The Fire Next Time - James Baldwin

I read this in two days. Why? Because James Baldwin is so compelling. Because he has such a wonderful eye for nuance. Baldwin and I have had wildly different life experiences. He grew up in Harlem and was there during the Harlem Riot of 1943 on his 19th birthday. But his words really spoke to me, plainly and beautifully about his experience and his hopes. 

The Fire Next Time is a collection of two essays originally published in The New Yorker. The first is a letter written to Baldwin's nephew that explores race in America and how his nephew might experience it. He cautions his nephew away from anger and into a love of self and blackness. An embrace of the Black is Beautiful aspect. 

The second essay digs into Baldwin's experience of Christianity and the racist misuse of the gospel. Baldwin spent time as a teenage preacher and the experience led him to turn away from religion altogether. Having seen the inside of the pulpit, he likened it to seeing behind the curtain of a theater and thus being disenchanted with the entire show. One cannot ignore the intersection of race and sexuality and its effect on Baldwin's experience. 

The Fire Next Time later became an influence for Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me and having now read both, I can see the influence there. While it is a snapshot in time of Baldwin's experience, The Fire Next Time is also timeless in its themes. 

4/5 Stars. 

The Girl with the Louding Voice - Abi Daré

How do you rate a book that emotionally wrecks you with the pain caused to the main character? How can I say that I enjoyed it when Adunni is so harmed? Perhaps its Adunni's spirit, which takes so many hits but cannot be crushed or denied. That she gets up again and again and is determined to find a way to make her life better.

I am no longer surprised at the cruelty humans inflict on other humans. Our capacity to cause pain is unbounded. In The Girl with the Louding Voice, we can see how the various characters are driven to pain or compassion. How the cruelties inflicted upon them can cause irreparable harm that they then inflict on others. We can also see how the kindness of just one person can change the trajectory of another's life.

Adunni is the only daughter of her mother and father. With an older and younger brother, and living in a small Nigerian village, Adunni's mother is aware of how vitally important it is for Adunni to go to school and leave the village. She wants a better life for Adunni than she has had for herself. She sells street food in order to feed her family. Money wasted on drink by her husband. When her mother dies, Adunni is unprotected and falls victim to her family's poverty. Her husband is forced to sell her into marriage, at 15, to an older man with two wives already. Due to some tragic circumstances (yes more tragic than forced child marriage) - Adunni runs away and finds her way to Lagos, where she is sold to a family to work as a house servant.

The man who brings her to Lagos collects her pay every month and never visits. She is for all purposes, enslaved to this family. The wife of the house beats her and starves her. The father has an eye for her that is far from fatherly. And by chance she meets a neighbor who may prove her only way out. If the neighbor only has the courage to step forward and do something.

I think the portrayal of the neighbor was really honest. We all can look away from things that we don't want to get involved in. We can all suspect people who are asking for help may not have the best motives. But the neighbor here takes a chance and it literally saves Adunni's life. May we have the wisdom to see these opportunities when they come.

4/5 Stars. 

Children of Virtue and Vengeance - Tomi Adeyemi

The follow up the the stunning Children of Blood and Bone does not let up. In this sequel, we find Zelie and Amari dealing with the aftermath of bringing magic back to Orisha. During the ritual, Zelie's love for her father and her reliance on her blood to complete the ritual has created semi-magical people who are not Magi.

In Children of Virtue and Vengeance, Zelie must fight against Amari's mother who was gifted with magic during the ritual. Her racist hatred against the Magi is now fueled and channeled through her own powerful magic. She attacks the Magi relentlessly and pulls Zelie into a trap. In her fight against her mother, Amari finds that the quest for the throne and for power has corrupted her.

How will Orisha survive when all who quest for the throne are corrupted and a source of what is rotten in the kingdom? Apparently we find out in the third book because there is going to be another one! I didn't know that when I was reading this so the ending or rather, not-ending, was a complete surprise!

Once again the writing is fantastic and the story moves. You have to question the motives of even your favorite characters. No one is unscathed. I love the moral ambiguity that is thrown into every encounter. Very excited to see this transferred to the screen.

4/5 Stars. 

Our Time is Now - Stacey Abrams

If you needed more evidence of the brilliance of Stacey Abrams (I mean folks she graduated magna cum laude from Spelman, was a Truman Scholar at UT's School of Public Affairs, and THEN got a JD from Yale), then I'm not sure if this book will tip you over the edge, but it should.

Part memoir, part history of voting rights and restrictions, and part manifesto of how to fix the inequities of our voting and redistricting systems, Our Time is Now is a forcefully important book. It's infuriating to read about the many many ways the right to vote is restricted. When your plan to win elections by ensuring the already marginalized are less able to vote, then that's just wrong. In the wake of the 2020 election, we are seeing many states try to limit voting in ways that will only serve to disenfranchise Americans. 

The rub is that while these schemes disproportionally affect the poor and minorities, its effects will be felt further away. And those able bodied humans who believe wrongly in their invincibility, may find themselves on the sorry end of this deal. Unable to access the ballot box due to infirmity. It should not be a radical idea to believe that the right to vote should be widely afforded to every citizen. 

Abrams could have left the book there. Documenting the various ways that voters are disenfranchised. But that's not how she operates. Because she's here to make things better. And she lays out the steps for everyone to help participate in protecting the right to vote. She's a warrior. And she's in this fight for voting rights. And we're all (even those that disagree with her) better for it. 

4/5 Stars. 

How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character - Paul Tough

It's telling that I'm struggling to write the review of this book I finished nine days ago, but I'm not sure what to say. It's good news that your IQ and "book smarts" aren't the only keys to success. In How Children Succeed, Paul Tough chronicles several programs aimed at assisting youth make it out of tough situations, and none of that is just tutoring. A lot of it is instilling certain character traits that will allow kids to rise above their situations and go on to live better lives. But the anecdotal presentation of the evidence left me feeling a little skeptical. 

We've been struggling with this a bit with our own kids. Our third grader continually says he's just "dumb at reading" after having a couple bad grades. But we're pushing him to have a growth mind set. The belief that hard work and determination can improve your situation. For anyone looking to work on this aspect I'd recommend the Big Life Journal.

It was interesting to read about the different programs being tried in Chicago. Obviously there is no easy answer to helping the kids in Chicago Public Schools succeed. Many programs have come and gone and graduation rates, teen pregnancy, and violence against and among students remain. But there are so many people trying to work on the problem. The number of shootings in Chicago may get the headlines, but the people working on the ground, in the neighborhoods never get any press. If it bleeds, it leads. Unfortunately.

So much of parenting is trying, and then failing like you're getting it right. So I was fairly surprised to read in How Children Succeed that I am, in fact, doing some things right. Trying to instill grit into my children will take a balancing act of trying to provide nurturing support, but also letting them fail, and reminding them that character counts along the way. 

3/5 Stars. 

Sword of Kings - Bernard Cornwell

What? A three star rating for a book involving my favorite boyfriend Uhtred? I know, I know. But hear me out. I know what this series is doing, where it's leading. And unfortunately to get from where it started to where it's going, Uhtred has to be like... 70 in this book. And he's fighting in a shield wall? I mean FFS. The man has swagger, but he should very well be dead by decades by now. But in Sword of Kings, here he is, just riding horses and fighting way way younger men.

And there's an odd meandering to this book that the others didn't have. Uhtred doesn't seem to know what he's doing. And that, partly, is likely because no one really knows what happened in the 5-6 weeks during which this book is set. King Edward dies. But then so does Aelfweard. But no one knows how, and eventually Aethelstan is king. But again, those bare bones of dates and events are all that history has left us. So to put Uhtred into the action, he's sailing a ship up and down England, saving women.

And then some side things happen that felt, well just sad and unnecessary. So, yeah. The book is overlong for really only covering a few weeks of time and a lot of back and forth for Uhtred. Listen, the man has swagger, but has outlived the local life expectancy by 100% at this point. I am absolutely going to read the last book in the series and I have high hopes for the events of that one because I'm pretty sure I know what is going to happen, but Uhtred always figures out a way to keep things spicy, just a little bit of a miss in this one.

3/5 Stars. 

Ploughshares Fall 2020 - Edited by Ladette Randolph

It's longform prose time in Ploughshares land (Actually it was in the fall but if I'm not an edition behind in reading these what am I doing?

This edition contained ten stories and they were all lovely. Starting with The Twins by Nicholas Delbanco a strange incestual tale of two twins who stunt their lives with their strict adherence to each other.

I'd also be remiss not to mention John Elizabeth Stintzi's The Rat King Scattered. Their story of a tortured artist and his boyfriend who lean into their relationship to escape the trauma of their own lives was really moving but just a bit surreal in a really good way.

There's also a story from Holiday Reinhorn in this book whos work in fiction I'm not as familiar with as her work in advocacy for Haiti, so finding that Emmanuel was a story based in Haiti was not surprising, but the strength of the work was really touching. Emmanuel is a man who holds up so many in Haiti and is killed as if by complete happenstance which makes his death all the more tragic and defeating.

Lastly, Alice Hoffman introduces a reprint of an old Ray Bradbury story, A Sound of Thunder, which is a tale of essentially, the butterfly effect, which wouldn't become a real named theory until a decade after Bradbury wrote this story. But it's perfect and timely, or should I say timeless because written in the 50s it still resonates today.

Chef's kiss to you Ploughshares.

4/5 Stars. 

Come Tumbling Down - Seanan McGuire

Jack and Jill are back! This is the third Jack and Jill centric book in the Wayward Children series and more in line with Beneath the Sugar Sky. This book is not a prequel detailing the lives of a child who ends up at Elinor West's Home for Wayward Children. Instead Come Tumbling Down follows events after Every Heart a Doorway.

Jack and Jill were gone from the scene. Jill had murdered a few people trying to get back to the Moors, trying to get back into the good graces of The Master, a vampire ruler who took Jill under his wing and taught her to be cruel. Following the gruesome murder of Jack's girlfriend, Jill and Jack departed the Moors and ended up at Elinor West's. Then went back to the Moors when Jack had killed Jillian, preventing her from becoming a vampire.

And this is all normal Moors stuff because there, a dead person is never really dead. So Jack will be able to resurrect her sister, save her from an undead fate, and hopefully take up with her girlfriend who will also hopefully not dead. And all this is what happened. Until, well, Jill really wanted to be a vampire and needed a never dead body. Since Jack had a nice warm body just sitting there, they performed the old-switcheroo.

Jack became Jill and Jill became Jack and Jack-in-Jill had to run for her life through a door. When she lands back in the basement at Elinor West's to find Christopher has occupied her former room, Sumi is definitely not dead, and a mermaid girl is now in the group. So again, our folks go travelling, this time to the Moors to try to put the girls back in the right bodies, and start a war for the balance of power in the Moors.

All of our friends with their various gifts become involved. And the despair of someone like Christopher, like Cade become more acute as they see their friends called back to their homes and they remain in our world.

I'm excited for the next book in this series. None of them disappoint.

4/5 Stars. 

Children of Blood and Bone - Tomi Adeyemi

Orisha is divided. 11 years ago, the government carried out a brutal genocide on the minority Magi - people born in clans of magic with powers tied to one of several gods. Zelie is a child of a magi mother and non magic father. Exiled from the home of her heritage, she lives in a tidal flat and eeks out a living in a family of fisherman. During the day, she trains with Mama Agba, a local woman who works to teach the children of magi - diviners - the skills they will need to survive in adulthood. Because few will reach adulthood. Most, shunned for the potential magic in their bodies, will enter the stocks, a brutal indentured servitude akin to slavery.

A new tax on diviners threatens to bankrupt Zelie's family, so she heads to the capital city to sell a rare fish. However, when leaving the trading hall, she's approached for help by Amari, Orisha's princess who, upon seeing the brutal slaughter of her best friend at the hand of her father, is running with a scroll which threatens to bring magic back to all of Orisha.

Together with Zelie's brother, Zane, the two set out to restore magic and rebalance the scales of power in Orisha. Hunted by Amari's brother, beset by enemies on all sides, will Zelie reach the shrine in time to perform the incantation?

This is all very riveting. Voiced by the incomparable Bahni Turpin, the audio of this story does not let up. Children of Blood and Bone is a total original. I can't wait to read the sequel.

4.5/5 Stars. 

Blended - Sharon Draper

This book ended up on my daughter's shelf. She's still a bit too young to get into this (there are no pictures) but in a couple years, she'll likely be able to read this on her own. The prose is fairly simplistic and the themes are complicated but accessible.

There are two major tween drama themes running through Blended. 1) Isabella's parents get divorced. It's traumatic for her. She doesn't feel truly at home in either house, and 2) Isabella's dad is black and her mom is white and being mixed race she gets a lot of comments from strangers that are hurtful. I felt the author dealt with these subjects well. She gets into a bit of nuance as Isabella learns to stand up for herself and her split identities.

The book does, however, spend a ridiculous amount of time on mundane details that don't add a lot to the story. Each chapter has a detailed explanation of what Isabella is having for breakfast. There are plot lines that seem to go nowhere. At one point, Isabella and her black friend are shopping at the mall and visit an upscale formal wear store where they are followed and then told to leave by the private security guard. This episode was well described and later when Isabella returned to the mall with her soon to be stepmother to pick out wedding attire, I thought this might come up again to close the loop but it did not.

And I'd be remiss not to mention that during the final 20 pages of the book there is a very traumatic episode that occurs that is really not explored at all except to be summarily disposed of in an effort to move the book to closure. It's hard not to compare this book with The Hate U Give, which is just a really masterful story told through the lens of Starr Carter. But of course, that book is intended for a more mature audience and this one is geared toward the middle school crowd.

For all its shortcomings, this is probably a very accessible book for a tween reader.

3/5 Stars.

The Graveyard Book - Neil Gaiman

First things first, you should know I love Neil Gaiman. I like the way his mind works and the worlds he creates. Although my eight year old received this for Christmas, I read it before him. Devoured it in a few days. This is what Gaiman does. He creates a world you want to inhabit. Even though it is usually creepy and discomforting, it is undeniably addictive.

In the Graveyard book, a man has come to kill a family, but he underestimated the curious nature of the toddler living in the house, who escapes without knowledge of the carnage and wanders into a nearby graveyard. The ghosts in the graveyard (a game I used to play as a child) come to find the child and are visited by the ghosts of the child's parents, who beg the graveyard inhabitants to protect their child. They agree and give him the run of the graveyard. He is taken under the protection of a mysterious figure named Silas, who, although his parents are two kindly old ghosts, it is Silas who provides most of the boys education.

Together, Silas and the ghosts keep the boy fed, entertained, and most importantly safe from the person or persons invested in killing him, who continue to look for him even after his escape to the graveyard. Along the way, the boy - whose name is Nobody Owens - meets fascinating people from the graveyard and learns to fade into the background and remain unseen.

As children do, he begins to question his mentors and venture out to discover what happened to him and why. This leads to a Gaiman style show down and Nobody shows why what he's learned in the graveyard is the best education he could have received.

Things that don't appear to be connected at first all matter and become connected with time. Bittersweet goodbyes and all that are wrapped up into this beautifully crafted book. What a gift for children to get to encounter Gaiman's creativity in such an accessible novel.

5/5 Stars. 

The Way of Kings - Brandon Sanderson

All year I've had friends tell me that I need to read the Stormlight Archive series from Brandon Sanderson. We're in the middle of a pandemic, they said. What else do you have going on, they asked.

I'm a big fan of epic fantasies, but I seldom have the time to commit to reading these gigantic tomes. So I decided that since I wasn't making that 2020 book goal anyway, I may as well commit to finishing off my year with The Way of Kings. What's the worst that could happen, I don't like it?

Well it only took about 25 pages for me to really get into this book. And yes, at the end, I completely loved it and the world that Sanderson has set up here. I love Kaladin (duh), I loved Shallan (even though she's sneaky) and I loved Dalinar. I mean these are some great characters. Not overly virtuous. Full of mistakes and misunderstandings. But trying. Trying so hard to make a better world. Even when others don't want it.

In the back of all this is a system of magic and politics and a history only hinted at but barely understood. And all of this has giant ramifications for the events of the day as our heroes race to understand what is going on, before it's too late.

This book is a big lift. I write. Generally for myself. And I can't imagine the time and dedication it takes to write something like this - let alone four of the five (ten?!) planned books in this series so far. That Sanderson finished off the Wheel of Time series for Robert Jordan is no surprise. He seems to have an unending energy for world building and writing. And yes, in the last 100 pages I could not put the book down. Stuck in what I understand is the "Sanderlanche" when all the plot lines start to come together and a lot of the action happens.

I'm assuming more happens in the second book because there was a lot of world building and set up in this one. There was a lot of momentum at the back of this book, but since the next one is just as long, I doubt that kind of pace could be maintained through another 1,000 pages without some breathing room at the beginning. But I'll let you know, because I am totally going forward with the rest of this series

5/5 Stars. 

Housegirl - Michael Donkor

I really wanted to like Housegirl more than I did. Perhaps it would have been easier to read rather than an audiobook. The narrator did a great job, but the accented and broken English dialogue made for a listen that required more concentration than I normally give to an audio book.

First, for a little plot. In Housegirl, Belinda is living with Auntie and Uncle in Ghana where she serves as a housemaid and mentor to another young maid in the house, Mary. Belinda is summoned, however, by friends of Aunti and Uncle to live instead in London to befriend a troubled teen, Amma. When she arrives in London, Belinda finds it difficult to adjust to life where her only role is to be a companion to Amma when she's not focused on her own studies.

Over time, Amma and Belinda begin to develop a friendship only to have it slightly implode when Belinda's conservative upbringing clashes with Amma's sexual orientation and results in a pretty terrible scene were Amma begs for kindness and Belinda gives her the opposite. This after Belinda shared with Amma the truth of her upbringing, and Amma had been soft and kind about it.

Then something else terrible happens in Ghana and Belinda has to return to deal with it, leaving the Amma/Belinda development completely unfinished. And Amma is very sweet to her again. Really, there are a lot of unraveled ends in this book that ultimately feel really unsatisfying. It stalls out when it should dig deeper.

In the end, this book could have been more.

3/5 Stars.

The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation - Natalie Y. Moore

For eight years we lived in Chicago, I was an avid WBEZ listener. I am well acquainted with Natalie Moore's reporting. I appreciate that she unapologetically covered issues important to Chicago's South Side during her time as a reporter there.

I have to admit, at the time, I sometimes wondered why she so fervently spent time covering the South Side. Living on the North Side as we did for eight years, you can lose track of the vastness that is Chicago. The vibrancy of the neighborhoods. It really is a City of neighborhoods where each enclave exists unto itself. So places that have problems, like portions of the South and West sides, get ignored or put to the side. You can focus on Chicago as a whole and claim that its problems are confined to a few neighborhoods and leave it at that. I've done that.

What this book, The Southside, does, brilliantly, is tie all those things together. It talks about the genesis of the South Side, its decline, and the reasons for that. It also details the efforts of community organizers and citizens who rather than leave their troubled neighborhoods, commit to making it better. For everyone. No one is going in to save the South Side. Should it get more help and resources? Absolutely. Will it? History says no. So the people have determined they must work for themselves.

Moore discusses health, housing, violence, and education issues all affecting the South Side. It really was an illuminating look at something I hadn't devoted enough time to as a citizen of the city (full disclosure - we lived in Evanston, just over the city line, but I worked and went to school in the city). This is a great read for anyone who wants to learn more about what really goes on in Chicago. It challenges a lot of assumptions and laziness on the part of pundits who like to say things about Chicago without any context from the people living and working in the City. 

4/5 Stars.