BW23: Words

 

Welcome to June and our month of celebrating fathers, summer, gardening, and the great outdoors.  This week is devoted to the window of the world with words.  The wild and wacky, wonderful and winsome, the witty and weary, world of words that whisper and weave the wonderous who, what, where, when, and why of words. 

Our author of the month is Akwaeke Emezi, a Nigerian author of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, as well as a film writer, musician, and artist. Last year, I read one of her stories - You Made A Fool Out of Me with Your Beauty.  There were so many layers to this story:  loss and grief, sexual attraction, choices, and love, sorrow and learning to live again. After the loss of her husband, Feyi is trying to figure out if she can ever love again. She plunges into the dating waters full steam ahead, trying to figure out who and what she wants. She's a woman exploring the sexual waters and falling in love with someone she didn't expect. The beginning of the story fooled me when it went full boil with a sexual escapade, but I gave it a chance. It simmered down and the more I learned more about Feyi, the deeper I became invested in her story. It was crude, it was raw. It was full of angst, full of sorrow. Full of choices, and full of love. 

“It was like a fork in the road has closed, shut off by an avalanche of grief, choked with rocks and a broken heart. It wasn't supposed to open, and honestly, it still hadn't, but somehow, an entirely new path had formed, green and creeping.”

You Made A Fool Out of Me with Your Beauty sticks with you long after finishing it and makes one think. One of the themes is all about choice. The choice on the characters who wants to make a choice for himself, when in the past, all his choices were for his children. When he choose himself, it got me to thinking about some decisions we make which aren't about the other person but about us. Food for thought.

I'm looking forward to reading The Death of Vivek Oji next.  

Her stories aren't for the faint at heart as they contain LQBTQ supporting cast characters, graphic sex, and crude language, so if you'd like, stick with our letter of the week, and check out Oscar Wilde, E.B. White, Elie Wiesel, Laura Ingalls Wilder,  Colson Whitehead,  Alice Walker, or Martin Walker to name a few. 

Happy reading! 

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