Wednesday Book Review: Catching Moondrops

Christian Fiction Fall Book Spotlight

An excerpt from Jennifer Erin Valent’s Catching Moondrops…

“Now, I’m all for civil uprisin’,” Tal continued. “I don’t see nothin’ wrong with colored folk sayin’ they won’t be walked on no more. I don’t see nothin’ wrong with wantin’ to use the same bathroom as white folks or sit in the same chairs as white folks. Way I see it, none of that’s goin’ to change unless someone says it has to.” He squatted in front of Malachi again and stared him down nose to nose. “But all this hotshottin’ and showboatin’ ain’t goin’ to do nothin’ but get your rear end kicked. Or worse. You aim to stand tall for somethin’? Fine. Stand tall for it. But don’t you go around thinkin’ these battle scars say somethin’ for you. You ain’t got them by bein’ noble; you got them by bein’ stupid. All’s these scars say is you’re an idiot.”

Summary: Jessilyn Lassiter no longer has to convince people she’s not a child. Having just turned 19 in the summer of 1938, her love for Luke Talley has never been more real. And Luke is finally beginning to care for her in the way she’s always dreamed of. But their budding romance is interrupted when Tal Pritchett—a young, black doctor—comes to Calloway, stealing the heart of Jessilyn’s best friend, Gemma, and stirring up the racial prejudice that has been simmering just beneath the town’s surface. The tension starts to bubble over when Jessie’s elderly neighbor Miss Cleta becomes the first white townsperson to accept Tal’s treatment. And when a young black man is lynched, Calloway is brought to its knees once again as Jessilyn realizes that her anger can make her heart as full of hate as the klan members who have terrorized her town and her family.
My review: The first lines of the book bothered me. It reminded me of  James McGovern’s  Anatomy o f a Lynching: The Killing of Claude Neal.  I’m still not sure if I’m in the right mental place to revisit this horrific era in American history. With the November elections and the nasty name calling of our President, I know this book is a relevant read. Perhaps this era is a safer read for the audience it was written for.
I would have loved for Tyndale to acquire an African American historical author, who could right about the same era, sort of like a literary diptych. Perhaps I will revisit this story when Sharon Ewell Foster’s novel of The Resurrection of Nat Turner comes out 2011
Gemma and Tal’s romance doesn’t satisfy me, but I wasn’t expecting it to. The relationship was the framework for the true story of Jessilyn’s self actualization and journey toward understanding social justice.
Moreover, Valent’s Jessilyn makes this story a worthwhile read. However, just like The Help I’ve grown tired of reading stories of southern white women’s rebuttals about Jim Crowe. What I liked most is that Valent didn’t dare try to be the voice of The Woman’s Club Movement or Black Womanist Thought like the Help. She showed a level of respect for a culture she can only know from the outside looking in. Catching Moondrops’s Jessilyn definitely personified that reality.

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GA Church Banning of Richard Wright effects on Christian Fiction

The purpose of Christian Fiction is to share Good storytellers with you. Sometimes these stories aren’t wrapped in pretty packages. Oftentimes these books aren’t discussed in Christian fiction circles, but they should. So in honor of Banned Books Week I want to share a Good book that some of our churches have removed[or removed] from some Georgia schools.(I live in Georgia.) Moreover, I want to share with you why fiction matters and this book shouldn’t be banned.

Banned Book: Native Son

Synopsis from Time Magazine:

In Chicago of the 1930's, where Bigger Thomas has found work as a chauffeur, he murders a young white woman, the only child of the wealthy family who has just hired him. Though the killing is accidental, it becomes a kind of retroactive act of will. It leads Thomas to an inquiry into his own injuries and humiliations at the hands of a sometimes literally bloodthirsty white society.

Who banned this book: Appling County School(Baxley, GA)  2008

Reason: Language

Response Appling High School English Department Head, Mary Ann Ellis, speaks out against the books' removal.:

Our students are the ones who’ve truly been betrayed by the very board responsible for giving them the best education available. Somewhere down the road when the ministers bring three more books and three more and Shakespeare, what will happen then?  Our students will leave this county unprepared for Mercer, UGA, Harvard, GSU.  Not because of the ministers, mind you. No, they can thank their very own Appling County Board of Education.

 Read her Op-Ed in the Baxley News-Banner.

My response: I read Native son in high school. My high school isn’t far from Baxley, Georgia, so I understand the region, especially Christianity influences there. However, what I don’t understand is how  that church couldn’t find black spiritualism and Christian existentialism as theme threads in. Perhaps because the ministers never read the book [according to the complaint.]

Thus, this realization causes another challenge.

I’ve talked with many ministers through the years about the relevance of Christian fiction and the banning of Christian fiction from their churches. And like Appling High School’s banning decision they, too, have never read the novels.

These decisions to ban books—for whatever reason—cripples our society. More so for Christian fiction authors, whose books are banned in their own churches…

Your thoughts. Does your church support Christian fiction? Or any fiction for that matter?

Christian Fiction: 4 Women on America’s Independence

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Every year my family celebrates not only America’s independence on July 4, but also our Aunt Doretha’s birthday. This year she will be seventy-six. She’s taught me a great deal about humility, inner strength, faith, longsuffering, and the long road my culture has traveled to get to where we are now, especially in the publishing industry.
Like the fictional maids in Kathryn Stockett’s popular novel The Help, for most of Aunt Doe’s life, she wasn’t afforded the opportunity to share her writing with the world. She was a South Georgian maid and nanny in the 1960s. She lived in a town that threatened to murder anyone who thought about protesting with a march, boycott, or sit in.
Back then freedom for a black woman meant silence. So she kept her thoughts to herself by writing. She wrote in notebooks and prayer journals locked away, only to be read by herself. Sometimes she shared her writing with me or her sisters. Back then there were very few places for women of color to publish their writing, yet she continued to write.
But she didn’t write to become published. She wrote to bear her soul, to dream of being free, and to pray for her family’s future. I would like to believe she prayed for me to have the blessings denied her for so many years because of her race, class, and gender.
So to honor Aunt Doe, I am spotlighting four current historical Christian Fiction novels about women of great faith who persevered despite their ethnicity, culture, and societal restraints. More…

Off Topic Tuesday: Will the US House of Representatives Slavery Apology Affect Prejudice?

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The House of Representatives was poised Tuesday to pass a resolution apologizing to African-Americans for slavery and the era of Jim Crow.

"African-Americans continue to suffer from the consequences of slavery and Jim Crow -- long after both systems were formally abolished -- through enormous damage and loss, both tangible and intangible, including the loss of human dignity and liberty, the frustration of careers and professional lives, and the long-term loss of income and opportunity," the resolution states"

Click here for more...

Obama Wins the Democratic Presidential Nomination

CNN Reports

Senator Obama makes history as the first African-American to lead a major US party ticket to possibly becoming the next President of the United States.

This is the email tat was sent off to his supporters.

Friend,

I'm about to take the stage in St. Paul and announce that we have won the Democratic nomination for President of the United States.

It's been a long journey, and we should all pause to thank Hillary Clinton, who made history in this campaign. Our party and our country are better off because of her.

I want to make sure you understand what's ahead of us. Earlier tonight, John McCain outlined a vision of America that's very different from ours -- a vision that continues the disastrous policies of George W. Bush.

But this is our moment. This is our time. Our time to turn the page on the policies of the past and bring new energy and new ideas to the challenges we face. Our time to offer a new direction for the country we love.

It's going to take hard work, but thanks to you and millions of other donors and volunteers, no one has ever been more prepared for such a challenge.

Thank you for everything you've done to get us here. Let's keep making history.

Barack

Race Doesn't Matter

Senator Obama's South Carolina speech...
What we've seen in these last weeks is that we're also up against forces that are not the fault of any one campaign but feed the habits that prevent us from being who we want to be as a nation.
It's a politics that uses religion as a wedge and patriotism as a bludgeon, a politics that tells us that we have to think, act, and even vote within the confines of the categories that supposedly define us, the assumption that young people are apathetic, the assumption that Republicans won't cross over, the assumption that the wealthy care nothing for the poor and that the poor don't vote, the assumption that African-Americans can't support the white candidate, whites can't support the African-American candidate, blacks and Latinos cannot come together.
We are here tonight to say that that is not the America we believe in. Read full transcript here

Henry Louis Gates' Ancestry Tracing in Atlanta

Trace Your Roots!Find out how with NBAF's DNA Project and African Ancestry...
SAVE THE DATES FORTHE NATIONAL BLACK ARTS FESTIVALJULY 18-27, 2008 visit National Black Artis Festival for more information

Honoring the Little Rock 9

It is easy to celebrate the courage of others for what they did 50 years ago. It is another thing all together to build the world our children would like to live in 50 years from now," Clinton said told about 1,300 people at the Statehouse Convention Center.
-Former President Clinton and other dignitaries at a gala Monday night for the nine black students who integrated Little Rock Central High School a half-century ago stressed the country's continuing need for better race relations.
More:

• Vanity Fair has a nice interview of Elizabeth Eckford.
• Video of Historic Event

Question: Would you allow your children to be world changers? What have you done as a parent to include diversity at your school or church?