Black Chameleon

October 1, 2022

Stand-up comic, actor (e.g., Netflix's Cobra Kai), and host of the No. 1 food podcast in the country, Green Eggs and Dan, Ahdoot uses an essay format in Undercooked to explain how food became a crutch and finally a dangerous obsession for him, starting with his brother's untimely death. Before he died of cancer, Braitman's father rushed to teach her important things like how to fix a carburetor and play good practical jokes; long after his death, she realized the cost of What Looks Like Bravery in suppressing her sorrow at his passing; following the New York Times best-selling Animal Madness. In Forager, journalism professor Dowd recalls her upbringing in the fervently Christian cult Field, founded by her domineering grandfather, where she was often cold, hungry, and abused and learned to put her trust in the natural world. Hospitalized from ages of 14 to 17 with anorexia nervosa, Freeman (House of Glass) recalls in Good Girls her subsequent years as a "functioning anorexic" and interviews doctors about new discoveries and treatments regarding the condition. In Happily, which draws on her Paris Review column of the same name, Mark uses fairytale to show how sociopolitical issues impact her own life, particularly as a Jewish woman raising Black children in the South. Philosophy professor Martin's How Not To Kill Yourself examines the mindset that has driven him to attempt suicide 10 times. Award-winning CBS journalist Miller here limns a sense of not Belonging: abandoned at birth by her mother, a Chicana hospital administrator who hushed up her affair with the married trauma surgeon (and Compton's first Black city councilman) who raised Miller, the author struggled to find her place in white-dominated schools and newsrooms and finally sought out her lost parent (60,000-copy first printing). From Mouton, Houston's first Black poet laureate and once ranked the No. 2 Best Female Performance Poet in the World (Poetry Slam Inc.), Black Chameleon relates an upbringing in a world devoid of the stories needed by Black children--which she argues women must now craft (60,000-copy first printing). A graduate of the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in South Africa, Mount Holyoke College, and Columbia University, Ramotwala demonstrates The Will To Be in a memoir of early hardship (her mother's first-born daughter died in a firebombing before the author was born) and adjusting to life in the United States (75,000-copy first printing). In Stash, Robbins, host of the podcast The Only One in the Room, relates her recovery from dangerous drug use (e.g., stockpiling pills and scheduling withdrawals around PTA meetings and baby showers) as she struggles with being Black in a white world. Author of the multi-award-winning, multi-award-nominated No Visible Bruises, a study of domestic violence, Snyder follows up with Women We Buried, Women We Burned, her story of escaping the cult her widowed father joined and as a teenager making her way in the world (100,000-copy first printing).

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 12, 2022
Poet Mouton (Newsworthy) combines family history and personal storytelling in this lyrical memoir. Her prose crackles as she fuses fables with stories to create a spirited portrait of Black American womanhood. Mouton recounts her early aptitude for wordplay, describing her sharp wit at age five and the punishments that often accompanied it: “I got it honest, this tongue. This way to weave words into something more than a masterpiece of theater.” Her stories feature goddesses, divinity, and Black womanhood as she recounts her mother swapping out church-approved clothing for “a golden-mustard kaftan draped over kitten-heeled Jesus sandals,” her seventh-grade picture day request of straightened hair just like the girls on magazine covers, and her musings on how she was formed (comparing her legs to the Egyptian Goddess Hathor’s “powerful thighs” and contemplating the Sumerian creation story of Ninti). Throughout, Mouton honors and complicates her heritage while seeking to understand her place within it: “ would tell you that this is why you must work twice as hard to get half as much. But I know that half is not the holy grail. Tell a half-full belly that it is satisfied and see how it grumbles. I did not come from the wombs of half-baked women.” The writing is unconventional and exquisite, and sure to enthrall readers of Jesmyn Ward.

December 1, 2022
Houston's first Black poet laureate weaves mythology and magic into a genre-bending memoir. Mouton remembers sitting on the porch of the Poetry Foundation when a butterfly perched on a fellow poet's skin. When the poet smiled and said that Mexican mythology identifies butterflies as visiting ancestors, Mouton thought about her enslaved ancestors' separation from African mythology, which should have been her birthright. "When have Black people in the Americas," she asks, "had the time to create a history outside the one they were just trying to survive? And in the few moments we get to dream aloud, who is there to record our origins beyond a whitewashed dictation?" These questions drive Mouton's memoir, in which she uses incidents from her personal history to create a new Black, female mythology. For example, in one chapter, a memory of sexual harassment leads to the myth of Acirema, a god of White supremacism whom Mouton kills but ultimately cannot vanquish. After the author chronicles how her weight prevented her from enjoying multiple amusement park rides, she writes an alternative reality in which her body is too powerful for the park to contain, which she follows with a myth she tells her daughter about how the graceful movement of her female ancestors' curvy bodies allowed them to save the children of a plantation from hungry alligators: "The waves were rising and falling to the motion of their hips. This hypnotism was the perfect way to stop the gators." At best, the book is lyrical, tender, and generous, celebrating the beauty of the oppressed with wildly imaginative and artfully rendered prose. Some of the devices--such as referring to the writer's past homes with mythical names, like the Empire, the City of Angels, and Space City, instead of their actual names--feel overly dramatic. Overall, though, this innovative mix of myth and nonfiction is a pleasure to read. A formally inventive celebration of Black womanhood.

COPYRIGHT(2022) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.