Polly, the protagonist of the novel The Leavers by Lisa Ko, is a character unlike the majority seen (or read) in modern mainstream literature. She is an immigrant woman who is ambitious, who has sexual desires, who trudges through the monotony of daily life in the working-class, who sacrifices for her child, who also makes…
Author: cheerstothebookends
Training School for Negro Girls
Sometimes, I buy books just because I see them a lot. I try to visit different bookstores as much as I can, and when I do, there are some books that pop up in many or all of them. Training School for Negro Girls is one of those books. I saw it in the curated…
The Vegetarian
Sometime last spring, I stopped wearing bras. I lost a bit of weight, which caused my bra size to change froma 32G to a 30F, neither of which is terribly easy to find in stores…or cheap. Around the same time, my relationship with my ex was disintegrating. It’s clear to me now that some of…
January Bookend
The first month of the year got me off to a good start. I enjoyed all of the books I read this month, and I’m ticking away on my goal of reading more non-fiction. Plus, I got a chance to meet my Spelman sister, author Tayari Jones (whose latest book, An American Marriage, was a…
You Can’t Pick Your Family
But you sure can write about them. Jennifer Teege has the distinct misfortune of being a half-Black woman who finds out in her adulthood that her grandfather was the psychopathic Nazi concentration camp commander, Amon Goeth. So terrible was Goeth that as played by Ralph Fiennes in the famed Spielberg film, Schindler’s List, he seems…
Becoming…More?
We basically all read Michelle Obama’s book, Becoming. Or at least, we all bought it. And great for Michelle. I’m never one to begrudge a woman her coins. What I didn’t get was my whole life, as I expected to get from this book. I’m not sure what exactly I expected from it, but I…
Broken Earth Series
If nothing else, I will make it my mission in life to see the Broken Earth series on the big screen, if I have to write the scripts myself. That’s how good those books were! According to Jemisin’s twitter page, there is a TV series hitting TNT sometime in the near future based on these…
Hollywood Still Rewards Shit White People Like, Even if No One Else Does
I did not need to watch The Green Book in order to know that it was going to be a terrible movie. The film’s trailers alone had all the makings of a movie about race made solely to make white people feel good about race. That didn’t stop it from coming out on top at the recent…
2019 Book Goals
Whew!!!!! 2018 is finito and 2019 is here. Praise the Lordt!! I am ready for all the goodness that 2019 has to offer. Of course, that’s going to include some awesome reads (I hope). Annnnnd, not being furloughed for too long…but I digress. So, last year my goals were very clear. It was a year…
2018 in a Bookend
2018, what can I say? I came. I saw. I read the shit outta some books. At the beginning of 2018, I set my mind on one reading goal: to read one book every week of the year. There were 52 weeks in the year, so there you go. By my final tally, after I…
