written. 

Caste

Finished November 30

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson

I bought this book more than a year ago and have been slowly reading it for the past couple of weeks. It is a book that looks at the origins of the American caste system, and how it relates to two other caste systems, the centuries-old caste system of India, and the one that arose under the Nazis. I was aware that Nazi's had studied how America treated its non-white citizens, particularly those who descended from earlier slaves, but this book made the connections more clear about how they tried to implement some of the same concepts and how the American situation went beyond in what it dared to define for castes and for how it had evolved to be ingrained in the American culture.

In India, the lowest caste is that of the Dalit, often called Untouchables. Wilkerson, on her first visit to India and meeting Dalits was introduced as one of America's Untouchables, and after the initial surprise, she had to see the similarities. 

She often gives examples of her own and others experiences to illustrate the various norms in America that arose from the caste system there, and how it is still having its effect, despite the laws and regulations that purport to eliminate it. 

Released in the last year of Trump's presidency, it is a book that is very pertinent to what the country is going through now, a test of its democracy, an awakening of those in the lower castes to the inbededness of the beliefs that have tried to keep them in their place, below the dominant caste of white European-origin males, and how the actions we are seeing today are part of a struggle to keep the system from changing. . 

This book should be required reading in every American history and culture course, as it looks at the history of the culture in a way that has seldom been explained in such straightforward terms. Wilkerson gives homage to those researchers who came before her in this area, and talks about their work and how she discovered it and built upon it. 

There is so much I could say about this eye-opening book, but the best is for you to read it yourself.

Read Men Knit

Finished April 29

Real Men Knit by Kwana Jackson

This romance book is centered around two twenty-year-somethings that have known each other since childhood, but face a major loss in their lives by coming together. Jesse Strong is the youngest of four adopted brothers, held together by the strength of their mother and their shared family. With their mother, known to all the neighbourhood as Mama Joy, suddenly passes away, he must join his brothers in figuring out what is next. 

They grew up in an apartment above the knitting store run by Mama Joy, and were all taught to knit at a young age, finding comfort and discipline in the act of creativity. The oldest brother, Damien, has launched his career as a financial analyst in the world of investment and keeps his old bedroom mainly as a closet for his upstyle wardrobe. The next two brothers, real half-brothers, Lucas and Noah, have just begun their careers, Lucas as a firefighter and Noah in the world of dance. The apartment is still a base for them even though they don't spend all their nights there. Jesse hasn't settled yet, either in his career choice or in his personal life. He is a bit of a player, and hasn't stayed in any one job too long.

One mainstay in the knitting store has been Kerry Fuller. Kerry has been working part-time in the store, as the only employee for years and even though she has now finished her degree in children's counselling and art therapy and works part-time at the community centre, she finds it hard to leave the knitting store. 

As Jesse fights to keep the store open and viable and keep the home they have above it, the brothers rely on Kerry to help them learn what they need to know to give the store a fresh start with the ideas that Jesse brings to it. Will this major life event mark a change in Jesse's life for the better, and what will Kerry's future bring her?

This is a story of love and loss, of learning and growing, of finding common ground and families coming together through adversity. The only thing missing for me was a knitting pattern. This book cried out for one to be included. There is humour and sadness, but an overall sense of hope for the future, for the main characters, and the community as a whole. 

A Long Way Back

Finished May 6
A Long Way Back by J. Everett Prewitt

This Vietnam War novel takes a bit of a different look at things. A young married black man, Anthony Edwards, a reporter for the Washington Post, is sent to Vietnam during the war for a short period to get a few stories. Just after Anthony arrives, he sees something that grabs his attention: a small group of black soldiers, coming in from the field on a helicopter. One is badly injured and the rest look like they've been through hell. He wants to know their story, but finds himself stymied at every turn. He was lucky enough to have the foresight to take a photo of them, and this helps him work towards the story. While he is in Vietnam, he gets permission to be embedded with a group of soldiers on a mission, something recommended to him by another, more seasoned, reporter. This experience is a harrowing one, and something that changes him forever.
His wife can tell from his letters that something has changed for him, and when he returns home, he finds himself behaving in ways that he isn't comfortable with, nor is his wife. As he reaches out for help to old friends who've also been overseas, he also finds himself drawn back to the story of the black soldiers that he saw and finds renewed enthusiasm for following up the leads that he has, especially as someone is sending him more clues for this secretive story.
This is a novel of war, of the effects on me, of the way that those in power can take retribution on those without power, and on race. As we get to know the various black soldiers that make up this hidden story, we find men who come from a variety of backgrounds, and who have a variety of ways of dealing with what they encounter. This is a disturbing story, but also one of men working towards a common goal, both in the war, and on home ground.

The Fire Next Time

Finished December 27
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

This short book was originally published in 1963, and yet so little has changed. The book contains two pieces. The first My Dungeon Shook is a letter to his teenage nephew on the one hundredth anniversary of the emancipation. It talks about the state of racial equality, and how little has improved in that one hundred years. It is a combination of history, social culture, and advice.
The second piece Down at the Cross is a "letter from a region in my mind" as the subtitle says. It includes his own experiences of prejudice, of the rise of black Islam, of the hypocrisy of many white Christians, It has so many sentences that resonate today.

It is this individual uncertainty on the part of white American men and women, this inability to renew themselves at the fountain of their own lives, that makes the discussion, let alone elucidation, of any conundrum - that is, any reality - so supremely difficult

and

From my own point of view, the fact of the Third Reich alone makes obsolete for ever any question of Christian superiority, except in technological terms.

and

We human beings now have the power to exterminate ourselves; this seems to be the entire sum of our achievement

It is sad that more than fifty years after this was written we still see these as relevant in our world. Very little real progress has been made for blacks in America.
As he says,

America, of all the Western nations, has been best placed to prove the uselessness and the obsolescence of the concept of colour. But it has not dared to accept this opportunity, or even to conceive of it as an opportunity. White Americans have thought of it as their shame, and have envied the more civilized and elegant European nations that were untroubled by the presence of black men on their shores. This is because white Americans have supposed 'Europe' and 'civilization' to be synonyms - which they are not - and have been distrustful of other standards and other sources of vitality, especially those produced in America itself, and have attempted to behave in all matters as though what was east for Europe was also East for them. What it comes to is that if we, who can scarcely be considered a white nation, persist in thinking of ourselves as one, we condemn ourselves, with the truly white nations, to sterility and decay, whereas if we could accept ourselves as we are, we might bring new life to the Western achievements, and transform them.

Essential reading.