SADEQA JOHNSON'S PAGE: KEEPER OF LOST CHILDREN; THE HOUSE OF EVE

KEEPER OF LOST CHILDREN
SADEQA JOHNSON
37 Ink/Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: In this new novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The House of Eve, one American woman’s vision in post WWII Germany will tie together three people in an unexpected way.

Lost in the streets and smoldering rubble of Occupied Germany, Ethel Gathers, the proud wife of an American soldier spots a gaggle of mixed-race children following a nun. Desperate to conceive her own family, she feels compelled to follow them to learn their story.

Ozzie Philips volunteers for the army in 1948, eager to break barriers for Black soldiers. Despite his best efforts, he finds the racism he encountered at home in Philadelphia has followed him overseas. He finds solace in the arms of Jelka, a German woman struggling with the lack of resources and even joy in her destroyed country.

In 1965, Sophia Clark discovers she’s been given an opportunity to integrate a prestigious boarding school in Maryland and leave behind her spiteful parents and the grueling demands. In a chance meeting with a fellow classmate, she discovers a secret that upends her world.

Toggling between the lives of these three individuals, Keeper of Lost Children explores how one woman’s vision will change the course of countless lives, and demonstrates that love in its myriad of forms—familial, parental, and forbidden, even love of self—can be transcendent.

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My Review: On a kernel of fact, Author Sadeqa coaxes a mighty oak of a story about the power of determination and the motivation of compassion. Three characters are entwined in a narrative of prejudice endured, triumphally defeated by love, and made into the beautiful thing that is selfhood.

Ethel Gathers has the most nominitively determinative name ever. I understand why Author Sadeqa chose it in place of the rather blander name of the woman who started the Brown Baby Plan, Mabel Grammer. Of course I, a white child of privilege, did not ever hear of this marvelous plan or its tutelary spirit. Being both about Black folks and established by a woman, that information is not startling. I have never been so heartened by the factual roots of a story! It entwines Ozzie, a "colored" man in the post-WWII US Army who merits and desires a promotion into the Intelligence service only to be stymied because, what else, racism shuts doors nominally opened by executive order; Ethel, as her time in 1951 Germany as an Army wife introduces her to the issue central to the story; and Sophia, a biracial teen in 1965 when we meet her.

No points for sussing out the interconnections among them all.

It's not an advanced storytelling technique that draws on into this read, it's the human connection, the fellowship of people who know anger, feel frustration and loss and sadness, and revel in goodness and rightness triumphing. Our older PoV characters proceed into the future while Sophia is mostly looking into her own past as she works to escape her truly awful upbringing. All three threads come together at a powerfully symbolic and racially charged moment in the 1960s.

It's not coyness that leaves me with lamentably vague language there. As you read along you'll see the interconnections forming. I'm not going to reveal them because they're a very big part of the finale of the story, giving it a lot of its oomph. I hate when reviewers do that but...trust me, you want to take this ride innocent of these facts.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

THE HOUSE OF EVE
SADEQA JOHNSON
37 Ink/Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: 1950s Philadelphia: fifteen-year-old Ruby Pearsall is on track to becoming the first in her family to attend college. But a taboo love affair threatens to pull her back down into the poverty and desperation that has been passed on to her like a birthright.

Eleanor Quarles arrives in Washington, DC, with ambition and secrets. When she meets the handsome William Pride at Howard University, they fall madly in love. But William hails from one of DC’s elite wealthy Black families, and his parents don’t let just anyone into their fold. Eleanor hopes that a baby will make her finally feel at home in William’s family and grant her the life she’s been searching for. But having a baby—and fitting in—is easier said than done.

With their stories colliding in the most unexpected of ways, Ruby and Eleanor will both make decisions that shape the trajectory of their lives.

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My Review: Playing the mother card does not earn a story my esteem. The Cult of Mother is, oddly, not the focus of Author Sadeqa's stories...it's about how women, in relation to motherhood, are required to make hard decisions and come to terms with how fathers create mothers but mothers do not create fathers. Many factors haunt Author Sadeqa's mothers in this story of how becoming pregnant is not always, or in all ways, a happy moment for a woman. Leaving aside the permanence of motherhood, the social milieu a child is brought into is almost more important than the love, or lack of it, a mother feels for that child.

In exploring these complexities in a 1950s racist US Author Sadeqa brings struggles and battles to light that can not help but move the reader. It is a sentimental story, it will cause you to well up with tears (or you're a sociopath), it does its romantic-fiction job with verve and gusto. It is not a prose megalith to be held up in future literary seminars, and is not meant to be, but it is effective at its chosen task. It entertains, it informs about the deep emotional ties humans form...willingly or not...to those they might or might not admire.

It's a good read for a dull weekend that will give you a solid satisfying ending for its story.

GREAT BLACK HOPE, debut gay Black author's tale of class, race, and their limits

GREAT BLACK HOPE
ROB FRANKLIN
Summit Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available tomorrow

Time's The 100 Must-Read Books of 2025 selection

On the ALA's 2026 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence longlist.

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A gripping, elegant debut novel about a young Black man caught between worlds of race and class, glamour and tragedy, a friend’s mysterious death and his own arrest, from an electrifying new voice.

An arrest for cocaine possession in the Hamptons on the last day of a sweltering New York summer leaves Smith, a young queer Black Stanford graduate, in a state of turmoil. Pulled into the court system and mandated treatment, he finds himself in an absurd but dangerous situation: his class protects him, but his race does not.

It’s just weeks after the death of his beloved roommate Elle, a glamorous member of the Black elite, and he’s still reeling from the tabloid spectacle—as well as the lingering questions of how well he really knew his closest friend and what exactly happened to her that night. He flees to his hometown of Atlanta, but the weight of expectations from his family of doctors, lawyers, and college presidents only pushes him further into his downward spiral. When his close friend Carolyn goes off the rails, Smith decides to return to New York to find out what happened to her and Elle. But it’s not long before he begins to lose himself to his old life, drawn back into the city’s underworld where his search for answers may end up costing him his freedom and his future.

Smith goes on a dizzying journey through the New York City nightlife circuit, anonymous recovery rooms, Atlanta’s Black society set, police investigations and courtroom dramas, and a circle of friends coming of age in a new era. Great Black Hope is a propulsive, glittering story about what it means to exist between worlds, to be upwardly mobile yet spiraling downward, and how to find a way back to hope.

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My Review: How do you cope with stress? What kind of stress do you need to cope with? What happens when you can no longer cope, and your coping mechanism is what slides you the next step down your ladder? Are you made of the stuff that helps you hang on? Or is this the moment your life changes trajectory? Will it be up...or down?

Don't choose dull, ordinary challenges for your debut novel, kids. Take a lesson from Author Rob Franklin. Get in there and scrape the bones, break 'em open, pry out the marrow. Don't tell me another Hamptons-rich-druggie story, Fitzgerald owns "West Egg" already, and that snowy white "Less than Zero" guy wiped up the corners. Making your bottoming-out addict Black in this milieu feels revolutionary!

Unless you know what PG means, and who starred in which season of The Real Housewives of Atlanta.

Young Mr. Smith isn't a unicorn, but he understands from the inside the burden and the unfairness of being a race man. He's got the money, the education, and the training to function in the top tier of the New York business world. Yet it costs him much more to claim his place there because he's Black...and gay.

It all comes to a head and begins to fry his brain as the novel opens with his arrest for cocaine possession in the Hamptons. A thing that wouldn't register for a white person, but despite his gigantic privilege among Black people, he's just another Black man among the really privileged. Awaiting his court appearance leaves young Mr. Smith a lot of time to process his stressors and figure out how to deal with New York life. We're along with him as the death...murder...of his bestie Elle absorbs a lot of his energy. If I had a complaint to air about the story, it's that the murder eats a lot of attention, and results in a lot of self-reflection, growth, and healing...but the resolution is so rushed it feels perfunctory.

I didn't get mad about it, though, because I felt it was all part of the voyage of discovery young Davey Smith was taking in front of me. I'm here for a young gay man discovering how much the world expects from you simply to have the things others just...get. I'm totally immersed in a story where someone privileged suddenly confronts the reality that privilege can be yanked away like any other "gift" from society. It's happened to me so I know how genuine his feeling of being forcibly unmoored really is.

I was never a party-party boy, so found Davey's interest in the nightlife uninteresting. It is just dull to me. I was ultimately able to enjoy the reflections on his loud, annoying, "fun" times because I don't and didn't like them at his age. I found myself thinking "no wonder I never liked that stuff!" a lot of the time. It made the read much more rewarding to me after I got past my own impatience with such an unserious, uninteresting "lifestyle" as clubbing.

In the end I was drawn into learning from the life Davey Snith led after I read this: “Identity was neither destiny nor salvation but a kind of animal trap, useful only if one was deft enough to claim the bait without tripping the door to the cage.” It's a pithy dose of home truth so it gave me a full and complete way into the club I'd pay money to stay out of in the flesh.

That half-star gone is my pound of flesh for being made to work so hard.

LISTEN TO YOUR SISTER, an exhortation at least two Black men shoulda taken to heart

LISTEN TO YOUR SISTER
NEENA VIEL
St. Martin's Griffin (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$12.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: For fans of Jordan Peele’s films, Stranger Things, and The Other Black Girl, Listen To Your Sister is a laugh-out-loud, deeply terrifying, and big-hearted speculative horror novel from electrifying debut talent Neena Viel.

Twenty-five year old Calla Williams is struggling since becoming guardian to her brother, Jamie. Calla is overwhelmed and tired of being the one who makes sacrifices to keep the family together. Jamie, full of good-natured sixteen-year-old recklessness, is usually off fighting for what matters to him or getting into mischief, often at the same time. Dre, their brother, promised he would help raise Jamie–but now the ink is dry on the paperwork and in classic middle-child fashion, he’s off doing his own thing. And through it all, The Nightmare never stops haunting Calla: recurring images of her brothers dying that she is powerless to stop.

When Jamie’s actions at a protest spiral out of control, the siblings must go on the run. Taking refuge in a remote cabin that looks like it belongs on a slasher movie poster rather than an AirBNB, the siblings now face a new threat where their lives–and reality–hang in the balance. Their sister always warned them about her nightmares. They really should have listened.

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My Review: "Listen to your sister" is the most oddly edged weapon in the arsenal of control. Listen to her wisdom. Listen to her express while she experiences despair. Listen to her, learn how the wisdom comes out of the same swamp as the despair.

Being tasked with responsibilities beyond your capabilities is a common feature in many child-as-custodian tales. Rising to meet the challenge, failing at it, muddling through...well, that's adulthood as parent or guardian or, to be completely honest, any old thing as a legal adult.

What sets this story above most I've read like it, from The Outsiders as a kid on, is The Nightmare. It's a really big part of Calla's quotidian awareness. It's a looming, energy-sapping Presence...éminence grise writ literal...that defines Calla's every waking thought about her ward/little brother. In The Nightmare Jamie dies, and dies, and dies; the most horrific death. Here's Calla, responsible for the life of someone she honestly should never have been if her parents had...well, what? not died? not run away? where are they and why aren't they there?...not, in any event, left her responsible unhelpfully unbackstopped by her other brother, useless Dre.

Now my full attention is engaged. Starting just before the halfway point I began to listen to my own niggling awareness. Permaybehaps this is Calla finding a coping mechanism to make sense of this utter reorientation of her world...permaybehaps she's tuned in to something like a psychic K-Cthulhu...she might simply be going quietly insane...and in the US a young Black woman whose self-image is of being too hefty who's also now responsible for shepherding a teenaged Black man into adulthood alive and unencarcerated when he has a big mouth and a powerful eye for hypocrisy....

I was deeply interested in the way I wasn't answered as I got these musings phrased into questions. I was instead led to ideas about the answers supported in the story. That we see the narrative through all three siblings' eyes lent the book the air of fairness, until you thought a minute about it when Calla's centrality swims into focus ever more clearly. She is the only one who acts for the clearly conceptualized good of the Family, where her brothers (one too young, one too narcissistic) think only of how The Nightmare and its embodiment in their sister affects them. It is through those young men's eyes that The Nightmare feeds into horror. They mock and disbelieve, thinking she's nuts and/or trying to control them.

Sound familiar, Cassandra fanciers? Calla's awful stresses are external, internal, self-inflicted, inevitable for a young woman of color in a deeply racist white world. They're real. They're just fearful imaginings. They can't be taken seriously. Laugh them off.

That goes as well as it usually does when men ignore sound advice from women. As a subject for social horror, I'm hard-pressed to think of a better, more trenchant way to build a story.

What I ended up enjoying the most in this read was less the plot...first novels are almost always a bit baggy at the knees...than Calla's mellifluous voice and her sense of humor. BE AWARE THAT THE N-SLUR IS USED A LOT. I don't like it, this is something I have trouble with from my 1960s childhood where it was used *very*differently* so I want you to know that fact. Mostly, Calla's a smart, funny woman doing a thankless job she wouldn't have had to do had death and abandonment not landed her where she is.

I can't go a fifth star because of the N-slur stuff. It made me think hard about many things, and might should get that five; but not with the (appropriate, well-thought-out) use of N-words.

YMMV, but in any event I encourage you to find out soon.

PORTRAITS OF RACIAL JUSTICE: Americans Who Tell the Truth, exactly what it says on the tin

PORTRAITS OF RACIAL JUSTICE: Americans Who Tell the Truth
ROBERT SHETTERLY
New Village Press
$34.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: A vivid portrait collection of past and present Americans speaking truth to power

The first volume of Robert Shetterly's Americans Who Tell the Truth portrait series, Portraits of Racial Justice takes a multimedia, interdisciplinary approach, blending art and history with today’s issues concerning social, environmental, and economic fairness. Shetterly's paintings, as well as profiles of those portrayed, illuminate a community of people not only willing to recognize the shortcomings of America’s history, but most importantly, individuals who offer their visions of a better world moving forward.

Starting with Michelle Alexander and ending with Dave Zirin, the diverse array of fifty full-color portraits spans multiple generations and struggles. This volume also includes four original opening essays on racial justice in the United States by Ai-jen Poo, Dave Zirin, Sherri Mitchell, and Rev. Lennox Yearwood, Jr., which provide an intersectional response to the long-term goal of diversity and inclusion.

As Shetterly says, “without activism, hope is merely sentimental.” Portraits of Racial Justice, Shetterly’s homage to transformative game-changers and status-quo fighters, provides the inspiration necessary to spark social change.

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My Review: Beautiful portraits of many people, famous and sadly underknown, who have spoken up and spoken out about issues of "racial" prejudice and its many, many consequences and victims.

I expect most US dwellers recognize civil-rights warrior and United States Representative John Lewis...I hope so anyway.

Shetterly's beautiful portraits are easy to stare at, fall in love with as artworks.

Fannie Lou Hamer looks magnificent, doesn't she? So exactly like her character. Shetterly captured an essence here.

Profile of a man whose name I am sad to say I've never heard before, and couldn't pronounce on a bet.

This beautiful object, and the people whose faces and stories fill it, deserve a place in your #Booksgiving celebration. They are all people to be celebrated for their courage and their clear-sighted opposition to the status quo.