Sandra Kitt is excellent in writing about the races in all of the varied forms we experience them today. Her heroine, Dallas Oliver, is biracial. She and her white best friend, Valerie, are now in their early thirties and have been bound together since they were in grade school. Dallas is a journalist for a…
You know you have read a good book when, three days after finishing it, your head is still spinning with questions and ideas that the book has raised. In addition to making me really think about issues of color lines (both outside and within the African-American community), Skin Deep makes it pleasant to tackle these…
I decided to read White Chocolate because I found the book’s cover interesting. It contained a close-up of the beautiful author, Elizabeth Atkins Bowman, and the synopsis was intriguing: a bi-racial TV journalist must face her past when the white supremacists she helped put behind bars are released and threaten her life. In this case,…
Bebe’s by Golly Wow is the very hip, very now, very with-it tale of an African American woman’s search for love. If you can get past the relentless, sometimes overpowering slang and the alternating points of view in which the tale is told, there is a pleasant story to be read. In this follow-up to…
Rachel Lee’s Conard County series is a favorite of mine and I was eagerly awaiting this book. While it was not at all a bad one and had several elements I thoroughly enjoyed, it was marred by a heroine who came perilously close to wallowing in self-pity and an absense of chemistry between the hero…
Timmothy B. McCann is the latest author to enter the booming African-American fiction market, following the path blazed by Terry McMillan and Eric Jerome Dickey. His first novel, Until. . ., mines the already well-worked vein of contemporary male-female relationships, much of which will seem familiar to fans of the genre. Betty Robinson is the…
Topaz links Katherine Love and Dix Wildhorse. Katherine wears the gemstone – her mother’s legacy – around her neck. Dix wears his grandfather’s legacies in one ear and on his badge as a U.S. Marshal. They meet when he rescues her from the clutches of Rupert Samuels, swindler, thief, and all-round bad guy masquerading as…
This is probably the most disappointing book I have read in quite some time, mostly because of what it could have been, but for some reason, wasn’t. Topaz, a multicultural romance, features a wonderful, dynamic and sexy hero, a feisty, determined, independent heroine, and great chemistry. When I first started reading it, for about the…
Mako Yoshikawa’s debut novel is exquisite. Here is a tale of a modern, young Japanese-American woman’s search for truth, presented as a tapestry interwoven with luminous threads of emotion, sensuality, and human connections in a world in which joy seldom comes without its measure of pain. This is not a romance, although it is certainly…
Badge of Honor is the fifth in Justine Davis’ Trinity Street West series, a series which has revolved around the men and women who risk their lives and hearts while working in a very special police precinct. The series has been terrific far, and this entry is no different – it is a stirring tale…