Christine Gabrièlle

I went on a “moms walk” the Friday before Mother’s Day with my mom and two of her friends. Basically, a selection of the historic downtown shops were participating in a Mother’s Day giveaway.

We, as the participants, had to go to each store on the paper map we were given and get a stamp showing we’d been there. A few of the stores also had snacks and/or discounts to hand out to visitors. At the end, the map full of stamps got turned in to the last store we visited and entered into a raffle for a gift basket each of the shops donated to.

Our first stop was my favorite. Can you guess where that was?

The local bookstore of course!

In addition to some light snacks (which we didn’t partake in because they looked picked over), there were two chairs full of ARCs (Advance Reader Copies) we could grab from. As soon as I heard “free books” I left my mom and her friends to listen to the rest of the instructions for the walk and went straight toward the treasure I was after.

As a book lover, it was really difficult not to grab all of the books there, but I restrained myself and only took the first two that caught my eye.

How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair was the first book I grabbed. The image of locs being threatened with a pair of scissors immediately drew me in, followed by the green, black, yellow color scheme. I connected to those colors subconsciously before recognizing them as the colors of the Jamaican flag (my grandfather was Jamaican). I was even further drawn to the summary of the book because it resonated a bit with my own conservative upbringing (albeit in a different, less volatile religion).

How to Say Babylon is Safiya’s memoir; it is the story of the relationship between her and her father and his religion and her womanhood. And I am so excited to read it.

The second book I picked up was Creep by Myriam Gurba. It is a collection of stories about creeps and things that creep. People, institutions, systems, rules.

I only had time to skim the back cover when I first picked it up, but the first line of the summary (and the fact that it was a collection of stories) was enough to commit me to it.

I learned to love collections in college (so. many. anthologies.). And as a short story writer, I have a heart for short, powerful pieces. I’m excited to dig into this one as well.

I believe these will be great summer reads for me. And, of course, I’ll let you know how I like them.

How to Say Babylon is coming from Simon & Schuster in August and Creep is coming from Avid Reader Press in September.

♥

P.S. We did not win the basket, but we had a whole lot of fun!