Adventures in Blackface and other shorts

I finally did it!! I recovered from writer's block by digging back into my archives of unused stories, and went KDP Select in the process. But as the cover says, they are "shorts," 99 cents on Kindle. And sometimes only your one of your besties will write a review for a 50-page book, even when I beat her at Words With Friends some of the time.
Thank you, Vicki.

Enjoyable, engaging, and thought-provoking read., January 18, 2015

By Vicki Aspenberg

This review is from: Adventures in Blackface: and other shorts (Paperback)

I enjoyed reading Sarah Weathersby's newest book, a group of two short stories and a poem. Her detailed and descriptive writing is engaging and thought provoking. In the central story, Adventures in Blackface, the nuances of relationships between black and white students in the 1960's was poignantly described as was the conflicted and ambivalent feelings held by both black and white students of that early period of integration on northern college campuses. The second short story, Dusty's Last Stand, is a lighter and humorous story about a dog and his master that precisely captured the setting and the personalities of the characters. It was the third piece though, a poem entitled If
I had drunk from the colored water fountain, that I was most drawn to. Beautifully written, it is moving and powerful, and brilliantly exposes a slice of experience of a black child growing up in the Jim Crow south. Sarah Weathersby, I look forward to reading more of your work and hope you are working on more poetry.

The Loss of an Old Friend

 

When Tinker and I got married in April 2002, we both had household stuff with lots of duplicates. The most problematic duplication was our collection of cordless phones. We probably had four or five different brands that you answer four or five different ways. Imagine a Chinese fire drill where we're running around trying to find the phone and then trying to answer.

The easy solution was to toss them all and buy identical new ones. So we bought a Panasonic Expandable set, with a base and three handsets. When we converted to VoIP it was easy to plug in the base, and keep going.

I regret to inform you that our trusty Panasonic DIED on us. It was slow and painful. Sunday night the base wouldn't quit beeping, but we could still make calls. By today it had flat-lined. We will miss the old joker. He gave us 13 years of service. The good news is that we set up our Vonage service to automatically transfer an unanswered call to my cellphone. The caller on the other en never notices the difference.

I wonder if I can sell the handsets on E-bay?

Under the Wide and Starry Sky

Under the Wide and Starry Sky by Nancy Horan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I have very mixed feelings about this book. As a fictionalized account of Robert Louis Stevenson's life, it captured my heart with the romantic involvement of Louis (as he was known) and Fanny, an older woman who moved with her children to Europe for their education and to get away from her philandering husband.

I was familiar with some of RLS's works, Treasure Island, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and A Child's Garden of Verses. The story covers all of those and some I have not read, but all to capture the personality and adventurous nature of RLS, his assortment of friends, associates, publishers, etc who were essential to his writing career.

What I didn't know was that he was a sickly child, and a semi-invalid for most of his adult life. And it was his wife Fanny (whom he married after her divorce) who nursed him and kept him alive.

The book is very long, in some places tedious, but I plodded through. This was a book club selection and I'm a good book club member. 

Finished reading December 2, 2014.

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