Serial Reading

Last week was spring break in Texas. So I spent a few days on the beach in Cancún Mexico. I have to admit is the first time in my life I actually did nothing for so long. I spent a few days reading some of the things that had been lined up for me, you know those books that you collected sure gotta read this as you get the chance?

They ranged from a hair above boring to mildly interesting, and riveting.

I started out with Fair Play by Deirdre Martin. Had a hard time with this one. It just couldn't hold my interest. There was something about a romance with hockey players that just didn't do it for me.

Then I moved on to Remember When my Nora Roberts and JD Robb. Half of this book is in the present with the last half being written in the future. It was a mystery crime, that happens now and is solved 50 years later. This was better. I was intrigued enough to make it all way through, although I found parts of the book tedious.

I was good and sunburned by this time, so I moved to the shade. I read the Scent of Scandal by Carole Matthews. This was in the interesting range. An aroma therapists from London moves to the country to escape an ex love and falls in love with the new,less sophisticated man, that she basically steals from his longtime live-in girlfriend. The local nosy bodies think that she is doing something improper. But the village really has its own scandals with a life that's a hooker sleeping with her husband's colleagues.

Then things really got good. It was time for me to read my book club pink. The Man in My Basement, by Walter Mosley. This was just plain good, and interesting allegory on evil and race in America. I wasn't sure I'd like at first, because I didn't want to see another easy Rawlins mystery or anything like that. But I was pleasantly surprised.

And that's when I arrived a Woman's Worth by Tracy Price Thompson. I met Tracy several years ago, while I was on tour and am going to see her in a couple weeks when I visit Hawaii, where she now lives with her husband. I thought I would catch up on my reading and read her latest book. This tale is set in both rural Alabama and Africa. The male lead is the son of a whore and a pimp who ends up in jail as a young teen when he avenges his father's death. He is taken in by another Alabama family, and becomes a prize boxer in the gym they own. When he puts a serious hurting on a white opponent during a fight, he has to leave Alabama and goes to the Peace Corps.

He ends up in Africa where he meets the daughter of a village leader, who is a emotionally scarred from female circumcision. She is a social outcast because she refuses to follow the rules of her village even though she no longer lives there. They marry and produce a daughter, who at age 5 is expected to undergo her own female circumcision. The details that Tracy gives about female circumcision in tribal Africa are so vivid that I felt like I was there. More than that, the way she describes the love between these two people and the love a good man has for his woman, left me speechless, breathless and not wanting to read anyway thing else because I didn't want the feeling that I was experiencing to go away. Plus the book left me wanting to find someone who was willing to paint my toes like the main character did for his wife.

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