A Love Affair with Book

It happens so often.

We have a love affair with a book.

It’s even better when it is a series. I felt this way about The Hunger Games, Scythe series, and Peculiar Children. Last summer, I read through Born Survivors and other books about the Holocaust.

For a long time, I continued to read. I wrote to get through some deep stuff. Stuff that connected to my memoir.

I think my memoir is still worth writing whether I write the poems around it or the book itself, but as I return to myself and fill out my skin again, I feel like a part of myself has returned. It’s as if it’s been on a trip somewhere, and this piece finally comes home.

Children of Blood and Bone, heck, Tomi Adeyemi’s writing, pumps life into my writer’s heart again.

When I read, I fill up a part of my soul. I will write a lot about Tomi Adeyemi’s books Children of Blood and Bone and Children of Vengeance and Virtue because they redirected my spirit towards the fiction I missed writing.

I rolled my eyes when the character, Inan, made his dick move in Children of Blood and Bone, and I remember how hard is it to make decisive decision at eighteen? Sure, it’s not like he’s choosing colleges.

I felt Zeile’s pain in the second book, but felt it took a long time for her to look up and see the people she still had around her who loved her.

When I saw Adeyemi had named a character Amari, my heart dropped. I read it meant “eternally lovely,” and it brought tears to my eyes. The character had an innocence the student I taught for two years was not afforded.

My Amari came in my classroom almost every day for two years. Sometimes she was scared to let me get too close, but she always wanted to be close enough.

When I read Children of Blood and Bones, I felt the pain of the characters, the frustration with why people hate others, and the students I taught for two years.

A teacher I worked with said that she thought my experience at my former school would probably play a larger role in my journey than I realized. While she referred to my journey as a teacher, I see it exposed in my writing. I feel it in Children of Blood and Bones and its sequel.

I could not stay.

Over the summer, poetry poured out of me. I reached a point after I wrote and edited them when I decided I did not want to write anymore for a while.

I left it.

I felt a tug at my heart as I finished Children of Blood and Vengeance today.

What the book gave me was the willpower to pull out my novel I wrote over eight years and have abandoned since 2012, Sons of the Edisto, and see a way to completely upgrade it with a more powerful message than what I originally wrote.

Our differences should not define us.

Our differences should cause us to embrace each other.

I’m dealing with my Adeyemi hangover. I’m probably going to read both books again, and write a review. I liked the first book better than the first.

But, it was the pair of them that caused me to write my fiction again.