“I’m old, and I like to lie,” Shonda Rhimes said these words in the opening of her memoir and I literally shouted, “Me toooo girl me toooo!”
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Immediately. I. WAS. LOCKED. IN.
 
I tell people all the time, don’t bother lying to me. I’m bound to catch you. Why? Because I’m great at lying, but I use my powers for good. So no, I don’t go around telling lies to people. Instead I write realistic fiction that is wildly entertaining, and of course, so does Shonda Rhimes, which is why I could immediately relate to her. I’m old and I like to lie too.
 
I wasn’t crazy about Grey’s Anatomy.
I wasn’t crazy about Scandal either.
I did however, admire the hell out of Shonda and her primetime television takeover.
Then How to Get Away With Murder came out, and I was on the Shondaland bandwagon. Every Thursday night my family and friends would tune in at eight and nine for Grey’s and Scandal, but then at ten, it was my turn. I would make sure my daughter’s homework was checked, she had whatever she needed and was in her bed. Then I’d grab my cake or glass of wine, and settle in the middle of my bed to watch my show. I never missed an episode. Although I didn’t get down with the other two shows, I didn’t knock anyone else for it. All of Shondaland was phenomenal in my book.

​So I tune into her memoir and she says all the things I need to hear. She literally touches on every single detail about being a woman. Being a writer. Being a parent. Being a sibling. Being a daughter. She doesn’t necessarily tell her life story from beginning to end. Instead, she talks about how she challenged herself to come out of her shell by agreeing to say YES to opportunities that were literally showing up on her doorstep, for a year. They say that anything you do for fifteen days becomes habit. So what do you think happened to the Year of Yes?
 
I felt that Viola Davis was hella-transparent in her memoir and I didn’t think it could get any deeper than that. I was wrong. Shonda digs deep. She doesn’t hold back discussing depression and how it overlaps with poor self-care. When the world is overstimulating, your imagination is overactive, and things need to get done, it’s easy to ignore fun. The closest I’ve ever been to depths of depression that Shonda talks about, was my postpartum period. All I wanted to do was take care of my baby and play video games. Why do anything else? That led to being severely underweight and digestive issues. In Shonda’s case, it led to being uncomfortably overweight. When she challenged herself to saying YES, it got her off her couch and out her house. It made her aware of her body and she said YES to making it comfortable for herself to live in.
 
The way she talked about simply wanting to live in the world she made up, made me feel so seen as a writer. Sometimes the real world is too overstimulating and it just feels easier to live in our imaginations. Shonda’s thing as a kid was to play with the canned goods in the pantry. She could be in there for hours in her made up world in the darkness of the pantry. I dug it. When I was a kid my mother used to say, “That girl cleans her room just to get ready to play.”
I used to get annoyed but she wasn’t wrong. I was always thinking of how to make space for my Barbies’ world. I was very serious about my Barbies and almost never wanted other girls to play with my dolls because they would mix up the families. I had almost thirty Barbie dolls. They had first, middle, and last names and they had permanent families. Someone gave me a camera and one day I did family photo shoots with my dolls. I posed them with my bedspread as the backdrop and everything. I still have the photos. By the time I was a teenager, I was heavy on The Sims games, and played into my mid-twenties. Sometimes I think about playing The Sims now but it’s better to put my energy into writing and entertaining others with my imaginary families.
 
Most of us probably view Shonda the way we view most celebrities. We think because of the red carpets and speaking engagements that life must be grand. They make it look easy. Then we listen to memoirs like this one and are reminded of their humanity. They have anxiety, insecurities, and flat out fears too. Listening to her memoir was enlightening, inspirational, and uplifting. The theme that struck a chord in me was this: saying YES to opportunities means saying YES to yourself. You’ll never know what you’re fully capable of, and what you truly love without saying YES to life.
 
Forget about a five-star rating for this book. At the end I wanted to shout, “Tens across the board!” IYKYK…
 
Thank you Shonda. I’m old, and I like to lie too, and I hope to gain an audience that enjoys my imagination just like you.

I knew very little about Assata Shakur before listening to her autobiography read by Sirena Riley. Like, I knew she was a revolutionary, but I was unable to place her in my schema of revolutionaries. This is simply because I knew more about the Black Panther Party than the Black Liberation Army. I suppose I was unclear about her because of the most fascinating thing about her; she escaped prison! She would have to be pretty vague to manage that right?
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Well…
 
Assata left no detail untold about her childhood. Revolutionaries impress me because I often wonder where they pull their strength and gumption from. I admire them because I wish that I had the nerve to do the things they do/did. People say that reading, and writing about the Black experience are revolutionary acts, and maybe I’m downplaying my capabilities, but it feels nothing like standing up to white racists in the south with only a shotgun. These are the things Assata witnessed her grandparents doing throughout her childhood in the south. She came from a strong industrious family who stood their ground and raised the children in their charge to do the same. Her mother became an educator, and her aunt, like most Black aunties, was the more supportive extension of her mother.
Assata grew up with everything she needed, yet her spirit was restless and it took plenty of trial and error for her to figure out what she wanted. She spent her teen years floating and figuring. She even called herself trying to be a pickpocket for a little minute. I laughed hard and loud while listening to her time in “the streets,” cuz girl what?? During this time, she struggled to get along with her mother and leaned more on her aunt.
 
She breaks down the changing of her name and her involvement in the Black Liberation Army. See, she was named JoAnne Deborah Byron at birth (July 16, 1947), but after becoming an activist, she changed her name. Assata Olugbala Shakur is now her full name. Assata means she who struggles, Olugbala means the one who saves, and Shakur means the thankful one. Considering the turns her life has taken, all three names turn out to be quite appropriate. She first became an activist while in college. Yes, with all her teenage shenanigans, Assata still earned her GED with her aunt’s guidance. Like most, college broadened her thinking even further, and she felt the drive to do more for her people. She first joined the Black Panther Party, but after a while she found herself disagreeing with the gender expectations, and soon joined the Black Liberation Army instead.

​May 2, 1973 is when Assata’s story takes a drastic turn. A stop on the New Jersey Turnpike in New Brunswick left Assata shot and wounded as well as one of her comrades Zayd Malik Shakur, who passed away due to his injuries. Officers involved were wounded as well. In the end, Assata was charged with armed robbery, possession of a weapon, assault, and ultimately murder.
 
Assata’s story is told in flashbacks, alternating between her childhood and her arrest. Eventually the two timelines coincide, and her story stops with her escape. I say “stops,” because clearly her story isn’t over. Members of the BIBC discussed shock at how she and Kamau Sadiki managed to not only build an intimate relationship, but also have relations and conceive a child. This is when I found myself driving with my lips pinched together, eyes wide open, attentive to her words. I was deep in my feels, listening to how poorly she was treated and the birth of Kakuya felt like ultimate get-back. Her escape was the cherry on top, because not only do Black people persevere, but we find ways to thrive, and we move on like we are unscarred.
 
Sirena Riley’s narration was crisp, melodic, and relatable. A good narrator can read to you without reading to you, if you know what I mean. Her narration was conversational, yet formal, as if she were being interviewed. As aforementioned, I often listen to my audiobooks on my commute, and it’s important to me that the narration is engaging while I inch my way through traffic. There were parts where I talked back to her, laughed out loud, held my breath, and fought tears all the way to work. When it comes to fiction, these are the signs of a good story, but if we’re talking nonfiction, these are signs of superb narration.
 
I’m not giving a rating to Assata’s story, because it’s American history, and how can we score that?

​Right away, this mysterious slow burn romance was off to an intriguing start. Olivia James’s grandmother Martha recently passed away, leaving Olivia her home. Her home was a cabin loaded with historical treasures, because Martha herself, was a historian and guardian of artifacts affiliated with and used for the Underground Railroad. The cabin, also deemed a historical site, on page one had become the scene of a robbery.
 
Olivia enters her grandmother’s home, noticing that the place had been ransacked. She calls the authorities, and to her surprise and perhaps initially her dismay as well, Cameron, her ex-boyfriend and park ranger shows up to investigate. Now I must admit, off rip, I was blaming everybody who entered the picture from Cameron to Ezra the art buyer, and Regina Olivia’s mentor. In some instances, I was dead on, but Ms. Howard kept me on my toes because I kept hitting brick walls.
 
The setting was so well-written and fleshed out that I could feel when the energy changed. Olivia’s inherited cabin, though it held a lot if history and was filled with the courageous spirits of those who were once enslaved, never once felt eerie. At first, I thought to myself “Could I have stayed in an old cabin in the woods?” The cabin was a second home to Olivia though and the place where her grandmother taught her a lot about their history as well as the town’s history. If I were her, then yes, I could’ve pulled it off too. From the opening of Chapter One, Ms. Howard pulls us into a rustic world that is more than aesthetically pleasing, with its heavy wood, colored fallen leaves, and older furnishings. All that was missing was a musical score.
 
I understood this to be a slow-burn romance, but Olivia and Cameron drove me absolutely insane. The deliberate miscommunication just proved how human beings are constantly getting in their own way when it comes to love. Olivia, being the main character was the most developed and she felt like a sister or close cousin that I occasionally wanted to shake. I liked Cameron’s attempt at being stoic until it became too much for me and I was talking back to him out loud as I read. I did flip through Ms. Howard’s other books to see if these two return though. I wouldn’t mind knowing what happens next with them.
 
The prominent theme to me aligned with something my grandfather said to me years ago. I was asking him questions about when he’d moved further up north in New York, and he said, “I thought I was running from my problems, but ya can’t run from ya problems. They will travel with you.” This novel is named History Lost Between Us, but nothing was ever lost. Olivia and Cameron thought they could run from and ignore their feelings for each other. They thought they could continue without closure, but their history lingered, forcing them into a situation together where they would have to face and solve their issues as a team. The importance of Black history woven throughout the novel reminds those who willingly forget how important Black people are to the structure as well as the breakthroughs of this country. There is no running away from the past, so we might as well embrace it.
I have already recommended this novel to fellow readers. It’s a dynamic blend of romance, desire, mystery, tension, and history. I enjoyed it from start to finish, and when I was done yelling at Olivia and Cameron, I was clapping for them. It is for sure a 4/5 star read, and should be considered for the big screen someday soon.