On Women’s Equality Day

Alright, so I’ve already acknowledged that I’m a little behind. If you need to know more about it, you can find out why here. Sometimes even with the best of intentions, we can fall short. So today, on Women’s Equality Day, I am honoring my original intention of dedicating my reading to books authored by and featuring Women of Color. 

The Hate U Give

In the opening chapters of The Hate U Give, Starr witnesses her childhood best friend being shot by the police. Tackling the topic of police brutality, the fear and pain that comes in the wake of each incident, felt daunting and, I’ll admit, foreign to me. However, by framing this story through the eyes of a sixteen-year-old girl, I found that I could understand it differently. I, too, was once a sixteen-year-old girl, and I found that I both liked and empathized with Starr. She was the kind of person I think I would have been friends with. I laughed with her, cried with her, and felt her triumphs and anxiety as if she were my friend. Angie Thomas has given the world a rare and beautiful story laced with hard truths and even harsher realities. The Hate U Give has certainly opened my eyes and changed the way I move through the world, more aware of the stories and scars we all carry. 

The Final Revival of Opal and Nev

The story follows journalist S. Sunny Shelton as she uncovers the truth about the ill-fated final show of Opal and Nev. What really intrigued me about this book was that as the reader, you are reading the book ultimately written by Sunny over the course of the novel, kind of like a book within a book. At first, I had to check that Dawnie Walton was not the actual main character. I literally stopped and thought, “this is fiction right?”. Dawnie Walton took real lived experiences and presented them through the lens of something universally understood, music. The descriptions of the 1970’s music scene were so vivid and the fierce passion of the main characters inspiring. The Final Revival of Opal and Nev was so powerful; it gave me a sense of nostalgia for a time period I wasn’t even alive to remember.

The City We Became

The first in the Great Cities Trilogy by NK Jemisin, The City We Became, introduces readers to the idea that all great cities are alive and embodied by an avatar, a normal human who, literally, becomes the city. However, a great enemy threatens all new cities. While New York is being born, its avatar falls into a coma, dispersing his powers to 5 individuals representing the five boroughs of New York. The world-building that NK does in this first installment was incredible in its detail. The characters were as diverse and interesting as the city itself. This book was simultaneously a fantasy novel and love letter to New York, which I appreciated immensely as a native New Yorker. That said, it was very dense and took me a long time to read. I didn’t feel the story truly got going until it was nearly over. Once it got going, though, I was intrigued enough to know I wanted to read the follow-up novels. I’m very much looking forward to gobbling up the next book when it comes out!

With the Fire on High

Just as inspiring and lyrical as The Poet X, Elizabeth Acevedo’s second book took my breath away. With the Fire on High was not originally on my original Women’s History month list, but I recently read it for a book club and was so moved and overjoyed by the story I had to include it here. Emoni is a high school student with a young daughter and love (and talent) for cooking that inspires everyone who eats her food and takes her places she’s never been. Like Emoni’s cooking Elizabeth has a magic touch when it comes to words, infusing so much emotion into them that the reader feels everything coming off the page. This book looked at the hard choices that families have to make every day and the true hope and love that persists through all adversity. 

Hood Feminism

It wouldn’t be Women’s Equality Day if I didn’t talk about Hood Feminism. As a self-proclaimed Feminist, this was the most important book I’ve read all year. Mikki Kendall lays out the hard truth about the Women’s Movement in a straightforward, undeniable, and compassionate way. This book taught me so much about intersectionality and the many layers of discrimination facing women of color. But, most importantly, it made it so that I could no longer look away. Thinking about what today represents in the context of this book, I know we have so much further to go. I also know that I’m inspired to be part of that change. To stand up for, volunteer with, and advocate for women in marginalized communities, because no one is free until we’re all free. Now to the hard work of figuring out how to do just that!

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