Happy Tuesday! I want to thank all my friends who purchased my first novel, A Good Excuse to Be Bad last month. I'm really honored, especially when there are so many books out by BIG authors and back to school shopping, high gas prices, & other things to do with $14. I hope you enjoyed the book. Please let me know.
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I hate to give book, movie any more hype, but am stilled distressed by what "Help" says re black women, our voice, our culture, principles." Tina McElroy Ansahttp://bit.ly/r7HVpP
Follow @TinaMcElroyAnsa. She is the acclaimed author of 5 novels (Baby of the Family, Ugly Ways, The Hand I Fan With, You Know Better, and Taking After Mudear.) She is also the founder of DownSouth Press and Sea Island Writers Retreats. She supports #blacklitchat, replies to tweets and is very generous to her fans (myself included.)
I I also recommend you follow Bernadette A. Davis @BernadetteDavis. She is the editor of Black Books Blog and co-produces #blacklitchat with me. (FYI: Carleen Brice is our August guest host.) I consider Bernadette an authority on serious African American Fiction. She's also Blogalicious, another bonus. Follow her at www.twitter.com/bernadettedavis
: I recommend you follow my handle - @deegospel, because I've been on Twitter for 4 years, since 2007 when it was mostly techies, tech PRs and me. I teach free classes on how to maximize Twitter and I have a list of over 100 bookstores, a list of over 100 libraries, and a three cool Twitter newspapers that are great sources for writers. http://www.twitter.com/deegospel Im the owner of DeeGospel PR, I’ also write as Miranda Parker for Kensington Books, so I know a thing or two about Blacks in Publishing.
Now who you got for me?
Sharon Ewell Foster is a critically acclaimed, award-winning author, speaker, and teacher. She is the author of Passing by Samaria, the first successful work of Christian fiction by an African American author, and six other works of fiction. Her works regularly receive starred book reviews—which is a rarity among writers—and has won a Christy Award, the Gold Pen Award, Best of Borders, and several reviewers’ choice awards.
Foster chats with Christian Fiction Online Magazine about this controversial novel, her questions to God about her writer’s journey, and how her readers were her saving grace. 
The 13 books on the list include: one former Man Booker Prize winner; two previously shortlisted writers and one longlisted author; four first time novelists and three Canadian writers. The list also includes three new publishers to the prize - Oneworld, Sandstone Press and Seren Books.
The titles were chosen by a panel of five judges chaired by author and former Director-General of MI5, Dame Stella Rimington:
I’m excited that Esi Edugyan’s Half Blood Blues was longlisted. It's the story of AfroGermans presence in the 1930s (Nazi Germany.)
“Berlin, 1939. A young, brilliant trumpet-player, Hieronymus, is arrested in a Paris cafe. The star musician was never heard from again. He was twenty years old. He was a German citizen. And he was black.
Fifty years later, Sidney Griffiths, the only witness that day, still refuses to speak of what he saw. When Chip Jones, his friend and fellow band member, comes to visit, recounting the discovery of a strange letter, Sid begins a slow journey towards redemption.
From the smoky bars of pre-war Berlin to the salons of Paris, Sid leads the reader through a fascinating, little-known world, and into the heart of his own guilty conscience.
Half-Blood Blues is an electric, heart-breaking story about music, race, love and loyalty, and the sacrifices we ask of ourselves, and demand of others, in the name of art.”
Read more about it here at http://www.esiedugyan.com/half-blood-blues.html
Samuel Clemons had Mark Twain. Charles Dodson had Lewis Carroll. The Bronte sisters had the Bells. Pseudonymns. For reasons public and private, long-speculated and tossed glibly in gossip, these and thousands of other authors through the years chose to publish their writing under different names. The reasons they chose pen names are many, varied from author to author and era to era. This week in #litchat we’ll discuss authors writing under pseudonyms.
On Friday, Litchat will chat with me about my choice to use a pen name and if the alter ego is a good excuse to be bad. Click here to get the deets on the chat, so you can join us.
Catherine Richmond’s Spring for Susannah
Synopsis:
With no prospects for marriage and her parents recently deceased, Susannah agrees to go west to the Dakota territory to marry her minister's homesteading brother, Jesse Mason. But Susannah is painfully shy, doesn't see herself as worthy of love from either a husband or from God, and lives in constant fear that Jesse is going to ship her back to Detroit.
In spite of her petite size and the fact that Susannah doesn't look like she could survive on the prairie, Jesse quickly discovers that his new wife is a greater blessing than he even hoped for. The years she spent as her father's veterinary assistant allow her to save Jesse's ox and twin calves and to help neighboring farmers with their animals.
But Susannah's feelings of unworthiness are deeply rooted, and she can't believe that Jesse's praise-or the tenderness and love he shows-could possibly last. The thawing of her heart seems almost as distant as Spring in the midst of the winter blanketing the Dakota prairie.
My Review:
1. Character: Jesse was charming from the first moment he met Susannah. I enjoyed his character a great deal. Susannah, albeit living in this story centuries before me, is very relevant to women like me. Her self condemnation, feelings of inadequacies, not seeing her value… that’s what makes this story compelling for an African American woman living in Atlanta (me.)
2. Plot: This story has a clear beginning, middle, and end. No surprises.
3. Style/Tone: Richmond has an elegance to her storytelling that I admire. It fit very well with a historical romance set in the Dakotas.
4. Setting/Theme: I enjoyed learning about Dakota Territory, particularly Oriska, North Dakota when it was a part of Fourth Siding. One of my challenges with modern women’s historical fiction is the notion that revising history for the sake of not dealing with the hard stuff works or keeps it pretty for women readers to digest. Revisionist history in works like Cold Mountain, The Help unnecessarily glosses over important issues that would make the story even more compelling. In this case Richmond, did the opposite and I applaud her for that.It was a perfect balance of grounding us into a realist backdrop of the time of Custer, the Maldan Indians, Reconstruction, and the expansion of the western territory.
5. Voice/Orthodoxy: The Christian Worldview doesn’t overwhelm or plod the plot. There is a very good balance of storytelling and spiritual takeaway.
Spring of Susannah was pitch perfect and hit every point I look for in a novel. Kudos! 5 Stars
