bahareads's reviews
1065 reviews

I read The Great Divide as an audiobook. It covers multiple POVs to give a holistic viewpoint of the Panama Canal. My favorite was Ada. I see the historical threads that Henriquez pulled to get her story together. I wished all of them did not have happy endings. I wanted more realism to shine through in the story.

A great novel about the history of Puerto Rico, Hawaii and migration. I loved it. I listened to it on audiobook. It was hard to keep track of the characters in the beginning but once the book got started up it was fantastic.

The Comforts of Home is a history of prostitution in British colonial Africa, and Luise White writes a study of political economy focused on women’s words. Hense White is mainly concerned with sex and money. She investigates the labour processes of prostitution that uncover the ‘two sides of prostitution,’ which focuses on what prostitutes did with their customers and what they did with their earnings.

The book challenges the conventional notions of prostitution as merely a symbol of degradation and instead presents it as a complex interplay of labour, gender, and colonial dynamics. The interactions between class and kin, family and farm, and migrants and housing are laid out by White as concerns that any historian of 20th-century Kenya should be investigating. Her analysis spans the early 20th century to the post-World War II period, revealing how prostitution intertwined in the socio-economic processes in colonial Nairobi.

White challenges the traditional framework of feminist scholarship about prostitution that emphasises hierarchy and deviance. By de-centering the state and men’s domination over women who engaged in prostitution White moves away from showing women as passive subjects. Instead, she shows the active roles and agency of these women.

White shows that prostitution must be looked at on a spectrum. There are different forms of prostitution in the world, and in colonial Kenya there were three forms; ‘watembezi’ (streetwalking), ‘malaya’ (proper prostitutes), and ‘wazi-wazi’ (women who 'entice' men outside their rooms). The book argues there was a complex spectrum of experiences rather than the binary the current literature offers. White challenges romanticised notions of prostitution, showing that the approval of Malaya women by their community is more complex. There were pitfalls and benefits to all of the three forms of prostitution performed in Nairobi.

The rise and fall of pimps in the literature is also discussed, and how the absence of pimps in Keyna allowed prostitutes to retain control over their earnings and form intimate relationships with their customers. She outlines how colonial policies such as the contagious diseases ordinances were designed to control sexually transmitted infections by making prostitutes do regular medical examinations. In turn, these policies granted a degree of legitimacy to the profession as registered prostitutes were seen as less of a public health risk. The regulation allows for records of prostitutes to appear in the archive but imposes a colonial gaze that historians have to navigate through.

The Comfort of Home was a well-researched study that challenged views and prevailing narratives of prostitution at the time of its publication. Through her work, White highlights the agency of women in colonial Nairobi, their strategies for economic survival, and the complex interplay of gender, labour, and colonialism. Her work underscores the importance of incorporating the voices and experiences of marginalized women in historical scholarship, offering a more comprehensive and humanizing portrayal of their lives and labour.

From Africa to The Bahamas looks at the movement, forced or otherwise, from African people to The Bahamas. Lawor uses Colonial Office Roecrds, maps and plans, first-hand narratives, newspapers, and a lot of secondary sources for his book. There are several helpful charts and graphs that allow readers to visualize the numbers and population density. FATTB is a small and quick read. Lawor starts with a look at African history and civilization growth to give background before focusing on The Bahamas. The chapters span looking at African history and civilization, the growth of the Black and Coloured population, the fates of enslaved from slave ships, Liberated Africans to Sierra Leone and Cuba, and Settlements after Emancipation. The demographics of liberated Africans brought to The Bahamas are heart-wrenching, while also informative. 

Lawor;'s work gives good information while also whetting the appetite for more deeper and in-depth works on topics like African cultural practices post-emapnication, and the dynamics between different African ethnic groups, among other things.

Normally I do not vibe with generational sagas but HOMEGOING OH BOY!! Yaa Gyasi did the damn thing. I enjoyed Homegoing so much. Her writing makes each point of view so distinct and memorable, not all are loveable but all of them are memorable.

The history work was *Chef's Kiss.* The research done to create such a novel was fantastic. It showcases the lines of origin so well, which is something that we talk about in class with books regarding slavery. Enslaved people can have their African persons wiped like a clean slate off the slave ship but with Homegoing readers can see the connection back to the ancestors perfectly, even if the characters themselves do not know.

I enjoy how we got both men's and women's POVs throughout the book. Each point of view gives us just enough about the character before moving on to the next one. I also enjoyed the abruptness of each switch. Homegoing could almost be classified as a group of short stories but I think if it was a group of short stories it would not hit the readers quite the same.

The stories are heavy. There were times I could only make it through one POV before I had to take a break. I cried off and on throughout the book, depending on the storyline.

The fact that Homegoing is a debut novel, makes me want to pick up Gyasi's other work. There's a lot more to say but I cannot find the words. Go read the book!

Saheed Aderinto is concerned with the sexual and national politics in Nigeria. Delving into the idea of 'dangerous sexuality’ and how it intersects with the broader issues of colonial progress and civilisation, the time frame for the study is from the beginning of the 20th century to 1958, when the age of consent in Nigeria was raised from 13 years old to 16 years old (20). Aderinto says “Prostitution is not just about the secret ‘sinful’ affairs between consenting adults of sexual exploitation of underage girls. It was about nation-building."

Aderinto emphasises that historians should place sex in Nigerian colonial encounters and more imperatively he encourages those specializing in other colonial sites to rethink existing approaches to the story of prostitution. In the histography, there is a gap in the present literature, at the time of the publication of this book. There was no book-length study on any Anglophone West African country in the colonial era when Aderinto started writing his work (24). There was and still is silence on the topic to uncover. To create a framework for how to approach and think about prostitution in colonial Nigeria, Adertino turned to other literature on sexuality in other regions of the British Empire. Besides the historiography in other British colonies, Aderinto was inspired by Luisa White’s early work, The Comforts of Home.

In When Sex Threatened the State, Aderinto moves beyond mentioning race and sex to show how the matters manifested in the day-to-day interactions between colonizer and colonized. It demonstrates the history of sexuality in Nigeria could have taken a completely different turn without the colonists’ rigid construction of prostitution, positing it as a moral crime for Nigerians and a threat to the White colonizers.

Saheed Aderinto is writing sexuality into Nigeria’s past. He shows the deep analyses around the ideological line of sex and perversion by numerous groups and historical individuals along multiple social, racial, and power divides at various levels including the local, regional, and international.

The three-pronged argument that follows throughout the whole book is that first, sexuality as a component of human behaviour cannot be understood in isolation from wider historical processes; second, the age of females who practised prostitution played a significant role in moulding the perception and institutional attention towards sex work, exemplifying the constructed difference between child and adult sexualities and lastly, the intersection between sexuality nationalism in Africa is far more complex than the present literature would suggest. ). Overall Saheed Aderinto accomplishes what he sets out to do with When Sex Threatened the State.

I read Babel as a buddy read! This is my second Kuang book.

I read Babel over about three months. It was stop and go because I wanted to sit what I was reading. Kuang's writing is so tangible. Readers will feel like they're at Babel. The vibes reminded me of Leigh Bardugo's Ninth House. The plot unfolds very well for the first 150 pages of the book. Certain events create drama and suspense but it is not until the last 200 to 150 pages of the book that the pace of the plot picks up to a runaway freight train. I ATE UP the stylistic choice of footnotes in the book. The Historian in me was geeking.

Kuang's themes are overt and constant. Readers may feel like they are being hit over the head with colonization, what it means to be colonized, and how colonized people feel in their colonized state; but that dear gentle reader is the entire point. Readers know what it is like to be a half-white, half-Chinese boy turned man or a Black young woman or an Indian young man pushing boundaries in spaces where you are only tolerated for your skills.

The dynamic between Letty, Victorie, Ramy, and Robin was fascinating. The levels between friendship and romance, jealousy and familial love are all bound up together. They do not get sorted out, even at the end of the book. There are hints of queer love here and there that are not explicitly spoken upon. Letty got on my nerves with her inability to try to understand her peers. She does not seek to try to understand them at all, instead placing them inside her shoes but never the reverse. She cannot admit when she is wrong. However Letty is also unable to see all the micro-aggressions her friends face because she is not trained to see them.

(obviously) Language is a big theme in the book. All the white/native English speakers see other languages and the people who speak those languages as interchangeable. Professor Lovell sees English as the superior language above all others. They see the English upbringing as better than others, which is why Lovell “creates” his own personal Chinese translators and takes them back to England. Kuang has so many sprinkled instances of racism throughout the plot it can be overwhelming. The reason why Victoire can’t study West African languages is an extremely layered example.

Professor Lovell's character growth towards the end of the book is wild. It makes me think that Kuang wanted to (finally) give depth to his character while allowing Lovell to assuage his guilt about being a terrible guardian. Lovell hoped that Robin would be only an extension of him and his Englishness, leaving the Chinese language to be the only thing from Robin's mother.

The ending had me in shock!! I enjoyed that we were able to see another point of view at the end. I wanted to cry though. In some ways, it makes one feel hopeless about situations like the ones that are being addressed in the book.

I found the stylistic choice of never letting readers know Robin or his mother's Chinese names very intriguing. I wonder why Kuang did it.

li Hazelwood has written a book out of my 14-year-old Wattpad-loving dreams. Werewolves and Vampires in an enemies-to-lovers book, ugh! The plot was very tight in the beginning, it drags in the middle and gets predictable by the end. I read Bride on audiobook with a fantastic narrator.

I enjoyed the romance and the romantic scenes between Misery and Lowe. But knotting?!? That's the worst werewolf stereotype out there in the ether. The worldbuilding had me wanting more, it made me want more books in this fantasy world. Misery is very naive which starts to get annoying towards the middle and end of the book. Lowe is a semi-dick head. It was clear from the beginning that Lowe was her mate, like OH SO CLEAR. I wanted more tension on that aspect, though we know that Lowe and Misery are the main characters. Also ONCE AGAIN Misery is just so damn naive. The side characters did what they needed to do in this book.

The mystery aspect of the book is part of what makes it drag. Misery finds out nothing about Serena for months and months yet it is all she talks about it in the book. I wanted a clue or something, Hazelwood should have thrown readers a bone instead of going from 0 to 100 at the end.

uly 2024
Cress is was a nice audiobook to put on in the car. Cress is my least favourite out of the main character group. I hate insta-love in books.
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May 2015
It was a little long for me. In the middle it started to get bit boring-ish but end was on point. I can't wait for Winter.

Real Americans is a family saga that spans three generations of a family. It follows Lily, Nick, and Mei or mother, son, and grandmother respectively. The writing was compelling and the story keeps you reading. This was GoodVibesBites&Brews Book Club Read and it was highly enjoyable. Generally, I do not like family sagas but Real Americans hit the spot. There is a lot to unpack as Khong tackles multiple topics with her book; there were so many we could not even talk about them all at book club.

My favourite POV was either Lily or Mei. I think Nick was ungrateful the older he got and that made me dislike his character towards the end of the book. I enjoyed Mei's perspective because I liked reading about what it was like to grow up during the Cultural Revolution in China. Each of the characters has a distinct voice that causes the plot to unweave itself until the reader has a full understanding of the actions of the characters.

I do think the genre of the book changed as the plot went along. It went from being literary fiction to science fiction.