The Next Book On My List

Motherhood so White: A Memoir of Race, Gender and Parenting in America by Nefertiti Austin I remember what it was like being pregnant with my son, flipping through the pages of What To Expect When You’re Expecting and preparing my house for a newborn. I was overwhelmed and excited. Motherhood hadn’t been a dream of mine, but with my husband I wanted an addition to my family. I didn’t gravitate towards books about motherhood having helped raise my two nephews and being around younger children throughout my life. It’s now after being a mother for eleven years, after knowing what it’s like to raise a Black child that I’ve gravitated towards stories of other Black mothers. This is a memoir outside of my realm. I don’t know what it’s like to adopt a child and what that experience entails. But the more Austin wrote about raising her Black son, who is only a year older than my own child, I felt a kinship. Nothing about being a mother is easy and raising a Black child adds a

The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste To put this simply, The Shadow King , is a really well written book that explores the history of the war that took place between Ethiopia and Italy in the 1930s. It tells the story of the women who fought the war, the challenges they faced, the struggle of the Ethiopian people during that time and the Italian colonel who forced innocent people off a cliff. The story begins at the end with Hirut in the 1970s waiting to meet Ettore. She has something that belongs to him and he has been looking for her for decades. But how they got to this meeting, begins when the war does with Hirut, a young woman with her father’s rifle and Ettore, an Italian Jew photographing both the living and dead as he served in the army. One of the parts of this book that really sticks with me is the imagery. Mengiste writes the most beautiful, heartbreaking, descriptive imagery and her prose lends itself to building these images in a really amazing way. Certain ph

The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates Hiram had no memory of his mother. Which was strange considering he could remember everything else: the stories of others, the songs sung in the field and the words written on paper. But of his mother he knew nothing. Gone Nachez way he believed. Like many of the other Tasked, she was taken from her family and sold further south. He had his father and his brother, but they were both of the Quality, as much master as blood and the love of the father to son didn’t exist. That is until Maynard, the heir apparent of the plantation Lockless, drowned. Now Master Walker had to rethink what the future of Lockless would contain. But Hiram had other ideas. He was ready to run. Ready to take Sophia, the woman he was falling for, with him. Find the Underground and find freedom. But the story of his grandmother Santi Bess, lingered in him. The story of the woman who walked into the river one night, with forty others and disappeared, never to be seen

Never Caught: The Washington’s Relentless Pursuit of their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge by Erica Armstrong Dunbar                 Not too long ago I sat in a kindergarten classroom while the history of George Washington was taught. The same old repeated stories were told to this classroom of young children that I heard as a child: he had wooden teeth, he cut down an apple tree, he was the father of our country. My son once sat in that same classroom and heard those same stories A year later he would take a field trip to Mount Vernon and see the home of the famous George Washington. Now, my son was taught about slavery but not in connection with the first president. So, as he learned more about those who had been enslaved like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, I made sure to also inform him that when he went to Mount Vernon, he was also visiting a slave plantation that housed hundreds of enslaved people within its acreage. He was shocked, mortified and sad. They hadn’t show

Dear Haiti, Love Alaine by Maika Moulite and Maritza Moulite Alaine was being sent to Haiti as punishment. Well, sort of. She was getting out of the line of fire after a really dramatic school presentation that almost resulted in the death of another student. In all honesty Alaine was just trying to highlight one of the events that ignited the Hatian revolution, with interesting theatrics. It was a part of her history and she wanted to put on a show! She had been suspended, instead of expelled, and was going to conduct not only independent studies but would also be interning under her aunt, the Minister of Tourism of Haiti. But Alaine would also have the chance to bond with her mother, who she hasn’t lived with in years and has a somewhat strained relationship with. What Alaine doesn’t know is that she could possibly end the curse that has been affecting her family since Haiti won its independence. This was a mix of quite a few things but most importantly this book was f

Kingdom of Souls by Rena Barron Arrah doesn’t have magic. She can see it as it comes to the others at the gathering of the five Heka tribes at the Blood Moon festival but it flees from her touch. Even though her mother is the Ka-Priestess of Tara, her grandmother the Chieftan of the Tribe Aatiri and her father an edam of the Tribe Aatiri as well, she has never known magic. Each year she has watched, angry and with less hope, as the magic passes her by. She knows there’s other ways to get magic but trading years of her life to obtain it would make her a charlatan. It would dishonor her and her family and she would never know how much of her life was taken until it was too late. But when children begin to go missing, she feels as if she has no choice but to give some of her life if it means saving others. This story is complicated. It contains magic, gods, demons, legacy and family drama. This might be one of the most intense mother and daughter relationships I’ve ever r