A fresh contribution to Black history, rooted in the author’s past.
Honoring Black matriarchs.
Cultural critic Bonét makes her book debut with a fervent homage to Black women—grandmothers, mothers, sisters, and cousins—who have instilled an indelible life force in their families. “I was surrounded by reliable women,” Bonét writes. “The men were peripheral—inefficient and fickle.” Central to her history is her grandmother Betty Jean (b. 1933), the great-granddaughter of enslaved people, who migrated to Houston from Louisiana in 1955 and eventually had 11 children with nine different men. One of those children was Bonét’s mother, Connie (b. 1956), who grew up poor and angry, resenting each new baby who arrived to deplete what little the family had. She fled Houston as soon as she could, landing in Manhattan, where she was a stern, uncompromising mother to her own children. Besides recounting the lives of the women in her family, Bonét looks at other Black women: Betty Davis, enslaved seamstress of George and Martha Washington, whose daughter, Ona Judge, escaped and lived in the north as a fugitive; Marian Robinson, Michelle Obama’s mother, who moved into the White House to care for her granddaughters; and activist Recy Taylor: Raped by white men in 1944, she contributed—along with Rosa Parks and other women—to forming the Committee for Equal Justice, an inspiration for the Civil Rights Movement. There’s Iberia Hampton, who feared for her outspoken son, Fred; he became a Black Panther and was assassinated. There’s artist Camille Billops, who rejected motherhood in favor of pursuing her art. “Each of us are the sum of our grandmother’s prayers,” Bonét writes, “the sum of many moments, of all the care and cruelty we have absorbed.” At times tender, furious, selfish, and sacrificial, these were “complicated women,” whom Bonét portrays with compassion.
A fresh contribution to Black history, rooted in the author’s past.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9780593536087
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.
Memories and life lessons inspired by the author’s mother, who was murdered in 2021.
“Neither my mother nor I knew that her last text to me would be the words ‘Think you’ll be happy,’ ” Avant writes, "but it is fitting that she left me with a mantra for resiliency.” The author, a filmmaker and former U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas, begins her first book on the night she learned her mother, Jacqueline Avant, had been fatally shot during a home invasion. “One of my first thoughts,” she writes, “was, ‘Oh God, please don’t let me hate this man. Give me the strength not to hate him.’ ” Daughter of Clarence Avant, known as the “Black Godfather” due to his work as a pioneering music executive, the author describes growing up “in a house that had a revolving door of famous people,” from Ella Fitzgerald to Muhammad Ali. “I don’t take for granted anything I have achieved in my life as a Black American woman,” writes Avant. “And I recognize my unique upbringing…..I was taught to honor our past and pay forward our fruits.” The book, which is occasionally repetitive, includes tributes to her mother from figures like Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton, but the narrative core is the author’s direct, faith-based, unwaveringly positive messages to readers—e.g., “I don’t want to carry the sadness and anger I have toward the man who did this to my mother…so I’m worshiping God amid the worst storm imaginable”; "Success and feeling good are contagious. I’m all about positive contagious vibrations!” Avant frequently quotes Bible verses, and the bulk of the text reflects the spirit of her daily prayer “that everything is in divine order.” Imploring readers to practice proactive behavior, she writes, “We have to always find the blessing, to be the blessing.”
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780063304413
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
An intriguing but uneven family memoir and travelogue.
An author’s trip to Venice takes a distinctly Borgesian turn.
In November 2020, soccer club Venizia F.C. offered Nigerian American author Madu a writing residency as part of its plan “to turn the team into a global entity of fashion, culture, and sports.” Flying to Venice for the fellowship, he felt guilty about leaving his immigrant parents, who were shocked to learn upon moving to the U.S. years earlier that their Nigerian teaching certifications were invalid, forcing his father to work as a stocking clerk at Rite Aid to support the family. Madu’s experiences in Venice are incidental to what is primarily a story about his family, especially his strained relationship with his father, who was disappointed with many of his son’s choices. Unfortunately, the author’s seeming disinterest in Venice renders much of the narrative colorless. He says the trip across the Ponte della Libertà bridge was “magical,” but nothing he describes—the “endless water on both sides,” the nearby seagulls—is particularly remarkable. Little in the text conveys a sense of place or the unique character of his surroundings. Madu is at his best when he focuses on family dynamics and his observations that, in the largely deserted city, “I was one of the few Black people around.” He cites Borges, giving special note to the author’s “The House of Asterion,” in which the minotaur “explains his situation as a creature and as a creature within the labyrinth” of multiple mirrors. This notion leads to the Borgesian turn in the book’s second half, when, in an extended sequence, Madu imagines himself transformed into a minotaur, with “the head of a bull” and his body “larger, thicker, powerful but also cumbersome.” It’s an engaging passage, although stylistically out of keeping with much of what has come before.
An intriguing but uneven family memoir and travelogue.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781953368669
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Belt Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
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