Shirleynature > Recent Status Updates

Loving this for wry laugh out loud moments, contemporary characters haunted by benevolent ancestors, and wise storytelling!

A heavy theme. With occasional reflections of the healing power we enjoy in relationships with trees and other plants, Montgomery balances family and autobiographical stories with deeply painful moments of race-based injustice that is rooted in specific time and place across the US and occasional globally far-afield mentions to places such as Benin.

I look forward to sharing this read in my Nature Book Club.

I didn't know I needed this moving story as catharsis, but I'm grateful for inspiring tears. While reading of the mystery injustice suffered by a Black American transgender woman killed by hit and run and mis-gendered by police as reported in the news. While the current horrendous actions of ICE haven't directly impacted me, I am grateful to champion stories of heroines such as lesbian private eye Mickey Knight.

notes: respectful recognition for people of color, especially Latine, resonance in various genres of popular music and the hopeful era in early 2008 leading up to electing Obama, an affectionate familiarity for New York, vibrato, the nefarious machinations of gentrification, consumerism, general excess, class divisions, skepticism of the benefits of marriage to women

Mesmerizing, yet unlike any other read in my experience. Such a juxtaposition to Livonia Chow Mein which will also publish in April and is set in Brownsville, another Brooklyn neighborhood. My frame of reference will make a future visit very interesting!

Such an emotionally intense thriller, yet with healing wisdom interlaced throughout like: "Focus on justice, not the unjust. Keep digging." Archeologist heroine Syd being shadowed by a ghost from a traumatic experience from her youth is quite vivid.

I love this heroine!!!

Just beginning and gotta save this epigraph:
"What happens to the land happens to the women." ~Native wisdom

A tough Choctaw heroine cop, Indian relay, horses, aspects of diverse Indigenous traditions, and land alottments. Blood Relay by Devon Mihesuah is due Feb24. This is my 2nd fiction entry by Mihesuah after The Hatak Witches from 2021. The author is an enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation and a Chickasaw descendant, professor, and historian; she teaches Indigenous Studies at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, KS.

It's extremely difficult to step away from the hold this story has on me.
This is a riveting fictional mystery. An account of the urgent and hauntingly real vulnerabilities of murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls.
I will return to finish soon! And look forward to recommending this to readers of realistic gritty thrillers.

So gripping!
I hope Rendon has more Ojibwa mysteries in the works!

Matthew Henson is a charming private eye with many helpful contacts all around the city also in this story are mentions of many gadgets and inventions that almost feel like a steampunk tale.

Cinematic espionage-like intrigue and noir-riddled underworld thugs that I wish my Dad were around to share this with.

Aviatrix Besse Coleman is among those featured!

This noir, pulp, adventure, mystery, and alternative history (set in 1920s Harlem) is an homage to the real Black American arctic hero Matthew Alexander Henson (1866-1955) with many more acclaimed historical figures also celebrated!

I'm laughing out loud at: "His cheeks were unusually rosey and with his pale skin and blue eyes he looked like an American flag."

Kevin is a genuinely decent human being. I appreciate he helped a grieving father in El Salvador.
While he waxes on about colors (an artist's eye) and also has so many philosophical reflections slow the story's pace, yet my admiration for Everett is not waning. This is my 4th Percival Everett novel: The Trees, James, Watershed, and now So Much Blue.

Intense throughout and now much more so!

That campus, from before it's founding -- the buildings are dated from centuries earlier -- is haunted throughout many generations! And certainly during our story's timelines 1908, 1934, 1998.

Author in provocative conversation with ancestors and settlers. Honoring family and place, including trail marker trees and learning how to make from husband Tom -- with a sapling. Powerful and heartfelt!

Minerva is captivatingly charismatic and no fool!
And Alba is so frustratingly naive; how did she become Minerva's great grandmother?

I'm fully enchanted and seeing a few parallels to Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders.