Every Sunday I have to go to the grocery store, usually to buy giant containers of Lactaid, some yogurt, and whatever heatable food items I can find for weeknight dinners (we haven’t had a kitchen since January and oh my holy mother of asparagus does it SUCK). I usually don’t allow myself much time in the book aisle because one, both, or all three men who are with me usually protest the delay within the first 2 minutes of my browsing. But! The A&P got tricky on me and has moved the book section, so it’s now adjacent to the cereal – which means more than five minutes of browsing! WOO!
So check out what I found: you know what’s shelved higher than Nora Roberts, Dean Koontz, and Clive Cussler? Black romance, that’s what. Granted, this is a tiny tiny shelf in a suburban grocery store, but damn, Carmen Green, Adrienne Byrd, Brenda Jackson and Donna Hill got some prime real estate at the A&P. Sweet! Now I want to go meet the book buyer who serves my A&P.
To paraphrase Scarlet, “I’m pea-green with envy!”
What did I find yesterday in my grocery store? Four, count ‘em, four Cassie Edwards books marching proudly across the top shelf of their book section. To make it even worse, every single one of them contained the word “Savage” in the title, which is a real button-pusher for me. It took me a while, but I managed to hide them all and put books by other authors in their place.
Damn it, will this torture never end? I want to shop where you shop!
Do I hear you about the sucketage of not having a kitchen. I’m in between houses and my temp housing has a microwave and a sink. For the past month I’ve been eating everything either nuked or cooked in this $10 slow cooker I bought at Mallwart. I am so tired of stew, curry, Scottish oatmeal, and rice cakes with melted cheese.
Oooh, tough break about the kitchen! But does this mean that at some point in the future you’ll have a bright shiny kitchen with new furnishings? We remodeled the master bath last year and each morning I’d have to grit my teeth and say, “This too shall pass. Someday, they’ll be done.”
And when it was finally, really, absolutely done, it was worth it.
Up here in northern Canada, black story lines pop up frequently in the library. I don’t know if they request them or what.
I just finished Sexy/Dangerous by Beverly Jenkins and didn’t realize it was “black” fiction until the hero mentioned something about a “fine sister”. And yes I saw the couple on the cover. It just never clued in.
Good read as have been most of the other’s I’ve read. I check out the backcover before I decide to read it, so the cover art is usually wasted on me.
A good read involving any couple is all I’m after.
Darlene: Yup. Our original kitchen was 10’ by 10’, maybe, and the appliances were so old they didn’t do their actual jobs. The dishwasher merely looked at the dishes, and never really washed them. Maybe it tossed some water their way, but I’ll never know for sure. I think they were collectively from 1989 or maybe 1990. The dryer, too. I broke the door off the dryer right before Baba was born when I had a Braxton Hicks contraction and ripped the door clean off. It was a hell of a contraction. The new kitchen will be a marvelous, long awaited improvement. And then I’ll stop watching Food Network like its porno.
I just came back from a special trip to my local B&N;to purchase Lisa G. Riley’s Simply Wicked. Keep in mind, I’m in ATLANTA, which is purportedly a chocolate city. Did they have the book? Hell no. That’s it. I will not, under any circumstances EVER return to a brick and mortar bookstore. If I can’t find black romances in Atlanta I might as well just order online.
Interestingly enough your find in the A&P;. We had a similar situation at my local Publix in Huntsville, AL. None of the bookstores in my area carried any black romances EXCEPT for the local Publix. I never could figure that one out.
You have my pity on the kitchen. We lived with one bathroom for a year, and are about to do the same with this house we just bought. We’re going to have to re-do the kitchen as well, but I’m putting that misery off as long as I can. I shudder to even contemplate life without a kitchen.
At my local Kroger, they have a section, in the lower half of the book section, that is about 3 feet long and usually takes up one or two shelves. The books are placed face out instead of spine out. In the bookstores, all books by Black authors are located in the African American Lit section.
Btw, there are NO Science Fiction or Fantasy books at that Kroger. There used to be, when there wasn’t a section for Black romance, but now there’s nothing. Why is the choice between two really good genre’s (although Black romance isn’t really a genre) when they have Westerns, Spirituals/Inspirationals, and Self Help books? And the westerns are by Louis L’Amour at that!!!
My husband is a store manager for a major grocery chain. I’m an aspiring novelist and so he pays attention to what is on his shelves. Last night he came home slightly curious, wanting to know if I’d ever heard of black romance. His store suddenly has a lot of it, too.
My local Wal-mart has moved to predominately black romance on their shelves. The flip side of that is other new releases are not there. I can get you any black romance, but no Ward or Roberts. I have taken to grocery shopping elsewhere in order to feed my book habit and my food habit at the same time! The change did surprise me as I thought all Wal-marts would carry basically the same stuff. If I shop at the one four miles away there are new releases galore!
Lucky you! All the local Wal-Marts in my area either don’t carry black romances (predominantly upper-middle-class white neighborhoods) or have switched them for a larger inspirational and a new Spanish-language books sections (in lower-class neighborhoods which, oddly enough, have a good sized black population). My local Borders Express moved their African-American section to the other side of the store and no longer carry Kimanis or any other romance that I can ascertain. Just a lot of street lit (grr). I have to g to Barnes & Nobles if I want any romance written by black authors.
I would just like some balance. It seems to be an all or nothing approach at both stores. They are both located in very mixed neighborhoods. The one with mostly black romance is in the Uptown section of New Orleans… white, black, college students, and more recently hispanic.
That’s awesome!
P.S. Have you tried goat-milk yoghurt? I don’t have any of the digestive probs with it.
…find one of those Dinner Express places where you make up a bunch of meals and freeze them? That’s gotta be better than microwavables all week… (says the girl who lived on microwavables while she was commuting cross country for a year…).
holy mother of asparagus… lol, good one.