The Kitchen House: A Novel by Kathleen Grissom

     The Kitchen House: A Novel by Kathleen Grissom is a story of American history.  Grissom takes the reader on a journey that is filled with the bones of innocent Americans.  She reveals layers of oppression that continues to tear holes in the fabric of American culture.  Her novel is filled with characters' tales that run thick with the blood of humans.

     The story starts in 1791, a child is on a boat full of desperate immigrants in debt to an American merchants and plantation owners.  These indentured laborers are Irish.  There is sickness and her parents die; her brother is sold; she survives.  Grissom's words draws tears as the child sees others love and she longs for someone to stroke her hair and touch her cheeks.  She hurts !  In a fog of confusion, the white child finds herself in the kitchen of a plantation where she is given as an "adopted" child to the black slave family.

     The story shocks as it should.  It reveals the horror of human sadism.

     Abinia grows up in the midst of strong and fierce love.  As a child she bonds with her new family.  She depends on them for sanity.  As a white child she learns the multiple meanings of freedom and trust.  She learns that nothing is what it seems.  Relationships cross boundaries and secrets are buried deep in souls.  Death is a daily experience and she sees that the slaves have no reason to trust.  As time goes on Abinia is faced with decisions that she experiences as if skewered by hot steel.
     Abinia can never get accustomed to the structure of slave culture.  Therefore, mistakes are made and lives are put at risk.  Her love of family is reciprocated by those who will give their lives for each other and for freedom.

Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline

     Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline opens one of the many doors to the world of the orphan in America.  In this case, the voice is that of a young girl whose world is turned inside out by the deaths of her family members.
     The story touches the heart as the reader witnesses the bare bones of emotional abandonment and confusion.  The young narrator's struggle to make sense of a lost life and, at the same time her strive for a measure of control in the new world of foster families, grips the reader with a pain that is deep and profound.  The story, along with the sudden and unfathomable loneliness of death and abandonment, gives the reader access to a world beyond the front door of foster care.  The lesson that seeps into the heart is that there are precarious places for a child and that the safety of children cannot be taken for granted.
     On the other hand, Kline uses the word to place a hand on the wound as she weaves the most unexpected friendship between a child on the verge of being jaded by unfortunate circumstances with her elderly friend and "savior."  Actually, the two women form a bond that allows them to heal old wounds.
    As the friendship progresses, Kline, along with the reader, weaves layer after layer of emotional warmth and at the end of this beautiful story, the bare bones emotional skeleton has grown layers of rich flesh infused with the forces of love, friendship, and acceptance.

The Story Teller by Jodi Picoult

The Story Teller takes place around the baking of fine, hotly buttered, mouth watering, scrumptious, multi-flavored, recognizable bread!  Brioche, challah, "babka, poppy seed cake and mazurek."

Jodi Picoult pulls the reader into a struggle with life and death, and with the human effort to understand how we end.  She takes this human and personal path to lead us into the painful puzzle of good and evil, of man and woman's inhumanity to others.  And, yet in the midst of the readers own horror at our inhumane possibilities one finds oneself one of those "humans" as the senses react - as the reader's visual memories are activated and the smell of good hot bread ignites that hunger in the midst of the same memory that smells of spilt human blood.

The reader is jarred into seeing his or her own possibilities.  The reader is made to contemplate the temptation to feel superior, the temptation to belong, and the temptation to use pain to inflict pain.  Juxtaposed against these human conditions one sees, feels, and smells the horrific consequences of following the status quo, and the animal that emerges when one falls into that trap.

Picoult uses the main character to take the reader on an emotional human ride.  It is a ride full of pain, friendship, and understanding.  Just as the reader comes to believe that Sage, the main character, will always feel the pain of her scars, she finds love.

The Story Teller is about crime and punishment; it is about soul searching; it asks ancient, present, and future questions.  It asks us to ask ourselves what lies ahead!

It is about the Holocaust.

Picoult is a sensitive and artful writer.  She uses metaphors and similes to help the reader digest horror.  As you read, you understand, that the bread metaphor works like a mother's hot soup on a day heavy with storms.

BUCK by Asanti

The hot beat of rap poetry stills the reader.  It weaves its way through your senses as the beat is caught in the fleshy sadness of a perpetual family and social story that should not be.

It simply should not be a story in the midst of a "progressive" and "civilized" society.

Ashante brings the voice of the urban black youth to the forefront.  His lyrics curl themselves around your heart and squeeze.  He is asking the reader, how could you not care!  He is demanding the reader to look and look again, recognize [my] humanity; take note of [my] anger.  Respect [my] possibilities.

BUCK is defiant; it is unapologetic.

BUCK is a son's love for his mother.

BUCK is a testimony for his brother.

BUCK is a demand for respect.

BUCK is a time to pause, to stop, to reflect.

BUCK is a time for change.

Ashante is a young man who takes us on an important journey into American life in what is called the "ghetto."  He calls attention to every mother's dream and every mother's sorrow.  He makes us bleed for lost fath.er's and fatherhood.

The music in his poetry keeps the reader high enough to withstand the pain that he exposes.
 
"Later on, at dinner, Uncle Howard tells me about the war inside.  "There's a war between two wolves inside everybody.  One is anger, jealousy, greed, resentment, inferiority, lies, and ego.  The other's good.  It's love, peace, beauty, happiness, truth, hope, joy, humility, kindness, and empathy."....... I give long, deep hugs to Uncle Howard and Aunt Georgia, then hop in the car with Ryan.  I start the engine, then jump out, forgetting something.  I walk up to my uncle.  "In the story," I ask, "who wins.... between the wolves?  The one you feed." (pg 187-8)

No Matter ... Bill Bailey Ain't Never.... by Edgardo Vega Yunque

I read!  638 pages!  And I read it twice.

Yungue's genius writing style took me on a journey of twists and turns that always came together at the right moments and, those connections served to propel me into extended sections of his novel.

The size of the book is daunting but, immediately, upon entrance, it grabs you.   At first, the long explanations and tangents into other minds and histories scare the reader with the fear of boredom to come.  Yet, that doesn't happen.  After a while the words open you up and release a sort of patience.  You are reassured that the writer expects that you will return, to reread, to think, to cross bridges, and to form opinions.  There is promise in his style; there is confidence in his style; he expects you to revisit.  And, you do.

The foundation he builds on is his love of music - of jazz music.  And, what is jazz?  Jazz, an orchestrated symphony of instruments talking of love, of pain, of life, of love.  He takes the opportunity to share the emotional calms and upheavals that come with this creativity and, in doing so, he understand that his writing had to call to life this symphony of stories.

more to come.......

Kindred by Octavia Butler

Kindred!  A word that dips in and stirs expectations.  It stirs the blood.

Butler takes the reader on a harrowing emotional ride through American's history of African-American experiences.  The reader takes this ride in the shoes of a young black female identity and, to some extent, the identity of a young white male.

Octavia Butler, in her written art piece, Kindred, does what she does with such unequivocal brilliance, she transform you the reader into the character.  You are no longer in control of who you think you are when you encounter Butler's words.  Her genius is the ability to take you there; her genius is in her power to make you a part of the other psyche.

What stands out in Kindred is the lack of logic harnessed in the willingness of humans to cave into sadism while expecting love and loyalty from their victims.  She highlights the inhumanity seemingly existing right under the surface of the human.

Butler takes you inside of yourself to quiver with your own insecurity, your own knowledge of that self reflected in all of her characters.  Her approach in this novel unsettles the reader.  The main character, Dana, is dragged into her past to save a member of her family. Positioned as this savior, Dana has to learn to love and forgive in the midst of

more to come.....

I,Tituba, the black witch of Salem by Maryse Conde

Respect! absolute honor and recognition is reflected in Maryse Conde's novel - I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem.

more to come.....