Reviews posted this week

Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor
– One of my very few ever 5 star books for the importance of the issues it presents in a fantasy story based in Africa.

Does Jesus Really Love Me?: A Gay Christian’s Pilgrimage in Search of God in America by Jeff Chu
– After a man from a family of pastors comes out as gay, he travels around America to see where he would fit in to Christianity today.

Reading this week

Some of My Best Friends Are Black: The Strange Story of Integration in AmericaSome of My Best Friends Are Black: The Strange Story of Integration in America by Tanner Colby

An incisive and candid look at how America got lost on the way to Dr. King’s Promised Land. Almost fifty years after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, equality is the law of the land, but actual integration is still hard to find. Mammoth battles over forced busing, unfair housing practices, and affirmative action have hardly helped. The bleak fact is that black people and white people in the United States don’t spend much time together—at work, school, church, or anywhere. Tanner Colby, himself a child of a white-flight Southern suburb, set out to discover why. (from Goodreads)

Much Ado About Magic (Enchanted, Inc., #5)Much Ado About Magic by Shanna Swendson

Katie Chandler is back in New York and at Magic, Spells, and Illusions, Inc. – and just in time. The city’s in the grip of a magical crime wave from spells that wizarding whiz Owen Palmer thinks look awfully familiar, and the rogue firm Spellworks is raising its profile in the magical world by selling protective amulets. It’s Katie’s job as the new director of marketing for MSI to fight this battle of public perception while Owen and the other wizards try to uncover what’s really going on.(from Goodreads)

Listening to this week on a roadtrip

Diamonds, Gold, and War: The Making of South AfricaDiamonds, Gold, and War: The Making of South Africa by Martin Meredith

Southern Africa was once regarded as a worthless jumble of British colonies, Boer republics, and African chiefdoms, a troublesome region of little interest to the outside world. But then prospectors chanced first upon the world’s richest deposits of diamonds, and then upon its richest deposits of gold. What followed was a titanic struggle between the British and the Boers for control of the land, culminating in the costliest, bloodiest, and most humiliating war that Britain had waged in nearly a century, and in the devastation of the Boer republics. (from Goodreads)

Calling Me HomeCalling Me Home by Julie Kibler

Calling Me Home by Julie Kibler is a soaring debut interweaving the story of a heartbreaking, forbidden love in 1930s Kentucky with an unlikely modern-day friendship.

Eighty-nine-year-old Isabelle McAllister has a favor to ask her hairdresser Dorrie Curtis. It’s a big one. Isabelle wants Dorrie, a black single mom in her thirties, to drop everything to drive her from her home in Arlington, Texas, to a funeral in Cincinnati. With no clear explanation why. Tomorrow. (from Goodreads)