On the Come Up
reviewdate:
Oct 28 2019
isn:
9780062498564
Tagged with family
Americanized: Rebel Without a Green Card
reviewdate:
Aug 26 2018
isn:
9781524717810
book type:
recommendation:
The Heartbeats of Wing Jones
reviewdate:
Feb 18 2017
isn:
9780399555022
recommendation:
Dragon's Breath and Other True Stories
reviewdate:
Nov 26 2015
isn:
9781941250013
author gender:
book type:
medium:
recommendation:
author demographic:
West of the Jordan
reviewdate:
Jan 29 2015
isn:
978-080708359-8
author gender:
book type:
medium:
author demographic:
All-Girl Filling Station's Last Reunion, the
Fannie Flagg novels always go down easy and are southern charming as all get-out. All-Girl centers on a 60-year-old woman who finds out she's not southern, at least not in the southern way of knowing who your people are a few generations back. It's also about Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs). Unless you're a real crankypants, you should be moved by protagonist Sookie Poole's evolution, the WASPs accomplishments, or both. I sniffled quite a bit reading about the titular event while riding a New Jersey transit train home from Jewish Christmas.
reviewdate:
Dec 25 2013
isn:
978-0-8129-9463-6
author gender:
book type:
medium:
recommendation:
City of Ashes
Pretty much the same review as for City of Bones.
reviewdate:
Dec 25 2011
isn:
978-1-4169-7224-2
author gender:
medium:
recommendation:
Every Good-Bye Ain't Gone
I'm not sure whether to class this book as memoir or essays. It's a series of essays about the author's family and about herself. It's person-focused, rather than linear. Normally I'm wary of that sort of thing, but I didn't mind it here. Njeri is a journalist, so each piece could appear by itself in a magazine. With the context of all of the other pieces, though, you get a more complete picture of the author than you would otherwise. Her family is huge, and she has a lot of facets to her own personality to explore. Still, there are some commonalities. Njeri is full of heart, also moxie. She is not uncritical of her family and herself, but she also shows a lot of love and understanding, even for the broken parts of her family and herself.
reviewdate:
Nov 6 2010
isn:
0-679-73242-x
author gender:
medium:
recommendation:
author demographic:
free:
Soul Brothers and Sister Lou, the
I'm having a hard time writing this review because I love the book so much. I've read it a bunch of times (five? ten?) since I first encountered it as a child. It's about a 14-year-old African-American girl coming up in a poor neighborhood of an unnamed northern city. She wants to feel like part of something, and gets her chance when she wrangles a former storefront church with an old piano in it into a clubhouse for her and the kids who previously had to hang out on the street, dodging a vindictive cop named Lafferty.
reviewdate:
Oct 31 2010
isn:
0-7043-4900-0