Anger Is A Gift by Mark Oshiro

Anger Is a Gift is devastating and spectacular. This one literally took my breath away. It made me cry, but it also filled my heart right up. The fact that it did both of these things--that it was often painful to read, but that just as often, it was filled with warmth and love and...

Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke

I don't read a lot of mysteries, but I'm trying to change that, because if there's one thing I've learned about myself as a reader in thirty-two years, it's that I like variety. I'm pretty certain at this point that there are going to be books I love (and books I hate) in every genre....

Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower by Brittney Cooper

In the past few years, I've been reading a lot of books about race, and something I've noticed is that, for me, it's usually the books that aren't aimed at white audiences that are the most powerful. I enjoyed So You Want to Talk About Race (which isn't necessarily written for white people, but certainly...

So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo

In So You Want to Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo breaks down a whole lot of complicated issues surrounding race in America into accessible pieces. I found it to be a quick read, mostly because of how beautifully clear and direct it was. With chapter titles like "What is the school-to-prison pipeline?", "What are microaggressions?" and...

One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams-Garcia

One Crazy Summer is an understated middle grade novel about Delphine and her two sisters, who travel from Brooklyn to Oakland during the summer of 1968 to spend a month with the mother who left them when they were small. While there, they spend their days at a summer program put on by the Black...

Wade in the Water: Poems by Tracy K. Smith

I read Tracy Smith's Life On Mars earlier this year and was totally blow away. So I got my hands on her newest collection as quickly as I could. It was, if anything, better than I'd hoped. Smith's language is so sharp and precise. She writes the kind of poems I could read over and...

White Rage by Carol Anderson

In White Rage, Carol Anderson expertly and clearly lays out the history of America from the Civil War through the present. She examines how, after each important victory of black progress, white supremacy (as wielded by white people in power) has responded in the same chilling way: by blocking that progress by every means possible--legally,...

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

It's hard for me to figure out where to start with this one. I've been putting off writing this review for weeks, because I really disliked this novel. I was expecting to love it. I finally read Jane Eyre last winter, and it completely blew me away. I was hoping Wide Sargasso Sea would enter...

Passing by Nella Larsen

After rereading Their Eyes Were Watching God, I decided to seek out books published by women pre-1950 to add to my 2018 TBR. You can see the whole list on a past Fierce Feminist Friday. I started with Nella Larsen's Passing, first published in 1929. Passing concerns two black women living in Chicago and Harlem...