Tag: AuthorsOfColor

Teaser Tuesday 12/15

On By carryabigbookIn excerpt, memes, Spell the Month in Books, Teaser TuesdayLeave a comment

Welcome to Teaser Tuesday, the weekly Meme hosted by The Purple Booker. It’s super easy and anyone can join in the fun!

1: Grab your current read
2: Open to a random page
3: Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page

Memorial is one of the 77 titles on the 2021 Tournament of Books longlist. This battle of the books takes place in March and pits the top 16 (or 18) books of the year against each other. Just think March Madness for book nerds. Right now most of us who follow this competition are in a mad dash to read the list. We are snatching up sales, searching our local libraries and waiting with bated breath for the shortlist to come out. So guess how lucky I felt when my library sent me the notification that Memorial was a hot pick for the day.

Teaser

Mike’s never promised me anything. Only delivered or didn’t. He always said that promises were only words, and words only meant what you made them.

Synopsis

A funny, sexy, profound dramedy about two young people at a crossroads in their relationship and the limits of love.

Benson and Mike are two young guys who live together in Houston. Mike is a Japanese American chef at a Mexican restaurant and Benson’s a Black day care teacher, and they’ve been together for a few years — good years — but now they’re not sure why they’re still a couple. There’s the sex, sure, and the meals Mike cooks for Benson, and, well, they love each other.

But when Mike finds out his estranged father is dying in Osaka just as his acerbic Japanese mother, Mitsuko, arrives in Texas for a visit, Mike picks up and flies across the world to say goodbye. In Japan he undergoes an extraordinary transformation, discovering the truth about his family and his past. Back home, Mitsuko and Benson are stuck living together as unconventional roommates, an absurd domestic situation that ends up meaning more to each of them than they ever could have predicted. Without Mike’s immediate pull, Benson begins to push outwards, realizing he might just know what he wants out of life and have the goods to get it.

Both men will change in ways that will either make them stronger together, or fracture everything they’ve ever known. And just maybe they’ll all be okay in the end. Memorial is a funny and profound story about family in all its strange forms, joyful and hard-won vulnerability, becoming who you’re supposed to be, and the limits of love.

Teaser Tuesday 11/17/20

On By carryabigbookIn memes, TBR, Teaser TuesdayLeave a comment

Welcome to Teaser Tuesday, the weekly Meme hosted by The Purple Booker. It’s super easy and anyone can join in the fun!

1: Grab your current read
2: Open to a random page
3: Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page

This week I struggled to find a Teaser for this meme. So I begged help from my tribe of bookworms. My middle son picked the page number (64) and my little ones decided the color. One said yellow and the other pink an Voila! This is what we came up with:

Synopsis

From GoodReads – “Twin sisters Bibike and Ariyike are enjoying a relatively comfortable life in Lagos in 1996. Then their mother loses her job due to political strife, and the family, facing poverty, becomes drawn into the New Church, an institution led by a charismatic pastor who is not shy about worshipping earthly wealth.”

“Following their fate over the course of two decades in Nigeria, this debut novel tells the story of each sibling’s search for agency, love, and meaning in a society rife with hypocrisy but also endless life.”

Teaser

When you’re the youngest in the family, everyone tries to protect you. They lie to you, they cover for you. You learn to do your own investigating. You have to be both persistent and invisible. Sometimes it seemed like there was a duvet of silence over all the important stuff about our family. There was no one willing to lift it for me, to let me see for myself what it was all about.

pg. 64

For those of you with siblings, how much do you think your birth order has affected your personality?

Saudade by Suneeta Peres da Costa

On By carryabigbookIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

“Love is a fire that burns unseen, a wound that aches yet isn’t felt . . . a longing for nothing but to long, a lonlieness in the midst of people, a never feeling pleased when pleased, a passion that gains when lost in thought” _ Camoes

Saudade is a feeling of melancholy brought on by the sense of absence and a longing to return to what was lost and can never be regained.

This sense of yearning ripples throughout this novella as a young Goan emigre struggles to find her self and her place during the Angolan Civil War. A daughter of Portuguese sympathizers she comes to realize that their existence, albeit of a privileged class, is that of outsiders. Yet they no more belong in Goa than they do in Angola. She does not recall her ancestral home and her parents cannot fathom how to return to a “life they have forgotten”. Peres da Costa eloquently captures this feeling of displacement across characters and experiences. Saudade is applied not only to the immigrant experience but to intimacy and coming of age.

“Suneeta Peres da Costa (born 1976) is an award-winning Australian author and playwright, best known for her tragicomic novel, Homework, about a dysfunctional Goan migrant family set in suburban Sydney. Peres da Costa was twenty-three years-old when the novel was published internationally.” Saudade is her third novel.