Read With Us: It's A New Book!

Have you been anxiously awaiting our new Read With Us book? Today is the day you get to find out what it is!

Kym discovered this list of 100 Best Books by Black Female Authors and suggested that it might be a good idea for us to choose something from it. You can also access the list here on Goodreads which I think is handy because you can click through to the included books.

"The result is a list of 100 masterworks, spanning 160 years of African American women’s literature, divided into sections from pre-emancipation to the present, including fiction and nonfiction, novels, plays, anthologies, and poetry collections and ranging in subject matter from the historical to the personal (and sometimes both at once). Taken together, the works don’t just make up a novel canon; they form a revealing mosaic of the Black American experience during the time period. They’re also just great reads."

Because the list is so extensive it took some time to choose just one. We felt that many people have already read the well-known writers like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, and thought that people participating in Read With Us seemed to prefer fiction/novels. After winnowing down the choices, we all agreed upon The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor. 

Published in 1982, The Women of Brewster Place is a series of interconnected stories about exactly what the title proclaims, women who live in Brewster Place, an urban housing development. Winning the National Book Award for First Novel in 1983, this novel portrays the courage, the fear, strength, struggles, and the anguish of some of the women who hold their families together, trying to make a home.

I have had a little trouble getting this book from any of the four libraries I borrow from, but hopefully, that won't be the case for you. The book is available for Kindle for only $2.99, so it is now on my Kindle and I'm anxious to begin reading. We'll each be promoting the book beginning in early October, with the discussion to follow in November, so you do have lots of time to find a copy. I love interconnected stories and look forward to reading the stories of The Women of Brewster Place, and hope you'll join Kym, Carole, and I and Read With Us!