In My Name is Marcus, Philp, a longtime Garvey scholar has written a factual account of Garvey’s life that is powerful as it is unsentimental. Boldly illustrated by a talented creative team (Shaquille Cross, Marcel Hemmings, Richard Kentish, Djet Layne, Mikel Miller, Davia Morris, and Michael Robinson), My Name is Marcus is a first-person narrative of Garvey’s childhood into adulthood…
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Review-The Bread the Devil Knead by Lisa Allen-Agostini
In The Bread the Devil Knead, we meet Allie. Confident and ambitious, she portrays an exterior of success while harboring a dangerous secret about her domestic life. This is an engaging read that digs deep into our society’s relationship with domestic abuse and uncovers a path to redemption. (I received a copy of this book so that I could prepare…
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Review-Hurricane Summer by Asha Bromfield
Hurricane Summer is a beautiful and compelling story of eighteen-year-old Tilla’s summer with her father’s family in the countryside of Jamaica. Tilla’s parents migrated from Jamaica to Canada, however, their father has never fully assimilated and spends so much time in Jamaica that the parents’ marriage seems all but over.
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Notes on Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
This is not a review, just my reflection on The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler written in 1993. This book is about a young woman, Lauren, growing up in the 2020s when the United States is in a state of anarchy. People survive by living in gated communities with armed neighborhood watches and live barely above the poverty…
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Review-Kingstown Burning by Rachelle J. Gray
I received a free e-copy of this book in return for my honest review. Kingstown Burning is a debut novel by Rachelle J. Gray. The book is a work of fiction with speculative elements set in Barbados. It takes readers inside the world of a group of friends who are also Rastafarians and dips at times deeply into the culture…
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Review – His Only Wife by Peace Medie
Twenty-one-year old Afi finds herself in the middle of another family’s drama when she agrees to marry the son of a wealthy woman who provided support to Afi and her mother after Afi’s father died. She enters the marriage willingly, despite never having met her intended before, and despite knowing that her husband-to-be is in another relationship and has a…
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YA Review-Frying Plantain by Zalika Reid-Benta
I have to thank Ann Marie Harvey, Librarian at the Enoch Pratt Free Library, for bringing this book to the top of my reading list on which it has been languishing since it was first published last year. Ann Marie invited me to a virtual book club meeting which I would not have been able to attend if it had been held…
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Review-The Mermaid of Black Conch by Monique Roffey
It’s 2015 and we meet David Baptiste, his “dreads…grey and his body wizened to twigs of hard black coral.” He is a fisherman on St Constance, a tiny Caribbean village on the island of Black Conch, who had been the center of “the events of 1976” when a mermaid came to shore on the island and challenged the hearts and…
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Review-Book of the Little Axe by Lauren Francis-Sharma
When I heard the premise of this book, I was intrigued and skeptical. A woman of African descent from Trinidad ends up in what is now known as Big Horn, Montana in 1830? Really? The likelihood and the logistics baffled me. Well, Francis-Sharma handles this masterfully with confidence backed up by compelling characters, complicated relationships, and what must have been…
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Review-A Girl is a Body of Water by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi
A Girl is a Body of Water by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi is essentially a coming-of-age story set in Uganda in the 1970s. The story begins with Kirabo Nnamiiro, a smart, feisty, twelve-year-old girl who consults a blind elderly neighbor, Nsuuta-labeled by the village as a witch-, to help search for her mother and also to help her to deal with…