I love to read, but lately all I've been doing is reviewing and editing books. These tasks somehow drain my love for reading until this month. My friend, Claudia Mair Burney, who write the hot pants off me sent me three of her latest novels, all divine, but this one--Zora and Nicky: A Novel in Black and White
--it did something I rarely get, something that justifies my reasoning for writing inspired fiction...illumination.Zora & Nicky in short is an interracial/interdenominational love story. How do people of different races build a world together? How do people of different ideas of sound doctrine live a life together? How do people love through Christ? A not so simple love story written with simple, elegant, honest, passionate prose. Best book of the year so far.
My favorite passage:
Because I have broken into a million pieces. Because I have scattered all over the sidewalk. Because I am not flesh and blood, only glass and dangerous dust that can burrow in your eyes and cause you to bleed, I try to remember that my broken soul is embodied and no one can see that only some shell of a soul is nearly all that is left.
Embodied, this shell I am makes a move toward the cab. The body of Zora has hands, and one of those brown and barely responsive hands takes hold of the handle of the back passenger side door, and somehow I enter the cab. I sit down inside. I watch Nicky give the driver what looks like more money than he should. I see them shake hands.
It is this Zora that still feels Nicky's hands at my waist while the pieces inside of me slide downward. I still feel the sensation of my stomach dropping to my knees. Oh Lord, oh Lord, oh Lord. Could he hear those pieces of me shifting to my toes, sounding like falling water? Like a rain stick turned upside down again and again?
I put my hand to my mouth and press my lips to my open palm. I can still feel the pressure of his lips, in turn fierce, firm, gentle. I can still taste him on my tongue, and I savor him.
"Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth:for thy love is better than wine."
No wonder that mysterious book of songs starts that way. I understand this now.
