Memorial Drive. Natasha Tretheway. 2020. Bloomsbury Publishing. 229 pages. [Source: public library.] Mother-daughter relationships are so often fraught. Mothers are often entrusted with raising healthy, whole adults and it seems daughters will find themselves raging against the strain of expectation and vicarious dreams. If they’re lucky, time will give them opportunity to reconcile the tension and benefit from an understanding of each other that comes with age. Unfortunately, that’s not the story of Memorial Drive, Natasha Trethewey’s memoir. Instead, Memorial Drive starts off with the hard truth that Natasha and her mother Gwendolyn did not have the benefit of time bringing them closer with a renewed relationship. It starts where it ends, with Gwendolyn’s murder at the hands of her ex-husband when Natasha was a 19-year-old freshman in college. The rest of the book follows as Trethewey, more than 30 years on, reflects on her childhood and adolescence, framed largely around the relationship between her and her mother. She recounts her earliest years with her black American mother and white Canadian father in the relative cocoon of familiarity in Mississippi. Later, when her parents separate, she ends up in Georgia, where the majority of her trauma unfolds during a period…

Motherhood So White. Nefertiti Austin. 2019. Sourcebooks. 300 pages. [Source: ARC provided courtesy of NetGalley.] Motherhood So White is a memoir that I picked up because I wanted to see a Black woman’s experience in parenting centered. Often, conversations about parenthood are colorblind, and use whiteness as a default when parenting Black children is far more nuanced. What I read was a robust memoir that examines numerous aspects of Black parents raising Black children specifically. As expected, Motherhood So White is deeply personal. Austin provides a great deal of detail about her own upbringing, including her complicated relationship with her biological parents and how that led to her being reared by her extended family.  Her reflections on the desire to become a parent, and eventual path toward adoption, provide further opportunities to highlight parenthood from several lenses. She considers economic barriers and their impact on the nuclear family. She examines implicit biases and how they impact children’s experiences in the educational and social services systems.  She also spends a great deal of time sharing her eventual experiences as a single mother to a Black son and navigating everything from her own family’s acceptance, trips to the barber shop, parent-teacher conferences, reuniting her son with…

Sometimes Sneezing Hurts. C. Sleek. 2018. 236 pages. [Source: Kindle Unlimited] Every once in a while, I find myself down a rabbit hole on Goodreads. Such was the case when I chanced upon Sometimes Sneezing Hurts. The title alone was enough to make me pause, but the description intrigued me. A divorced bachelor … journaling? Seems like a unicorn worth reading about. Overall, this was an enjoyable read. I mean, I started it in the evening and stayed up until 1:30am to finish it. It’s very conversational, which is to be expected of its journal format. The author finds a pretty good balance of humor, thoughtful introspection, and assessment throughout that made it easy to get invested in his adventures over the course of a year. What really had me interested in this book was its unique-to-me perspective. I admit that I’m a serial monogamist, so the idea of dating new person after new person is almost foreign and anxiety-inducing to me. Couple that with the fact that I don’t often have in-depth dating conversations with men and there’s definitely a gap in my knowledge of current perspectives on dating. I also really wanted to get a male perspective that…

No review, this time, sorry. Instead, I’m shining the spotlight on a book I am highly anticipating — The Pretty One: On Life, Pop Culture, Disability, and Other Reasons to Fall in Love with Me by Keah Brown. It’s set for a late summer release, and I can’t wait to get my hands on it. In full transparency, I didn’t know who Keah Brown was before 3 days ago, when I saw it featured in a catalog of upcoming releases. But I stopped at this cover. Why? Because it’s rare that I see a book representing Black women’s joy. There she is on the cover of her book exuding what looks like carefree bliss. Then, when I read the subtitle and saw it focused on a Black woman with a disability? I knew there would be no question that I’d be reading her book. Why? I am a Black woman with a disease that severely limits my mobility. It is apparent as soon as I walk into a room, so I move through the world as a Black, disabled woman. This perspective is rarely represented in media, and it is becoming a more salient aspect of my own identity as…

Blissfully Blended Bullshit. Rebecca Eckler. 2019. Dundurn. 280 pages. [Source: ARC provided courtesy of NetGalley]. As someone in a blended family, I appreciated Eckler’s humorous approach with this book. I read this book as a bit of a “what to expect when you’re blending families,” because she tackles a lot of the big and small questions — dealing with exes, connecting with step-children, finances, etc. She holds no punches, even those that don’t portray her in the best light. Her input from friends provide unique perspectives of those with varied experiences. This isn’t just a book about Eckler, but about the range of blended family experiences. In describing the start of her relationship and how it developed, she tackles common “issues” that arise for parents as they date and join families. She didn’t sugarcoat any of it, and she presents her experience without judging others. She covers not the logistics of dating as a parent, but also the emotional angst that comes with it. It’s important to note that she doesn’t hold anything back. She’s graphic to a fault (didn’t need the visual for how she conceived her “Mid Life Crisis Baby”) which may not be everyone’s cup of tea….