Black by Popular Demand
On this last week of April, we'll take you to Detroit, rural Arkansas, Trinidad for a Carnival, and more!
Brain Lair Books of South Bend has many books to recommend!
Happy Reading!
The Edge of Yesterday
Greer Coffey is a principal dancer with a renowned Harlem company. Sebastian Coffey is an architect with a prestigious Midtown firm. The Coffey’s are the ultimate dream couple — until their world completely unravels. After Greer develops a career ending neurologic disorder, she finds herself back in her hometown of Detroit. Angry, lonely, her marriage buckling under the strain, she takes to aimlessly wandering the city streets. One night, she stumbles through a vortex, a portal through time that transports her back into 1925 Detroit, where she meets a handsome, charming doctor.
Dr. Montgomery Gray is a member of Detroit’s Black Aristocracy, wealthy and connected to some of the most powerful Black families in the country. Detroit in 1925 is the beating heart of an industrial nation, but it is also a tinderbox of poor immigrants, Prohibition driven gang wars, and the Klan. As a member of the Talented Tenth, Monty is expected to be the tip of the spear in the fight for the Race, no matter the cost. Exhausted, frustrated, and longing to break free of expectations, he is stunned to find a woman from the future roaming Detroit’s Black Bottom.
Initially cautious, Monty and Greer slowly grow increasingly exhilarated with the visits. For Greer, 1925 offers an escape from the sorrow of her "real life," and for Monty, the future that Greer lays before him is irresistible. But 2025 becomes gradually less and less recognizable, as each visit back through time causes increasing rips in the timeline. Ultimately, Greer finds herself trapped in 1925 and Monty is forced into a deadly confrontation that changes the trajectory of his life.
(Fiction)
The Defiant Queen
Royal advisor Baas never stopped loving the woman he was forced to send away. When Shaya unexpectedly returns, he sees his chance at happiness—but winning back her trust proves more challenging than any task he’s faced.
Though Shaya’s heart still yearns for her first love, a devastating secret from her past threatens their reunion. As an enemy plots to expose her, Shaya must decide if protecting herself is worth losing Baas again. With palace schemes and old wounds standing between them, can they build a future together? Or will their second chance at love crumble like their first?
(Romance)
Ms. V's Hot Girl Summer
For the last sixteen years, Trinidad Velasquez has done everything right. Raised her twin sons on her own, worked her butt off and created a stable life. But Trinidad is done waiting for a happy ending to show up at her door, and when her current boyfriend proposes, she can't help but wonder if, at her age, love should be practical, not butterflies and heart-racing chemistry.
But then her teenage sons trick her into a Caribbean Carnival vacation. And she finds herself staying with the one guy who's always revved her engine...even if he's a decade south of her dating range.
Orlando Wiggins has never been able to take his eyes off Ms. V. He's mentored her boys for two years, and she's never suggested there could be more. But at Carnival, between the sensual dancing, heated looks and electric touches, whatever he's been feeling for her is definitely reciprocated.
Now Trinidad is having the time of her life. Every cell in her body is charged, alive. But will this new version of who she's become stick around for the return to real life?
(Romance)
One Way Witch
The world has forgotten Onyesonwu.
As a teen, Najeeba learned to become the beast of wind, fire and dust: the kponyungo. When that took too much from her, including the life of her father, she let it all go, and for a time, she was happy — until only a few years later, when the small, normal life she’d built was violently destroyed.
Now in her forties and years beyond the death of her second husband, Najeeba has just lost her beloved daughter. Onyesonwu saved the world. Najeeba knows this well, but the world does not. This is how the juju her daughter evoked works. One other person who remembers is Onyesonwu’s teacher Aro, a harsh and hard-headed sorcerer. Najeeba has decided to ask him to teach her the Mystic Points, the powerful heart of sorcery. There is something awful Najeeba needs to kill and the Mystic Points are the only way. Najeeba is truly her daughter’s mother.
When Aro agrees to help, Najeeba is at last ready to forge her future. But first, she must confront her past — for certain memories cannot lie in unmarked graves.
(SciFi)
Reading Du Bois
An Afrocentric Critique of the Color Line
Offering a vision both hopeful and thoughtful, Reading Du Bois is an Afrocentric reexamination of the work of one of the most important intellectuals of our time. Du Bois wanted to solve the issue of race dividing American society. Aaron X. Smith and Molefi Kete Asante take one of Du Bois's key concepts, the idea that the problem of his century was going to be the color line, and demonstrate that such a reader of that concept provides fresh insights into our present interpersonal and political situation. The application of Du Bois's concept such as the color line reveals the subject place of African American people is not merely a marginal space but rather a central space to all who seek to bring justice, democracy, and optimism.
(Nonfiction)
This Leaves Me Okay: Race, Legacy, and Letters From My Grandmother
After marrying, Mama Ceal, a washerwoman, and her sharecropper husband struggled in poverty. They made the agonizing decision to send their only child, LaRuth, Pryor’s mother, to live with cousins so that she could attend a good school. It was the only way they saw for their child to escape to a better life. Within months of that decision, Mama Ceal’s husband drowned, leaving her as a single parent without an income. She went to work for a well-off White family in the area and lived in a room without hot water as their maid for the next 40 years.
(Nonfiction)
