The Ancestors, a collection of three novellas by L.A. Banks, Tananarive Due, and Brandon Massey.

I was seriously underwhelmed by this collection. I couldn't even manage to finish the stories by Banks or Massey. ( Slightly spoilery review behind the cut. )

I'm awful at doing writeups, so this list has just been sitting on my desktop for ages making me feel guilty for not doing writeups.

Soo, I will just put the list up with brief one-liners on whether I liked it or not, and I'd be happy to discuss more in comments.

5) Silver Pheonix by Cindy Pon ( Read more... )

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz ( Read more... )

Julia Alvarez’s Before We Were Free, like her In the Time of the Butterflies, is a novel set in the Dominican Republic during the dictatorship of Trujillo. However, it’s a more successful novel than In the Time of the Butterflies; while both novels focus more on family drama than on politics, the approach works better in Before We Were Free ( Read more... )

The Beast, Walter Dean Myers, 8/50. This is a very careful, balanced novel - the metaphor throughout is that of the labyrinth, with the beast at its heart, but the danger is not so much the monster itself as the ever-present possibility of losing your way. Anthony Witherspoon comes back to Harlem after his first term at a Connecticut prep school, ( Read more... )

I was recommended to this community by a friend, and I'm very excited to enjoy such a wealth of recommendations of books by people of color as well as share about the books I'm reading. Though I'm excited to read 50 more books by people of color, I'll probably also share some reviews of previous books that I've read and loved.

Currently, I'm in the ( Read more... )

I'm excited about this community and this challenge. I hope I can do it in a month. I'm going to start by counting the book I read last month.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. Much like everyone else, I fell in love with this book. It was hard for me to put down. Even the characters I found hard to take, were made a little ( Read more... )

I bought The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao on ethereal_lad's recommendation but was afraid it would be too literary for me, too New Yorker-ish and twee ( Read more... )