Joey Pinkney

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When I started reading this book, I was immediately intrigued with how fluid the sentences were composed and how vividly the images came off the page. I had to stop reading and google the author’s name, Francis Ray, to see why this book was so good. No wonder. With twenty novels in print, a dozen awards and various series, Francis Ray is more than a writer – she is a franchise.

Not Even If You Begged is for the “grown and sexy”in the literal sense of that phrase. I’m not talking about the cute, early twenties reader that’s lost in the club scene that says, “Ooooh, that’s my song!” to just about anything on the DJ puts on. No, this book is geared more for the mature reader whose perspective shapes their life and not the other way around.

This book focuses on the love lives of two members of “The Invincibles” women’s club - Traci Reed and Maureen Gilmore. Holding true to the title, both women have the hardest time letting love run its course, but for two very different reasons. The bad thing is that the men actually beg to love and be loved, and that’s what makes this book so good!

Maureen Gilmore is a widowed Southern Belle that owns a thriving antique shop. Although her beauty is ageless, she has a hard time being comfortable with nearing sixty. This is especially true when it comes to Simon Dunlap, a police officer who was come to fall in love with Maureen. She is equally in love. Instead of following her heart, she makes a myriad of excuses such as, her inability to have children or Simon’s ability to pursue a more fruitful relationship.

Traci is a full-figured, hard-nosed lawyer that runs her own PR firm. She married her ex-husband for all the wrong reasons. Everyone one of those reasons came back to do more than bite her in the end – and scarred her for life. Forever burdened with emotional baggage, she had the hardest time allowing Maureen’s son, OB-GYN Ryan Gilmore, into her heart for two reasons. One: she thinks she’s too plump for a man of his physique and status to desire. Two: she doesn’t believe she could ever fall in love again after giving her heart to a man who cheated on her.

The problem that both women face is the fact that love is love – uncontrollable, mysterious and consuming. Francis Ray skillfully depicts all of the nuances of the beginning of a lifelong relationship. There’s the misunderstanding, the anxiousness, the confusion, the lust…everything the reader needs to dig deep and become invested in the characters.

These two love sagas are embedded in a novel that includes a psychiatrist that stalks Ryan, a talented teen that is a budding artist but is unloved by his mother and Traci’s grandfather who is struggling to keep his land from being squandered by Traci’s mother.

Not Even If You Begged is the type of book that you read and lose track of time because of how in depth the story is.

FeMALE TRAITS by Lurea C. McFadden

“Oh! What a tangled web we weave
When first we practice to deceive!”
Sir Walter Scott
from Marmion, Verse 6, Stanza 17

This famous quote is played out in Lurea McFadden’s debut novel, FeMALE TRAITS. Grace Trufant is married to the man most women dream of. Edwin is tall, dark and handsome. He worships the ground Grace walks on and is willing to provide for her every whim and need. Unfortunately for Edwin, he is gullible and Grace has an itch that he can’t scratch…alone.

The cheating-spouse-getting-caught-in-an-extra-marital-affair saga has been told many times before, but FeMALE TRAITS puts an interesting spin on that theme.

Grace is a formidable combination: a seasoned player, a sex addict, a forward-thinking liar…and a female. Grace’s lust for sexual encounters with other men outweighs her conscience, so she stays on the prowl and fabricates lies to stay one step ahead of both her husband and her lover. The once smooth road of infidelity gets bumpy, and Grace finds herself struggling to keep her secret lifestyle from getting the best of her.

Brian Lawson starts pressuring Grace to commit to him and end her six-year marriage to Edwin. Brian is young, handsome and attractive. He even considers himself to be a player and has his pick of women. But he meets his match in Grace and does the one thing all players think will never happen - fall in love. Will he move up in status or move on?

Edwin’s best friend is Sonia James, a Latina sister that truly has Edwin’s best interests at heart. She’s been down since they were in elementary school. To Grace’s dismay, Edwin and Sonia as close as a man and a woman can get without being intimate or married.

Women’s intuition keeps Grace in Sonia’s thoughts. Although she secretly fell in love with Edwin, she remains true to their friendship. Plus, she’s dealing with her inability to commit to Phil, a man who truly loves her but can’t keep her interest.

When mutual friends of Brian and Sonia unknowingly brings everyone together at a birthday/holiday party, everything comes to a head.

Lies are exposed…

Truths come to light…

And relationships are put to the test…

The rest of the story (and there is much, much more)! is yours to read. Enjoy.

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From the poem Writing Magic:

Some writers choose just a scant few
to say a lifetime of feelings,While other writers
gather thousands of words in a book
to paint a few days of one life…

Animated Objects is Linda D. Addison’s debut offering. This is a mesmerizing mixture of poetry and short stories, fables and science fiction, enchanting fantasies and harsh realities. It will take you on a journey and touch you in places long forgotten or never experienced.

What makes this collection such a treasure is that Addison is such a skillful writer. She is able to be true to herself and her art form while turning the reader’s interpretation into participation. Her words can be as gentle as a mother’s hand, as sharp as a razor, as rough as a nail file and as blunt as a hammer.

This book has something for everybody without that being its purpose. A perfect example of the universal appeal of Animated Objects is the inclusion of bits and pieces of her personal journals that encompass twenty-seven years of of hopes, trials and disasters.

Reading those snippets let’s you see that which is usually hidden from the reader. You get to look past the writer as a person and instead get to look at the person as a writer. You get to peer into her world in a way that’s as cryptic as the light of her Night Bird yet as forthcoming as the birth of one child and the miscarriage of another.

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Torn follows the bittersweet relationship between lovestruck Mo and eternal-playboy Quan. The line between right and wrong in their relationship is hazy because Mo and Quan have invested nearly a decade of love, time and money in each other. Although the fruits of Quan’s hustling is visible in the expensive house, cars and clothes, Mo would trade it all for a true bond of love from his heart to hers.

Mo’s father and her friends, Quan’s mother, and even Mo’s own intuition tell her to move on, but her desire for Quan controls her actions. Quan, on the other hand, knows he isn’t right, yet explodes at the very thought of Mo possibly being unfaithful. Their relationship is simultaneously passionate and pathetic, keeping you absorbed page after page. While they are saying “Yes, yes, yes!”, you will be cringing and saying, “No, no, no!” When you add baby-momma-drama, shady friends and other love interests, Mo and Quan are forced to make life-changing decisions that will test whether or not they are soul mates.

Keisha Ervin’s latest spin on love, life and lies is nothing less than incredible. Torn is street literature in its finest form. Keisha Ervin has written a story transcends its environment. Gunshots, crackheads and drug lords have been replaced with the sleepless nights, the phone calls that need to be taken in private and heart-to-heart advice that may hit home for some of the readers. There is even guest appearances by sisters Mina and Meesa, from Keisha Ervins’s National Best Selling Novels Mina’s Joint and Me & My Boyfriend respectively.

Keisha Ervin’s Torn has added on to her remarkable repertoire and is a yet another Best Seller in the making, following Chyna Black, Me & My Boyfriend, Mina’s Joint and Hold U Down. If you came across “After The Storm” in Triple Crown’s second anthology Street Love, Torn is the breathtaking expansion on that short story. This is not book for quick consumption like an item off the dollar menu. Instead, this book is full of substance, a tale that you will not mind taking time to read and digest.

Queen is the debut novel from one of Triple Crown Publications’ newest authors, Cynthia White. The namesake of this alluring novel is daddy’s little girl. Queen’s daddy just happens to be Hershey Aaron, the Boss of St. Louis’ most powerful organization, the Black Mafia.

The murder of her unfaithful mother sends Hershey to death row and Queen’s life on a tailspin full of lovers, killers and high-priced shopping sprees. Her striking beauty and intelligence are matched by her determination to keep alive the empire her father founded. But Queen is a teenager, exploring both her sexuality and her desire to love and be loved. The fine line that separates right from wrong is definitely blurred. What’s a teenage daughter of a boss to do?

Queen must deal with cops trying to shut down her father’s operation, various men vying for the opportunity to be her king, rival organizations on the come up, and her not wanting to turn into the deceased mother she despised. One thing is definitely true about this book. If you have to put it down for whatever reason, rest assured that something new and unexpected will develop when you start reading again.

Murder, sex and lies…these are the things that Queen must navigate through in order to survive. Love, life and liberty…these are the things that Queen slowly begins to realize are much more valuable. From manslaughter to motherhood, Queen struggles to make sense of the unyielding pace of her life.

Cynthia White has set the bar high for her future endeavors. This quality piece of street literature has aligned this new recruit with some of Triple Crown Publications’ veteran squad in terms of talent. Full of high fashion, expensive jewelry, unorthodox plot twists, arousing sexual encounters and quality characters, Queen may be seen as a street lit classic in the future.

I knew it had to happen eventually. I mean, the realness I write is just too much for the mainstream to digest. Just kidding…

Well, I usually post the my reviews on Amazon.com within 48 hours of submitting them to the websites I review for. So I sat for a couple of days after I posted the review on Amazon.com and noticed that my review for Crave All Lose All never showed up.

So I emailed Amazon.com’s customer service like, “What’s up?!”

Actually, I wrote this:

I submitted a review for Crave All Lose All by Erick S
Gray that has yet to post. What do I need to do to make sure my review is posted?

Here’s what they told me:

Thank you for writing to Amazon.com.

Your review of “Crave All Lose All” was removed because your comments in large part focused on authors and their intentions, rather than reviewing the item itself.

Our guidelines do not allow discussions that criticize authors or their intentions. We encourage all voices to respond openly in our store, both positive and negative. However, we do exert some editorial control over our customer reviews.

As such, your review cannot be posted on Amazon.com in its current format. What I can suggest is that you resubmit your review, restricting your comments to critically analyzing the content of the item.

After that was a bunch of blah, blah, blah about reading guidelines, forum discussions and something about if I got an attitude then I could delete my reviews and take them elsewhere. Okay…it didn’t go that far, but I felt slighted.

The nerve!

Oh yeah, I changed some stuff around with the original review, condensed it and resubmitted it. Hopefully it will go through this time. I’ll keep you posted.

(While I’m on the subject, could just one person find one of my reviews on Amazon.com and click yes or no where it asks if the review was helpful or not? I mean, Crave All Lose All will be my 14th review on Amazon.com without anyone giving me any kind of flavor!)

UPDATE 05-14-08

I checked this morning just to be looking and the review I put together by reconfiguring the Crave All Lose All review I did for UrbanBookSource.com. That’s the original that got banned for talking more about the author’s intentions that the book itself. What?!

One thing that rings true with Urban Lit, Street Lit or Urban Fiction (whatever you like to call it) is the fact that there is a strong female aspect to the movement. African American females are well represented in Urban Fiction’s readership and authorship. I would even go so far as to say that most of the readers of this genre are African American females.

Why is that important? Because it is Mother’s Day, of course.

I’d like to take the time to do something special, and unique, and give a Happy Mother’s Day shout-out to three easily identifiable mother’s of urban lit as we know it today.

Sister Souljah, author of The Coldest Winter Ever

Sister Souljah is the perfect example of a person that was meant to be somebody. Look her up on wikipedia to see what I mean. The Coldest Winter Ever is often cited as the novel which inspired many of the established authors of the Urban Fiction genre. Sold out of the trunk of Sister Souljah’s car, this novel went on to be a bestselling classic and street certified.

A sequel to The Coldest Winter Ever is supposed to be released October 18, 2008 entitled Midnight: A Gangster Love Story. Sister Souljah and Jada Pinkett-Smith are in the process of producing a movie version of The Coldest Winter Ever.

Teri Woods, author of True to the Game

Can you believe that True to the Game was turned down? Yes, and it sat in her closet for two years before Teri decided to pump it out the trunk of her car. The realism of this Urban Fiction classic showed future urban fiction authors that they could also put their stories out there and make things happen. Teri Woods is not only a respected author but also a respected publisher releasing quality urban fiction titles on a regular basis.

Vickie Stringer, author of Let That Be the Reason (Triple Crown Publications Presents)

Her publishing company is locally known and internationally respected! Vickie Stringer jumped into the book publishing industry with her debut novel Let That Be The Reason. She later started her own publishing house, Triple Crown Publications, and has literally taken control of Urban Literature.

Turned down by 26 publishers, Vickie has been offered as much as $3 million to sale the flagship of Hip Hop Lit, Triple Crown Publications.

On the heels of my last post, this is the same thing in reverse.

Instead of lumping everything together because of a common denominator, black authors, Simmons Teen Reading writes about a librarian urging her colleagues keeping urban lit separated from the other books in the young adult section. I have to agree with the librarian. Better yet, I have a question for the librarian: Why would you put these books in the Young Reader’s section, anyway?

I wouldn’t dare let anyone under 18 openly have some of the books I come across. But then again, I wouldn’t suggest some of the music and movies that a lot of the youth have access to. Sex, drugs and violence shouldn’t be standard fare for a teenager’s reading supply.

Then, on top of that, why would the urban lit be in the kid’s section anyway? Like I said above, all of the urban lit I’ve read was absolutely adult in nature.

So to Simmons: Yeah, but naaaaah…

Christopher Chambers writes about the “blacks only” section popping up in many bookstores and supermarts. In his quest for Matt Johnson’s graphic novel Incognegro, he’s directed to the “black section”. Mixed in with the urban fiction is other classics like Richard Wright’s Native Son and Dorothy West’s The Wedding. ( must admit that I’ve only heard of and read Native Son.)

His frustration came from the fact that African American authors and pushed into one section regardless of genre, time period or quality of writing. This is how I feed about it. Until these big corporations start to care about black authors as authors, as opposed to African American authors, we can’t expect for them to include African American authors with the other “greats”.

But to be mad about the success of urban lit is…typical, yet natural. Urban lit follows the same pattern that other forms of entertainment in black America have taken. The best and most recent example would be hip hop. Black artists were making music that their people liked. Not every black person was down, but that wasn’t the point.

The point was that hip hop wasn’t tailor made for mainstream consumption.That didn’t stop the music from being made in makeshift studios. That didn’t stop the music from being sold out of the trunks of cars. That didn’t stop the music from finally making it mainstream. That also didn’t stop the music from being raped just like the jazz, blues and rock n’ roll that came before it.

And just like hip hop, urban fiction writer’s hustled their way into prominence. While the corporations swooped in to make some money from the trend, black writer’s of other genres tend to feel slighted and in return attack.

It makes me wonder if there is some literary Willie Lynch that held a big publishing event somewhere overseas. I bet it’s in a book. (Because we don’t read, right…) Pit the new African American writers against the old African American writers. Pit the intellectuals against the uneducated. Pit urban lit against African American romance…

Lori Johnson shared an interesting aspect of reader feedback about the sex in her novel After The Dance. Two distinct groups: those that wanted more, those that thought it was too much. Although sex sells, that wasn’t the focus of her book. Her take on the whole matter is this: adults read what they want to read, sex or no sex.

In her eyes, a lot of today’s urban lit is little more than porn with a loose plot thrown in for good measure… As a book reviewer that reads a lot of urban lit, I can see where she’s coming from. If you can’t see past the sex, drugs and violence to stories of how temptation, corruption and being a victim of circumstance can affect a person…the sex scenes stand out as explicit.

But it is what it is. Porn to some, reality to others.

I’m going to start reading Lori’s blog because she is the first author that I’ve come across that is from North Carolina. Plus After The Dance is set in Memphis, where I was born and raised. Plus Shelia Goss commented on her post. (She’s one of my literary sheroes.)