Favorite Books from November & December 2022
Reviews of Take My Hand, The Count of Monte Cristo, and Black Roses: Odes Celebrating Powerful Black Women
Take My Hand by Dolen Perkins-Valdez
Take My Hand is one of those books you will not be able to put down. It’s cinematic and should definitely be adapted into a film. It takes place in Alabama in the early 1970s and 2010s. Told in first person, Civil Townsend, a Black nurse, tells her story of working in a family planning clinic and her relationship with The Williamses, a rural Black family consisting of two daughters named India and Erica. Something tragic happens that reverberates decades later when Civil is now an older woman and a physician. The book is filled with a great cast of multidimensional characters. A tragic but hopeful story. Make sure that you read the author’s note which covers the historical and contemporary relevance of this book.
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, translated by Robin Buss
“But the fact remains that the Count of Monte Cristo is a very strange man.”
The quote above is the understatement of the centuries. The Count of Monte Cristo was indeed a strange man and an entertaining epic novel. It’s about betrayal, revenge, cosmic justice, you name it. So many interesting characters are in the book from The Count to Abbé Faria to Maximilian and Valentine and so much more. This is the longest book I have read but it was worth the read.
Black Roses: Odes Celebrating Powerful Black Women by Harold Green III
The poems and illustrations of these 40 Black women are beautiful. Many of the women featured in this collection are notable and some are less well-known but are important to Green’s life. The poems have a spoken-word feel and are very accessible to readers. A few lines in Green’s poems about Stacey Abrams and Misty Copeland stick with me.
