The Same Country is a gripping story from beginning to end, through the eyes of so many vivid characters, at one of the most explosive times in America for race relations.
The main character Cassie is a white journalist returning home to see the Black Lives Movement play out before her very eyes. A mystery dictates the effects of it on her and all around her and transports back and forth to a past not different but silenced.
Carole Burns makes you feel as if these people from an American cross-section really know each other. Or maybe I, being from a similar American cross-section, just knew them well. I loved this novel.
The Same Country is a powerful and thought-provoking story about family, friendship and the risks we take to unravel the truth.
Twenty years ago, Joe was shot dead in the bedroom of his white girlfriend. It was deemed an accident, but now his friend Cassie – a journalist – is not so sure. As racial tension ignites a string of violence across their New England city, secrets are revealed, questions mount and suspicions grow. Will the answers that she is so desperate to find cause everyone's world to shatter?
The glamour and propulsion in Did You Hear About Kitty Karr? are unstoppable from start to finish in this part mystery, part historical novel, and all between is beautiful prose telling several dynamic women’s stories in grand fashion.
Crystal Smith Paul transports us quickly and easily across several worlds in challenging times for women and Black people in America, breaking their shallow surfaces down to deeper implications. The characters’ voices, particularly of the resourceful Elise St. John and old Hollywood star Kitty Karr, sound loudly and its ending is one of the more unforeseen I’ve read in years.
A multigenerational saga that traverses the glamour of old Hollywood and the seductive draw of modern-day showbiz
When Kitty Karr Tate, a White icon of the silver screen, dies and bequeaths her multimillion-dollar estate to the St. John sisters, three young, wealthy Black women, it prompts questions. Lots of questions.
A celebrity in her own right, Elise St. John would rather focus on sorting out Kitty’s affairs than deal with the press. But what she discovers in one of Kitty’s journals rocks her world harder than any…
These poems bring burgeoned, whole, communal worlds alive, often at a glance. Language masterstrokes and arresting visuals leap out throughout. Tara Betts never lets go of a palpable thoughtfulness, so we remain unmistaken of what’s depicted and meant.
Refuse to Disappear is a flourishing but careful collection, one of the poet’s best. In the identity reflections, testaments to womanhood and social indictments are devotion to Americana and a high place in expanding it. The last section delivers my favorites, like “An Open Letter to the Voyeurs” and “Priest, the Pit Bull.” Every poem from the first to the last entitling one is heartbreaking or heart-healing, which one depending on the reader.
A new collection singing the survival and thriving of Black women, chosen by Cynthia Arrieu-King for the Hilary Tham Capital Collection.
"In the spirit of magic, potions, and inventory, this book calls up the language of both science and witchery to call roll on Black women. Betts says their names in a litany of circumstances and survival. In the first section of the book, the poet draws a matrilineal line that connects these beings, and through this line, the bounce and weft of Betts's verse meets readers in the actual: in hot sauce, FUBU, Sindee and Alexandra from Tangerine, Simone…
I started Running to Fall during 2020 lockdowns when my efforts to reach or relate to people in limited ways revealed a disturbing trend: an uptick in drinking at home as the new “fun.” Suddenly, women and girls tapping at me for years convened in this novel about Tragedy Powell, a closet alcoholic whose life as one of few Blacks in the fictitious Grayson Glens elite community upends when a missing young Black girl comes up in the Grayson River just after lockdowns end.
It's a mystery and suspense novel like my last. However, like my last, its center is the fraught experience of Black women in America and all women in a man’s world. I hope you discover and enjoy them.
