Beautifully written, Okra Stew: A Gullah Geechee Family Celebration is heartwarming, and compelling, and shines throughout with themes of family and food, and their emphasis on passing down cultural traditions.

What do you get when you combine a missing person, vampires, blood-siphoning butterflies, and caterpillars galore? You get Direwood by Catherine Yu.

What’s On My Nightstand is a sometimes weekly blog post, composed to update you all on what I’m currently reading. Why? Because I’m terrible at updating my social cataloging apps. I know. Shame on me.

Remember when I said I had Darknesses on my nightstand and needed to read it soon? Well, I finally did it; it was quite an adventure. Darknesses by Lachelle Seville is a sapphic, gothic, Dracula-inspired novel that has had traction in the book community circles I follow. I chose the book purely by faith in the readers that suggested, and as usual, I didn’t know what I was getting into. That’s nothing new. Now, having finished the book, I wish I would have asked them why they enjoyed it.

The Jot Down – December 17, 2022 Happy Saturday y’all! Phew! This week was a myriad of things. If I had to give it a title, it would be “Different: The Scripted and Unscripted.” I didn’t get around to posting a WWW Wednesday this week because I had some extraneous tasks outside of my normally scheduled program to tend to. One of them being a stressful journey running errands on Fannin at UTHealth Houston and another being a task that took longer than expected. By the time I finished both, Wednesday was gone. It would’ve been fruitless of me to…

February, the Month of Love, was my Month of Meh. I had some decent reads, but I wasn’t wowed. It was a pretty mediocre month of reading for me.

If you aren’t following me, I’ll have you know that I’ve been taking my time to post more regularly on YouTube. Clap. Clap. Clap.

The Devil Won’t Keep Us Apart by Shane T. Clark is a suspense novel and revenge story crafted around a father-son relationship between an elderly man, Elmer Ray, and his next-door neighbor, Adrian Franklin. I received a gifted copy of the book in exchange for an honest review from the author via Booktasters, and here it is. 🙂

A. M. Shine’s ‘The Creeper’ is negligibly unnerving. The Creeper and its rules played with my mind and dredged up fear of suffering from the consequences of not believing in the unexplained.

Once read, reread, and zoomed out, this book of poetry reads as a mashup of the author’s biography and passions. In 13 poems, Javier describes his concerns and love for Harlem.

Maggie’s upright world which she’s carefully curated, suddenly tilts on an unbalanced plane. Talk to me! Will Maggie tell Hubert about Claude? Will Claude tell his parents about him and Daisy? What do you think will happen next?

Burn Down, Rise Up is a thrill of a book. The writing is informational, tense, and easy to digest. Set in the Bronx, New York, it’s observed that people are steadily disappearing without a trace. The disappearances command the attention of our main character Raquel, her best friend Aaron, his brother, Mario, and a friend ‘not a friend’, Charlize. Charlize’s cousin, Cisco is the most recent disappearance, and finding him requires Raquel and the others to play a dangerous game that could result in them disappearing too.