Kibkabe Araya's Blog, page 35
June 5, 2019
Miranda from “Sex and The City” stars in book written by her Instagram fans
The women behind the popular Sex and The City Instagram account @everyoutfitonsatc has published a book in praise of their favorite character from the vintage HBO series.
Chelsea Fairless and Lauren Garroni announced the release of We Should All Be Mirandas: Life Lessons from Sex and the City’s Most Underrated Character Tuesday via Instagram to its 580,000 followers. The post quickly garnered over 22,000 likes.
As self-proclaimed “Mirandas,” the authors took the TV version of Candace Bushnell‘s character from the 1996 novel of the same name. Miranda Hobbes, played by former New York gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon, is a tough-minded lawyer who loves sarcasm. But with her short red hair and lankiness in bland business suits, she didn’t become as beloved as the other three characters who came to be known as fashionable single-girl-in-the-city archetypes, including main character Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker, who’s also a book imprint owner), Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall), and Charlotte York (Kristin Davis).
This parody book is dedicated 20+ years later to a character from a novel who was brought to life on screen to make an argument on why this character’s so-called awkward femininity should be accepted and admired.
Available for pre-order on Amazon.com, the book will be released in October.
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June 2, 2019
Book Review: “Gingerbread” by Helen Oyeyemi
Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
“Gingerbread” by Helen Oyeyemi takes the dessert’s role in fairy tales and turns it into a convoluted story between two families and one girl seeking the truth about her father.
Harriet Lee is a teacher but has a specialty in making gingerbread and sharing it whenever she can. Her daughter, Perdita, yearns to eat the gingerbread, but she has celiac disease. Soon Perdita makes a life-threatening decision, and Harriet realizes it’s because her daughter wants to know who her father is and where Harriet’s homeland of Druhástrana is since it can’t be found on a map. While Perdita recuperates, Harriet tells her daughter the family history and how she ended up making gingerbread as an expertise. The tale starts in the farmlands of Druhástrana and heads to London where Harriet becomes a star gingerbread maker with a group of girls, including her friend Gretel. These girls seem to be used for child labor to create the desserts for mostly hungry men. Eventually Harriet and her mother, Margot, move in with the rich family, their distant cousins the Kerchevals, who brought Harriet into the gingerbread world and their destinies intersect and result in Harriet’s independence.
First, this book starts describing the characters and their histories quickly and then it becomes a rabbit hole of overdone character development that doesn’t feed the story. When you hear about a novel like this based on the legend of gingerbread in fairy tales, this is not what you expect. The story can be followed, but there’s too much detail that doesn’t move the story forward. For example, groups of characters are introduced from the Parental Power Association to Perdita’s talking dolls to the Kerchevals, where there are several people named but not all the characters are developed enough to add anything to the story.
Overall, the story collapses into too many other stories that may be hard to follow for some or may not be interesting enough.
Book Review: “Queenie” by Candice Carty-Williams
Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
“Queenie” by Candice Carty-Williams surrounds a protagonist going through a breakup and myriad other situations that send her on a downward spiral. It’s one of the first new adult novels I’ve read where mental health is brought into the storyline for a woman of color who’s on a dangerous path to destruction, yet it’s relatable and comical at times.
“Bridget Jones’ Diary” meets “Americanah” is how the publishers are describing this novel since Queenie is a 25-year-old, 2nd-generation Jamaican Brit struggling to get over her boyfriend, Tom. Some reviews complain about Queenie’s obsession with Tom since he’s white, but she’s a millennial who thought she found her soul mate and has a dating preference. The story opens to Queenie in a clinic where she learns she’s had a miscarriage, even with her IUD in use. But she can’t go home and tell Tom, and he’s tired of the lack of communication, so he asks Queenie to move out of their apartment. She ends up renting a room while trying to get ahead in her journalism career. She pitches stories but keeps getting distracted by her colleague, Ted, who seems persistent in workplace flirtation. But Queenie believes she and Tom would get back together with her friends Darcy, Kyazike, and Cassandra trying to convince her otherwise. While fending off Ted, Queenie falls into a one-night stand habit with men from OKCupid and other places who have objectified her body as a BBW. All her bad decisions around men explode in her face. The explosion then stimulates her anxiety until she has a breakdown where she has move into her grandparents’ home and ask for professional help to get her life back on track.
The novel opens up to Queenie’s miscarriage, so there’s a theme of making bad sexual health decisions with unprotected sex and multiple partners within a short amount of time. Also, there’s a theme of bigger black women being objectified for only sex due to their size and race. Queenie feels she’s not worthy of a relationship, especially when she deals with non-black men; the reason why she chooses men outside her race coming up later in the book. Mental health surfaces through her depression and anxiety with the roots of her pain stemming from her own mother’s bad decisions around men. Depending on her religious Jamaican family, we see the first- and second-generation issues from immigration that linger with Queenie being the first to graduate from college but unhappy that the career of her dreams is stalling because she’s a black woman seeing her white colleagues moving forward.
Overall, the book may slowly grow on the reader since it’s one bad decision after the next, but once Queenie’s layers come undone, there’s a deconstruction of why she’s making these decisions. And these actions could be interpreted as “wild” and “promiscuous” for a woman of color, opening up to judgment, but many women period like men deal with sex and love differently, especially in their 20s. That’s why this novel stands out for portraying a very imperfect character. Though you might not agree with her actions, there’s a level of realistic growth in Queenie identifying, understanding, and rectifying her issues.
June 1, 2019
‘Queen Sugar’ shows how a memoir could affect your family
The new trailer for Queen Sugar‘s fourth season made a splash with seeing how the Bordelons handle the activist journalist-turned-author character’s memoir, which begs the question on how much can you reveal comfortably when your family will read your work?
Nova Bordelon, played by Rutina Wesley, has turned her career of black community journalism into a memoir about her family’s rise in the sugarcane industry as they are the only African American owners to create a sustainable business in St. Josephine Parish, Louisiana. Yet, like with many families across cultures, there is deep-rooted tension that never came to the surface until Nova decides to put it to pen in what looks like will be a successful memoir. The success drives a wedge between each family member with her sister Charley, played by Dawn-Lyen Gardner, accusing Nova of the pages showing how much she hates her.
The season starts Wednesday, June 12 at 9 p.m. ET/PT. The critically acclaimed OWN series is based on Natalie Baszile’s 2014 novel of the same name that added Ava DuVernay’s cinematographic vision to upgrade the overall story.
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Mystery novelist Attica Locke lends writing talent to Netflix’s ‘When They See Us’
Acclaimed novelist Attica Locke joined a National Association of Black Journalists Los Angeles panel Wednesday in Hollywood along with actors Niecy Nash and Blair Underwood for their new Netflix series When They See Us, featuring the true-life stories of the boys who had become known as the Central Park Five.
Based in Los Angeles, Attica has written award-winning novels The Cutting Season, Pleasantville, Black Water Rising, and Bluebird, Bluebird, which was picked up by FX in 2017 for a TV series. A sequel titled Heaven, My Home will be out in September.
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Attica Locke / Mel Melcon, Los Angeles Times
As a writer and producer, Attica said the Ava DuVernay project, which includes Oprah and Robert DeNiro as producers, was the highest outlet for her talent with the social justice aspect. The four-episode series available on Netflix this weekend surrounds the New York City case convicting five teenage African American and Latino boys over the rape of a white investment banker who received the moniker of Central Park Jogger. The 1989 event and the subsequent trials revived racial tensions within the city and country, infamously including an $85,000 New York Times ad from Donald Trump calling for the death penalty for the boys. The woman, who was later revealed to be Trisha Meili in a 2004 memoir, survived the attack though still experiences cognitive difficulties.
The case is now examined by journalism scholars who find the media coverage 30 years ago had a racial tinge with most articles never saying these boys—Antron McCray, 15, Kevin Richardson, 15, Yusef Salaam, 15, Raymond Santana, 14, and Korey Wise, 16—”allegedly” committed the crime, a necessarily placed word to let the masses know their innocence was probable. Terms such as “wolf pack” and “wilding” dominated headlines along with “bloodthirsty,” “animals,” “savages” and “human mutations,” according to the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit journalism and research organization. It added newspaper columnists such as New York Post’s Pete Hamill wrote the teens hailed “from a world of crack, welfare, guns, knives, indifference and ignorance…a land with no fathers…to smash, hurt, rob, stomp, rape. The enemies were rich. The enemies were white.”
In 2002, after the boys became men in prison from sentences ranging from 6 to 13 years, convicted murderer and rapist Matias Reyes admitted to the rape. His DNA matched the samples collected from the crime scene, and detectives said he knew details about the crime that was never released to the public. He’s serving a life sentence.
The next year, the five wrongfully convicted men filed a civil lawsuit against New York City for malicious prosecution, racial discrimination, and emotional distress. The charges against them were vacated, and they eventually received a $41 million settlement in 2014.
Reams of articles from the time were prepared by the When They See Us staff for the actors to know the real people they will play on screen, the panel said. Attica added that watching the actual “confession” videotapes from the boys, who say they were coerced into those confessions for a crime they didn’t commit, “fucked her up.” She said it was difficult to watch the children without their parents saying they were a part of the crime when their statements contradicted each other. Niecy brought up in the discussion that mental health hotlines were available to the cast and staff over the emotionally heavy material, adding she had never seen an emphasis of self-care on a production set.
In November, Attica led a social media campaign against the Mystery Writers of America’s decision to bestow a lifetime achievement award to Linda Fairstein, the Central Park Five prosecutor who pushed for the convictions of the teens and eventually became a successful mystery novelist. The literary organization rescinded the award for the first time in its history after it said many members were also against the decision.
May 30, 2019
Mindy Kaling teams up with Amazon Publishing for next essay collection
Actress and comedienne Mindy Kaling announced this week she will be joining the Amazon Publishing family with a new essay collection on her parental adventures.
The collection will be released via Amazon Original Stories in summer 2020 and free for Amazon Prime members with the audiobook narrated by Mindy. It will focus on her life as a single mother in Hollywood and working around other celeb bookwomen such as Oprah and Reese Witherspoon. Amazon Studios is behind Mindy’s new movie Late Night, co-starring Emma Thompson, which had a premiere Thursday night and opens nationwide in theaters on June 7.
“It’s so exciting for me to share the secrets of how I balance being a professional writer, actor, and single mom in a new collection of essays,” Mindy said in a statement. “I mean, it would be so exciting to share those secrets. I don’t have them. Like, not even close. This morning I bribed my baby with a remote control to get my car keys back. But I do have funny stories about my life and I can’t wait for you to read them.”
The e-retailer has controversially taken the book industry by storm, with gearing business toward indie authors and now successful traditionally published authors. Other recent well-known authors on the Amazon Publishing roster include Congresswoman Jackie Speier, N.K. Jemisin, and Veronica Roth. Amazon Original Stories and Amazon Studios have had joint acquisitions, such as with a climate fiction, or cli-fi, series by Lauren Groff, Jane Smiley, Jess Walter.
“Working with Mindy Kaling is an absolute dream project for Amazon Publishing, where every day our guiding light is to strive for the best not only for our readers, but for our authors as well,” said Mikyla Bruder, publisher of Amazon Publishing, in the same statement. “Whether she’s delighting fans on-screen or on-the-page—as The Office’s Kelly Kapoor, The Mindy Project’s Mindy Lahiri, Molly Patel in the upcoming film Late Night, or as a New York Times bestselling memoirist—Mindy is guaranteed to entertain. We’re privileged to be a part of bringing Mindy’s deeply personal essay collection to life, and can’t wait for readers to laugh, cry, and fall in love with her all over again.”
Penguin Random House published both of Mindy’s previous essay collections, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) in 2011 and Why Not Me? in 2016.
Founded in 2009, Amazon Publishing has a staff of mostly female editors with what looks like to be at least five women of color.
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May 20, 2019
‘The Sun Is Also a Star’ sees mediocre reviews: Is multicultural YA viable on silver screen?
Nicola Yoon’s best-selling young adult romance The Sun Is Also A Star transformed into a movie this past weekend, but the critics didn’t seem to love it. Now with a score of 52% on Rotten Tomatoes, this story about interracial love bombed at the box office, so how does that impact other multicultural YA novels blossoming into films?
So far, the movie grossed $2.5 million, significantly below the anticipated $6 million to $12 million from 2,100 theaters, according to Variety. Deadline Hollywood said the film’s ultimate box office return on its $9 million production budget looks dismal with even the author’s debut novel-turned-movie Everything, Everything opening at $11.7M in 2017 and finishing with almost $62 million globally.
The movie follows the novel well with Natasha Kingsley (Yara Shahidi of Grown-ish) heading to an immigration lawyer to save her family from deportation scheduled for the next day when she bumps into Daniel Bae (Charles Melton of Riverdale), who believes their meeting is kismet. As science-minded Natasha fights Daniel’s determination to make her believe in love and fall in love with him, they’re savoring every moment they can together in New York City. With the cinematography expertly showcasing the city, the marshmallow fluffiness of love that readers adored falters a bit onscreen.
And reviewers emphasized that. Entertainment Weekly gave the movie a C while it gave the book in 2016 an A with having the exclusive of the cover reveal. Separate reviewers graded the film and book, but it’s jarring to see such variations for the same media outlet.
The New York Times editors added the book to its curated top children’s books of 2016. “The story and its trappings feel a little generic, the dialogue studiously bland and the characters and their problems curiously weightless, in spite of gestures in the direction of real-world issues,” A.O. Scott wrote in the film review. And “generic” pops up in the headline for the review as well.
Potential moviegoers also saw casting issues with both stars being biracial when Natasha and Daniel were not in the story. Yara is half-black, half-Iranian when Natasha is fully Jamaican, a contrast visible in the film where the actors representing Natasha’s family have a darker complexion. Charles is half-white, half-Korean when Daniel is fully Korean, another contrast visible with the actors playing his family look fully East Asian as his attractiveness is mentioned. It’s the same issue that reared its head in the casting of Nick Young’s character in Crazy Rich Asians.
How this successful novel became an unsuccessful film may not influence future multicultural YA adaptations, but the magic of a book is hard to capture, and casting and script-writing obviously plays a role in the high-profile critiques and bringing the key audience into theaters.
May 15, 2019
Book Review: “The Sun Is Also A Star” by Nicola Yoon
The Sun is Also a Star by Nicola Yoon
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
What I love about Nicola Yoon’s young adult novels is they simplistically explore pure teenage love. This novel touches on timely issues with Natasha, who’s being deported with her family back to Jamaica, and Daniel, who’s dealing with academic pressures brought on by his Korean parents.
They both live in New York with immigrant parents and are trying to find their own version of the American dream. They meet on the street, like so many other New Yorkers, and totally connect despite Natasha scientifically explaining how love doesn’t exist while Daniel uses poetry to explain it does.
Despite their cultural differences, they find themselves interconnected as Daniel tries to help Natasha fight back the deportation order while they fall in love all in one day.
To stretch a book in the span of one day is a feat, and the author does it well, with short chapters from viewpoints of Natasha, Daniel, and the others they come into contact on that fateful day. It’s a feel-good love story that brings up issues of the day such as Daniel’s parents owning a black hair store and Natasha’s parents coming into the country illegally. It can be devoured quickly with satisfaction.
Book Review: “Queen Sugar” by Natalie Baszile
Queen Sugar by Natalie Baszile
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
First of all, the writing and pacing is really good. But the drama dragged. The actual sugar cane business overshadowed the interesting family situations occurring between characters. And because it went into detail about the business, there were all these miscellaneous characters the reader doesn’t care about. I read it because Oprah is doing a show on it, but I have a feeling OWN changed a lot for the book to be remotely entertaining on TV.
Charley Bordelon is a single mother raising her 11-year-old daughter Micah in Los Angeles, where she can’t keep a job as an artist though she enjoys the fruits of her ophthalmologist mother’s labor. When Charley’s father dies, he leaves her a sugarcane field in Louisiana, where he’s originally from. So Charley packs her things up and moves to Louisiana with Micah. They live with Charley’s grandmother Miss Honey while Charley deals with her troubled half-brother Ralph Angel, who has a son named Blue.
While Charley tries to figure out how to run a sugarcane farm, her bullheadedness leaves her making some business mistakes as Ralph Angel grows jealous that the business wasn’t left to him. As Charley gets on track with the help from Remy Newell, a competitor, she finds herself falling him though she doesn’t realize how much she’s neglecting Micah. Ralph Angel’s actions eventually lead to a timely Black Lives Matter ending, which brings the family closer.
The OWN TV series is better but totally changed characters and situations. The show added a sister, Nova Bordelon, to add even more tension between Charley and Ralph Angel. Violet is a preacher’s wife who only shows up a few times in the book as a confidant to Charley; now she’s a waitress with a knack for baking. Miss Honey doesn’t exist, like her character is combined with Violet. In the show, Violet’s love interest is Hollywood, but in the book Hollywood is an old classmate of Ralph Angel who’s a little slow (he gets his nickname for loving tabloids) yet wants to be there for his friend while having a crush on Charley. Remy is an older white man, so Charley has reservations about dating him at first since she would be in an interracial relationship in the South. Micah is a boy in the show while his father is alive and well as a star basketball player who Charley leaves in the season premiere over a cheating scandal. In the book, girl Micah’s father is dead, which is the reason why Charley has been financially desperate to the point where she relocates to handle a sugarcane farm without experience. Also, Ralph Angel returns to town with Blue assuming his son’s mother died of a drug overdose since he abandoned her in a crack house in the book. The TV counterpart has the mother as a recovering addict but still alive and trying to make amends with her family. Prosper, the old farmer who helps Charley get her business moving, is probably the only character who’s stayed the same. And maybe Blue (though the Power Ranger he played with in the book evolved into a Barbie doll in the show).
Though the book sets a good layout for the TV show, it’s one of those stories fun to compare and contrast because there are multiple changes.
A bibliophile’s guide on how to Marie Kondo your bookshelf
Already a best-seller list mainstay, Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up revived new interest in conscious cleaning via Netflix this spring. But book enthusiasts riled against the KonMari method—the official name rather than the author’s name becoming a verb—that recommends only keeping around 30 books in the home, a range too minuscule for people who actually read.
If the number of books don’t matter yet your bookshelf looks disheveled, these tricks should help you declutter.
Donate books you are never going to read
You really wanted a book and bought it only for it to still be on your bookshelf five years later—unread. The book industry is lit right now, therefore the book you wanted to read five years ago may be stomped by another book released this year. Adding both would be contributing to clutter, so reconsider books that you’ve bought in the past that have been left unread. If you feel you can read it the next few months, then keep it, but when you read the synopsis on the back and you don’t get the warm feeling inside anymore, throw it in the donation heap.
Donate books you don’t absolutely love
Sometimes, we get into what society thinks about a book. You might have a book on your shelf that you did read but admittedly didn’t get why it won all those awards or spent all those weeks on the best-seller list. Unless you feel it might come in handy in some way like you refer to it for guidance, then to the donation heap it goes.
Books autographed by the author that you paid full hardcover price and attended the book launch are difficult choices: should they stay or go? Your name is penned inside with a note from the author, and depending on how you connected with the author, it might be a personal note. How to deal with those books may be a future post. What do you do with those books?
Donate books you know others need
The Free Black Women’s Library recently launched in Los Angeles, looking for gently used books written by black women. That’s one example of a charitable group looking for specific books. If you have a book like a children’s book that doesn’t hold as much meaning anymore, maybe a children’s hospital would appreciate it. Book donations can carry more meaning when it benefits a mission-oriented nonprofit if you’re not feeling the corporate Goodwill donation route. And donations could mean giving a book to a friend or a family member as long as it’s not taking unnecessary space on your bookshelf.
