The three books that I rated five stars this month are all so different from each other. A magnificent rom-com, the first book in a paranormal series about immortals, and an American History book about Reconstruction and Jim Crow. This goes to show that reading books out of your “comfort genre” from time to time can boost your enjoyment of books and change how you see the world around you.
All three of these books were borrowed from my local public library. I save thousands of dollars every year by using mine – go get a library card if you don’t have one! Free books, people! Try before you buy!
My Soul to Keep (African Immortals, #1) by Tananarive Due
After reading The Reformatory and following Tananarive Due on Facebook, I decided to dive into her back catalog. Especially when I saw that she has a series called African Immortals – my favorite fantasy trope is immortality. Due does not disappoint, setting up a world in which a ‘living blood’ is shared with men who are part of a secret society dedicated to observing mankind and studying in order to advance human knowledge by more than can be learned in a single lifetime.
Release Date: November 15, 2011
I read My Soul to Keep on Kindle, borrowed from my local public library. Yay for libraries!
David is madly in love with his wife, Jessica. He adores their daughter, Kira. He is immortal, and has had wives and children before, but Jessica and Kira are different. He is estranged from the group of immortals he has lived and studied with for hundreds of years. When they find him and tell him it is time to leave his family and return, he cannot bring himself to do so.
Jessica is a journalist and is very career focused. Raised in the church, she has a strong faith and connection to her family. David is a jazz historian and former professor, and she is wildly attracted to him. As a series of tragedies befalls the people that she loves, she increasingly suspects her husband may be behind some of them.
I won’t give away anymore of the plot, but I encourage you to read this book if you like immortal fantasy. Fans of Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice will likely appreciate this world that Due has created.
Fortunately, I’m 13 years late to the party and can now go on and read the next three books in the series. I continue to be a huge fan of Due’s novels and am happy to have the opportunity to continue reading her work.
Publisher’s Summary
When Jessica marries David, he is everything she wants in a family man: brilliant, attentive, ever youthful. Yet she still feels something about him is just out of reach. Soon, as people close to Jessica begin to meet violent, mysterious deaths, David makes an unimaginable confession: More than 400 years ago, he and other members of an Ethiopian sect traded their humanity so they would never die, a secret he must protect at any cost. Now, his immortal brethren have decided David must return and leave his family in Miami. Instead, David vows to invoke a forbidden ritual to keep Jessica and his daughter with him forever.
Harrowing, engrossing and skillfully rendered, My Soul to Keep traps Jessica between the desperation of immortals who want to rob her of her life and a husband who wants to rob her of her soul. With deft plotting and an unforgettable climax, this tour de force that Stephen King called ‘An eerie epic’ is sure to win Due a legion of new fans.
Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Release Date: April 2, 2019
I listened to this Audiobook for free using the Libby app in conjunction with my local public library. Hooray for libraries!
Narrator: Dominic Hoffman
I am an admirer of the work Henry Louis Gates, Jr. does as a Historian and Genealogist, although I first became aware of his work in 2009 after he was handcuffed and arrested when a neighbor called the police on him for trying to force the door of his home open when he found it jammed. Some Americans were outraged that a Black man had been arrested for breaking into his home after he had proved it was his home, and some Americans were upset because the President of the United States said that the police acted “stupidly.” The resulting political firestorm was resolved with then President Obama’s “beer summit,” when he invited Gates and the police officer to have a beer at the white house and talk about racial tensions with the police.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is a brilliant thinker and a lifelong scholar of African-American studies. His expertise in genetic genealogy and the discovery of a high ratio of European DNA vs African DNA in the African-American gene pool puts hard facts and data behind an ugly truth: sexual slavery was commonplace for enslaved women in the American slave states for over two-hundred years.
Beginning with reconstruction, he catalogs the effects of reconstruction, “redemption,” and Jim Crow laws on the Black community. This book addresses, head-on, the revisionist history that was adopted and taught across the United States in the 20th century (and in some communities, still, today) that the civil war was about “states rights.”
This book is, from a history perspective, well sourced and thoroughly researched. Any person with an interest in American history should read it.
Publisher’s Summary
The abolition of slavery in the aftermath of the Civil War is a familiar story, as is the civil rights revolution that transformed the nation after World War II. But the century in between remains a mystery: If emancipation sparked “a new birth of freedom” in Lincoln’s America, why was it necessary to march in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s America? In this new audiobook, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., one of our leading chroniclers of the African American experience, seeks to answer that question in a history that moves from the Reconstruction Era to the “nadir” of the African American experience under Jim Crow, through to World War I and the Harlem Renaissance.
Through his close reading of the visual culture of this tragic era, Gates reveals the many faces of Jim Crow and how, together, they reinforced a stark color line between white and black Americans. Bringing a lifetime of wisdom to bear as a scholar, filmmaker, and public intellectual, Gates uncovers the roots of structural racism in our own time, while showing how African Americans after slavery combated it by articulating a vision of a “New Negro” to force the nation to recognize their humanity and unique contributions to America as it hurtled toward the modern age.
The story Gates tells begins with great hope, with the Emancipation Proclamation, Union victory, and the liberation of nearly four million enslaved African Americans. Until 1877, the federal government, goaded by the activism of Frederick Douglass and many others, tried at various turns to sustain their new rights. But the terror unleashed by white paramilitary groups in the former Confederacy, combined with deteriorating economic conditions and a loss of Northern will, restored “home rule” to the South. The retreat from Reconstruction was followed by one of the most violent periods in our history, with thousands of black people murdered or lynched and many more afflicted by the degrading impositions of Jim Crow segregation.
An essential tour through one of America’s fundamental historical tragedies, Stony the Road is also a story of heroic resistance, as figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells fought to create a counter-narrative, and culture, inside the lion’s mouth. As sobering as this tale is, it also has within it the inspiration that comes with encountering the hopes our ancestors advanced against the longest odds.
The True Love Experiment by Christina Lauren
I am a mood reader, and I was in the mood for a great Rom-com. I had seen rave reviews for The True Love Experiment by Christina Lauren for a long time and I’m so glad I finally dove in and read the book. It is truly a masterpiece of romance novels, with an amazing set of main characters, a funny and poignant plot, and wonderful dialogue.
The tropes in The True Love Experiment are forbidden romance, office romance, and a nice mix of other real life issues that make the characters relatable. This book basically has all of the things that make romance novels wonderful escapism with none of the things that annoy me about romance novels (hellooooo miscommunication trope – that’s always an automatic DO NOT FINISH for me!).
Release Date: May 16, 2023
I listened to this Audiobook through the Libby App in conjunction with my local public library. Yay for libraries!
Narrators: Jonathan Cole, Cindy Kay (five star job by both!)
Felicity “Fizzy” Chen is a successful romance novelist with a large following. She’s a serial dater who has never had a long-term relationship, and she’s ok with that.
Connor Prince is a nature documentary filmmaker whose production company assigns him a dating reality show as his next project. He’s not thrilled about it, but when he finds out the author of his ex-wife’s collection of romance novels is single, funny, and beautiful, he decides to approach her about being the star of a “Bachelorette” style dating show.
Fizzy says yes, but only if he agrees to play by her rules. He agrees, and hilarity ensues. She demands that the contestants must all be 100% true to romance tropes – gorgeous men with hearts of Gold. She wants a Vampire, a Cinnamon Roll (I had to look that one up), the Hero, the Doctor, etc.
Connor comes through, but he soon wishes he hasn’t. He is falling for her, she is falling for him, and as she dates all of these wonderful men in front of the camera, she really wants the man behind it.
Christina Lauren is a master at creating tension and making your heart thump loudly while you turn page after page. And thank goodness for Happily Ever Afters, of which there are never enough. Read The True Love Experiment when you’re in the mood to have smiles sneak on your face for the next few days while you revisit all the feels this book will give you.
Publisher’s Summary
Felicity “Fizzy” Chen is lost. Sure, she’s got an incredible career as a beloved romance novelist with a slew of bestsellers under her belt, but when she’s asked to give a commencement address, it hits her: she hasn’t been practicing what she’s preached.
Fizzy hasn’t ever really been in love. Lust? Definitely. But that swoon-worthy, can’t-stop-thinking-about-him, all-encompassing feeling? Nope. Nothing. What happens when the optimism she’s spent her career encouraging in readers starts to feel like a lie?
Connor Prince, documentary filmmaker and single father, loves his work but when his profit-minded boss orders him to create a reality TV show, putting his job on the line, Connor is out of his element. Desperate to find his romantic lead, a chance run-in with an exasperated Fizzy offers Connor the perfect solution. What if he could show the queen of romance herself falling head-over-heels for all the world to see? Fizzy gives him a hard pass—unless he agrees to her list of demands. When he says yes, and production on The True Love Experiment begins, Connor wonders if that perfect match will ever be in the cue cards for him, too.
