Tag: books

In Joseph’s Shadow: Part One

Tanya McNair, dressed in her favorite navy-blue blouse, which bore a faint trace of glitter from the campaign rally a month ago, moved from group to group of the crowded apartment. Her living room was alive with chatter, laughter, and the occasional burst of applause from friends and neighbors whenever a commentator announced another state leaning toward Obama. Tanya looked fondly at the old TV set sitting on the floor beneath the big, flat-screen they were all watching.

The floor model television belonged to her grandmother, Sidney McNair—Mama Sidney to everyone who knew her. Uncle Eddy had bought it after great-grandma Judith passed, back when he and his sisters decided to remain in Chicago a while longer. That was also around the time her father, Joseph, disappeared into what he later called a revolution of self-discovery, also known as abandoning the family until he found himself.

The television had been there through it all.

It was the same set where great-grandma Judith—daughter of the great Solomon, son of the first Stella—watched the Black Panthers march down the street in their berets and rifles, demanding the freedom of Huey Newton.

The same screen that flickered quietly in the corner the day Aunt Karen’s boyfriend, Noah, stormed into their lives. Years later, she would name their first and only son after him.

For Tanya, it wasn’t just a piece of furniture but a sacred repository for memories, a portal to her family’s history.

Tanya frowned at the stacks of books on top of it, wondering if she was disrespecting her grandmother by using her TV as a table.

A cheer erupted from the room as the phone rang. Tanya’s heart raced as she ran to answer it without taking her eyes off the flatscreen. So far, Obama was winning.

“Sisss,” sang her little brother.

Tanya raised her eyebrows, “Are you drunk already, Mike?”

“Nah. I’m good. What’s the word?”

Tanya sighed, “Michael, you are not good. I can smell the Hennessy through the phone.”

Mike burst into laughter, and Tanya pulled the phone from her ear. That boy was gonna make her go deaf. “Where are you anyway?”

“I’m handling some business. Why, what’s good?”

“The business you were supposed to be handling is here. What happened to you helping me with the party?”

“The election party? You know I don’t get into alla that,” he said, slurring his words.

“Well, you need to get into it. History is being made. Have you talked with Dad?”

“History? Yea okay. Nah. I ain’t spoke to him today.”

“He was supposed to be coming over.”

“Coming over where?”

“Over here, to the apartment.”

“Not today, he ain’t. He told me he was working on the Malibu.”

“That beat-up old thing?” Tanya sighed. “And I thought you ain’t talk to him?”

“Look, pops don’t wanna hurt yo feelings, but you know the old man don’t vote.”

It didn’t make sense to her. Joseph McNair was born in 1945 and grew up in the ’60s at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. He had heard Dr. King speak, fought segregation with his friends through protest, and was even beaten for trying to integrate at a bus station during the Freedom Rides.

Finding out he really was a mixed Black man and not the white boy he grew up believing himself to be is a history lesson all its own.

And now, as the country waited with bated breath to see if the United States really would elect its first Black President, her father, the revolutionary of the family, didn’t participate in politics?

Joseph McNair was politics!

“Yo T, you there?”

Michael’s voice startled Tanya back to the present, her heart beating a million miles per minute as her guests sat on their hands, quietly waiting on the biggest announcement of their time, the walls echoing with hope.

“Okay, well. I’ll call you back.”

Yep. It’s another Stella book in the works!

Ain’t No Red Carpet for the Prophet

Revolution sounds pretty.

This polished word

makes a giddy sound,

like raising your first

or rubbing your feet together.

We quote Martin with a rhythm that swells the chest.

Malcolm’s words hum like power.

Assata’s taste like survival.

Garvey’s tickles the ear.

Lumumba’s boom like djembe drums.

Angela’s convinces the tongue that it is brave.

But no one applauds

the silence that follows a truth

told too clearly

in a world where lies

are the laws of the land.

We forget that Zora died counting coins,

her name folded small in her own purse.

Lowered into the earth without a stone to speak for her

in a segregated garden of silence

while her words, once blazing,

lay out of print like abandoned children.

We forget that revolution is only another word for change,

and change is rarely applauded in its own lifetime.

The ones who bend the arc of the world

often do it alone,

unclapped.

Revolution sounds sweet in the mouth

like a hymn rising,

like the lift of a firstborn into waiting arms,

like the soft hush of skin against skin.

But ain’t no red carpet

for the prophet.

Just dust. Truth.

And the long walk home.

This poem was inspired by an amazing podcast episode of “Our Ancestors Were Messy” about the friendship between Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes (which I’ve hinted at in my novel Renaissance), their fall-out, and what culminated in the tragic ending of a folklorist, documentarian, author, and anthropologist.

Once one of the most successful writers of the Harlem Renaissance, Zora Neale Hurston would die in poverty in the segregated wing of a welfare home. Her body would be buried in an unmarked grave. The woman who preserved Black life faded into obscurity until she was rediscovered by Alice Walker in 1973.

Walker would resurrect Hurston’s writings and place a marker on her grave that read, “Zora Neale Hurston: A Genius of the South.”

Black History Lives

Meeting Mrs. Sarah Collins Rudolph, the lone survivor of the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing, 1963

The more I study Black history, the more I am humbled by how close it still is to us, and how often the past breathes in the same rooms we do. It lives in the hands of my elderly aunts and uncles, in my husband’s great-aunts now in their eighties and nineties, in the quiet authority of people who remember a world entirely unlike the one we inhabit today.

When I look at them, I am struck not just by their age but by the eras they have survived. Even my late parents, born in the 1940s and 1950s, moved through a country so different from the one I know that it feels almost unrecognizable. I used to think that world was gone, and in many ways, it is. And at the same time, it is also sitting across from us at dinner tables, folding laundry, telling stories we don’t always ask to hear.

This is what makes Black history (and history in general) so accessible and so urgent. It is not only found in textbooks, memorials, museums, or the names etched into stone. It is carried by people who are still alive. People whose memories collapse the distance between then and now. It reminds us that history is not just the past, but it is also inextricably connected to the present. Those who made history were simply living their lives, never knowing their present moment would one day be named.

This weekend is the perfect example of this.

On February 7, 2026, I had the esteemed honor of meeting a woman whose story should have been in our history books, but the world barely remembers her name.

On September 15, 1963, the distance between past and present collapsed in the basement of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. A bomb exploded beneath the church steps, ripping through a space that had long been a place for organizing and for Black resistance. In 1963, Sixteenth Street was the largest Black church in Birmingham, a heartbeat of the Civil Rights Movement.

History often tells this story in a single, devastating sentence: four little girls were killed. Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley (between the ages of eleven and fourteen) lost their lives in an act of white supremacist terror. Their names are remembered, mourned, and rightly so.

What is mentioned less often is that there were five girls in that basement lounge that morning. Addie Mae’s sister, Sarah, was also there. She lived, but survival came at a cost that would follow her for the rest of her life.

Twelve-year-old Sarah Collins Rudolph was standing nearby when the bomb went off. The blast hurled shards of glass into her body, leaving her immediately blind in both eyes. Though she eventually regained partial sight in her left eye, her right eye was so severely damaged that it had to be removed and replaced with a prosthetic. Tiny fragments of glass remained embedded in her skin, even in her eye.

“If a single strand of hair got into my right eye socket, the pain was unreal,” she says, “The skin around my eye was very sore and still healing. It felt like something was cutting my eyes whenever hair or anything sensitive brushed over this area. The hair itself felt like tiny particles of glass stuck inside my eye socket all over again.”

– Mrs. Sarah Collins Rudolph

Sarah did not die in that basement, but she carried September 15, 1963, with her into adulthood, into older age, into the present we are still living in.

With no counseling or therapy, Sarah was forced to return to school as she struggled to heal, grieve the loss of her sister, and her old life. The world moved on. Dr. King spoke at the joint funeral for three of the girls, and it attracted over eight thousand people. Photographer Frank Dandridge took a picture of Sarah while she lay in the hospital, with patches over both eyes, and it was published in Life Magazine on September 27, 1963.

However, despite this searing image, Sarah Collins Rudolph and what happened to her faded from public consciousness, limiting her story to nothing more than a historical footnote.

It was only when Mrs. Rudolph herself felt compelled to share this story that the world began to learn about the part of that tragic day that had not been told before.

Today, Mrs. Rudolph is a social justice speaker, author, and activist speaking to people all over about what happened to her and why stories like hers matter.

Don’t forget we have Black History articles on this blog under Black History Fun Fact Friday and on Substack at substack.com@yecheilyah!

Yecheilyah’s Book Reviews – Chains of Gold by Ken Robb

Title: Chains of Gold: Based on the True Story of Slavery During the California Gold Rush

Author: Ken Robb

Publisher: Word Star Ink

Genre: Historical Fiction, US Historical Fiction

Published: September 22, 2025

Pages: 438 pages

The year is 1852, and Carter is shouting his freedom into the face of the law as deputies close in, threatening to drag him back to Mississippi in chains. From this moment of terror, the story retreats a couple of years back to the Perkins Plantation, where Carter is not free at all but enslaved, under the watch of a brutal overseer. It is here that Charles Perkins returns home from college to witness the abuse of his slaves.

Although Carter and Charles are half-brothers, playing side by side as boys, adulthood exposes the lie of that intimacy. One is granted power by birth; the other is denied ownership of his own body. I was struck by how powerfully the author juxtaposes affection and oppression throughout the story, illustrating how love can coexist with, and be corrupted by, slavery. Carter and Charles’ bond is no match for a system designed to break one man for the comfort of another.

Charles Perkins is the oldest to inherit the plantation. He was gifted land and slaves, and his father wants his sons to learn how to manage a plantation. Despite this, Charles is noticeably different from his brother. Rather than basking in the excitement of running his own plantation, Charles shows more compassion, doesn’t want the enslaved to be mistreated, and has dreams of going to California to find gold.

Carter is an intelligent Black man. He knows how to read despite being enslaved (something he hides), pays attention to details (especially details on slavery), carries his Bible everywhere he goes, and watches Charles’ back. He is more responsible and proves to be his brother’s keeper on more than one occasion.

While Carter yearns for true freedom, Charles is a man of his time. Despite how much grace he extends, he is still a slave master. As Charles reminisces about the beauty of the mansion and the land, recalling his father’s ambition and how hard their ancestors worked to farm and buy the land, Carter reminds him that “more land means more slaves.” He knows it was built with his family’s blood, sweat, and tears. (Robb 2025)

Though looking at the same view, the men see two different worlds. This is reflected throughout the story. While Charles’s love interest, Emmy, gives him a professional photo to remember her by, Carter’s love interest, Peg, gives him a charcoal drawing she made using a mirror.

My AI rendition of Carter and Charles

The narrative eventually follows Carter and Charles westward to California in pursuit of gold, a journey the author renders with careful attention to historical details. Rather than functioning solely as an adventure, the passage underscores the persistence of racial and social hierarchies across geographic space. In California, distance from the plantation does not translate into liberation from inherited roles. Charles’s attempts at fairness are marked by visible moral ambivalence, yet the surrounding society repeatedly reasserts the boundaries between them.

This tension is crystallized in several figures throughout the book, such as Bill, the seasoned miner, whose disapproval when Carter refers to Charles as his “master” exposes the unspoken codes governing race, power, and language. This tension resurfaces in Charles’s exchange with Fritz, who asks whether Carter is paid.

Although Charles views himself as well-intentioned, his decision not to compensate Carter—and his quiet assurance that the money would not matter to him—reveals how deeply he remains anchored in the assumptions of mastery. In this moment, Charles acts not as an equal or a brother, but as a man still shaped by the privileges of ownership.

The author does a good job of highlighting the lesser-known aspects of California’s history that are not widely taught.

Slavery and unfree labor were deeply ingrained during the Gold Rush era, despite California’s 1850 admission as a “free state” prohibiting slavery. Slaveholders brought enslaved Black people to work mines, and state laws like the 1852 Fugitive Slave Law enforced this practice. This resulted in complicated legal disputes, community resistance from free Black Californians, and the persistence of servitude until the Civil War.

The best thing about this book is that it’s based on a true story. Both the characters and the Gold Rush era are also well-researched, including the scene where Charles explains to the men how to transform the gold into banknotes. We often overlook the fact that paper money was once backed by gold, until the gold standard was removed in 1971 when Nixon ended the dollar’s convertibility to gold. This is why a dollar in 1800 had far more buying power than a dollar in 2025.

In 1850, $1 could buy what about $40 buys now.

This is a long book, so it will take some time to read. However, if you are looking for some good historical fiction, this one is well worth the time! I was eager to see what would become of the characters.

I think you will too.

Ratings

  • Plot Movement / Strength: 4/5
  • Entertainment Factor: 4/5
  • Characterization: 5/5
  • Authenticity / Believable: 5/5
  • Thought Provoking: 5/5

Overall: 5/5

Chains of Gold is Available On Amazon Here!

The Review Registry is Closed for 2025.

To Be Added to the Waitlist for 2026, please email the first chapter of your book to the email listed in our review policy with “Book Review Waitlist” in the subject line. While this does not guarantee a review, it places your book at the top of the list for consideration in the new year.

To apply for 2026, click here

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Yecheilyah’s Book Reviews is a reputable review service that features writers from around the world, including both traditionally and self-published authors. We are listed on Kindlepreneur as a top-tier book review blog and on Reedsy as one of their vetted active book blogs that provide insightful, excellent book reviews.

*Books are read in the order they are booked.

Yecheilyah’s Book Reviews -Cancer Courts My Mother by LindaAnn LoSchiavo

Title: Cancer Courts My Mother

Author: LindaAnn LoSchiavo

Publisher: Prolific Pulse Press LLC

Genre: Contemporary Poetry, Death, Grief, and Loss Poetry

Published: November 7, 2025

Pages: 40 pages

We live in a society with a rule we’re never taught, but somehow already know: you do not speak ill of your mother. Mothers are indeed sacred, but in this language, the rule is that mothers are beyond critique, beyond blame, untouchable. It means you are never to speak badly of them. Ever. Not in public. Not even to yourself. It’s not carved in stone or written on any wall, yet it hovers among us silent, expectant, immovable. Cancer Courts My Mother defies that silence.

These poems and stories peel back the polite mask to reveal the complicated, aching truth of loving a mother who has not always loved you well—and then being asked to care for the very person who once caused the hurt. It is bravery set to verse, honesty without apology, and the painful dance between resentment and devotion when illness becomes the final judge.

“Bad memories are cadavers that refuse burial. Instead of an archive of velveteen nostalgia, her name leaves gravel in my mouth.”

The title suggests that cancer is courting the mother, but more deeply, the illness is also courting the daughter who tells this story. In this piece, LoSchiavo is not only the narrator; she is the wounded child. As she tends to a woman who once sharpened every word into a blade, she is confronted with a new version of her mother: frail, softened by illness, gentled by morphine.

“Cancer helped adorn my mother with patience, her acidic breath pausing to accept the spoon that brought breakfast.”

The disease becomes an unwanted chaperone, pulling the daughter into an intimate dance between what was and what is—between the sting of old wounds and the strange tenderness of caring for the very person who caused them.

In the piece “Flash,” the author reveals how her breached birth changed everything.

“To hear my mother tell it, a respectful infant should politely slide from the womb.”

I felt sympathy for the daughter because one cannot control how they enter the world, and she articulates this with a raw truth in the lines, “eventually, I became a vegetarian, refusing to eat anything that had a mother.”

These kinds of powerful lines are all throughout the book, and you’ll want to sit wth them. While the book is a short, quick read, you wouldn’t want to rush through it. The words deserve to be savored for their deeper meaning.

While holding space for the daughter, I also felt empathy for the mother. I know from the testimony of family and friends that motherhood is no fairytale. I understand how a mother can lose herself to the point of resentment. I enjoyed balancing these two thoughts, and I love that the author gave me this opportunity.

As the Grim Reaper inches closer to claiming his prize, we can see how, despite the daughter’s feelings toward her mom, it is not without deep love, proving society wrong: We can tell the truth about mothers while loving them.

As KE Garland writes: “There are kind ways to characterize those we love, without denigrating them.”

The way this book is written conveyed the truth without judgment.

“When my mother died, she took home along with her.”

As someone who has also lost her mom to multiple illnesses, I sympathize with that powerful line, and it reminds me of a line from Nayyirah Waheed, who says, “My mother was my first country. the first place i ever lived.”

(The non-capitalization in Waheed’s lines is intentional.)

My only wish is to see this as a whole book, maybe a memoir, so we can have the entire experience. The poetry and the prose, the haikus, are all excellent, but it’s such a good story that I wanted to read some of it raw and without poetic decoration.

Ratings

  • Structure and Form: 4/5
  • Originality/Authentic Voice: 4/5
  • Creativity/Lyrical Content: 5/5
  • Thought Provoking: 5/5

Overall: 4.5/5

Cancer Courts My Mother is Available Now on Amazon!

The Review Registry is Closed for 2025.

To Be Added to the Waitlist for 2026, please email the first chapter of your book to the email listed in our review policy with “Book Review Waitlist” in the subject line. While this does not guarantee a review, it places your book at the top of the list for consideration in the new year.

To apply for 2026, click here

Up Next: Chains of Gold by Ken Robb: Based on a True Story of Slavery During the California Gold Rush

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Yecheilyah’s Book Reviews is a reputable review service that features writers from around the world, including both traditionally and self-published authors. We are listed on Kindlepreneur as a top-tier book review blog and on Reedsy as one of their vetted active book blogs that provide insightful, excellent book reviews.

*Books are read in the order they are booked.

Yecheilyah’s Book Reviews – Sick by Christa Wojciechowski

Title: Sick

Author: Christa Wojciechowski

Publisher: Blood Bound Books

Genre: Medical Thriller, Psychological Fiction

Published: October 14, 2025

Pages: 282 pages

Susan Branch is in a different kind of prison. She is a prisoner of her husband’s illnesses. From broken bones, surgeries, rashes, and medications she sometimes steals from her job as a medical clerk of a podiatrist, Susan is forced to take care of her ailing husband. John is diagnosed with Idiopathic Thrombocytopenic Purpura, a complicated blood disorder, and for Susan, “In sickness and in health” takes on a literal meaning.

“Medications to give, wounds to clean, bed pans to empty, and food to serve.” (pg. 20) Taking care of John has become Susan’s life, going to work her only reprieve before returning to a home where she is locked inside the unsanitary cell of her and John’s bedroom. 

As the story unfolds, John begins to feel less like a husband and more like a helpless child trapped in a man’s body. Susan reads to him until her voice cracks, feeds him baby food, hums lullabies meant to soothe infants, and speaks to him like a mother coaxing a toddler to behave, calling him a ‘good boy.’

John pouts, sulks, and whines when things don’t go his way, and Susan seems to shrink a little more each day, her life orbiting entirely around John’s frailty. She is no longer a wife, not even quite a woman anymore, but a nurse, a mother, a prisoner in her own home.

My version of John and Susan using Chatgpt Sora, lol.

As the story progresses, we learn more about John Branch’s history, his upbringing, and his perspective on life. Readers gain insight into how John Branche’s response to the trauma of his childhood has influenced his adult decisions. When I read this story years ago, I said he was retarded. However, this progeny of old money is not retarded at all. John is quite the mastermind and narcissist with a sophisticated way of manipulating those around him. John does not believe his actions are wrong. He thinks we are all guided by our natural instincts. Speaking of nature, the author plays well with irony and karma. 

This story is well-written and fleshed out. The more you read, the more is revealed. Just when you think you’ve figured it out, there are more layers of the onion to peel off. The author keeps you on your toes, and the more I read, the more I found myself imagining watching an episode of American Horror Story.

Psychological fiction might just be my new favorite genre. I love twists and things that make me go “Whaatt??”

There are parts of the story where I felt sorry for Susan, and parts when I didn’t. Is she a prisoner, or is she also sick? Or, as John would say, are we all just a little sick?

 

“Most of us hide it so deep within that we can convince ourselves it doesn’t exist, while it gestates like a mutant embryo. But you can detect it in everyone. You can sniff it out. You can see it in people’s eyes when they think no one is watching them. There are tells—religion, porn addiction, smoking, or something as innocent as nail biting. Anything to distract themselves from the beast slumbering inside.”

– John Branch

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Ratings

  • Plot Movement / Strength: 5/5
  • Entertainment Factor: 4/5
  • Characterization: 5/5
  • Authenticity / Believable: 5/5
  • Thought Provoking: 5/5

Overall: 5/5

Sick is Available Now on Amazon

My Review Series is Open Again for a Limited Time.

Apply here

Due to the high demand, you must apply based on the instructions provided at the link. Please do not send anything other than what is specified.

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Yecheilyah’s Book Reviews is a reputable review service that features writers from around the world, including both traditionally and independently published authors. We are listed on Kindlepreneur as a top-tier book review blog and on Reedsy as one of their vetted active book blogs that provide insightful, excellent book reviews.

*Books are read in the order they are received.

Avoiding Bad Publishing Advice

Self-publishing can be overwhelming for various reasons, including the limitless number of people who offer advice. The problem is that counsel is not universally applicable. Even the word “Bad” in the title is subjective. Who determines what is bad? Is there any advice that works for us but not for others?

Here is a quick list of things to remember as you continue your publishing journey.

Experience Levels Vary—Resist the urge to follow the advice of people who have not been where you want to go. Some advice may come from beginners who haven’t seen long-term results. For example, some people have self-published several books but have never worked with professionals.

This leads to the next point.

Beware of Personal Bias—People tend to recommend what worked for them, even if it’s not objectively the best method. Someone might tell you to publish a first draft or not to worry about editing because it is what worked for them. But one size does not fit all. What succeeded for one author may not suit your genre, audience, or goals. Remember to apply sound advice that suits you and not make emotional business decisions.

Different Goals Need Different Strategies—Be careful with advice that applies the same strategies to different goals. Your publishing route and the kind of book you write require a different publishing approach. Writing a memoir, a children’s book, or a business book each requires something different.

Outdated Strategies Circulate Often—The publishing landscape changes quickly, so not all tips stay relevant. (Even the articles I have on this website, which date back to 2016, need an upgrade.) Stick to current guidance as much as possible.

Paid Services May Drive Certain Advice—Some give advice to upsell you on courses, editing, or marketing packages. When working with service providers, discern whether a suggestion suits your goals or if it is to persuade you to buy into the service. Many vanity publishers will not care if your story makes sense or if you wrote it in two days. They will encourage you to publish that book as long as you have the money to pay, even if the manuscript is not ready.

You Can Waste Time and Money—Make sure people can show you receipts for their claims. What social proof do they have to support their advice? Remember, reading a book about swimming will not teach you how to swim. Accept advice from people who have been in the water and have done the work. Bad advice can lead to wasted money and, perhaps most importantly, time.

There are many more things to watch out for, such as advice that leads to confusion and second-guessing your decisions. Ultimately, remember that this journey is yours, and you should do what aligns best with your identity and goals. Watch out for conflicting advice that can cause your voice to get lost. Trying to mimic others too closely may make your work less authentic or original.

Need More Help? Register for Indie Korner!

Part I: WRITING WITH KE GARLAND
6/22/2025 | 2-3:00 PM (EST)

Part one is led by KE Garland, who will detail the first step to self-publishing: writing a fantastic book! In our excitement, we tend to skip this step, but no matter how you publish, you still must write something people want to read. Garland will walk us through the first draft, revisions, professional editing, choosing a genre, and everything you need to prepare your manuscript for a publisher, even if that publisher is you!

Part 2: PUBLISHING WITH YECHEILYAH
6/23/2025 | 7-8:00PM (EST)

Yecheilyah leads part two. She will explain the different forms of publishing, from traditional to vanity to hybrid to self-publishing, and why a basic understanding of them matters. She will also discuss how to avoid publishing scams and walk us through the foundational steps to get that amazing manuscript you learned how to write on day one, published at the highest professional level.

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