As I stalk the airport bookstore for an interesting title to read while I’m away for a week I find myself wondering how many people are downloading Makaveli’s Prince for that reason. Dan Brown’s Inferno seems to be the book of the moment and last year it was Fifty Shades Of Grey. But Inferno is only currently available in a size that is likely to overload my luggage or tire out my arm holding it as I read.

You have to think ebooks are the way forward for the book hungry traveller who likes to travel light. With titles as different as the two mentioned above I also wonder what makes a good holiday read. Do people like to read something in particular while on holiday? Tell me what you think.

Because of Ricky’s drug-empire, Kira finds herself in the most dangerous situation ever. Ricky forces Kira to believe that he’s going to call on his reinforcements, so everything will end in his favor. However, unknown to Ricky, Kira felt the need to devise an escape plan on her own. Will she choose loyalty or her life?

In a world where everyone wants to be “wifey” the question is–can you play your position and handle the drama the streets will throw your way?

I truly enjoyed this book.  I read it in one night.  ”Wifey” is the tale of Kira and her unfaithful husband Ricky.  Kira has lived through seven and a half years of insecurity and drama with Ricky.  Kira is a typical drug dealer’s wife with the same problems as the rest.  Baby mamas, thirsty chickenheads trying to get a piece of her man and jealous so called friends.  When Kira decides to separate herself from the lifestyle, it all backfires in her face.

I read this book and really loved it.   Kiki is talented and I could really feel where the characters were coming from.  The little girl was a trip and Kira’s husband Ricky was too.  I liked Kira and I understand that she loved her husband and wanted things to work out with him, most women do.  He just made bad choices and that was sad, she took alot off of him.  Well, I read the second and third book and let me tell you it gets better. 3 stars.

Reblogged from HELL ON A HYBRID:

Competent navigation is important to the trip so we decided we'd opt for GPS.  Not because we can't map read but because we won't have to stop to read maps.

The difficulty this posed was how we power our phones for a day's ride so they could serve this purpose.  I looked at various options of dynamo hubs, solar power etc but it seemed that the most reliable and cost effective was a battery pack.

Read more… 151 more words

Hood Rat (n.): A woman of questionable repute, one who has been known to “get around” in the ‘hood.

Yoshi is young, fine, and larcenous.   She lives her life playing on men’s hearts as well as their pockets.  She learns the hard way that all that glitters isn’t gold.  Billy, a former high school basketball star, is at the end of her rope with the opposite sex.  To her, all men are dogs, so she secretly seeks comfort in the arms of women, until she meets a man who makes her reevaluate her feelings.  Reese is an around-the-way chick, trying to keep up with the Joneses.  There’s a revolving door on her bedroom as she tries to find the love she always felt was missing.  Her promiscuity leaves her pregnant from a one-night stand and Reese is faced with the task of breaking an age-old cycle, passed down from mother to daughter in her family, and standing on her own.  Rhonda is twenty-something with three kids, by three men, and riding the system all the way to the bank.  To her, work is a dirty word; between the multiple checks she gets from the government, and the games she plays with men, she’s living the life of a ghetto superstar.  The game soon turns ugly when one of her “sponsors” snaps and decides to get some payback.

Harlem has never seen four friends as scandalous as these. The neighborhood will never be the same again.

These women are four scandalous friends.  If there was ever an example of how women should not act, then this novel is it.  From Yoshi being a stripper/prostitute to Rhonda making her baby daddy’s life a living hell for no reason, these women had no shame it their game.  My personal favorite character was Billy because it seems like she was a hood rat more by association than anything.  She wasn’t totally innocent but she had the most sense out of the group.

This novel is definitely a wake-up to all women about the importance of self-love and how it influences their relationships with men and their children.  Hood Rat is an excellent novel about lessons learned and the importance of making the right life decisions.  I loved this book because it needed to be written. People need to wake up and take their place and do the right thing, not try to make it off the men in their lives.

All in all a good book, 5 stars.

Side note: Ladies look out for Jahlil lol

Reblogged from Urban Fiction News:

Reblogged from Urban Fiction News:

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I wanted to take a moment to go over the Urban Fiction Genre. Urban Fiction is a rapidly growing genre written in an urban setting with predominately black or latino characters. It provides readers with an in your face depiction of city living that ranges from murder, adultery, cheating, prison, violence and sex all of which are glamorized sensationally.

The urban fiction genre gives writers an opportunity to challenge their imagination, create over the top characters with even larger than life situations.

Read more… 114 more words

Reblogged from HELL ON A HYBRID:

HMDX Audio - This is the neat little speaker I've just picked up to give us some tunes to listen to at the end of a hard day's cycling.

For £25 I thought I wasn't going to get great sound but I was wrong.  It's pretty good.  Good enough for a portable speaker anyway.

It's about the size of a drinking glass.

Read more… 180 more words

When Samuel Wright, aka Spade, is released from prison after doing a seven-year sentence, he makes a name for himself in the drug game within five years.  He has women, money, and a loyal team.  Everything seems to be going according to his plan.  Get in and get out so he can start investing in legitimate business endeavors, above all an entertainment company.

But with suspicious events taking place, and unknown gunmen closing in on him, will he get out of the drug game alive to go legit?  Is his team as loyal as he thinks?  Will women be his downfall?  Soon Spade will find out you can never be sure of all the players on Deception’s Playground.

Deception’s Playground appears to be the first book by Kevin Williams al-Fahim under Felony Books.

The main character Spade acts like he’s god’s gift to women.  And clearly thinks it too.  I’ve never read anything before where one guy has sex with so many women in a single day.  But credit to him, he’s as fastidious about showering between each encounter.  That made me chuckle a few times but the synopsis was right to ask whether they would be his downfall the women not the showers!

It took me a while to get into the book because of the number of characters from the beginning and the lack of initial direction.  By the mid point of the book the plot started to come together, I just wish the author had made it gripping from the start.  I swear by the fifty page dash.  get your readers to read the first fifty pages in one sitting because it is gripping and you have them for the whole book.

I think many readers will have given up by the middle despite the obvious ploy of sex to keep a certain readership interested.

I read the second half in one sitting and it wasn’t for the sex.  The sex had become a little repetitive and had limited value to the overall plot.  It was the fact that I was already so invested that I surged ahead when the plot thickened up.  What got me interested in the synopsis was ‘unknown gunmen closing in on him’ and when this finally happened there was enough peril to want to see Spade deal with it.

The twist, if you could call it that, was played out a little too easily and quickly at the end.  It should have been savored and lavishly described.  Did Spade get off too easy in the end probably.  I would have preferred a more probable end for him.  I can’t say much more without spoiling it.

There were numerous unintended grammatical errors throughout but less than the average free Kindle download.  Still, I’d recommend the author gets a proof reader next time around.

Overall I’d rate this books as average for the genre – only just 3 stars.

The truth is that she has been unfairly pursued from the get go.  Read the opening of her autobiography:

Suddenly the door flew open and I felt myself being dragged out onto the pavement.  Pushed and punched, a foot upside my head, a kick in the stomach.  Police were everywhere.  One had a gun to my head.

“Which way did they go?” he was shouting.  ”Bitch, you’d better open your goddamn mouth of I’ll blow your goddamn head off!”

I nodded my head across the highway.  I was sure that nobody had gone that way.  A few of the cops were off and running.

One pig said, “We oughta finish her off.”  But the others were all busy around the car, searching it.  They were pulling and prodding.

“Ya find the gun?” they kept asking each other.  Later, one of them asked another, “Should we put’er in the car?”

“Naw.  Let’er lay in the gutter where she belongs.  Just get’er out of the way.”

Assata goes on to recount how there was an effort to allow her to die from her wounds and describes the voices of the ambulance crew over her asking ‘Is she dead yet?’

She is a role model for Nia in Makaveli’s Prince – Book One because of her strength of character as a woman facing persecution and oppression.   Below is an except from the book where Nia has gone to visit Cuba and is prompted to think about Assata because she knows she’s there in exile.

Nia thought particularly about a woman named Assata Shakur whose story had inspired her.  In her early days with Leon she’d read many books about black revolutionaries in the US.

Nia had read about Assata Shakur being accused of shooting and killing a New Jersey State Trooper in 1973, how she was imprisoned in several penitentiaries and how human rights groups had gained interest because of her poor treatment.  Nia knew there had been other questionable charges, attempted murder, armed robbery, bank robbery, and kidnapping but Assata Shakur eventually escaped prison in 1979 and went into political asylum in Cuba in 1984.

Nia couldn’t believe, for all the injustices that so obviously existed in the US, so much had been done to vilify a woman who’d fought for her freedom.

In 1997 the superintendent of the New Jersey State Police wrote to Pope John Paul II pleading him to discuss the possibility of Assata Shakur’s extradition in his talks with President Fidel Castro.  The pressure was ramped up further in 1998 when the New Jersey Governor asked the Attorney General to do whatever it would take to return Assata Shakur from Cuba.  Later that year the US Congress passed a non-binding resolution seeking Cuba to return Assata Shakur.  In 2005 the FBI classified Assata Shakur as a domestic terrorist and raised the federal reward for her capture from fifty thousand dollars to one million.

In a rebuttal to the raising of the bounty on the thirty second anniversary of the 1973 shooting, President Fidel Castro described Assata Shakur as a victim of racial persecution, terrorist portrayal, brutal injustice and an infamous lie.

In many ways Castro probably got it right in this case.

Reblogged from The Spizzy: