Where Wild Peaches Grow By Cade Bentley (A Book Review)

Nona Davenport left Mississippi angry, hurt, and determined. Running away from everyone she knew, she heads to Chicago. She is estranged from her father and sister due to a betrayal that Nona takes deeply personal.

While away, she transforms into a different version of herself, a version she settles for but is far from owning fully.  She makes a new life, one that is built on the importance of history and truth, which is a contradiction to how she currently orchestrates her personal life. When her father dies, Nona returns home. She comes face to face with her own history; a history buried by denial, lies, and assumptions.

Julia Curtis is a woman with abandonment issues. All of which was brought on by her mother leaving as a child and her sister years later. Now she is tasked with burying her father. One of the first steps of this process is notifying Nona, her estranged sister of over 20 years. As she does, her abandonment issues comes to the surface. Will the sisters rebuild the bond they once shared or will the distance and estrangement between them widen the gap even further?

I wanted to like this book better than I did. I’m not against a slow burn at all, which I consider this book to be. There were too many chapters for it to move so slow. I loved the premise of the story. The multiple narratives in the story had many loose ends. With the different narratives not being tied in, it seemed disjointed at times and became an exhaustive read. It was rich with potential, but didn’t hold my attention. I was ready for it to be over.

Rating 6/10

Don’t Cry For Me By Daniel Black (A Book Review)

Jacob Swinton’s life is coming to a close. He is met with a sense of urgency to write to his son Isaac. He shares his life’s story through a series of letters. The letters; part revelation, part remorse, detail Jacob’s upbringing, his marriage, his divorce, and his beliefs on manhood, etc.

Jacob’s view on life and manhood is challenged when his son Isaac is born. Isaac, an expressive child bubbling over with feelings, did not enter the world in typical male fashion. This serves as the catalyst for the complexities that make up he and his father’s relationship.

Jacob’s letters shed light into the intergenerational divide of societal norms that is so deep between father and son. Although vestiges of growth is apparent in the letters, it struggles against his innate inability to have a demonstrative love towards his son. He is a flawed man ridden with inner conflict that is true to men of a particular generation. 

What I appreciated most about Don’t Cry For Me is the authenticity. It shed light on the less than ideal reality of some family relationships.

*****Some insightful and poignant quotes from the book:

November 27th, 2003 chapter
“If you still don’t understand why I’m telling you all this, just keep reading. A man’s history is all he has. It says more than his mouth ever will. You’ll see what I mean soon enough. ” ~Jacob

November 28th, 2003 chapter
“I stood there wondering how this had happened to me, thinking of all the things I’d do differently  if I could live again. It was useless thinking,  if course. Nothing was about to change. Not for me. There are no do-overs in this life. Either you get it right or wish you had.”~ Jacob

December 24th, 2003 chapter
I always called you boy. When a father calls a boy son, he’s declaring his pride in him. I didn’t feel this way about you, even when you got grown.~Jacob

January 17th, 2004 chapter
The more I read, the more I saw myself. Knowledge is a funny thing, Isaac. It informs by exposing. It shows you precisely how much you don’t know.~Jacob

January 26th, 2003 chapter
Silence isn’t always quiet though. It troubles a man’s soul, forcing him to admit what he’d rather forget.~ Jacob

February 5th, 2004 chapter
Reading taught me that a man’s own life is his own responsibility, his own creation. Blaming others is a waste of time. No one can make you happy if you’re determined to be miserable.

All I wanted was to look you in the face and tell you I’m sorry. I had wounded you beyond my capacity to heal you.

Love doesn’t make us perfect; it makes us, want to be. By the time you discover this, your imperfections have done their damage.

February 8th, 2004 chapter
A man’s son is his truth unadorned. When he can look at him and be proud, his fatherhood is complete.

February 10th, 2004
You must learn to uproot unwanted seeds without destroying the entire harvest.

Rating 10/10

Will by Will Smith (A Book Review)

This was an interesting read. Will laid his life out as honest as he could. He bared his inner struggles with what he deemed as cowardice early in his life; a trait that he appeared to carry and battle with throughout his life.

He spoke of how inadequacies in his early life fueled his personal recipe for success. He was able to carve a successful path for himself and his family at least it appeared so externally. He confessed that the success did not always transfer internally within his family.

I enjoyed reading this memoir. It had a few gems as takeaways sprinkled throughout the book. One downside was that in certain instances the book came across as preachy. I would have liked for it to remain matter of fact and/or recounting solely on his experience in those instances.

It felt as if he was giving a lecture to his readers at times instead of trusting his readers enough to get it.

Impactful quote:
Living is the journey from not knowing to knowing. From not understanding to understanding. From confusion to clarity.

Rating 8/10

Beautiful Little Fools by Jillian Cantor (A Book Review)

Jay Gatsby, an alluring young man with promise, was shot to death at his West Egg, NY home. For all intents and purposes, this is a clear cut case of murder-suicide between local mechanic George Wilson and Jay Gatsby.

Not everyone believes this solid and neatly crafted conclusion to this unfortunate ordeal. Enter Detective Frank Charles, who is called in to find out what really happened. Detective Charles is relentless and is determined to do just that once he finds a diamond hairpin near the murder scene.

During his investigation, three women become persons of interest. Daisy Buchanan, a woman from Gatsby’s past who is currently married to Tom Buchanan, a philandering millionaire. Jordan Baker, an excellent golf player who plays on the national circuit, is Daisy”s best friend and knows Gatsby from earlier years as well. Catherine McCoy, a suffragette, passionate about women rights, whose sister Myrtle Wilson, is in an abusive marriage, is also a familiar acquaintance of Gatsby.

All three women are entangled in an intricate web of deception and obsession, carefully orchestrated by Gatsby himself. Will Detective Charles uncover the truth of who really led Gatsby to his demise?

A brilliant remix on the classic, The Great Gatsby, Beautiful Little Fools, offers a strongly crafted possibility of what happened to J. Gatsby. It is told from the perspectives of the women in Gatsby’s world.

I absolutely loved the reworking of The Great Gatsby. In Beautiful Little Fools, Cantor with much care and respect for the original story, beautifully offered a nuanced retelling of the timeless classic. It brought into focus the women of the Great Gatsby in an interesting way. I thoroughly enjoyed every drop.

Rating 9/10

So We Can Glow by Leesa Cross-Smith (A Book Review)

This is a great collection of stories covering the nuances and idiosyncrasies of womanhood. It explores their emotions, loves, memories, and reasons of why some women choose some things that govern their lives. Below are some of the stories that I liked most.

We Moons: I loved the sheer honesty of womanhood. It was beautifully written. It reached deeply into intricate parts of being a woman.

Pink Bubblegum and Flowers: Is about the awareness of the harshness of life’s circumstances layered right beneath the innocence of youth. The sweet smell of bubblegum and flowers provided a calming balm for the less than ideal situation at hand. It cemented the mutual love in the midst of chaos.

Knock Out The Heart So We Can Glow: This story represented the deep longing of a woman wanting love in her very specific way.

Some lines that were poignant were: “She was drawn to the dusty items no one else seemed to love.”

“She asked her husband if he remembered when she was eating pineapple and started to cry because she was alive and some people weren’t. Reminded him of that morning after church when her hair was baptism-wet. How she sat at the kitchen table, born again, drowning in the sunlight.”

“Her husband was a good man and she loved him, but he didn’t know how to be special, how to glow. She said it was pretty simple and she’d teach him. There was no big secret. You just had to let the things in your heart get real dark first.”

Two Cherries Under A Lavender Moon: This was about the sweetness of fantasy love and the heady, fast, and swelling feeling of which that love provides.

Boy Smoke: This story was about a wife discovering her husband’s affair and kicking him out of the house, while his students were driving pass their home. Some memorable lines from this story were: “Her face looks like a country song: smudged black eyeliner, red wine teeth.” “He’s Max and I’m Nina,” Coach’s wife says, snapping to normal in the way that only women can when they’re holding up the Earth. Nina says thanks to us and smokes at the front of the car, standing there like a crownless queen in streetlamp light.”

Dandelion Light: This is a sweet account of acquaintances slow dancing towards reconnection.

I absolutely loved the lyrical and poetic flow of how these stories were written. It captured the essence of each subject of each story. It was a beautiful collection of stories. This is the second body of work I read from this author and it was another great reading experience.

Rating: 9/10

Crazy Faith by Michael Todd (A Book Review)

This book is about the different facets of faith. It expounds on how to start our faith walk by having childlike trust and taking baby steps to accomplish that. It even speaks about how to walk in faith when we”ve lost hope to do so.

There were many concepts that spoke to different places that one can experience in their faith walk. The book explores what to do if our “faith has been hijacked.” It also touches on how to move through disappointment when we hope for something great but it doesn’t happen right away and how this can be accepted through God’s timing and through patience. That’s only the tip of the iceberg. It explains what active faith looks like and even what it’s like to have crazy faith. There are many more deep gems that the author shares.

This is a book that is meant to be absorbed and meditated on. I don’t normally reread books, but this is definitely one that requires a reread and then some.

Rating 10/10

The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray (A Book Review)

Belle de Costa Greene is a formidable collector in the art world. As the personal librarian to Mr. J.P. Morgan, she is entrusted to secure art for one of the most powerful financiers in America. However, there is more to Belle than meets the eye. She is not all she appears to be.

Belle was born Belle Marion Greener, the daughter of a prominent Black professor and civil rights activist. With growing racial tensions developing in the nation, her mother made a fateful decision that the entire family was to pass for white. This destroyed the family as Belle knew it. Belle’s father leaves the family because he did not agree with his wife’s decision. He continued to live the rest of his days as a Black man, while Belle, her mother, and her siblings passes for white.

Belle hides in plain sight by being somewhat of a socialite while acquiring art for Mr. Morgan. While researching and mingling in social circles to acquire art for the library, she is unapologetic in her approach. She accepts the advances of a fellow art enthusiast, Bernard Berenson. Berenson is in an unconventional marriage with his wife, and due to his accepted dalliances outside of his marriage, he and Belle engage in an affair. She falls in love with him. However, as time moves forward, Belle discovers many things that alters her view of him in a tainted way. She reluctantly accepts the truth and is forever changed in matters of the heart.

When Mr. Morgan dies, Belle briefly struggles to see her purpose in the world. The family chooses to keep her on as the personal librarian for the library. She continues building on Mr. Morgan’s legacy by acquiring art for the library. She uses the skill she honed in her profession to also govern other areas of her life and lives her life on her own terms. The story flowed at a natural pace, which kept me interested. I enjoyed the various layers unfolding in Belle’s life. The authors fleshed Belle out nicely.

Rating 7/10

Firekeeper’s Daughter by Angeline Boulley (A Book Review)

Daunis Fontaine feels like an outcast amongst her Native American community due to her mixed heritage and extremely pale skin.

She’s 18 and about to start her life’s journey by way of college. She meets an attractive young man named Jaime, who is a player on her brother Levi’s hockey team.  Two tragedies occur within her inner circle of family and friends that changes her path. She initially puts college on hold to face these personal setbacks in her life. Both tragedies brings Daunis  into an FBI investigation.

Jaime Johnson, a mysterious teenager who blows into town with his Uncle Ron, is not who he appears to be. He takes center stage in Daunis’ orbit. It’s a laborious yet delicate investigation for Daunis. She discovers so much hidden information in the investigation. This journey results in shocking discoveries that Daunis must face head on.

This book moved at an extremely slow pace for me. It did nothing to hold my interest. There were a lot of details in the book that I had difficulty understanding, like the Native American expressions. As a result I found myself lost when I came up on those in the book. This was especially disappointing because I knew the importance of that and was eager to learn.

I really wanted to connect to this story but was unable to. I do however, respect the tireless labor of love ( it took ten years) this author put in to tell this story and represent her culture. That is a huge feat and is to be appreciated. Unfortunately, it didn’t connect for me.

Rating: 6/10

Behind Her Eyes by Sarah Pinborough (A Book Review)

Louise is a single mother of a young son. She lives a self-proclaimed non-eventful life. One night she goes to a local pub and meets a handsome stranger, who she flirts with to the point of a kiss. The stranger admits he’s married and they go their separate ways. When she goes to work the next morning, she discovers that the stranger, is her new boss, David. She later runs into his wife Adele. They strike up a conversation and a friendship. Adele forces Louise to keep their friendship a secret from David. As time goes on, Louise and David act on their attraction with one another and enters into an affair. Louise is caught in the middle of the husband and wife’s sadistic marriage.

I was excited to read this book. However, it became exhausting after awhile. It was very lengthy, which is not necessarily a bad thing. The story just felt like it dragged through a huge portion of the book. It took beyond the halfway mark for the mystery to unfold. The ending was a twister that I didn’t see coming; which I did enjoy. I only wished that I wasn’t dragged along for this long ride to get to the mystery of it all.

My Rating 7/10