Misty Bloom Book Club

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With wit and acuity, novelist Ada Ihenachor reviews fiction from around the world for literary merit and artistic quality.

Ada Ihenachor

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S1E1 - S1.E1: The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 28, 2020 19:14

Hi, it's Ada. I hope you're taking good care of yourself and doing well. In this episode I will be reviewing The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. So I thought this would perhaps be the fourth, fifth or even sixth episode of the Misty Bloom Book Club. But in light of recent events, I bumped it up to the first episode, The Hate U Give is timely, and it felt irresponsible to stick to my original podcast timetable. The Hate U Give is named after Tupac's Thug Life which I of course, immediately listened to again, but which I can't play here for obvious copyright reasons. However, I do encourage you to listen to it. It is amazing. I mean, Tupac's an incredible musical genius and social revolutionary and I still miss him till this day. The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas is hugely popular. You've probably heard of it. It hit the bestseller list, there was a movie made from the book. So yeah, The Hate U Give is a huge commercial success. However, I didn't care to read it when it first came out because I thought it'd be one of those books that was getting all the buzz only because of the subject matter not because of its artistic quality or literary merit. But because of the themes it addresses. I thought it'd be one of those issue books, you know, that deal with a topical issue. And I always feel like issue books are not really for me, because they're never about a story but about an issue, if that makes sense. But hang on and hear me out. I always knew The Hate U Give was about police brutality and racism and American blackness, which are important topics. But I don't care to read about issues in fiction because I hate the burden that the publishing industry places on the shoulders of minority writers to write about issues where white authors get to write about just normal life stuff like falling in love, coming of age, daydreaming, going on a date, there's tons of books about random white dudes, where the author is desperately trying to convince us that these guys are interesting enough that we should spend pages upon pages reading about their wandering reflections on life. So that's the kind of stuff that white authors get to write about. I mean, there's this freaking hugely popular book out there right now. And I think there's an accompanying TV show, too. It's called Normal People by Sally Rooney. I haven't read it. But I think the title is ironic. White authors get to be normal while we battle our societal issues. Most black and minority writers are not afforded the same opportunities to be normal. A book set in Africa, for example, has to be about poverty, war, hunger, the slave trade, you know, the usual. I challenge you to go now on Amazon and look up novels by better known writers of African descent. And you'll see the descriptions publishers use to describe their work are usually either like pre-colonial, or postcolonial even if the book has absolutely jack to do with colonialism. But that's how they see us. I have to say, though, that this is not always the case. But it is extremely common and the current standard, it's like black and minority writers have to pick an issue and make a story around the issue instead of crafting a story and having the characters experience an issue. And that's why I didn't ever plan on reading or watching The Hate U Give. However, a year ago someone whose book tastes I trust said she liked it and so I kind of parked The Hate U Give at the back of my mind to read at some point. And boy am I glad I read it! It is so good. I loved it and I can't wait to have a conversation with you about it. First, I'll tell you what the story is about. It follows 16 year old Starr Carter who lives in Garden Heights, a poor black neighborhood but goes to Williamson, a suburban prep school that's like an hour away. And so Starr straddles two different worlds, has to code switch and navigate a dual identity with being this poor African American kid who goes to a predominantly white school and socializes with rich white kids. She even dates a rich white boy, but poor Starr is constantly hyper aware of not being perceived as hood or ghetto. But anyway, the novel begins at a party in her neighborhood where Starr runs into her childhood best friend, Khalil, a shooting occurs and they leave the party together. On their drive home, they are stopped by a police officer for no reason. And a few minutes into the fake and fraudulent traffic stop, the police officer shoots Khalil, who's unarmed and does absolutely nothing to provoke his own murder. The news picks it up and Khalil's murder becomes national headline news and as frequently happens Khalil is blamed for his own murder. The criminal justice system works overtime to protect the killer cop so Starr and her community rise to protest for justice. So here's what I loved about The Hate U Give. The writing is so smooth, as smooth as jazz. This book runs over 400 pages. And yeah, it was just so easy to read and tells a compelling story. It took me three days and I hated when I had to put it down to work, eat, sleep and do other life stuff. And even though it deals with really topical timely issues, I mean, when is race not topical or timely, but that's a whole other conversation. But the story here, in spite of its gravity also has jocularity and a sense of humor, which made it easy to read. This playfulness does not diminish the importance of the subject matter, but helps the reader breathe in between episodes of tension and casual horror. And I think it also works to demonstrate that we are people that are resilient, and that in spite of all the hardships, there is hope, we will overcome and there are so many reasons to be happy and many opportunities to find joy. And there is a lot of humor in this book. For example, on page 30, it reads, "Black Jesus hangs from the cross in a painting on the hallway wall, and Malcolm X holds a shotgun in a photograph next to him. Nana still complains about those pictures hanging next to each other." So even though the writing feels very easy, casual and ordinary, it is deceptively good. The prose flows really well, the language is accessible, the author manages to really balance slang, Ebonics and standard American English without a hiccup, which I found freaking admirable. It felt effortless. And whenever something feels effortless, I, as a writer know that on the back end, it takes a gargantuan effort to get it to feel that way. And yes, the reverse is also true. Anyway, here's another example on page 33. "It's like a fragile sticker is on my forehead. And instead of taking a chance and saying something that might break me, they'd rather say nothing at all. But the silence is the worst." I feel like the amount of work that Angie Thomas did with this book is quite staggering. And I have to be honest, I'm not the type of writer that's easily impressed by the work of others. But quite frankly, I admire what Angie Thomas has done here. I'd be really interested to know how long it took for her to write and revise this book. If you happen to know, leave me a comment on my social media. Another strength of this book is its ability to capture the human condition. In this book, you will experience the anger that accompanies loss, the pain of tragedy, love's gentle sweetness, and people just going about their everyday business. Let me read you an example from page 37. "We turn onto Marigold Avenue where Garden Heights is waking up. Some ladies wearing floral headscarves come out of the laundromat carrying big baskets of clothes. Mr Rueben unlocks the chains on his restaurant. His nephew Tim, the cook, leans against the wall and wipes sleep from his eyes. Miss Yvette yawns as she goes in her beauty shop." This is such an effective paragraph and I'll tell you why. So the paragraph starts out with the writer saying we turn onto Marigold Avenue where Starr's neighborhood, Garden Heights, is waking up immediately I start to feel sleepy because it's early in the morning in the paragraph and a languid time of day. Also, this paragraph describes Starr's inner city neighborhood. There's a laundromat, there's a guy who's unlocking the chains on his restaurant which suggests it's a neighborhood where it's a little bit unsafe. Restaurants in the suburbs don't have chains on them. And then there is a beauty shop and it's a beauty shop not a salon. And then the author follows up with saying his nephew Tim, the cook, leans against the wall and wipe sleep from his eyes. Guys, I get even sleepier here. Then, the author writes, Miss Yvette yawns as she goes in her beauty shop. And I didn't even realize what was happening as I was reading but I yawned at that moment. So guys, if a writer does not manipulate your emotions or your feelings, I'm sorry, they haven't done their job. This here is an excellent example of a writer making me yawn with just words. Angie Thomas choreographs an early morning transports me into the moment and tricks me into feeling sleepy, so much so that I physically yawn in real life. Hmm. And I read this paragraph around 5:30? 6pm? Not at bedtime or first thing in the morning. It's incredible. I love this book also because it's populated with some very colorful neighborhood characters that have flesh and bone and feel like real people. Like Mr. Lewis, the grumpy widower who grumbles and complains about everything. And then there's Mr. Reuben, who owns the restaurant with the chains on it, remember? And Mr. Reuben is so nice. He remembers his customers' usual orders. He knows all the kids. If a kid comes in with a good report card, they get a free meal. And even if a kid comes in with a bad report card, they still get a free meal as long as they promised to do better. So sweet! I could see all these people in my mind's eye even though the author didn't really describe what they looked like. Their personalities just lifted off the page. Another thing I quite enjoyed about this book is that in many African cultures names are really important, very significant, they are a marker for your destiny, a proclamation of your fate. And I was excited to see this tradition reflected in an African American novel. For example, on page 48, the author writes, "Daddy once told me that King's parents named him after the same gang he later joined. And that's why a name is important. It defines you." Another strong feature of this book is that it was a prophecy for today. There's a line that Starr's father says on page 210. He says this in response to the district attorney. "In the meantime, tell your boys, the mayor and the police chief, to get them fucking tanks out of my neighborhood. Claim folks need to act peaceful but rolling through here like we in a goddamn war." Guys, this book was published in 2017, which means Angie Thomas started writing this book in 2014, 2015, I'm speculating, I don't know. It is 2020 today. And it is a gut wrenching shame that nothing has changed, that right now there are militarized police officers and the military on the streets attacking peaceful unarmed, black protesters. Moving along, I love that this book gave me all the feels, the fullness of human emotion. It made me want to be 16 again and fall in love for the first time like Starr and her boyfriend Chris. It made me want to grow old with someone just like Starr's parents. It reminded me that even the world's violence and diabolical white supremacy cannot keep us from loving and being loved. So guys, there you go. I've told you what I absolutely loved about The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. But before I tell you what I love a little bit less. Here's a quick message from my sponsor don't go anywhere. This episode of the Misty Bloom Book Club is made possible by the support of my novel, OYIBO spelled O-Y-I-B-O It is 1976 when prodigal daughter, Songoli returns her mother's home in a remote south eastern Nigerian village with a wailing toddler on her hip. Not long after, Songoli vanishes again, leaving the fair skinned and dreadlocked child, Adesua, and unanswered questions behind. OYIBO is the haunting chronicle of Adesua's troubled girlhood in the village where she's persecuted for her biracial, dreadlocked appearance. And after a tragedy occurs, the novel falls Adesua's devastating coming of age in the bustling cities of Lagos and ultimately, Brooklyn, New York. Reviewers have described evil as captivating, powerful, and heart wrenching. OYIBO is available on Amazon. Welcome back to the Misty Bloom Book Club. Thanks for staying with me. So I'm going to talk about what I think was less successful about The Hate U Give. But before I jump in, I do want to talk a little bit more about emotion. So here's the thing with emotion. And if you're here for writing tips, you might want to pay particular attention to what I'm about to say. Emotion will save a writer from a multitude of sins. I don't think The Hate U Give is a perfect book by any means. But, I was also reluctant to identify the imperfections of The Hate U Give because of how emotionally gripping this novel is. I was so swept up in the story so much so that even in the moments that I'm going to talk about when it lags, I waited patiently I extended grace because I'd fallen in love with Starr and the other characters. And I knew that in the hands of this writer, Angie freaking Thomas, it won't be long before the beauty returns again. But with that being said, I gotta be honest about a couple things. First, I didn't like the parts of the book where I felt Angie Thomas was explaining African American culture. For example, in the scene where Starr and her parents visit Miss Rosalie, Khalil's grandmother, the writer explains the very uniquely African American ways in which the characters in that scene greet each other. And describes what they're wearing, like the head wraps and whatnot. And Angie Thomas also describes Khalil's grandmother in regal terms. The whole overdone Black Queen narrative - this entire scene made me cringe. And then there was a mac and cheese conversation later in the book, which irked me. I just didn't care for, you know, like trying to explain ourselves to other people. I totally get why it's necessary for a wider mainstream audience. But I just hate that publishers and the reading audience demand this of black and minority writers. And so we have to do it. When I read books by white writers, they don't explain how they greet each other. They don't explain their foods. They don't explain themselves at all. The expectation is that we live in their world and we should know and understand them. And even as readers, when we don't understand certain aspects of white or European culture, the burden is on us to do the work to understand them. But when it's us, we have to help them understand us and that makes me itch. Another flaw of this book is that unlike when the author describes the characters that live in Starr's black neighborhood that I talked about earlier, like Mr. Reuben. When the author describes the non-black or white characters that are Starr's, friends from her prep school, they don't feel quite as three dimensional. They all kind of blended into each especially her two best friends, Hailey and Maya. For the longest time they felt like the same person I couldn't tell them apart for nothing. Until much later in the book when Starr visits Maya's house. Finally, the writing toward the end of The Hate U Give came off to me as chaotic. One could argue that this was done to reflect the agitative nature of the protests, rioting, looting that occurred. But, I would argue that the writing became chaotic way before that. Starting with the Memorial Day Pool party, too many people occupied that scene and the ensuing scenes after. And Angie Thomas devoted attention to every single character's actions and activities whether or not these actions propelled the narrative forward. As a writer, I recognize that Angie Thomas was preparing us for this climactic, breakneck speed conclusion, but it felt like too many things were always happening to too many people at the same time. But that's about it for what I thought was less successful about The Hate U Give. As you can see, I overwhelmingly loved it. So now I'm gonna shift gears and guess what Angie Thomas, the writer is like personality wise and wrap up with my final thoughts. But before I do, there's a quick message from my sponsor. Stay right there. This episode of the Misty Bloom Book Club is made possible by the support of my novel, OYIBO spelled O-Y-I-B-O. It is 1976 when prodigal daughter, Songoli returns her mother's home in a remote south eastern Nigerian village with a wailing toddler on her hip. Not long after, Songoli vanishes again, leaving the fair skinned and dreadlocked child, Adesua, and unanswered questions behind. OYIBO is the haunting chronicle of Adesua's troubled girlhood in the village where she's persecuted for her biracial, dreadlocked appearance. And after a tragedy occurs, the novel falls Adesua's devastating coming of age in the bustling cities of Lagos and ultimately, Brooklyn, New York. Reviewers have described evil as captivating, powerful, and heart wrenching. OYIBO is available on Amazon. . Welcome back to the Misty Bloom Book Club. Thanks for hanging out with me. So let's talk about what I feel Angie Thomas would be like. Personality wise, I feel like Angie Thomas would be bright, fun, the type of person that would be great to go to brunch with and have really good, interesting, thoughtful conversations with over mimosas. I think she'd make for a great conversationalist. But I also think she might be a little reserved and better one on one than in large groups. If you know her, let me know if I'm right on target, or completely missed the mark. Okay, now for my closing thoughts. All I know is I'll be reading Angie Thomas's future work point blank period because I've seen how good she is and what she's capable of. Although I do feel nervous for her because with such a powerful debut, she has set the bar so high and I don't envy her the task of outperforming herself. And I'm also nervous for myself as a reader because my expectations for Angie Thomas are so high now that I'd be disappointed with anything that's not as astonishing as The Hate U Give. For this reason, I wish her all the luck in the world and wish her the best with her writing career. I think Angie Thomas is a force to be reckoned with and that everyone should go read The Hate U Give. Thank you for hanging out with me on this episode of the Misty Bloom Book Club. Don't forget to like, share, leave a comment and subscribe. To find me on social media or to contact me for sponsorship opportunities or if you'd like to become a member of the Misty Bloom Book Club and enjoy all of those wonderful perks go to www.mistybloom.com for all of my information. Be sure to check out my novel OYIBO spelled O-Y-I-B-O exclusively available on Amazon. Until next time, keep reading, stay lit, peace and love Support Misty Bloom Book Club by donating to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/mistybloombookclub Find out more at https://mistybloombookclub.pinecast.co

S1E2 - S1.E2: Season of Crimson Blossoms by Abubakar Adam Ibrahim

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 12, 2020 23:16

Welcome to the Misty Bloom Book Club! Hi, it's Ada. Hope you're taking good care of yourself and doing well. We’re on episode 2 already? Can you believe it? Thanks for sticking with me. It’s just gonna get better and better. In this episode I will be reviewing Season Of Crimson Blossoms by Abubakar Adam Ibrahim. Let’s get into it! So the reason I selected this book was because I wanted to read a book by a northern nigerian author. Perhaps you know this already, but umm, most of your best known Nigerian authors, including yours truly, are southeners. This novel, Season of Crimson Blossoms is set in northern nigeria against the backdrop of Hausa culture and Islamic conventions of behavior. So this totally fit the bill. Let’s start with a summary. Season of Crimson Blossoms follows a forbidden romance between 55 year old Binta, a respectable Muslim widow and Reza, the local weed dealing overlord who also moonlights as a political thug. And clearly, with this taboo type relationship there’s bound to be drama, shenanigans, secrets, lies, implications and consequences for not only Binta and Reza, but also for their families, and for the wider community. So I was excited to see how this would all play out. But before I dive into my review, let me introduce you properly to Binta and Reza to help contextualize the rest of my review. I’ll start with Binta. Like I said, Binta is a widow. She's tragically lost her husband and her first born son to socio political circumstances which are endemic to Nigeria and maybe even particularly the northern nigerian experience. The book interestingly is set sometime during the first ever attacks by the Boko Haram terrorist group and there are some references to that happening in the background. But anyway back to Binta. She lives with her 8 year old granddaughter, Ummi, love that name, Ummi, and her 16 year old niece, Faiza whose father and brother were murdered in one of the many religious riots that plague northern nigeria. On the other hand, Reza, Binta’s lover is also a victim of a society that quite frankly and sadly sees him as disposable and has thrown him away. He is a 25 year old criminal with serious mommy issues. And I’ll talk about that a little bit later. Ok, let’s just jump into what I thought was successful about this novel. First thing - This is an accomplished novel and does not read like a debut effort. Abubakar Adam Ibrahim is a writer who's not an amateur. He is not new to this. The author came across as fully formed, self assured, and has a clear and unhesitating perspective. To me, the author shows off prose that is observant and thoughtful and there is a maturity to the writing. This novel contains some beautifully written prose which I will read to you to underscore what I’ve just said. For example on page 123, the author writes, "...the two bus drivers were standing by the door, arms hanging by their sides. One was Yoruba and the other Kanuri, but Reza thought they looked alike; the same worn faces, the same sweat-stained jumpers, and the same strained eyes. Occupational siblings." What I just read shows off the author's strong observational skills and appropriate use of metaphor which separates amateurs from professionals. A second strength of this novel is the interrogation of Hausa and Islamic norms. For example, this novel explores a custom in which mothers are disallowed from calling their firstborn children by name or being affectionate toward them. Or even acknowledging their later born children. This is a custom that I'd never heard of and I found myself upset by it and responding viscerally to it. But it was also very intriguing. And I loved that the author interrogated this part of the culture while also handling it with tenderness. love love loved it. It gave not only a deeper insight into this dare I say questionable custom but it also has real consequences for the characters' lives. I appreciated that the author didn’t use this custom as a device to make his novel appear cool. You know what I mean? You know how people do that? Throw in something that has a novelty appeal to compensate for being boring or other weaknessnesses in their storytelling. In this case, the tradition served a purpose which was to explain the motivations of the characters and propel the story forward. For me, it was one of the most moving parts of the story. No pun intended haha. Guys, I really liked Reza. He is a very well drawn, sympathetic character. He makes questionable choices no doubt and does some really bad things. But you know, it's in the nature of a rogue to also be charming and I think the author did an amazing job with infusing this character with equal parts compassion and charisma without shying away from the moral complexities that Reza presents. In this book, the author does a great job with balancing out Reza. I mean, it's just like any other human being, we're never just one thing. Reza is the kind of character, the kind person on the fringes of society, most middle-class people who read literary fiction like season of crimson blossoms and yes, I'm calling out myself and dragging all of you who are listening to this too. Reza is the type of person we will probably never interact with in our lifetimes so shout out to Binta for defying social norms. And I think it's important to feature characters like Reza in fiction so that middle-class people are forced to humanize the types of people they would typically avoid, ignore, or even recoil from. In my opinion, fiction has a responsibility to tell the truth and the author tells this truth well. Thirdly, I enjoyed the realism of the novel. I felt a sense of place, a strong sense of the characters, their foods, their routines and habits, desires, their pain. Their interactions all felt very authentic and genuine. The novel did not at all feel false or artificial. It all felt real, like I was transported into their town and paying witness to their lives. There was a strong sense of realism woven throughout the novel. It was very well done. Last but not least, I also thought the author's use of pacing and suspense as literary devices was pretty sharp. I liked how the author would delay revealing the character’s motivations for withholding significant information. It set me up for a greater expectation of more to come. Which is what every writer should be aiming to do with their readers. So two thumbs up to Abubakar Adam Ibrahim for doing this so well. So that's it in terms of the major strengths of the book. But before I dive into what I thought was a little less successful about this novel here's a quick message from my sponsor. Welcome back! Thanks for staying with me. So let's pivot to the less successful aspects of this novel. Cons First, the tone of the writing felt a little too serious to me. It wasn't so bad, however, as to deter me from continuing to read. It kind of reminded me a little bit of how I felt reading Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates. In Season of Crimson blossoms there’s no playfulness or lightness to the prose. No air, no space to move and play. The only glimpses of humor are to be found at the beginning of a few of the chapters. Each chapter in the book starts with a proverb. For example Chapter 10 starts with a proverb that says… the search for a black goat should start way before nightfall… which I found to be pretty amusing, clearly it doesn't take much to amuse me. However the intrinsic nature of a proverb is not only to present wisdom but to do so sometimes in a cheeky, shady way. But the proverbs in this book as far as I could tell, are not original to the author so I can not ascribe the humor that they provide to the author. Anyhoo, interestingly both of these writers, Abubakar Adam Ibrahim and Ta-Nehisi Coates are also journalists. So, I suspect that because of their backgrounds reporting the news and presenting factual information in a sober manner, this style of writing bleeds into their fiction leaving it feeling a little stiff. I'll give you an example. I’ll read you a line from page 12 of the book but before I do, I’ll lay out the scene for you. In this scene, Binta attends a madrasa, which is islamic school, with women in her neighborhood. On this particular day, their teacher has called in sick and the women decide to spend the time productively by going over previous lessons but they cannot agree on which topics to revise so they agree to disperse. And this is how the author describes their dispersal… after a lengthy and discordant debate garnished with thinly coated sarcasm the women left in groups… In my opinion, this was an opportunity for lightness or humor, you know like the women can’t get it together, but for whatever reason, the author just chose not to take it. so I struggled with the overall serious tone of the book. Please understand that my desire for air or lightness is not to, you know, escape from the importance of the themes that are being discussed but as a reader I demand, mmm look at me demanding things. I demand, as a reader to experience the fuller breadth of human emotion. I want joy, sadness, empathy, grief, levity, loss, good Humor, compassion, i want to smile, I wanna grunt at something, I wanted be pissed off. Look, I'm spending a good chunk of my time with this book and taking hours over several days to engage with the characters and have them feel like real people that I am interacting with. and when you interact with people in real life, guess what, you experience a spectrum of emotion. So, this should be no different. This novel felt monotone. And while we're still on the subject of humor, there is a book Binta owns that's mentioned pretty frequently throughout the course of season of crimson blossoms. The book is titled The Major Sins and is written by Az Zahabi. I know a book within a book. pretty meta huh? Anyhow the major sins by az zahabi features pretty frequently throughout the narrative of the story. However, it never becomes of significance to the plot and i was confused and slightly irritated by it. So after I was done reading this novel I went and looked up the major sins. and then I got it. it's kind of supposed to be this ironic, inside joke type thing. However, I think, and this is my personal preference, the most successful jokes while they should be intelligent and engage with the audience's intellect, it should also be immediate. I don't think the audience should have to go home to uncover research in order to get the joke. You feel me? Second, I mentioned the character, Faiza, earlier. She is Binta’s rebellious, teenaged niece. Her characterization starts out strong. I appreciated Faiza’s refusal to be tamed especially when juxtaposed against the repressive community in which they live. I know, I know this is not particularly novel, pun intended this time. We’ve all seen that characterization of the modern teenager rebelling against old customs a thousand times before. However, I promise you in the hands of this author it still comes off as fresh and truthful and not all hackneyed. On the flip side of this, however, is that I thought the author didn't quite achieve the evolution of Faiza. If you recall earlier I mentioned that Faiza lives with Binta because her father and her brother were murdered in a religious riot. Quick sidebar. I hate the term religious riot.. But here I am using it. It’s such an easy throwaway term that's also inaccurate because religious riots are never really about religion but a perversion of power and corrupt political machinations. But back to Faiza. Midway through the book, she starts to deal with the trauma of that tragedy. While I do think it was good of the author to address mental health and question the norms surrounding it, I did not think the author did justice to the scope of Faiza’s issues. And I feel strongly about this because I also tackle mental health issues in my novel, OYIBO. In Season of Crimson Blossoms, Faiza transforms seemingly overnight from this mouthy rebellious teenager into a subdued, moody person. There was no gradual transition. And the author also abruptly resolved her trauma. He didn't handle it with the finesse I would have liked to see. It felt choppy. I do understand that the novel is ultimately Binta and Reza's story and the author was perhaps being careful not to let Faiza's story overshadow the main characters but I also thought he could have done a little bit more with Faiza. I thought there was a little more wiggle room in the story for Faiza. She deserved better. Third, I also spied a few paragraphs that i feel should have been left on The Cutting Room floor. I think the book could have done with a tiny bit more you know tighter editing. I also caught a few words that were overused throughout the prose. Itinerant was one. Exotic was another. For example, on page 151, the author writes,"... Musa, the teaman came in with an exotic tea set." did you catch that repetition? did you see how the author unnecessarily used tea twice in the same sentence within the space of 11 words? he could have just simply written Musa wheeled in a tea service and that would have sufficed. You know, it's the little things that bug me and make my skin itch. The rest of the sentence reads, "Reza admired the dainty porcelain cup with intricate powder blue floral designs and a teapot in the center which was giving off a steady stream of steam through the spout." did we need the additional words that tell us that steam comes out of the spout? The base? Could we have lived without it? . The editor could have totally cut out those words because any person with a basic understanding of kettles or tea pots knows that steam comes out of the spout. where else would it come out of? the handle? Or on page 230 where the author mentions Binta feeling a deep sense of foreboding." Can you guess what my gripe here is? I mean to the average reader it’s no big deal. The sentence works just fine. And I get it but as a writer, my eyeballs latched on to deep sense foreboding and would not let go. A sense of foreboding is a sense of foreboding. foreboding suggests that things are about to go left, something bad is about to happen. Foreboding is ominous. There is no such thing as a deep sense of foreboding. Just as there's no light sense of foreboding. There's no minor or easy sense of foreboding. There's no gentle sense of foreboding. And now the word foreboding is stuck in your head cos now I'm ranting uselessly about foreboding. But seriously though, look, I've become a pretty merciless editor of my own writing. And I think if any of you listening are aspiring novelists, those are just simply examples of how you can be a more effective editor of your own writing. You know, take a step back, take more steps back, infact take 50 kilometers back and always ask yourself is this word relevant to the story? Does this move the story forward? Every single word must be loaded, must be weight-bearing, must serve a narrative purpose, must work, work, work, work, work to earn their space on the page. Every single word must be used judiciously to move the story, must help the characters do something, introduce new information that's relevant to the story. Words need to earn their place. So moving on. Another major gripe that I had with this book was the unfortunate ageism, the reference to Binta as an aged woman. There was a part early on in the book where the author describes her as tagging along with a number of aged women. I just assumed that she was walking with older women. But as I kept reading, I realized Binta was also part of this aged woman clique. On page 12, the author writes… “it almost made her heart devastated already by the ravages of age and the many tragedies she had endured in life, burst..”. And on page 13 Binta is pleading for her life, and she cries out, “Please I'm old”. At the beginning of chapter 6, the author refers to Binta’s hair as "a clump of ancient hair". Here we go again and again with the age thing. Honestly, if the author had not revealed Binta’s age as 55, I would have assumed she was in her 90s or something. And this is not exclusive to Binta which makes it even worse. On page 90, in a scene where two women visit Binta in her home, the author describes these visitors and I read...Kandiya in her dampened Hijab and Mallama Umma with her shriveled face and sunken eyes had witnessed 60 rains and 61 harmattans. I found the obsession with women only in their 50s and 60s being described as aged, ancient, and shriveled, as honestly super weird, gross, and disturbing. And guys, can you guess what the absolute worst part of this is? None of the older men in this book are being degraded or defined by their age. On page 281 for example, an old Senator is described as a "little man with boyish eyes." seriously?! The author also allows one of Binta's suitors, an old man to proclaim his virility. At that point, I was just like, I cant! Anyhoo moving on I was unable to differentiate among the residents of San Siro where Reza lived with his gang. I know it's a difficult thing for any writer to successfully individualize members of a collective especially when they are always appearing together in the same scenes. And I recognize the author's admirable attempts to differentiate between them but I think the problem here was that in the initial descriptions of the residents of San Siro, the author would simply describe the person and not have that person be involved in some immediate plot advancing action which would have helped the character stick in the reader’s mind. So there’s another writing tip. I’m dropping all these gems. Anyway, overall I didn’t find this aspect of the book to be successful. Also Season of Crimson Blossoms did not necessarily grab onto my emotions. While I was curious to see how things would turn out, where the characters would end up, I didn’t feel emotionally invested in their journeys. The final shortcoming of this book for me is that both binta and Reza end up in their situationship because they are both searching for someone else in each other. so you know that common psychological thing where people will say women end up marrying a man like their father or a son will marry a woman that reminds him of his mom, or a man remarries a woman that looks exactly like his ex wife. Basically to explain where someone would subconsciously fill a void in their life with a person with very specific traits. In this book, Binta and Reza, are doing the same thing which is not unusual, and is a pretty common thing that happens in the lives of many people. However what makes it uncomfortable here is that both characters are doing it literally, not subconsciously. Binta and Reza are both hyper aware that they are attracted to each other because of significant people in their lives that they’ve lost. This made me really uncomfortable and not in a good way. I do like when art that I’m consuming causes discomfort whether it’s television, film, reading fiction or whatever. I like to be made uncomfortable because it helps me confront issues and challenges what I think I know of the world. But in the case of this book, it made me really really uncomfortable in like a gross, unpleasant way. I want to be provoked into thinking differently not into wanting to throw up. I also thought it was lazy of the author to have this direct psychological manifestation. I thought it would have been more successful if the writer had manipulated the reader into knowing that this is what Binta and Reza were doing without them realizing it and then the reader could observe the characters come to that realization. So that's it for what I thought was less successful about Season of Crimson Blossoms. Next up, I'll guess what the author is like personality wise and wrap up with some final thoughts. But before I do here's a quick message from my sponsor. Don't go anywhere. Welcome back to the Misty Bloom Book Club. Thanks for staying with me. So in terms of personality I felt like Abubakar Adam Ibrahim came across as studious. The type of person that when he was a kid was an excellent student and diligent in school. Abubakar Adam Ibrahim also came across to me as a cautious sort, the kinda person who takes his time with warming up to strangers. But among close friends he puts his guard down, and is very relaxed maybe with a little bit of a wry sense of humor. Well if you know Abubakar Adam Ibrahim let me know if I pegged him correctly or if I'm completely off. I’ll end with some final thoughts. The first is and this is a commonality that I noticed between Season of Crimson Blossoms and another book, Born On A Tuesday by El Nathan John which I read maybe 2 years ago. Both books were published around the same time and in both books there is a focus on northern nigerian characters who are lost boys, street kids who sell weed, hire themselves out as political thugs, you get the gist. So even though this might be indicative of and endemic to the socio economic and political environment of Northern Nigeria and even other parts of Nigeria, I don't want to see these characters take center stage in every single novel that's written by a contemporary Northern Nigerian writer. Final Thought 2: I'm a gigantic fan of people chasing happiness because life is tough. And finding happiness is even more weighted and intense in a repressed society so that it then becomes this act of courage. So I personally can't help but cheer on the people who seek happiness even if I disagree with their methods or values, I'm still ultimately that person who will be like do you, boo. So if you like stories about ordinary people trying to find simple happiness where and when they can, check out season of crimson blossoms. Oh one more, absolute final thought, if you do read Season Of Crimson Blossoms let me know what happened to Reza's money? Support Misty Bloom Book Club by donating to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/mistybloombookclub Find out more at https://mistybloombookclub.pinecast.co

S1E4 - S1. Bonus Ep 1: Circe by Madeline Miller

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 29, 2020 18:39

Hi guys, this is Ada, I hope you’re taking good care of yourself and doing well. So welcome members of the Misty Bloom Book Club to your first bonus episode. You guys make it possible for me to keep this podcast alive so thank you and enjoy. You deserve this. By the way bonus episodes are ad-free because you guys already make the episode possible with your sponsorship so thank you again. So far this season, we’ve made pit stops in inner city America, northern Nigerian, south Africa and you guys, I thought you know what? Let’s escape the world entirely for a little while, there's a pandemic ravaging the world so we deserve this escape. So in this bonus episode, as you know, I’m gonna be reviewing Circe by Madeline Miller. 44.7And because you guys are members it’ll be even more fun to do this review because you have the reading list and have probably already read Circe... [become a member of the Misty Bloom Book Club for more...] Support Misty Bloom Book Club by donating to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/mistybloombookclub Find out more at https://mistybloombookclub.pinecast.co

america nigerian africa madeline miller circe tip jar 7and

S1E3 - S1.E3: What We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 29, 2020 20:57

Hey hey hey, it's Ada. how are you doing? I hope you're taking good care of yourself and doing well. In this episode of The Misty Bloom book club I am going to be reviewing What We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons. You ready? Let's go into the clubhouse. Before I launch into my review of what we lose by Zinzi Clemmons, I want to talk a little bit about honesty. So grab your coffee, water, wine, whatever your drink of choice is, sit back and relax. Because it's about to get real. So there's this great advice that I’ve seen floating around the internet. I’ve seen two versions of the same advice and I don’t know who to originally attribute the quotes to but if you do know, let me know. Okay, so the first quote is truth without love is brutality. And the second quote is honesty without compassion is cruelty. So both of these quotes are essentially saying the same thing. And it's stuck with me because honesty is a virtue. And that is unquestioned. We are taught from a young age not to lie, to always speak truth to power, we are taught honesty is the best policy. There's no negotiating honesty. We should all strive for honesty as one of the greatest virtues to pursue and practice. However, honesty is not an excuse for us to hurt people. You know in the exercise of being blunt there's no need for us to administer blunt force trauma. There has to be a way, and I'm learning this as well, to be honest without inflicting harm on someone. So finding a balance between being honest and truthful but also couching the honesty and truth in the way that minimizes harm. So why am I bringing this up? No, I'm not taking a detour from talking and being about books to becoming a virtue guru. Although if that pays more I might reconsider. I still want everyone, including myself, to be kind. It makes for a better world and a gentler existence when we're all kind to each other. But the reason I was bringing up the whole honesty and truth cruelty brutality thing is because I thought about perhaps not doing reviews for books that I didn't enjoy reading but I also think that's completely unrealistic. You know, sort of pandering to the whole if you have nothing nice to say don't say anything at all. Which to me can sometimes be a cowardly piece of advice in my opinion because it is taking the path of least resistance. If you're willing to do the work you can always find something nice to say. It's a little bit passive and kinda wack to just absolve yourself of the responsibility of saying nothing at all. Rather than plumbing the depths to finding the good about someone or a situation. Also the podcast would start to come across as fake because after a while you'd notice that I love absolutely everything that I read. Which is impossible. Life is not just a pond of lilies. It would not give The Misty Bloom Book Club any sort of dimension, I would not be a reliable source of literary commentary, critique, or appreciation. You guys are smart. You would pick up on the artifice that I'd be putting out. And even as a published author, I'm still growing and always learning to be a better writer and seeing the work of others, where their novels shine and where they fail, helps to sharpen my own craft. And the bottom line is that it is immature to avoid conversations that are difficult or uncomfortable. And, like you, I also want to challenge myself to be honest without being brutal. So now that I've given you my whole spiel on honesty and brutality, let me start my review of What We Lose with a quick and dirty overview. See what I did there? What We Lose is written in the first-person, the I, and follows Thandi who's born and raised in Pennsylvania to a South African mother and an American father. Partway through the novel, Thandi’s mother is diagnosed with cancer and very unfortunately passes away. And the novel transforms into a meditation on dealing with terminal illness, grief, and loss. So going into what we lose by Zinzi Clemmons, I had high hopes for the book. And the reason I had such high hopes is because the writer Zinzi Clemmons. Ok, hold on let's talk about her name for a second. I love her name, Zinzi, by the way. It just sounds glorious and she has the coolest initials. Zee Cee baby. Zee Cee in da building!!!. Anyway Zinzi Clemmons is part South African and part African-American so I was looking forward to getting her extremely unique and distinctive perspective on race and race relations. You know with her coming from this dual heritage that's very loaded on both sides with very different but both extremely intense race histories and that's putting it mildly. And no I'm not putting this burden on Zinzi Clemmons to talk about race. You guys know exactly how I feel about black and minority writers being forced to take on social issues. If not, go listen to Episode 1 of The Misty Bloom Book Club where I talk about this in a little bit more detail. I had this expectation for Zinzi Clemmons to address race issues not because of her heritage. But because the actual book jacket describes the protagonist of What We Lose, Thandie, as being caught between being black and white. So there you go. The first thing I thought about What We Lose is that this novel, for me read like a memoir or maybe even more accurately a non chronological diary. Or maybe a fusion of all these things together. Like part novel part memoir part diary. Which I thought of as an unconventional approach to creative writing. I totally saw what the author was trying to do here. Zinzi Clemmons took what we know of as the conventional novel, you know the traditional approach to crafting a novel and turned it on its head. It had like untitled mini chapters under chapters, there are graphs included in the book, it is wildly non-chronological, there is some philosophy thrown in, there are expositions on South Africa. With What We Lose, the author attempted to do something inventive. But not just trying to be inventive for its own sake. I saw very clearly that the unorthodox structure Zinzi Clemmons adopted for this novel is meant to reflect that grief is not linear or a tidy emotion. The emotions of grief are all over the place. Grief is disorganized. Your feelings are a jumbled mess. Your memories of the person you lost switch back and forth between the recent past and way way back. And the non-chronological narrative choice of What We Lose reflects this. And I always respect when anyone is truthfully and doggedly pushing the boundaries of what we think is possible. It was certainly brave of Zinzi Clemmons to attempt to do something innovative here. Like I said earlier taking what we know of as the orthodox approach to novel writing and turning it on its head. And I respect Zinzi Clemmons for writing What We Lose in the manner that she felt was best suited to this story. I'm gonna speculate that Zinzi Clemmons would have come up against some resistance so it must have taken guts to push forward with and fight for a novel structured in this manner. Aside from that, What We Lose had some profound moments. And I'll give you some examples. I really liked the part of the book where Thandi's father is moving on and finding a new relationship after the death of his wife. And Thandie is understandably resistant to her father moving on from her mother. And I'll read the scene to you from page 164. "I want to be happy again" he says, his voice breaking. "Don't you think I deserve happiness?" "of course, I say." you deserve much more than that. I only wish I could be okay with what form of happiness you've chosen." That right there is a pearl of wisdom that I want you to think about in your life. For example I think many of us are not really resistant to other people finding happiness. We only question their methods for doing so. Whether or not is our business to do so but it's something to definitely think about. There was one line I really liked on page 145 and it reads "I realized that that was how heartbreak occurred. Your heart wants something but reality resists it." So true, you guys! So true. I also like this paragraph from page 182. It reads “Love and marriage are completely unrelated enterprises. Marriage bears little resemblance to love as competing in the Olympics does to your afternoon jog. Sometimes I think with regret of how our love might have grown if we hadn't driven a pregnancy, then a marriage, like two speeding 18-wheelers straight into it.” I mean that right there is a lot of food for thought. I also liked this line on page 185, “Peter sighs, reaches for the pacifier, and pops it nervously into M's mouth, as if our child is a bottle of champagne threatening to explode.” I thought that was a fun sentence. Here’s another great line page 206. It reads, “sometimes I sniff the bottle of perfume of hers that I saved, but it doesn't come close to the robustness of her smell. It is her, flattened.” It is a heavy sentence and it made me sad. I think the sentence was so effective because we associate smell with memories and nostalgia so I think that's what was so profound about this particular sentence. So those are the things that I appreciated about What We Lose. Now, I'm gonna flip the script and talk about what I didn't like quite as much about What We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons. But before I do that here is a quick message from my sponsor. Don't go anywhere. Welcome back to the Misty Bloom book club thanks for staying with me. So now I'm going to talk about what frustrated me about What We Lose So, overall, I'm going to admit that I struggled with What We Lose. Sadly, it didn't hit the spot for me. And I hate that it didn't because like I said earlier, I had such high hopes for this book. However, I wouldn't call what I didn't like about the book as weaknesses per se. But I see this more as a cataloging of my frustrations with the What We Lose. What We Lose totally was a worthy and admirable attempt at being experimental and innovative with fiction However and ultimately for me. I’m sorry. it just didn't work. While I wholeheartedly understood that the author was making a deliberate eclectic artistic choice, I struggled with the way the book was structured. I mentioned that it had like untitled mini chapters under chapters, there are graphs, it is wildly non-chronological making it difficult to follow, the philosophy felt like it was thrown in, there are what I found to be problematic expositions on South Africa that I'll talk about a little bit later . The inconsistency of the novel's structure crippled my enjoyment of it. It interrupted the flow of the novel and gave it a distinctly jerky quality that felt like whiplash. I appreciate the author’s experimentation. But to me, it just read as disjointed and came off as gimmicky. Or maybe I just simply have boring, stock, archetypal tastes in literature. You tell me, I don’t know. But my advice here for any new and aspiring writers who are listening, my advice for whatever it's worth is to be aware of the line between avant garde and gimmicks. You should always, always aim to express your own originality or uniqueness like Zinzi Clemmons did here. However, please remember that your originality or uniqueness is like a fingerprint, it’s innate in you. And you don't need the gimmicks, bells and whistles, or whatever the writing version of auto-tune is. Trust yourself that your work will reflect your individuality. Period. Apart from the stylistic and structural choices that Zinzi Clemmons made in What We Lose, I also found that unfortunately there was nothing special about the writing itself. And that was another problem for me. The writing overall was pretty basic. But it did have some very strong, thoughtful moments which I shared with you earlier in the episode. And those were the shining moments. I didn’t like that beyond those examples that I shared earlier, most of the rest of the prose was pretty basic. Like describing winter as a “long dark and cold period”. Or saying “The sun is shining with full strength.” I don’t expect descriptions like this from someone with an MFA in Creative Writing. And for those who don’t know, an MFA is a Masters in Fine Arts. Which is an advanced degree for fiction writing. So, when I get descriptions like winter is long dark and cold period or the sun is shining with full strength I get genuinely confused and frustrated.These are some of the ways in which I found What We Lose to be frustrating. I mentioned before that What We Lose contains expositions on South Africa. These expositions on South Africa did not resonate with me at all. I wasn't feeling them because the protagonist’s story would suddenly stop, and then the author would randomly veer off into unrelated discussions sprinkled through the book on South Africans and South Africa. Like talking about Oscar Pistorius, talking about the Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist, Kevin Carter, the author inserted a blog post about crime in Durban, there were sections on Winne Mandela. And then we'd return to the novel’s main plot, Thandie's story. It was totally disruptive to the story’s narrative arc. And the hard part about reading these expositions on South Africa was it didn't feel like I was reading it from an insider, it wasn't a knowing, intimate, and heartfelt perspective of a South African but felt like it was coming from a foreign, touristy gaze. These South African sidebars had the quality of reading as academic, like something copied and pasted from Wikipedia or a newspaper article. They were all things that anyone who even has a tiny micro familiarity with events in South Africa already knows. It wasn’t new information or like you know a new take on these people or events. And there was no emotional connection or narrative links between these events and Thandie. And this matters because Thandie is supposed to be half South African. It really really frustrated me because all it did was to say "hey I'm Thandie, I'm half South African and I'll prove this to you by talking about some South African things. " It just felt like a cheap shot, like these South African events and people were used as filler, to fill in pages in the book. And it made me honestly feel defensive and protective of South Africa being used this way. Something else I had mixed feelings about was that this book is very unapologetically upper-middle-class. I felt like Thandie kept trying to emphasize the fact that in South Africa she is a colored and therefore higher up the social ladder than a black person. And in America, she comes from an upper middle class black pedigree. The issue is not in having these social advantages. The issue here is that they're not stated merely as fact but stated as a sort of point being made about social separation. And I'm not sure who that point is being made to because this book is written in the first-person. Hmmmm. I honestly cannot see it appealing to a diverse array of literary tastes. I mentioned that this book is a meditation on Grief. And grief is a universal emotion and feeling that everyone across every social category will go through. We will all experience loss. We will all experience bereavement. We will all mourn people that we love. That's bound to happen to all of us unfortunately. So I feel like this book should have read as universal but it didn't. It's very specific in its target audience, very specific in who it would appeal to. And it would appeal to firmly upper middle class readers. But maybe ultimately there's nothing wrong with that. You know there's an old saying - know your audience. Something else I wanna discuss and this is not just specific to what we lose or Zinzi Clemmons but broadly across the literary world. Literature has a lot of jobs. You know? To inform. To help us empathize. To reveal who we are as a people. To introduce us to new worlds. Blah Blah Blah. But there's another function of literature which I feel is often minimized or not seen as important as the other functions of literature. And I'm just going to say it. Literature also has a duty to entertain. It's like other forms of art whether it's film or music or paintings or fashion. I don't care how high brow or indie or niche or upscale your sensibilities are. Art should also be aesthetically pleasing and part of being aesthetically pleasing is the duty to entertain, to please my senses you know. It's kind of like those super, super indie movies that only like two people that get what the filmmaker is trying to do . Or those haute couture outfits that only 10 people in the world will ever wear not because of the price tag but because there's no normal everyday event to wear them to. In those cases, you're ultimately producing art for yourself and not to please an audience. And this is how I felt reading What We Lose entertaining. My opinion is that yes make art for you. But, if you expect to have an audience participate in your art, then you have to think beyond yourself. Look, I get it this book is not a $100 bill so it's not going to appeal to every single person that reads it. Including me. But I would have at least liked to have been able to relate to a tiny aspect of it. And speaking of being unable to relate to this novel I think I figured out what the crux of the issue was for me. What We Lose reads like the diary of a moody, conflicted teenager. Even though Thandie is not a teenager. So you're immersed in this conflicted, jumbled reality of a person who doesn't even know who they are, who has no sense of direction, who's simply aimless. And there was no inner growth or progression as Thandie got older. I was disappointed. Very disappointed. I found Thandie to be very tiresome. And the reason I found her to be tiresome is because she is one of those people that's very feelings based who is so severely inward looking. You know those people who never really look outward, who don’t seem to be concerned about how other people are feeling or how they're doing. They're just so into the supposed complexity of their own super important feelings. You know those kinds of people who define themselves by their feelings and think that somehow the complexity of their feelings makes them cool. But all it does for the rest of us is it make them appear selfish because they don’t care about how other people feel. They come across to us as insufferable because they don't have the capacity to realize that other people besides them also experience very complex emotions.I said earlier that What We Lose is a novel about handling grief. It also deals with the depression that accompanies grief which I think is a really powerful subject to always address in fiction. But the problem with Thandie as a fictional character is that she was always inward looking and feeling sorry for herself even before tragedy hit so we never saw her degradation from normalcy into grief. Thandie was mourning life waaay before death came along. Another aspect to this was that I didn't feel like I could latch onto the secondary characters even if I wanted to ignore Thandie. Thandie was so me me me, that I never got the chance to really get to know the secondary characters in a tangible way. So guys, that's the main gist of my catalog of frustrations of What We Lose. Next up, I'll do the fun personality profile of Zinzi Clemmons and guess what I think she is like as a person. And then I'll end with some final thoughts. But before I do that, here's a quick message from my sponsor. Per usual, don't go anywhere. Okay I'm going to do a personality profile of Zinzi Clemmons. Of course this is purely fun guesswork from reading What We Lose. Soooo, I'm gonna guess that Zinzi Clemmons is probably a spontaneous, adventurous type person, who wears her heart on her sleeve. If you know Zinzi Clemmons, let me know if I hit the bullseye with this or if I'm completely way off base. Finally I'll close with saying that i admire the unconventional eclectic style and structure of what we lose. Even though i think would have been incredibly successful if it was written as a straightforward memoir. But I also realize it's a selfish thing for me to say because by saying that, I'm wanting the author to adapt her art to suit my own particular preference. And I suspect, and of course this is pure but respectful speculation, that it was a deliberate choice for Zinzi Clemmons not to write this book as a memoir to intentionally put some distance between herself and the grief, and shield herself from direct pain. And I completely understand this. So, if you've read What We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons or if you do plan to read it, let me know what you think. I'd love to have a conversation with you on social media. Support Misty Bloom Book Club by donating to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/mistybloombookclub Find out more at https://mistybloombookclub.pinecast.co

S1E4 - S1.E4: Lakota Woman by Mary Crow Dog

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 9, 2020 19:19

Hi! This is Ada, I hope you‘re taking good care of yourself and doing well. So guys, I'm so proud to be taking you on this lit global journey with me and I can’t wait to go even more places with you. It’s only episode 4. And we’ve been to inner city US, northern Nigeria, South Africa, and today, we're returning to America. Native America that is. So, in this episode, I’ll be talking about Lakota Woman by Mary Crow Dog. You ready? Lets get into it. So, Lakota Woman is Mary Crow Dog’s memoir . And if you remember from episode zero, I mentioned that in the Misty Bloom Book club I would be reviewing mostly fiction and on rare occasions would consider nonfiction. So I guess today is the rare occasion. It came early. This book reminded me a tiny little bit of Born A Crime by Trevor Noah. Not at all in terms of style or substance. They are very dissimilar in those regards because Born A Crime is Trevor Noah’s account of growing up in apartheid South Africa while Lakota Woman follows Mary Crow Dog’s story as an activist fighting for the rights of Native Americans. But my comparison here is in terms of Mary Crow Dog and Trevor Noah being compelling storytellers, not professional writers. And so for that reason I'm not going to do a typical review of Lakota Woman. I feel like how do you qualitatively assess or critique somebody's lived experience. You really can't judge it, you know what I mean? And also these are people, Mary Crow Dog and Trevor Noah just trying to tell us an honest story of oppression, all that matters is that these are stories that we should all be paying attention to and be provoked into positive actions. They are not trying to be professional writers so it feels dishonorable to critique their style of writing. So, I'm just not gonna do it. Instead I'll take a different approach and just chat with you about the book, okay? I think a great place to start this conversation is to ask who is a Native American? Because that's a question that always seems to keep popping up in public discourse. And Mary Crow Dog answers this question. She says, "I should make clear that being a full blood or breed is not a matter of bloodline, or how Indian you look or how black your hair is. The general rule is that whoever thinks, sings, acts, and speaks Indian is a skin, a full blood and whoever acts and thinks like a white man is a half blood or breed, no matter how Indian he looks." This book covers Mary Crow Dog’s life in the seventies and it’s interesting how 30, 40 years later people still try to claim a Native American heritage even though they do not think, sing, act, or speak like a Native and do not have familiarity with native traditions. I wonder what Mary Crow Dog would have thought of today's world where people benefit from and will fully exercise not being seen in the world as Native but will claim being Native when it's convenient and profitable. So your classic case of eating your cake and having it too. I’ve seen that happen where the majority of their existence in society is as an oppressor because of course, of the privileges attached to whiteness and then they switch over to oppressed when they wanna benefit from a minor advantage of their native heritage. So basically wanting to participate in the scarce wins but participate in zero of the struggle, pain and bloodshed that has to occur for those tiny wins. I've seen people do this. I find it to be pretty dark and disturbing. But moving along, I also wanna say that it felt like a treasure and a privilege to read this book. I felt like Mary Crow Dog was like letting me or us, since y’all are listening to this, into a sacred people and tradition that we do not deserve to know about but she is generous enough to share her people’s customs with us. In this case, obviously Lakota which is part of the Sioux people. Each chapter in this book starts with a saying or a poem or the lyrics of songs by select Native American people. Chapter 8 for example starts with what appears to be the first verse of a poem by a young man from Eagle Butte. And it goes like this, "I knew when I brought my body here, it might become food for the worms and magpies. I threw my body away before I came here." This verse brought tears to my eyes, broke my heart and it feels like desecration to even attempt to dissect it because the verse has said all that needs to be said. And the verse lays bare that even though this book is Mary Crow Dog's story it is also a chronicle of Native American suffering. And that is the proper place to start the conversation. This book covers the systematic stealing of indigenous lands by white settlers, the forced sterilization of Native Women including the author’s sister. It recounts the organized erasure of the native customs, and traditions, the introduction of poverty, addiction, and hopelessness into Native life. So it's both a story of a people and a person. Lakota Woman starts out on the Rosebud Indian reservation in South Dakota where Mary is raised by her grandparents in a loving but extremely poor home, a shack with no electricity or indoor plumbing. The grandparents try to raise the author and their other grandchildren as Catholic and to adopt White culture and norms for practical reasons, you know, to make it possible for their grandchildren to survive in the world beyond the reservation. But it is also heartbreaking where the author reveals that her grandparents still subconsciously turn to some of the traditional ways to find healing because the old ways is their truth, you know. At some point Mary Crow Dog is forced by the government to go to boarding school where they employ inhumane methods in unsuccessfully forming her into a good white Catholic girl. The memoir also recounts her time as a young adult trying to find herself in the world, roaming the United States with a band of other footloose and fancy free Native youth also trying to find their place in a world that’s been stolen from them. As a sentence in the book reads, “He had himself wrapped up in an upside down American flag, telling us that every state in this flag represented a state stolen from Indians.” It’s honestly overwhelming to even think about the depravities that America thrust upon and continues to do to Native America. But anyway, during their youthful, aimless wanderings, Mary Crow Dog and her merry band of Natives of course suffer police brutality and violence from random racists. It is during this time Mary Crow Dog becomes exposed to AIM, A.I.M which is the American Indian Movement. So her memoir also follows her activism in the AIM movement some of which includes historically significant actions like the March in Washington DC as well as the siege at Wounded Knee. Thereafter, Mary Crow Dog or Mary Ellen Brave Bird at the time marries Medicine Man and civil rights leader, Leonard Crow Dog. And she becomes a mother wife and the stepmother all at the same time, at the ripe old age of, wait for it? 18! So Mary Crow Dog lived a lot of life in one. But anyway. towards the end, a significant part of Lakota Woman also follows Mary’s time as a wife fighting for the release of her husband, Leonard Crow Dog, when he’s imprisoned for his activism. In this book, Mary Crow Dog spends a lot of time talking about how Native Americans are intentionally and systematically pushed out of society with little to no access to jobs, education or opportunities, the loss of their language, traditions, and ceremonies, the stripping of who they are as a people and them having to turn to alcohol to you know deal with the trauma that their lives have become. And in this book she addresses how alcohol becomes a coping mechanism because people often say things like oh you can pull yourself up by the bootstraps, oh why don't you want better for yourself. And there's a line that took my breath away and it's on page 54 “people talk about the Indian drinking problem but we say it is a white problem. White men invented whiskey and brought it to America. They manufacture, advertise and sell it to us. They make their profit on it and cause the conditions that make Indians drink in the first place.” It’s the same thing today. Go to the hood, same situation, same conditions, flooded with liquor stores, pun intended. Moving along, remember I mentioned earlier that Mary Crow Dog joined AIM, the American Indian Movement? Well, there's a line on page 74 which I thought was really very insightful and articulates what I’ve always thought about activism and its effects on an activists’ lives. Here it goes, “I recognize now that movements get used up and the leaders get burned out quickly. Some of our men and women got themselves killed and thereby avoided reaching the dangerous age of 30 and becoming elder statesmen." This is why I have the utmost regard for activists. They live a principled life and they pay dearly for it, because it is marred with great sacrifice and suffering. Secular martyrs. And while we are on this, here is a quick plug. Please be supportive of and kind and generous to an activist. Also, this book made me reconsider the meaning of Thanksgiving in a new way. While I’ve always known Thanksgiving to be a troublesome holiday, and that’s understating it, I don’t think I realized the breadth of the pain it represents to Native Americans. I'm gonna read a short paragraph from page 75. By the way, this is the author's first encounter with AIM, the American Indian Movement. On page 75 she writes "he talked about not celebrating Thanksgiving, because that would be celebrating one's own destruction. He said that white people, after stealing our land and massacring us for 300 years, could not now come to us now saying celebrate Thanksgiving with us, drop in for a slice of turkey." So yeah. Okay, so I found something very interesting on page 77, where Mary Crow Dog says, and this is relative to the American Indian Movement, “we took some of our rhetoric from the blacks, who started their movements before we did. Like them we were minorities, poor and discriminated against, but there were differences. I think it's significant that in many Indian languages a black is called a black white man. The blacks want what the whites have, which is understandable. They want in. We Indians want out. That is the main difference.” It’s such a shrewd observation. But I think there is a bit more nuance that I’d like to offer here based on historical context. So yeah black people want in on a country that was built entirely and completely on their forced labor. And Natives want out because they are indigenous to America, with a complex and established civilization, until the advent of the white settler state known as the USA. They want out of the white settler state and the return of America to them. But I’d love to hear what you all think about this. The author also talks about how being radicalized sent her back to her Indian traditions. She writes, “To white friends this may seem contradictory but for me and my friends it was the most natural thing in the world. This process had already begun when I was still a child. I felt that the kind of Christianity the priests and nuns of St Francis dished out was not good for my digestion. Jesus would have been all right except I felt he had been co-opted by white American society to serve its purpose. The men who had brought us whiskey and the smallpox had come with a cross in one hand and the gun in the other. In the name of an all merciful Jesus they’d use that gun on us.” Can all the colonized say amen? Huh. Anyway, Mary Crow Dog says something that I think it's really profoundly interesting on page 111. “I do not consider myself a radical or revolutionary. It is white people who put such labels on us. All we ever wanted was to be left alone, to live our lives as we see fit. To govern ourselves in reality and not just on paper. To have our rights respected. If that is revolutionary, then I sure fit that description. Actually I have a great yearning to lead a normal, peaceful life, normal in the Sioux sense.” That right there is what every oppressed person is trying to scream above the noise of the oppressor. We just want a normal, peaceful life. It’s really that simple. Mary Crow Dog also makes another really astute point in the book. In fighting her husband’s incarceration, Mary Crow Dog visits New York for the first time and she's comparing the cost of things in New York versus on the reservation and this is what she says on page 112. "Everything was so much cheaper than on the reservation where the trading posts have no competition and charge what they please. Everything is more expensive if you are poor." This is an ongoing conversation that I'm always having in real life about how poverty is expensive, and capitalism is built on and sustained by racism. If you're poor you're working so many jobs which is detrimental to your physical and mental well-being because there’s no leisure time to recharge, you're not taking time off, you’re not taking long walks, you’re not hanging out in the park, you don’t spend time with your family, you're not going on vacations. And all of these things have a cumulative effect and impact your overall well-being pretty quickly. So you break down and because you’re poor you can’t afford adequate healthcare so you have to pay a massive sum out of pocket or be riddled with debt or both. So, yes poverty is expensive. And think about the demographic of people who typically work multiple jobs to make ends meet and you’ll realize why I said capitalism is sustained by racism. When you are poor you also don't have access to quality and affordable safe foods so you're spending your scarce dollars on cheap meals that are not good for you so that also has an impact on your health and then you develop expensive physical problems that you can not afford. So here we go again. Or when you’re poor you don’t have emergency savings so that when something big happens you are forced to borrow at exorbitant rates from predatory lenders because you don’t have collateral to negotiate a cheaper rate. So it’s like wash, rinse, repeat. I could go on and on but I think you guys already know this already. Poverty is expensive. This memoir as you’ve obviously seen so far is full of quotable quotes. From page 241, Bill Kunstler, who is the attorney for Leonard Crow Dog. Anyway, here is what Bill Kunstler says and before I read the quote when I say they, you, or we in the quote, it refers to the oppressor, okay? "they are most afraid of the fact that the claims are morally right, because when you are confronted with the moral imperative against an immoral imperative on your part you got to hate the people who assert that moral imperative. And I think there is an irrational, guilt-caused hatred now that is beyond my ability to analyze. We hate them because their claims are totally justified and we know it." I encourage you to rewind this if needed. This very eloquently explains the oppressor’s illogical denial of the claims of the oppressed. This underpins the whataboutisms, the all lives matter crew, And in my opinion, it’s why the oppressed should not devote too much energy to debating the oppressor’s arguments because they are irrational. To me, the energy is best spent working for equity and justice. Many things are so familiar in this book. On page 244 Mary Crow Dog says and I quote "to me, women's lib was mainly a white, upper-middle-class affair of little use to a reservation Indian woman." I mean, I’ve always thought the same thing that the feminist movement is not inclusive of minorities. It felt validating to read this. I mentioned before that reading this book felt like a privilege. And the reason for that is that Mary Crow Dog lets us into Native or more specifically Sioux ceremonies. I learned about the peyote, the curing ceremony, the traditional Sioux family, which is the tiyospaye, that is the traditional extended family unit that people from most indigenous cultures around the world can relate to, and which was you know intentionally destroyed by white settlers and replaced with the nuclear family system. I learned about vision seeking, the sweat lodges which I kind of knew about before but learned a lot more about the sacredness of sweat lodges. I learned about the Ghost Dance, the Sun Dance. On page 253, Mary Crow Dog writes, and I’m paraphrasing just a tiny bit. "in 1883 the government and the missionaries outlawed the dance for being barbaric, superstitious, and preventing the Indians from becoming civilized. The hostility of the Christian churches to the Sun Dance was not very logical. After all, they worship Christ because he suffered for the people, and a similar religious concept lies behind the Sun dance, where the participants pierce their flesh with skewers to help someone dear to them. The main difference is that Christians are content to let Jesus do all the suffering for them whereas Indians give of their own flesh year after year to help others. The missionaries never saw this side of the picture, or maybe they saw it only too well and fought the Sun Dance because it competed with their own Sun Dance pole - the cross." She roasted Christianity and made also cringe thinking about the sundance channel and they should consider renaming it. So I’m gonna end this episode and close out with page 262 which is the epilogue. Mary Crow Dog ends with a recap of the activists associated with the American Indian Movement who participated in the siege at Wounded Knee and Mary Crow Dog says, "those are the survivors, many of the former brothers and sisters are dead. Some were killed but most died from natural causes. I think that the wear and tear of the long struggle just burned them up, ruined their health and took years off their lives. The best always die young." And this my friends, like I said before, is the high price of activism. Mary Crow Dog, while being an activist herself, also discusses the other perspective which is the toll that being the wife of an activist can take. And she writes, "Cooking and cleaning up for innumerable guests most of them uninvited, listening to countless woes and problems. It became too much for me. I was going under. Wherever Native Americans struggle for their rights, Leonard is there. Life goes on." And just so you know Mary died at the age of 58. And there, my friends, I think is a poignant place to end on. Support Misty Bloom Book Club by donating to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/mistybloombookclub Find out more at https://mistybloombookclub.pinecast.co

S1E5 - S1.E5: What It Mans When A Man Falls From The Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 23, 2020 20:07

Episode Notes Hey guys, how are you doing? I hope you're taking good care of yourself and doing well. In this episode, I will be reviewing What It Means When A Man Falls From The Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah. Are you ready? Cos I am. Let’s go clubbing! This book is a short story collection. So first things first, before I launch into my review, I’m gonna tell you about my beef with short story collections. I don't typically read them. And the reason I don’t read short stories is because I don't feel like I get enough time with the characters or enough time to sink my teeth into the character’s stories before I'm being dragged off into another story. It feels like speed dating. And for this reason Short story collections have always felt unsatisfying to me. So I usually avoid them. Something else that I don't like about short stories, is that usually not always, but usually the endings never give any resolutions. So I'm speaking of a true resolution though not the resolution that I want. Let me explain. For example, I, just like most people, typically yearn for a happy ending to stories. But even where I don't get a happy ending, I want some sort of closure. So even where I don't get the happy ending that I want I will admire the alternative ending. I respect the alternative ending. I will think that it's brave of the author to choose the alternative ending. I may even concede that the alternative ending was the better ending. But on the other hand, I also think it is cowardly for a writer to choose no ending, to leave the story unresolved. And I feel like short story writers are typically guilty of this and short stories give writers a cop out from any sort of true ending or closure. Short story writers are notorious for jumping off the story and leaving you hanging with some intentionally esoteric ending, with some fill in the blanks with your own ending. Personally I find it gutless, weak, pathetic and I don't see anything to be admired with a lack of resolution in storytelling. And short stories are often guilty of this. So there’s my rant and now that’s out of the way. But first I’ll give you a teaser of the book. The stories tackle domestic abuse, untreated ptsd and its effects on a family, troubled teenagers, ghosts, domestic and sexual abuse. So this review is going to be a little bit different than the reviews of novels. Because this is a short story collection so we are not following the same characters from beginning to end, we're not following the same narrative arc, the themes change from story to story, and so forth. So here’s what I loved about What It Means When A Man Falls From The Sky. Fortunately in what it means when a man falls from the sky, most of the stories are well resolved. This does not mean Happy Endings or Bad Endings it just means there's closure. Most of the stories don't leave you intentionally hanging by the end. What It Means When A Man Falls From The Sky is gorgeously written. The author's sentences are so economical it's a thing of stunning beauty. Lesley Nneka Arimah says the most with the least possible amount of words. I'll read from the first story called The Future looks good and this is from on page 2. But before I read it, the context here is that a step mother puts a boy out of his home. Got it? Ok here we go… "The boy is 15 and returns from the market to find his possessions in two plastic bags on the front door step, he doesn't even knock to find out why or to ask where he's supposed to go but squats with other unmothered boys in an abandoned half-built bungalow where his two best shirts are stolen and he learns to carry his money with him at all times. He begs, he sells scrap metal, he steals, and the third comes so easy to him it becomes his way out. He starts small, with picked pockets and goods snatched from poorly tended market stalls. He learns to pick locks, to hotwire cars, to finesse his sleight-of-hand." See how she very quickly describes how this boy is abandoned by his parents and forced to become scrappy and street smart. It is So tightly done. there was not a spare, extra word. For example if you contrast this against Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens. There's a huge chunk of the novel Oliver Twist where Charles Dickens spends a lot of his prose talking about how the Artful Dodger and Fagin teach Oliver how to become a pickpocket. A good good chunk of Oliver Twist is spent on what Lesley Nneka Arimah spends on a paragraph. Of course I understand that there are differences, one is novel and the other is a collection of short stories, and that in economizing your prose you sacrifice other things like character development and developing a fuller story for instance. But i still think my comparison between the two examples for the purposes of making my particular point about economy of words, holds. Or check this out on page 24 in the 3rd story titled Wild, but before I read the sentence I'd like to set the stage. Here we have a mother who's at her wit's end with her badly behaved daughter and she has had enough.. And so here goes the sentence. Enough had started with stupid teenage things that, magnified under the halo of Chinyere my well-behaved cousin made me a bad bad girl. So here's why i think this sentence is pretty great and that the writer's use of economy of words is so ridiculously good is because of how she introduces us to a new character Chinyere a well-behaved cousin and then uses just one word halo, to fully establish and develop this character. Halo is suggestive of as you know an angelic, saintly person and then when contrasted against the main character that this short story is about, you know the one whose mother has had enough, helps us understand more fully their personalities in so few words. Or how about one more example on page 25 still on the same story. "My mother was a small woman who carried her weight in her personality." Do you see how, tight and powerful that sentence is? basically, that short sentence tells us the mother is a small sized person with an outsized personality. These sentences are so good and I feel like they gleam because they are scrubbed of anything unnecessary. No superfluous adjectives no unnecessary adverbs. And let me tell you applying restraint as a writer is an extremely difficult thing to do and this author has honed this skill well. Something else I also loved about what it means when a man falls from the sky is that The stories are short and snappy, like a flash of electricity. The stories are short but emotionally complex and layered. They hold an explosive power like dynamite. Like boom boom pow. I mentioned in episode 2 of the Misty Bloom Book Club the observational skills that a writer must possess and the reason it matters is because life is the ultimate inspiration for any writer. Now in this book on page 61 in the story titled light there's a sentence I thought was just so profound and I'll read it to you. " this starts another argument between husband and wife, mild at first, but then it peppers and there is this thing that distance does where it subtracts warmth and context and history and each finds that they're arguing with a stranger." I'm not going to interpret the meaning of this sentence for you. All I'll say is that the sentence is stellar because it does show off the author's observational skills, how she deconstructs the anatomy of an marital argument but what is most important here is the ability to not only observe but to translate the moment and articulate it into seemingly effortless wisdom. So great job, Lesley Nneka Arimah. I often mention how metaphors are effective tools for great storytelling so there's this line on page 61 that reads "the girl holds a grudge as well as she holds water in her fist". A lesser author could have easily written the girl was terrible at holding grudges but that would not have come off as commonplace and much less impactful. Also this metaphor of a fistful of water or lack thereof conjured up an image, that was effective in describing the girl's carefree temperament, and also read as original. The economy of sentences is not just important for its own sake but it also forces the reader to participate within the story so that it feels more immediate and really captures your attention and emotions. Check out this line from page 71 on the fifth story Second Chances so I'll read this so it starts out by saying, "after my mother died, I spent a few months in a place where they spooned food and medication into me." The reason I select the sentence is because it just very sparsely talks about being in this facility because obviously if you are being spooned food and medication it's some sort of facility where a third party is doing these things to you most likely a medical professional but I think this an an excellent example of participating with the prose so even though the sentence says enough it doesn't say a lot so as a reader, I'm forced here to fill in the blanks here with you know the medical professional, with it being a facility. I am forced to generate emotions associated with someone who needed to be in a facility because of the tragic passing of a parent, someone who needed to be spoon-fed because circumstances have left them unable to do it for themselves. Therefore the tragedy feels heavier because sufficient little is said which forces me to participate in the story by filling in the blanks with my own imagination and feelings about the situation. The 6th story, Windfalls was crushing. It is written in the second person. and by second person I mean you. I've never been convinced that writing in the second person had any sort of merit whatsoever. I've been adamant against any writer ever exploring writing prose using the second person. I've never thought of it as a sustainable way of telling a complete story but this story, windfalls, and Lesley Nneka Arimah have convinced me otherwise. However I still have to say that in using the second person, you, I never got to know the characters names. And I think putting a name to someone helps you feel like you're connected in a way to that person. And without having a name of any of the characters I felt a certain loss. But I also don't know if that was intentional by the writer. Finally I'm gonna end what I loved about What It Means When A Man Falls From The Sky by talking about my favorite story in the book titled what is a volcano. And I think I like it because it's a folktale, it's very multi-layered has many hidden meanings, packed full of wisdom, imagination, profundity, and I think this is the one story where I felt like the author let herself go and and relaxed on the page. And the best part? It does have a great resolution. So those are the main elements of what I loved about What It Means When A Man Falls From The Sky. But before I tell you what I liked much less about this short story collection, here is a quick message from my sponsor. Don’t go anywhere. Welcome back to the Misty Bloom Book Club. thanks for staying with me. Without further ado, let’s talk about what I liked less about What It Means When A Man Falls From The Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah. In Wild, the third story, the main character has a Lebanese friend named Leila which I kind of thought in the manner of naming conventions, was kind of lazy. Really? This is like the hundred thousandth Arab female character in fiction named Leila? Come on! I also think it did a disservice to the character because Leila is such a common name that non-arab artists tend to use in their art that it did a disservice to who Leila could be. Giving her such a common name made her feel basic and since the short story format doesn't leave enough room for character development it made Leila feel one dimensional. Imagine the English equivalent of a character named Jane, that you barely get to know. With little room for character development, you would subconsciously ascribe Jane with flat, one note, basic girl next door characteristics. I think this is a good tip for new or aspiring writers is to put a lot of thought into how you name your characters. You cannot pretend that when you see a person's name you don't ascribe a set of traits or characteristics or make assumptions about that person even without meeting them. There's a reason for naming Mother of Dragons Daenerys Targaryen versus Mary Ellen Because of how much Lesley Nneka Arimah's sentences shone it really contrasted when other sentences weren't quite as good. But honestly there were veral few examples of not so great sentences and I believe in a lesser author these examples wouldn't matter at all but seeing what this writer is capable of, the lesser sentences. For example a sentence on page 61 reads, " but the space between mother and daughter is widened to hold something cautious, and elephants of mistrust and awkwardness." I didn't at all care for this sentence. Elephants as metaphors for vastness and space is so overdone and overused and I just was disappointed to see it. I mean I realize there are very few examples of things that exist in nature that are big and can be used to describe space and distance but I think also think that Lesley Nneka Arimah didn't use elephant in a particularly original or fresh way. But honestly it feels like I'm nitpicking because this is only one average sentence out of a million other incredible sentences. Shortly after this, a really beautiful sentence follows and it reads, "she strings his virtues out like Christmas lights" how freaking magical and redeeming is that? The writing is so polished, feels like MFA in Fiction writing type work. And for those who don't know what an MFA is, it is a Master's in Fine Arts. Basically an advanced degree for how to be a fiction writer. To me this book appears to be the product of intense work shopping. When A Man Falls From The Sky is very clean, refined. it's almost surgically precise, clinical. There's no frayed edges there's no rawness, no feeling of letting loose on the page. Its been work shopped to perfection. And for this reason the book as a whole does not feel approachable. So it's kind of like when you polish silver and it's shiny and perfect. So you don't want to touch it you don't want to leave fingerprints or scuff marks. You admire from a distance. So in that vein this book does not feel approachable. It left me with a very interesting mixed feeling. on one hand I think the stories definitely do have mass appeal. There’s a mix of middle class and upper as well as working class characters. However, the surgically precise writing created a little bit of distance between writer and reader. So even when earlier I would say things like I found a story to be sad or moving or whatever, I still feel like the emotions that Lesley Nneka Arimah's writing generated felt a little bit more cerebral than deeply heartfelt. Like the emotions didn't stay with me. they didn't last but I also don't know if that's a factor of the short story format where the reader doesn't get to linger with the characters enough in order to empathize with them in a fuller more complete way. You only get to meet short story characters in passing and so your emotions are also shortlived. So think about how certain characters become fixtures in your life. And I'll use an extreme example. Harry Potter. And the reason Harry Potter is so well loved is because we've spent years knowing and empathising with Harry Potter. With a short story which is on the very opposite end of the spectrum from Harry Potter you're spending very little time with the characters so it's a challenge for the reader to feel invested in any meaningful way. In spite of that though, I still think just the ability to elicit any type of emotion whether cerebral or heartfelt from a reader in only 10 to 15 pages is still pretty exceptional and very difficult to do. So big props to Lesley Nneka Arimah The story I liked the least was actually the title story, What It Means When A Man Falls From The Sky. It's a futuristic, science fiction story that's also a deconstruction of grief. Grief as in sadness sorrow mourning. This story holds an interesting concept of grief eating. However I didn't find it particularly original for a scifi futuristic type story because it's a sort of play of of the old Welsh custom of sin eating, where a person would eat the sins of a newly deceased person or in other words take on the sins of a recently deceased person. Look it up on Google if you haven't heard of it it's pretty fascinating. And what it means when a man falls from the sky it's basically a rip off of sin eating where in this story it is grief eating. Yeah I was kind of cool but not that interesting. But I didn't connect to it on an emotional or even intellectual level because I am not a huge consumer of science diction anyway so it totally makes sense why I didn't connect with this particular story. I didn't hate it but I didn't love it either. I was indifferent and kinda bored. Its like the title track of a musician's album. You go in wanting to love the title track of an album because the musician obviously does. Otherwise they wouldn't name their entire album after the title track. And the title track is supposed to be this crowning glory of the entire album. Similarly, what it means when a man falls from the sky is in my opinion, supposed to be the pinnacle story you know. So, when you don't connect with the title track or the title story in this case it's kind of disappointing. The writing was good, but the story fell super flat for me. So, there you go, those are the parts of the book that I didn’t like quite as much. As you can see, it’s a spectacular book and the weaknesses I talked about are still pretty superior. But anyway, I gotta wrap this up. So I wanna do my fun guessing game of what I think Lesley Nneka Arimah is like in real life. And close out with my final thoughts but before I do, here is a quick message from my sponsor. Don’t go anywhere. Welcome back to the Misty Bloom Book Club. thanks for staying with me. So, here is what I think this author’s personality may be like. I'm gonna guess that Lesley Nneka Arimah is a perfectionist. However, I would guess that she is perhaps not necessarily interested in wanting to be the best BUT is more interested in giving the best that she is capable of. That's my first thing. The second is that I think she's one of those people that's been writing since she was a child and perhaps feels most comfortable expressing herself through writing. Like writing is her comfort zone, safe space, that kind of thing. If you know Lesley Nneka Arimah, let me know if I'm right on target or completely missed the mark. Final thoughts, I'm so impressed with the economy and refinement of Lesley Nneka Arimah's wordsmithing. But I also acknowledge that economy is well suited to the short story format. So I'd be up for checking out what she does with the longer-form narrative like a novel. If she will retain her signature style or will approach a long form novel differently. I'm definitely curious. Let me know what you think of What It Means When A Man Falls From The Sky. Support Misty Bloom Book Club by donating to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/mistybloombookclub Find out more at https://mistybloombookclub.pinecast.co

S1E6 - S1.E6: Kintu by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 7, 2020 21:37

Episode Notes Hi its Ada. I hope you are taking good care of yourself and doing well. In this episode, I will be reviewing Kintu by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi. Ok, guys 2 quick things you have brought to my attention which I'll address real quick. First I know I usually say the author’s full name throughout all the episodes but it’s intentional to you know put respeck on their name as is spelled out on the book cover. My thinking is that that’s how the author wants to be addressed. And that’s that. I”m not gonna call them Jennifer or Angie or Abubakar or Zinzi. We’re not bffs. It’s really that simple. Something else that I don’t know if you’ve noticed or not is I usually avoid mentioning if the book is award winning or whatever. And it’s not to diminish the award or a failure to acknowledge. After all that information is publicly available anyway. The reason I try to avoid mentioning awards or literary prizes where possible is to refrain from making any false distinctions between award winning books and otherwise. Because while awards are incredible especially for minority writers. Awards bring more publicity to the book. Just like you know an oscar winning movie, gets more attention and viewership. Or in the case of books, more readership. People make buying decisions around prizes and awards and all that great stuff. So awards are extremely helpful for writers, especially less visible, minority writers. They can use all the visibility they can get. Also the awards come with considerable monetary compensation which is phenomenal for writers because writing is not like your typical 9-5 guaranteed income stream. Umm look at me. I’m podcasting. So, overall back to my point is that while awards are extremely useful and in many cases, actually necessary, and trust me, I’d love to win a couple of them, but honestly to me, awards are not the final or comprehensive determiner of what makes good literature. Literature like all other forms of art is subjective. There are so many magnificent books out there that could go toe to toe and even surpass award winning books by a clear mile. So that’s the reason I don’t bring awards up. Unless of course it’s mine. To me, great literature is great literature, whether or not it’s award winning. So, let’s start as we typically do with a teaser of what Kintu by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi is about. Kintu is an intergenerational epic saga set in Uganda. So guys yeah, we off to Uganda in this episode. East Africa, baby! Quick sidebar. My claim to fame with Uganda is I was on a flight once that stopped in Entebbe airport to refuel and pick up passengers. So I’ve been on Ugandan soil or maybe more accurately, a Ugandan tarmac. Anyway this book kicks off in 1750 in the kingdom of Buganda (so the pre-colonial Uganda) Here we meet Kintu, after whom this book is obviously named. Kintu is a powerful and wealthy man, He is the Ppookino or governor of the Buddu province within the Buganda kingdom and is married to identical twins. Kintu has a lot of children, many of whom are twins. And he also adopts a boy, Kalema, who is the child of a Tutsi immigrant, Ntwire, who lives in their community. Kintu loves Kalema just like he does his biological children but something happens between Kintu and Kalema. And in response Ntwire, the Tutsi immigrant aka Kalema’s biological father, I hope you’re following this?, lays a curse on Kintu and his future generations. And so the book follows the manifestation of the curse on Kintu’s descendants. As I was reading this novel, very early on I saw the obvious influence of Chinua Achebe's seminal Things Fall Apart. And not because of the pre-colonialism aspects of Kintu but also because of that pivotal relationship between Okonkwo and Ihemefule in Things Fall Apart echoed in the relationship between Kintu and Kalema. Are you guys still following me? My suspicions were confirmed on page 312 where the author references Things Fall Apart as a work that is being explored as a sociological study by one of the characters. So it felt good to be right haha So let’s talk about what I loved about Kintu. The scale of this novel is grand. If this novel were a building it would be a stately manor. This book runs over 400 pages with about 20something major characters. I’m not gonna lie, when I bought the book and saw it ran 400 pages in small print, I was nervous because I didnt wanna spend that much time reading a book I wouldn’t enjoy. I’ll post a picture of my copy on social media so you’ll see what I mean. At over 400 pages it felt daunting to even start but I’m glad I did. It was compulsively readable, a page turner. Like I mentioned, this novel is intergenerational, spans several descendants of Kintu, the breadth of the novel is formidable. But in the hands of this writer, it was never an unwieldy beast. From Pages 1 to 410, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi was always in charge. She never lost control of her story or characters. It was terrific. This is the type of novel of such an impressive scale that challenges me in my own writing to squeeze myself for more juice, for more story to be told. This is the book that I wish that Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi was. Have you guys read Homegoing? Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi was also intergenerational but to me the descendant stories didn't feel connected. And I get that you could totally argue that Homegoing was about the disconnect, to say the least, that happened because of the transatlantic slave trade. However, the biggest frustration that I had with Homegoing was that it felt to me like a book of short stories, like a collection of vignettes, and not a cohesive novel. Homegoing got a lot of really great accolades and it did have its shining moments and I loved a few of the stories, it had a great theme, but overall I personally found it to be underwhelming.I think it got a lot of buzz because it was an issue book. Listen to Episode 1 for my fuller take on issue books. But although Kintu is not about the transatlantic passage, I just think Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s ability to tell that really good story of generations of Africans interrupted by European influence (in Kintu’s case, colonialism) is just so masterfully done here. This novel is divided into 6 books. Also, I loved, loved, loved, did I say loved, Book I. Book I covers the first 15 chapters. These chapters are where we meet Kintu, his complicated family, and also watch him execute his duties as governor of Buddu province in service to the kabaka, that is the king of Buganda. These 15 chapters of Book I were chef’s kiss, superb. I rarely reread books but I’ll reread these chapters again at some point. And I think what was particularly impressive is that the author balances the plottings of Kintu’s household on one hand, and the political machinations that happen at the kabaka’s palace with such jaw-dropping finesse. For me these were the best parts of Kintu by far. Beautiful, beautiful work. Thirdly, all of the different descendants of Kintu that appear in this novel are all very well done, fleshed out, very solidly three-dimensional, they arrive on the page with a history, you get to pay witness to their current lives and peek into where they're headed. It is so very well done, it’s an outstanding achievement of a novel that Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi has written. So, lemme talk about the writing for a moment. Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi writes with such exhilaration and pride. In Kintu, she tells the story of a country through its people. The writing doesn't try hard, it’s not self conscious. It is both masterful and unpretentious at the same time. I’ll read you a few examples of her sentences to illustrate why I mean by masterful yet unpretentious. On page 123, “when there is no one to remind you of who you are, then you belong” you see how profound that sentence is but also like humble at the same time? Here’s another example from the next page 124 “who strangled the toothpaste?” one word, strangle, that successfully captures what the ordinary person would describe as squeezing from the middle of the tube. And one more example from page 228, “From then on the disease accelerated - night sweats, fevers, fatigue, a funny rash on the left arm, sometimes her mind went and her feet hurt. She suffered from this, that, and everything. Then her weight dropped. Before we knew it she had lost her hair. Then her feet hurt so much, I put her in a wheelchair. From the wheelchair, Nnayiga hopped into the coffin.” So I thought this was so well done because it was about the tragedy of a prolonged illness. But there is an effortless humorous affect to the passage. Also, I hope you didn’t miss the irony of someone who lost their ability to walk but still hopping into death. The author has a wry sense of humor which I appreciate. Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s insights on colonialism are so incredibly keen. On page 314, she writes. But before I read it, just for context the passage I’m gonna read is about a character named Miisi. Miisi is an intellectual who was raised by colonial-era missionaries, Irish priests who raise Miisi in such a manner that degrades and dehumanizes everything that’s African.The Irish missionaries imbue themselves with a pseudo Messianic nature. You know we’re here to save the savages and bring Christ to the heathens. So Miisi comes to associate whiteness with goodness, godliness,intelligence and he imagines that Europe must be heaven. And so that's the kind of effective brainwashing that the white, European missionaries did on Miisi who ingests these messages and even grows up being grateful to the colonialists for saving him from his savagery and heathenism. At some point later on in his life Miisi goes to Britain to study for a PhD and in the process of studying and living in Britain he finds that British people do not exactly fit the illusion the colonialists brainwashed into him. And in response to the dismantling of this false reality he’s carried all of his life, Miisi builds for himself instead an idealized Wakandaesque narrative of Africa. So with this background and context, I’ll read you the quote on page 314."The image Miisi had constructed in Britain of the noble African rooted in his cultural values and shunning Westernization was a myth. What he returned to were people struggling to survive, who in the process had lost the ability to discern vivid colors of right and wrong. Anything that gave them a chance to survive was moral. To make matters worse people around him including his family called him muzungu. Miisi had become European among his people.” Moving along, so Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi also writes against the backdrop of key historical events in Uganda’s post colonial life. One of them being the rise and fall of Idi Amin. While Idi Amin has never featured too much in my political consciousness, the author resurrects him and makes the reader rethink what they think they know of Idi Amin. He has been widely painted as a wild cannibalistic tyrannical despot. And I’ve never before questioned this caricature of him. But Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi for the first time made me step back and reconsider who has been responsible for painting Idi Amin in such colors? Western media. It’s sad how I never questioned the caricature of Idi Amin. I’m sure he was tyrannical and perhaps unhinged as most depots tend to be. But who created the conditions for an Idi Amin to rise? Who revels in the narrative of the savage cannibalistic African? Those are the questions we should be asking. And we know the answers. Overall, this book is a mic drop, a feat, an achievement. It's the kinda book if a random stranger by way of conversation as Americans tend to do, were to ask Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, what she does, you know like hey girl hey Jennifer nice to meet you what do you do and then Jennifer can be like THAT while pointing to Kintu. She can die happy knowing she wrote this novel and accomplished something astounding. And I don't use astounding flippantly. So there it is, you guys. That is what I loved about Kintu by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi. But before I launch into what I didn’t like quite as much, here is a message from my sponsor. Stay with me. Welcome back to the Misty Bloom Book Club. Thank you for hanging with me. So let’s jump into what I didn’t care for about Kintu. I hated the prologue. I felt like the novel should have started with Chapter 1, Kintu’s story. So the prologue was a narrative of the grisly, violent murder of one of Kintu’s descendants. It was impactful in the sense that for the novel’s opening it grabbed your attention but it left me with a very bad taste in my mouth that took me a good while to shake off. For me, there was no literary merit to the outright violence. It was disconcerting and felt like it was done for shock value and I always find shock value to a cheap ploy. Also the prologue had your classic,almost paint by numbers style MFA writing. I even googled to see if Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi had an MFA and she does. While MFA writing is good writing don’t get me wrong, but it feels the same to me, I can spot it anywhere, churned out from the same creative writing workshops and factories and for that reason it feels soulless to me. So I was immediately disappointed starting this novel. But I was so glad I stuck with it and I didn’t have to wait long at all because the tides quickly turned on Chapter 1. But basically I didn’t care for the prologue. Okay so moving along, So let’s talk about the character, Miisi. On one hand Miisi is vehemently intellectual, you know an atheistic, cerebral and rational person who is out of place and sticks out like a sore thumb in the village because of his you know intellectualism. But Miisi also has visions and has some metaphysical experiences. And while I do think people can be both, I don’t think the author did a great job of reconciling the two aspects of Miisi. Miisi himself, the staunch atheist rationalist does not interrogate these opposites within himself. It was not believable at all. Also, Miisi arrived late in the book and we spend the final 16, yes you hear that right, 16 chapters on this guy. I was sick of him. He was cool for like 2 or 3 chapters tops but I did not find him to be particularly interesting or fascinating for 16 chapters so I got tired pretty quickly reading about the character, Miisi. And here’s a tip for new or aspiring writers. Please do not introduce important characters late in your novel. Bring them on board early on or in the middle somewhere. Otherwise the reader, like me in this case is constantly questioning the character’s significance instead of focusing on the story. It’s very distracting. Also when you delay introducing us to a character who has a very important role to play in your story, they end up not feeling like real people but like plot devices. It’s very deus ex machina. Imagine meeting Jon Snow for the first time ever in Season 6. I found two typos in this book. I think finding a rare typo is super cute. I forgot to log what the first typo I found was. But I smiled when I encountered the second one. The second one I found was on page 335 and it reads "Miisi changed subject.” Did you catch that? Miisi changed subject not Missi changed the subject I find typos like that to be cute in the sense of someone forgetting to fix their collar or a strand of hair is out of place. Of course like everyone else I don't want to see typos galore, typos everywhere. It’s horrible, that’s not cute, it’s poor quality control but seeing the odd, rare one or two throughout the book is super cute. I don't know it. It just makes me smile. Those imperfections are sweet and it feels relatable you what I mean. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just weird. Ok, finally the ending was a jumbled mess of a resolution. It was similar to how I felt reading the ending of The Hate U Give. The writing itself, in terms of artistry was still fantastic. But it was the cramming of too much into the final chapters, the author’s manic dedication to giving all of the characters a resolve. It was an exhausting note to end on. Another tip for writers, watch your pacing, please. It’s like being a conductor of an orchestra. All of the musicians and instruments can’t all be playing at the same tempo during the crescendo. So that’s what I didn’t care for about Kintu. Let’s turn now to guessing who Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi is like. But before I do that, here is a super quick message from my sponsor. Stay with me. Welcome back to the Misty Bloom Book Club. Thank you for hanging out with me. So, what do I think Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi is like? I think she is a person of integrity, the kind of person whose word you can rely on. But also expects the same in return and will hold people accountable to what they’ve said they’re gonna do. I also think she is a hardworking, grounded, sensible type individual. So that’s my guess of who Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi is. If you know her, let me know if I pegged her correctly or got it wrong. Final thought, I profusely, enormously loved Kintu. It’s freaking epic in the truest, most authentic sense of the word, epic. If you’re in the mood for a novel that straddles the traditional and the modern in the vein of Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, definitely check out Kintu. Support Misty Bloom Book Club by donating to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/mistybloombookclub Find out more at https://mistybloombookclub.pinecast.co

Welcome to the Misty Bloom Book Club! I'm your host Ada Ihenachor and I'm super excited to talk all things books with you. I'm a bookworm, super fond of reading novels. So much so, I had to write them. I've been so busy over the past several years writing and publishing my first novel, OYIBO, spelled OYIBO for those who don't know. And I'm currently working on my sophomore novel. But here’s the deal. Writing is such a solitary, long term endeavor and so even though I wanna stay engaged with my readers, there’s really not much to tell you about on a day to day basis except me sitting in front of my laptop typing out words. And that gets boring really quickly. Look, I just bored myself saying out loud. So I’ve been thinking long and hard about how to stay engaged with you. I thought about youtube videos but I was like girl, you can barely put your pants on in the morning, you are not gonna do a whole camera set up, background, lighting, put on make up, get my hair right, think about my outfit, give good face. And we haven't even started on actual content. Or the editing. You know what, shout out to all the youtubers. I could write 10 more books with all of that time. And then like a revelation, it came to me. Skip all of the visuals and just do audio. Start a podcast. Misty Bloom Book Club. So here we are Season 1. And by the way, I learned really fast that podcasting takes a LOT of time, effort, technical skill. And I did it. For you guys. Here we are, season 1 baby! But back to the whole writing thing. So, as part of my process, when I’ve worked on one of many iterations of my manuscript, I will put the manuscript away for a good while to sit and do what I like to call, marinate, which for me, in this context, is putting distance between myself and the manuscript so that when I come back to it, I see it with fresh eyes, I will have the objectivity that I need to revise it again and again and again and again so it’s a whole repetitive, prolonged process. So I thought during those times when the manuscript is marinating, why not create lots of quality AND free podcast content for you guys to enjoy until my next book is available for you guys to read. So win win. You get more of me all the time. On the Misty Bloom Book Club, I'll be sharing my reviews of books that I’m reading while my manuscript is marinating. Reading fiction is one of my absolute most favorite things to do. Seriously, I credit books with opening my eyes to the world and its diverse peoples. For me, it’s second only to traveling or maybe even close to being the same. And I truly believe that if you read with your heart, you'll find that all stories are ultimately universal. Okay so, on the Misty Bloom Book Club, I’ll be doing reviews a little bit differently. You ready to hear this? I’ll be reviewing novels from 2 perspectives - as a regular average reader AND also from the craftsmanship perspective of a novelist. I will be reviewing novels because I primarily read fiction, aaaand I write it too. Fiction has just always been a personal preference. My tastes run in that direction. But I’ll be making exceptions for the odd non-fiction as well. So stick around if you're looking for what to read next, if you’re looking for what to avoid reading, or you just like my commentary or the sound of my voice. No judgment. There's gonna be interviews, giveaways, all that good stuff. And if you are a new writer, an aspiring writer, any kinda writer you'll pick up tons of excellent and the best part? Free writing tips in every episode. So stay tuned. Guys, we're gonna have so much fun. I’ll be posting new episodes every other Monday to help you get over those Monday blues and start your week on a lit note. See what I did there? Get it? Lit. Literature. Something else I’m going to be doing in each episode which I think will be a lot of fun is to guess the personality of the author of the book that I’m reviewing. I do believe that art contains clues of the artist's personality so I'll be searching for clues of the writers in the novels that I'm reading and try to, you know, guess their personality profile. I'm a writer myself (have I said that a million times already?) so I know there's particles of me sprinkled throughout my work and that my personality also dictates my writing sensibility and the kinds of characters and stories that I'm drawn to writing about. But I don't often have the objectivity to see much of it myself. And it's more fun to look outward anyway, to try to guess what other writers are like. Simply by intuiting based on their work. Oh and if you'd like to, you can also be a part of this awesomeness and join the Misty Bloom Book Club by becoming a member. Some of the perks and of course this depends on your membership level. Check out my website www.mistybloom.com for more information. Some of the perks of joining the Misty Bloom Book Club are backstage access to my book list. You’ll get to know what I’m reading in advance before the podcast episodes are posted. So you can read along with me in real time. How cool is that? And we can have meaningful conversations after the episode is posted. Also, I’ll be hosting virtual book club meetings for members. That’d be so fun, guys. Members will get a free signed copy of my 5 star reviewed novel, OYIBO. Members can contribute to the episodes. And when I do have big book news, like cover reveals, book release dates, sneak peeks, members will have first dibs. And also I’ll record bonus episodes for members only. You know what? It’s a book club and even though book clubs are about books, you guys know we also talk about other stuff at book club meetings like say pop culture, what’s on netflix, who’s popping on instagram, what’s going on in the world. And so these bonus episodes will be members only. And your membership support or if you can’t afford membership but wanna show me some love, leave me a tip in the tip jar. Or just buy my books. All of it honestly will make it possible for me to maintain the production costs to keep podcasting. And I have other amazing stuff in the works planned for the Misty Bloom Book Club that I can’t talk about right now but you’re gonna love. And will blow your mind. But for now, I gotta go read the next book! I'll see you in the next episode of the Misty Bloom Book Club. Make sure to like this episode and you know what to do...subscribe to the podcast to get automatic alerts for new episodes. The episodes are free people! Also, don't keep this to yourself. Share this podcast and invite other bookworms to the Misty Bloom Book Club. In the meantime, keep reading. Stay lit. Peace and love. Support Misty Bloom Book Club by donating to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/mistybloombookclub

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Latest episodes from Misty Bloom Book Club

S1E1 - S1.E1: The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

S1E2 - S1.E2: Season of Crimson Blossoms by Abubakar Adam Ibrahim

S1E4 - S1. Bonus Ep 1: Circe by Madeline Miller

S1E3 - S1.E3: What We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons

S1E4 - S1.E4: Lakota Woman by Mary Crow Dog

S1E5 - S1.E5: What It Mans When A Man Falls From The Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah

S1E6 - S1.E6: Kintu by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

S1E7 - S1 E7: White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

S1E8 - S1 E8: Juletane by Myriam Warner-Viera

S1E9 - S1 E9: The Girl With The Louding Voice by Abi Dare

S1E10 - S1 E10: Red At The Bone by Jacqueline Woodson

S1E10 - S1 E10: Red At The Bone by Jacqueline Woodson

S1E9 - S1 E9: The Girl With The Louding Voice by Abi Dare

S1E8 - S1 E8: Juletane by Myriam Warner-Viera

S1E7 - S1 E7: White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

S1E6 - S1.E6: Kintu by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

S1E5 - S1.E5: What It Mans When A Man Falls From The Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah

S1E4 - S1.E4: Lakota Woman by Mary Crow Dog

S1E3 - S1.E3: What We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons

S1E4 - S1. Bonus Ep 1: Circe by Madeline Miller

S1E2 - S1.E2: Season of Crimson Blossoms by Abubakar Adam Ibrahim

S1E1 - S1.E1: The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

Welcome to the Misty Bloom Book Club by Ada Ihenachor

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