RWL February 2023 - Gathering at Poet's Corner Hope Gardens
We did it! We found Poet’s Corner at Hope Gardens and we think this may be our little spot from now on.
On February 5th, the members of our bibliotherapy community gathered at Poet’s Corner in Hope Gardens to celebrate Rebel Women Lit's anniversary and our journey towards self-love. It was a day of cake, cookies, cotton candy, and most importantly, an opportunity to reflect on the growth we’ve experienced on this journey.
For the months of January and February, we read "30 Things I Love About Myself" by Radhika Sanghani. During our meetup, we took inspiration from the book and started our own lists of 30 things we loved about ourselves. It was a wonderful experience to witness some members surpassing 30, while others had only a few. Regardless of the number, it was evident that the journey towards self-love is a unique and personal one.
As we continue our journey, we look forward to meeting for our online book club on March 5th on Google Meet. You can RSVP to attend our upcoming book club. We will be reading Nina's story, and it's an opportunity for us to reflect on our own experiences of self-love and our place in the universe.
Our bibliotherapy community is a space that allows us to grow in self-love and self-awareness. It's a journey we embark on together and with each passing day, we become more confident in our abilities and more accepting of ourselves.
RWL Readers' Retreat - Holywell Park
Rebel Women Lit’s June Readers’ Retreat to Holywell Park, St. Andrew
Photos from our June 2021 readers’ retreat to Holywell Park.
📸: Nelly Taylor
All About Love by bell hooks: Bookstagram Template
Perhaps the best online pandemic trend is all the new bookstagram accounts popping up, here are some templates for this month’s book club meetup.
We’re back with Bookstagram & Twitter fleets review templates
Bookstagram Templates
Get more book(ish) digital downloads by becoming a Rebel Women Lit member
About Rebel Women Lit
Rebel Women Lit is an open book club, turned literary community, based in Jamaica. We focus on stories from women, non-binary persons, queer persons, and other voices that have been traditionally marginalised in publishing. Yes, everything we do is political and deliberate. We have a podcast, book store, free community library, youtube channel and a few awesome projects.
The Confessions of Frannie Langton Review + Tea with Sara Collins on our Podcast
We review the Confessions of Frannie Langton and chat with Sara Collins, on Like A Real Book Club.
In The Confessions of Frannie Langton, Frannie shares her story of being formerly enslaved in Jamaica, who is then brought to England as an (under) employed servant, becomes a dominatrix sex worker, and later accused of murdering her employers.
Sis goes through a lot...
Everyone in book club was a little hesitant to start this book because the marketing focused on it being a slave narrative, an Lorde knows we can’t all handle the trauma that tends to come from books about slavery. But by in the first couple of pages, Frannie won us over convincing us that we’ve never read a book like this before.
“This is a story of love, not just murder, though I know that’s not the kind of story you’re expecting. In truth, no one expects any kind of story from a woman like me. No doubt you think this will be one of those slave histories, all sugared over with misery and despair. But who’d want to read one of those? No, this is my account of myself and my own life and the happiness that came to it, which was not a thing I thought I’d ever be allowed, the happiness or the account.”
Excerpt From: Sara Collins. “The Confessions of Frannie Langton.”
The book does indeed highlight slavery through the stories of experiments done on Caribbean plantations in the name of “science”, the motivations of white abolitionists, and other themes that we don’t see in best selling books based in the 19th Century England that are still on our CXC syllabus cough cough Jane Austen. Perhaps one of the best things about The Confessions of Frannie Langton is that it doesn’t throw historical records in our faces, instead, Sara Collins subtly shows how slavery built the UK’s wealth and how many people living in the UK never had to think about it when they asked for someone to “pass the sugar”.
At the start of book club a few people acknowledged that they stayed up all night reading the book, and Candiese even did a speed-read through the last few pages just before the meeting so she could talk about it! 🤣
Kristina summed up a lot of our feelings about being introduced to Frannie and Frannie’s drive to tell her own story.
The style of The Confessions of Frannie Langton is something we also admired for its very poetic and metaphorical language. In the book “scientists” try to find reasons for treating black people as sub-human, whereas Frannie uses logic and her hunger for knowledge to discover more about her humanity and the brutal ironies of abolitionists and slave-owners alike.
“It is impossible to be both black and a woman. Did you know that? No one was asking me to give any lectures. They allow some blacks to impress them. Men like Sancho, Equiano … Yet I fail to see what was so impressive about them. They wrote, yes. But thousands could, if someone would bother to teach them. And everything they wrote was written for whites. Petitions. Appeals. It’s another of this world’s laws. Blacks will write only about suffering, and only for white people, as if our purpose here is to change their minds.”
Excerpt From: Sara Collins. “The Confessions of Frannie Langton.”
Finally, the sex… oh the sex. No one saw The School House scenes coming and we couldn’t have predicted how thought-provoking it would’ve been to see 19th-century dominatrix black women in London. This spurred a lot of discussions about the politics of sex and how trauma can make its way into sex and sex work.
(No videos on that, go read the book! lol)
Another thing we really admired about the book was the intense that went into it. So much so that Natasha put together a playlist featuring all of Sara’s youtube videos talking about the research for the book.
There were a few things we wished were included in the book, particularly more about Paradise, Montego-Bay and more interactions between Frannie and other black people.
We got a chance to interview Sara Collins about her debut novel in our podcast Like A Real Book Club, and without even mentioning that we wanted to see more of Paradise, she brought up why she chose to tell the story the way she did.
Bonus: She talks about her upcoming sophomore novel.
And, in case you missed it, we also did our Like A Real Book Club podcast meetup to talk about this book in more details about the book and its plot.
We highly recommend reading this book and we guarantee it’s unlike any story you’ve read and we’re happy that it’s being adapted into a television series.
Subscribe to our podcast: Like A Real Book Club
And follow us on Twitter and Instagram
See You At Book Club!
7 Books You Should Read Before They Hit The Screens
7 Books You Should Read Before They Hit The Screens
Controversial opinion: read the book before its tv/movie adaptation comes out.
I can already hear the arguments in the comments and on twitter about which you should indulge in first to save yourself possible heartbreak. Personally, after I see a movie, it always feels too late to go back and read the book. So, when I know that a tv of film adaptation for a book is coming out, I try my hardest to read it first.
Regardless of where you stand on the Read It First vs Read It After debate, we can all agree that there’s nothing like seeing a story you only imagined come alive brilliantly on screen. So to help prep our reading list, I came up with a roundup of tv shows and movies coming out within the next few months that are based off novels diverse novels or will have diverse creators & casting.
Whether it be on your commute to work, before you go to bed, or on the beach these are definitely worth taking the time to read.
Americanah
About: Lupita Nyong’o and Danai Gurira’s planned adaptation of the Chimamanda Adiche’s novel “Americanah” has a 10 episode show lined up for HBO Max. When she was a teenager Ifemelu, fell in love with her classmate Obinze while living in military-ruled Nigeria. As young adults, they each depart for the West, with Ifemelu heading for America, where, despite her academic success, she is forced to grapple for the first time with what it means to be black living in America. Obinze had hoped to join her in America, but with post-9/11 America closed to him, he instead plunges into a dangerous undocumented life in London.
Who’s in it: Lupita Nyong'o, Uzo Aduba, Corey Hawkins, Zackary Momoh
Read Americanah
Release date: TBA from HBO
P.S. I Love You 2
About: If you love a cute rom-com you’ve probably seen the film To All The Boys I Loved Before a few million times on Netflix and you can’t wait to see the sequel coming out just before Valentine’s Day! In part 2, Lara Jean and Peter have finally taken their relationship from pretend to officially official. They’re going on romantic dinner dates, holding hands, giving valentine’s day gifts, the works. When another recipient of one of her old love letters (from part 1) enters the picture and Lara Jean realises she also has feelings for him. Can a girl be in love with two boys at once?
Who’s in it: Lana Condor, Noah Centineo, Madeleine Arthur, Ross Butler
Release date: February 12 on Netflix
High Fidelity
About: Hulu is also swinging in this Valentine’s Day with their gender and race swap on British novel High Fidelity was not something anyone could have anticipated, but we’re all pleasantly surprised by it. This Rom-Com follows Rob, the owner of a semi-failing record store, as she takes a look back at the five biggest heartbreaks in her life, all so she can figure out why she keeps having her heart broken.
Who’s in it: Zoë Kravitz, Jake Lacy, and Da’Vine Joy Randolph
Read High Fidelity
Release date: 14th February on Hulu
Little Fires Everywhere
About: Based on Celeste Ng’s 2017 turn-pager, Little Fires Everywhere follows the intertwined fates of the picture-perfect Richardson family and an enigmatic mother and daughter who upend their lives when they move into their rental property.
Who’s in it: Kerry Washington, Reese Witherspoon, Rosemarie DeWitt, and Joshua Jackson.
Read Little Fires Everywhere
Release date: March 13 on Hulu
The Underground Railroad
About: This Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner’s screen adaptation is highly anticipated by readers and cinephiles alike. This historical fiction TV series directed by Barry Jenkins follows Cora, a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia, who finds out about Underground Railroad, and decides to take a terrifying risk and escape with Caesar, a newly arrived slave from Virginia.
Who’s in it: Thuso Mbedu, Chase W. Dillon, Aaron Pierre, Joel Edgerton
Read The Underground Railroad
Release date: TBA on Amazon Video
Lovecraft Country
About: If you’re into drama horror this is the HBO tv serie created by Jordan Peele, Misha Green, J.J. Abrams and Ben Stephenson promises to be the story you’re craving. In this story, Atticus Black joins his friend Letitia and his Uncle George to embark on a road trip across 1950s Jim Crow America in search of his missing father. This begins a struggle to survive and overcome both the terrors of white America with monsters that could’ve been ripped from an H.P. Lovecraft book.
Who’s in it: Jonathan Majors, Jurnee Smollett-Bell, Wunmi Mosaku, Aunjanue Ellis, Michael K. Williams, and Abbey Lee
Read Lovecraft Country
Release date: TBA from HBO
The Witches
About: This Roald Dahl’s children’s book gets a dark fantasy twist for the big screen. In The Witches a little boy stumbles across a conference of witches while staying with his grandmother at a hotel, and gets transformed into a mouse by the Grand High Witch, played by Anne Hathaway.
Who’s in it: Anne Hathaway, Octavia Spencer, Stanley Tucci, Chris Rock
Read The Witches
Release date: In Theatres October 9th
Our Thoughts on Pet and Who We Think Should Play Bitter in a Movie
Our collective thoughts on Pet by Akwaeke Emezi as told through our book club meetup questions.
In October we read Pet by Akwaeke Emezi.
We had terrific discussions about the plot, symbolisms, allegories, and had lot of friendly arguments about the odd utopian/dystopian world of Lucille.
Akwaeke’s work is no stranger to our book club. We read Freshwater last year and it immediately made everyone’s (and I do mean EVERYONE’S) Favourite Book list. With that in mind, we were very excited and hopeful about Pet and whether Akwaeke would live up to the really high bar they had set for themself with Freshwater. Akwaeke surely lived up to their name of being thought-provoking, genre-defying, and rebellious in their sophomore novel, Pet.
We asked each Rebel Women Lit meetup to share their feedback on Pet and here’s a quick recap:
Overall, is the story and/or its characters easy or difficult to relate to?
“It’s a world I would want to live in but everything is flawed. It would be nice to live in a world where LGBT+ people, people of colour, neuro-divergent people etc. can feel safe. But it’s still a world where children aren’t believed and predators are protected, which is sad, but that part mirrors our reality. I wish they went into more details on what this ‘perfect’ society looks like.” - Gabrielle, Mandeville
“I didn’t so much relate to the characters, but I still feel warmly towards them. The moment I found most relatable was when Jam struggled to ‘see the unseen.’ ”- Akilah, Kingston
Mandeville Book Club Meet-Up
“I didn’t relate to any of the characters much except for Moss because I’ve been in a similar situation of being abused by the angel that was to protect us and not having anyone to talk to about it.” - Jaii, Montego-Bay
What do you think was Akwaeke’s message in the book? What ideas were they trying to get across?
“The need to critically reflect on the world, especially considering the limits of ‘perfection’” - Damali, Kingston
“I think they were speaking to a younger version of themself; they were trying to convey ideas of justice.” - Jodi-Ann, Kingston
“To remind us that forgetting and denying the past and trauma can create a new cycle.” - Jessica, Kingston
“I’m thinking that they want to expose our desires of a utopian society by asking us to truly consider the set-up. They are asking us to interrogate our ideas of justice and of what ‘perfection’ looks like” - Kristina, Kingston
What part of the story resonated with you the most?
“The scene where Jam stopped Pet from Killing Hibiscus by asking it to consider how effective that would be in the long run as well as how that would bring any peace or reconciliation for the victim, Moss. It resonated with me because it was a moment of reflection for me on how I perceive justice.” - Kristina, Kingston
“The tension with striving for a better world”- Damali, Kingston
Kingston Book Club Meet-Up
“I loved the world building, the characters and the task of figuring out what their names meant. I thought it was great that they tackled a serious issue in a way that kids would understand (who doesn’t like mysteries and fighting monsters?)” - Jaii, Montego-Bay
If Pet Got Made Into A Movie, Who Would You Cast?
BITTER:
Charlayne Woodard, Dominique Jackson, Angelica Ross or Lupita Nyong'o
ALOE:
Sterling K Brown, Winston Duke or Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje
PET:
James Earl Jones or Viola Davis
REDEMPTION:
Asante Blackk, a young Dayo Okeniyi (lol), Ethan Herisse
JAM:
… [We all agreed that we need more black teen girls who are of trans experience in Hollywood!]
Final thoughts?
“I’d recommend this book to fantasy readers, especially (black, queer, neruodivergent, or Caribbean) looking for a good read.” - Gabrielle, Mandeville
“I really like their commitment to non-ableist language!” - Jodi-Ann, Kingston
“I'd recommend Pet to mostly pre-teens and teenagers. But I think there's value in adults reading it as well” - Kristina, Kingston
Thank you to everyone who came to our book club meetups for Pet by Akwaeke Emezi!
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