Blog Tour--T. J. Young and the Orishas: The Gatekeeper's Staff (Book 1)

T. J. Young and the Orishas: The Gatekeeper's Staff  is book one of a series by Antoine Bandele.  I was delighted to be chosen for the blog tour by Shealea of Caffeine Book Tours.  As I've said elsewhere on this blog,  I consider myself a student of all religions including the Orisha religions.  The Orishas are worshiped in a number of Caribbean spiritual paths as well as in Brazil. 

 I do have to say that the last time I mentioned the Orishas on this blog was in 2018 when I reviewed The Black God's Drums by P. Djèlí Clark here.

                                       

The figure on the cover looks like he could be a teen-age image of the Orisha known as Olokun who is supposed to have been chained under the sea.  There are chains surrounding this underwater figure. Yet the novel is called The Gatekeeper's Staff.  The Orisha of doors and gates is Eshu who is as prominent in this novel as Olokun.  

There are a number of other Orishas who are mentioned in this book including a few who I needed to look up on Wikipedia because I wasn't familiar with them.

One of the Orishas that I needed to look up was Olosa, the Orisha of lagoons.  Some say that Olosa's messenger is an alligator and others that it's a crocodile. There are differences between alligators and crocodiles that aren't particularly relevant to this review.

I took author Antoine Bandele's quiz about which Orisha I'm aligned with.  The quiz can be found on Bandele's website here . My quiz result was that I'm aligned with Orunmila, the Orisha of wisdom according to Bandele.  Others believe that the Orisha of wisdom is Obatala.  See this You Tube video here. 

I went along with Bandele's idea that his adolescent protagonist, T.J., was himself a new Orisha.  Some readers might find this view problematic or incomprehensible.  The concept that there are new Orishas, or that a human being could be an Orisha would be unthinkable in certain spiritual approaches.

I enjoyed  reading The Gatekeeper's Staff.  It is my hope that T. J. Young and the Orishas will be a long and successful series.

                              

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Good Kill: A School Shooter Is Terminated

 I learned whodunit fairly early on in A Good Kill by John McMahon, but the story is mainly about the man who took the killer down and how his action impacted him.  I received a copy of A Good Kill from publicist Wiley Saichek.  He requested that I review it.

 

                                

 The protagonist is  Police Detective Paul T. Marsh, but he is called P.T. by the overwhelming majority of the characters.   This is the third book in the P. T. Marsh series, but it's the first that I've read. I didn't have any preconceptions about P.T. when I began this book.  Other reviews say that P.T. is obsessed by the death of his wife and son.  I thought he had every right to be obsessed by that particular crime, and that his ability to become obsessed with his work was what made him such a good detective.  He  follows up on every bit of evidence. 

There's a substantial amount of content about guns in A Good Kill. In fact, a major plot strand involves the bleeding edge of gun technology.  I found the gun tech aspect fascinating. I could see how some advanced guns would pose a tremendous challenge to law enforcement.

My main quibble with A Good Kill is that it didn't feel like it really took place in Georgia.   I don't recall any vivid location details that could have given this novel a sense of place. It might easily have been set in a major metropolitan area like Los Angeles or New York City.

 A Good Kill had a suspenseful plot.  I raced through it.  I hope I will have another opportunity to read another P.T. Marsh novel in the future.

 

                               

                                 

Do Better: Can A White Reviewer Steer Clear of White Supremacy?

 Black author Rachel Ricketts believes that whites are too enmired in systematic white supremacy to steer clear of it.  Maybe I can't, but I'm going to try my best in my review of  Do Better by Rachel Ricketts.

               

When Rachel Ricketts was a child, she tried out for the role of Snow White because it was the school play.  Instead they gave her the role of the Witch's black cat which was a racist thing to do.  She was also condemned for running while black.  I had the experience of being chased off the track in high school because the track team needed it for practice.  This was in the early 1970's.  There was no girls' track team.  So I was running on the track while female. Such a scandal!  The boys' track team thought I was trespassing on their territory.  I never ran again. 

The kind of friendship commitment problems that Ricketts had with some of her white friends, were issues that I also had with some of my friends.  I decided that they must define friendship differently than I did.  I believe that people in my life who think friendship doesn't involve commitments, must be considered acquaintances instead of friends.   

Ricketts points out that I and other white readers haven't been victims of white supremacy.  True, but I have experienced anti-semitism. The first time I was six years old.  The younger sister of a friend told me I killed Jesus.  I ran home in tears.  

In Ricketts' definition of racial justice she says that it requires getting rid of white supremacy.  So it seems to me that she considers racial justice an ideal that has never been achieved.  I would say that when you consider the centuries of harm that white people have perpetrated, it would probably take centuries of positive acts to balance the scale.

When I look back at 2021, I expect to consider Do Better to be the best book I've read this year.  My criterion for non-fiction is how much I've learned from the book and I think I've learned more from this book than any other.  It  caused me to reflect a great deal about racism, and how I personally could have caused harm unknowingly.