Next 5 TBR: Volume 3 — Femmeuary and Black History Month edition!

Hello, biblios!

I'm really excited for my February TBRs. In the U.S., February is Black History Month. And on Booktube across the pond, the adorable Lauren of Lauren and the Books announced that she'd be observing Femmeuary.

"I will be reading, watching films, listening to music and just generally consuming ANYTHING I CAN GET MY MITTS ON stuff that makes me proud, empowered and delighted to be a woman!"

I am all about it, Lauren! So I thought I'd combine these two and read only books by Black American women authors in February. And I have some amazing looking books on my whole list.

Since I do my TBRs in groups of five, this isn't the full list but rather the first five I plan to read, and I'll see where we're at on the calendar once I'm done with these.

Synopses and thoughts below!

1. The Untelling by Tayari Jones

Aria is not stranger to tragedy — as a young girl, she and her older sister and mother survived a car crash that took the lives of their father and beloved baby sister. And although relations with her remaining family are strained, she's done her best to establish a solid, normal life for herself, living in Atlanta and teaching literacy to girls who have fallen on hard times.

But now she has a secret that she's not yet ready to share with Dwayne, her devoted boyfriend, or Rochelle, her roommate and best friend: Aria is pregnant. Or so she thinks. The truth is about to make her question her every assumption and reevaluate the life she has worked so hard to build for herself ... as it sends her reeling in a direction she had no idea she was destined to go.

I read Jones' novel Silver Sparrow a few years ago and loved it, so I'm really eager to read more from her. And in fact, she has a new book coming out very soon, and which is already on its way to me in my February Book of the Month club box!

2. Black Water Rising by Attica Locke

Jay Porter is hardly the lawyer he set out to be. His most promising client is a low-rent call girl and he runs his fledgling law practice out of a dingy strip mall. But he’s long since made peace with not living the American Dream and carefully tucked away his darkest sins: the guns, the FBI file, the trial that nearly destroyed him.

Houston, Texas, 1981. It is here that Jay believes he can make a fresh start. That is, until the night in a boat out on the bayou when he impulsively saves a woman from drowning—and opens a Pandora’s box. Her secrets put Jay in danger, ensnaring him in a murder investigation that could cost him his practice, his family, and even his life. But before he can get to the bottom of a tangled mystery that reaches into the upper echelons of Houston’s corporate power brokers, Jay must confront the demons of his past.

This is Locke's debut novel, and will be the first of hers I've read. She had a new book out recently, Bluebird, Bluebird, which is also on my master TBR. But I wanted to start out with her debut, because why not start at the beginning?

3. When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter memoir by Patrisse Khan-Cullors and asha bandele

From one of the co-founders of the Black Lives Matter movement comes a poetic memoir and reflection on humanity. Necessary and timely, Patrisse Cullors’ story asks us to remember that protest in the interest of the most vulnerable comes from love. Leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement have been called terrorists, a threat to America. But in truth, they are loving women whose life experiences have led them to seek justice for those victimized by the powerful. In this meaningful, empowering account of survival, strength, and resilience, Patrisse Cullors and asha bandele seek to change the culture that declares innocent black life expendable. 

Even before reading it, I am so glad this book is out in the world. There is so much dishonesty and garbage spread around about BLM, and the voices of those behind the movement deserve to be lifted high above their disingenuous critics.

4. A Mercy by Toni Morrison

In the 1680s the slave trade in the Americas is still in its infancy. Jacob Vaark is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh North. Despite his distaste for dealing in “flesh,” he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland.

This is Florens, who can read and write and might be useful on his farm. Rejected by her mother, Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master’s house, and later from the handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved, who comes riding into their lives.

A Mercy reveals what lies beneath the surface of slavery. But at its heart, like Beloved, it is the ambivalent, disturbing story of a mother and a daughter - a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and a daughter who may never exorcise that abandonment.

I've read a number of Morrison's books, and even the couple that weren't favorites were still so good, because Toni Morrison, basically. Definitely eager to read another from the master.

5. Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson

Running into a long-ago friend sets memories from the 1970s in motion for August, transporting her to a time and a place where friendship was everything—until it wasn’t. For August and her girls, sharing confidences as they ambled through neighborhood streets, Brooklyn was a place where they believed that they were beautiful, talented, brilliant—a part of a future that belonged to them.

But beneath the hopeful veneer, there was another Brooklyn, a dangerous place where grown men reached for innocent girls in dark hallways, where ghosts haunted the night, where mothers disappeared. A world where madness was just a sunset away and fathers found hope in religion.

This is a very slim little novel, but I expect it will still pack a real punch, based on what I've heard about her other works. Plus, Woodson was recently named the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature for the Library of Congress!

So those are the first five I'll be tackling for Femmeuary/Black History Month! Have you read any of these? Are you going to be observing either celebrations in your reading? Do tell!


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