All Will Be Well is the best possible title for this restorative memoir. When my mother died, I felt I had failed her. I could have, should have done more for her during her final days.
Like Fowler's memory of playing the piano side-by-side with her mother as the older woman gradually slipped away through dementia and the family stories my mother told me again and again, many of us have precious memories that keep our deceased loved ones alive to us.
Yet, many of us do not know how to forgive ourselves for what we failed to do for those loved ones when we knew they were dying. Fowler shows us how.
For more than twenty years, I was in a writing group of Black female novelists, poets, and memoirists. We called ourselves Zora’s Girls. I think we all read Their Eyes Were Watching God, but we never discussed this 1937 American classic. Instead, we came to the table each month with Zora’s womanist view. That was the main thing, but we also did our best to write with her passion, tell a great story, and make our characters soar off the page as Zora did.
I can’t think of any scene more vivid than the storm, any story more compelling, nor any character in all of literature who has Janie Crawford’s inner strength and sense of self. Zora in Janie is someone to emulate.
Cover design by Harlem renaissance artist Lois Mailou Jones
When Janie, at sixteen, is caught kissing shiftless Johnny Taylor, her grandmother swiftly marries her off to an old man with sixty acres. Janie endures two stifling marriages before meeting the man of her dreams, who offers not diamonds, but a packet of flowering seeds ...
'For me, THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD is one of the very greatest American novels of the 20th century. It is so lyrical it should be sentimental; it is so passionate it should be overwrought, but it is instead a rigorous, convincing and dazzling piece…
I am a Christian, so I believe in God and that His only begotten Son died and was sacrificed to save all of mankind from sin. I also believe in God’s grace, mercy, and forgiveness, all given to us because He loves us, His children, unconditionally. That’s what the Bible says, so it must be true. But surely, I often find myself thinking that there must be limits to the unconditionality of God’s love, no matter how often and fervently we pray to God for forgiveness.
In her memoir I Told The Mountain To Move, Patricia Raybon, unguardedly and with exquisite writing, discloses sins, some huge, she has committed. But Patricia prays and prays, and God listens, guides, heals, and then continues to love. So can we. So will God.
Christianity Today Book of the Year Finalist.In the critically acclaimed prayer memoir from award-winning author Patricia Raybon, the Colorado essayist sets out to learn the secrets of mountain-moving prayer. But will her broken marriage, a dying husband, conflicts with an adult daughter and her determination to pray for her household lead to a healed family and a renewed faith? In the page-turning depths of I Told the Mountain to Move, Raybon wrestles with her upbringing in a strict, churchgoing family, her questioning about her childhood faith, and her determination to return fully to God in adulthood. This wonderfully written book…
Kirkus
Reviews describes Bettye Kearse’s memoir The Other
Madisons as “A Roots for a New Generation.” Without the ancient West
African tradition of oral history, Kearse would not have known she is the
great-great-great-great-granddaughter of the enslaved cook Coreen and her
enslaver and half-brother, President James Madison.
When her
mother delivers the box family of memorabilia—painstakingly collected— Kearse
becomes her family’s eighth-generation oral historian. For 200 years, the
family credo, “Always remember—you’re a Madison. You come from African slaves
and a president,” has served as a source of inspiration and pride, but for
Kearse, it resounds with the abuses of slavery.
In search of the whole truth,
Kearse embarks on a journey of discovery—of her ancestors, the nation, and
herself.
