Give the Gift of Literature
Without a doubt, holiday traditions are best upheld with large families. Lots of delicious meals, and heartwarming gifts. In Louisiana, nothing beats spicy fish, okra-filled gumbo, sweet yams, peppered collard greens, cornbread dressing with Cornish hen, and homemade eggnog with splashes of New Orleans bourbon. Add in a few uncles singing The Temptations, cousins returning from college, and aunts making pies, and it is officially holiday time.
What can make the moments merrier? Louisiana Literature. Books, books, and more books. Under the tree, in the stockings, through the mail, and hand-to-hand. As you are contemplating the perfect gift of the season, you can’t go wrong giving the flare of Louisiana in books. Give the gift of literature. Here are a few favorites to add to your list.
Blood Bayou by Lynn Emery (Mystery-Thriller)
Lynn Emery brings unforgettable mystery-thrillers in two collections set in south Louisiana. In Emery’s LaShaun Rouselle Mystery seven book series, a psychic and a deputy sheriff go after human and supernatural killers in the bayous of Louisiana. In Blood Bayou, LaShaun Rousselle and her deputy husband Chase Broussard find themselves pulled into a murky web of secrets, lies, and murder when their daughter Ellie gets in trouble at school. What starts as a simple disciplinary issue soon turns into a complex investigation, with Ellie’s tutor charged with murder and links to Chase’s latest case. The five novels in her Joliet Sisters Psychic Detectives Mystery series features two New Orleans private investigators who use a combination of living and dead confidential informants to solve murders. Emery, a Baton Rouge author, has published more than 30 novels. Her third novel, “After All,” became a movie produced by Black Entertainment Television and she has won three Emma Multicultural Literary Awards for her romance novel Kiss Lonely Goodbye.
Ninth Ward by Jewel Parker Rhodes (Middle Grade)
In Ninth Ward, Jewel Parker Rhodes captures the essence and resilience of New Orleans and its people through the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina. Twelve-year-old Lanesha lives in a tight-knit community in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward. She doesn’t have a fancy house like her uptown family or lots of friends like other kids on her street. But what she does have is Mama Ya-Ya, an 82-year-old seer and midwife who loves Lanesha fiercely, is wise in the ways of the world, and is able to predict the future. So when Mama Ya-Ya’s visions show a powerful hurricane fast approaching, it’s up to Lanesha to call upon the hope and strength Mama Ya-Ya has given her to help them both survive the storm. Ninth Ward is a celebration of resilience, love, family, and friendship, and a deeply emotional story of transformation. This middle-grade novel has won more than a dozen national book awards.
Mama Ruby by Mary Monroe
Growing up in Shreveport, Louisiana, Ruby Jean Upshaw is the kind of girl who knows what she wants and knows how to get it. By the time she’s fifteen, Ruby has a taste for fast men and cheap liquor, and not even her preacher daddy can set her straight. Only Othella Mae Cartier, daughter of the town tramp, understands what makes Ruby tick. When Ruby discovers she’s in the family way, she’s scared for the first time in her life. After hiding her growing belly, Ruby secretly gives birth to a baby girl at Othella’s house. Othella talks Ruby into giving the child away–and with the help of a shocking revelation, convinces Ruby to run off with her to New Orleans. Mama Ruby by Mary Monroe is familiar and coarse, violent and jaw-dropping funny, everything that makes for good reading.
The American Daughters by Maurice Carlos Ruffin
Ady, a curious, sharp-witted girl, and her fierce mother, Sanite, are inseparable. Enslaved to a businessman in the French Quarter of New Orleans, the pair spend their days dreaming of a loving future and reminiscing about their family’s rebellious and storied history. When mother and daughter are separated, Ady is left hopeless and directionless until she stumbles into the Mockingbird Inn and meets Lenore, a free Black woman with whom she becomes fast friends. Lenore invites Ady to join a clandestine society of spies called the Daughters. So begins Ady’s journey toward liberation and imagining a new future. The American Daughters is a novel of hope and triumph that reminds us what is possible when a community bands together to fight for their freedom. Ruffin recently won the Louisiana Writer Award and is an assistant professor of creative writing at LSU in Baton Rouge.
Secret Lives of Men by BJT Ledet
In BJT Ledet’s The Christians series, she weaves a Louisiana story with characters who boldly feel right in their “Christian” beliefs and contradictions. They are sassy, sophisticated, and irate including Church Mothers who have tunnel vision and live in the past, ministers who are in the business of religion instead of uplifting the people and teaching them to love, and the ‘show and tell’ flock. Book one of the series-titled The Christians follows the life of Mary Jean Woods, a beautiful young woman in 1960 Bains, Louisiana as she maneuvers through self-discovery, unrighteousness, and betrayal, seeking a true spiritual identity in a town of bold, all-knowing Christians who are flawed and fallen. Book two, The Secret Lives of Men opens with the honeymoon of Rev. Donald and Mary Jean Grant and weaves through the scandalous entanglements of Rev. James Mical, his deacons, and female friends–all who set out to destroy Rev. Grant and the church. Using romance, family scandals, and murder, the series questions who is a Christian and how the interactions between family and friends impact the spiritual growth of young adults. Ledet is a retired Hurricane Katrina survivor who worked at Tulane University in New Orleans and now tutoring children and their parents in her Baton Rouge home.
How the Word is Passed by Clint Smith III
Beginning in his hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith III leads the reader on “an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks – those that are honest about the past and those that are not – that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping America’s collective history.” It tells the stories of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello Plantation in Virginia, the Whitney Plantation in Edgar, Louisiana, (one of the only former plantations devoted to preserving the experience of the enslaved people whose lives and work sustained it), Angola State Penitentiary, a former plantation-turned-maximum-security prison in Louisiana; and Blandford Cemetery, the final resting place of tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers. How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America is Smith’s first narrative nonfiction, though he is an award-wining poet and journalist with The Atlantic.
Wild Seed Witch by Marti Dumas (Middle Grade)
In this middle grade adventure by Marti Dumas, Hasani’s post-seventh-grade summer to-do list is pretty simple: get a bigger following for her makeup YouTube channel and figure out how to get her parents back together. What she does NOT expect is that an emotional outburst will spark a latent magical ability in her. Or that the magic will be strong enough to attract the attention of witches. Or that before she can say #BlackGirlMagic, she’ll be shipped off on a scholarship to a fancy finishing school for talented young ladies. Les Belles Demoiselles, set in Vacherie, La., is a literal charm school. Here, generations of young ladies from old-money witch families have learned to harness their magic, and alumnae grow to become some of the most powerful women. Needless to say, admission to the school is highly coveted, very exclusive . . . and Hasani sticks out like a weed in a rose bouquet. While the other girls have always known they were destined to be witches, Hasani is a “Wildseed”––a stray witch from a family of non-witches, with no background knowledge, no way to control her magic, and a lot to catch up on. “Wildseed” may be an insult that the other girls throw at her, but Wildseeds are more powerful than they know. And Hasani will learn that there are ways to use magic and thrive that can never be taught in a classroom. Dumas is an elementary school literacy educator in New Orleans.
Catalina Cove series by Brenda Jackson (Romance)
Catalina Cove is a seven-book romance series set in the beautiful Catalina Cove, Louisiana, where “where even the biggest heartbreaks can be healed“. Brenda Jackson shares the exuberant and irresistible entanglements of lovers (and enemies). With first loves, matchmaking, ex-heartbreak, and second changes, Catalina Cove is home to them all. In book one of the series, Love in Catalina Cove, Vashti Alcindor left Catalina Cove in the wake of a devastating teen pregnancy that left her childless and heartbroken. Now, more than a decade later, Vashti reluctantly finds herself back in her hometown after inheriting her aunt’s B&B. Her homecoming gets off to a rocky start when the new sheriff, Sawyer Grisham, pulls her over for speeding, and things go downhill from there. Brenda Jackson has written more than 100 novels and novellas and is the first Black author to appear on the bestseller lists for the series romance genre.
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By Candace J Semien, Jozef Syndicate reporter @Jozefsyndicate
Jozef Syndicate 