In her debut novel, Jasmine Guillory presents two complex but easily recognizable characters who are navigating conflict and their own shortcomings in order to find their way to themselves and each other. The Wedding Date ends that unnecessary drought.
While McMillan is still publishing, and having her novels adapted for screen, there are fewer and fewer Black romance novels. Over time, romance novels written by Black women and released by mainstream publishers seemed to come few and far in-between. Thomas’s Nappily Ever After and the sheisty Reverend Curtis Black and his fed-up wife, Tanya, in Kimberla Lawson Roby’s Casting the First Stone. In the intervening years, I, and so many other Black teens and women, also discovered Stella, Delilah, and Winston in McMillan’s How Stella Got Her Groove Back Venus, Clint, and Kandi in Trisha R. I was 13 when I stumbled on Waiting To Exhale, and I quickly fell into a comfortable rhythm with Robin, Bernadine, Savannah, and Gloria.
She’d read it so much that her paperback had dog-eared pages, a mark of a book that’s been cracked open over and over again. I felt that for the first time when I read my mom’s well-worn copy of Waiting To Exhale, Terry McMillan’s iconic 1992 novel. It has been a long time since a romance novel written by a Black woman that centers a Black heroine took my collective breath away, stopped me in our tracks, and helped me remember that Black women can fall in love outside of the pages of novels.
0 kommentar(er)
