By Terri Schlichenmeyer

c.2024, Amistad

$28.00

437 pages

You’re lucky you didn’t hit your head!

The damage you did to yourself was bad enough. You didn’t need a head wound to lay you low, too. You haven’t skinned your knees like that since you were ten years old. Your elbow still hurts from that tumble. But read the new book, “The Fallen Fruit” by Shawntelle Madison and be grateful: you’re still in the here and now.

She should’ve just put a “For Sale” sign on it and sold the place, like she was told.

Cecily Bridge-Davis was warned by the locals that the portion of the old Bridge farm she’d inherited was “godforsaken,” but she had to see it. Maybe it would help her understand her father, who’d up and died when Cecily was just a baby. If she could find anything about him, the trip wouldn’t be wasted.

The property was overgrown, rundown, and there was a tumbledown cabin on it that she couldn’t resist. Inside the cabin, Cecily found a Bible, and an X-marked map.

Millie Bridge prayed that she’d be the one to fall.

It was 1920, and her brother, Isaiah, was meant for better things. She’d be able to handle a trip back in time better than he, but it was a fifty-fifty chance. Their father was a Bridge man, and the family curse that’d been around for hundreds of years would send one of his children to another time in the past, which is why the offspring of every Bridge man carried freedom papers with them.

Since one never knew if, where, or when they might fall, one could never be too careful.

Bridge-Davis looked over the Bible and followed the map to a hole in a tree stump, where she found an old satchel and more questions. Was she actually supposed to believe that, as an only child, she might disappear one day, only to reappear in another time?

How could that happen? Moreover, how could she tell her husband and children?

Autumn seems to be the right time for a spine-tingling, twisty-scary novel, doesn’t it? And “The Fallen Fruit” is just about the right book.

If you mixed together the movie Groundhog Day and Octavia Butler’s “Kindred,” you might have something close to what’s inside this novel. The difference is that author Shawntelle Madison adds a few more levels and a lot more characters to time-travel, meanwhile keeping readers guessing as to where this curse began.

Sometimes, that makes this novel scrape against your imagination until it’s raw. Other times, it feels oddly like an adventure story or a survival-type tale, a test of resourcefulness that you can place yourself inside. And then there are shades of romance, to keep you rapt.

If you’re someone who tends to overthink novels, you may not like this one; it leaves a lot of questions that don’t get answered. But if you’re up for a thrill-ride of a novel, “The Fallen Fruit” is a gem. A speculative fiction fan will go head over heels for it.

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By Terri Schlichenmeyer

Author: Leonard Pitts, Jr.

Deep down inside, there’s a part of you that always wants to do right.

Did someone teach you that? Or were you just modeling what your elders did when they did what was true and right? Either way, your moral compass points the way, always. You do right for the world, even if, as in the new novel “54 Miles” by Leonard Pitts, Jr., it’s the wrong personal decision for you.

Sitting in church, hundreds of miles from home, Adam Simon felt the distance keenly.

This surprised him. It wasn’t like he was close to his parents. No, his father, a White minister, had over-preached to Adam for too long, and his Black mother never showed Adam much warmth. With no siblings to help soften these facts, Adam left college to head to Alabama, to work with SNCC’s voter registry efforts.

That was the plan, anyhow, but down-deep, Adam had no idea what he was doing. It was a good cause, a great and righteous one, but not without danger: he was almost killed while marching across the Edmund Pettis Bridge.

And that’s how his frantic parents learned where he was: alerted by Simon’s parents, his Uncle Luther tracked the young man down in a Selma hospital, took him in, and notified Simon’s parents that he was safe.

By that time, Simon was on his way to Alabama for his son’s sake.

Years ago, George, the elder Simon, and his now-wife, Thelma, had busted almost every racial law the South imposed, and they married. Shortly afterward, Simon’s father sent the new family north, for safety.

And now Simon was in Alabama, in the mouth of the dragon and he had other troubles on his mind.

Simon knew he shouldn’t have snooped, but while staying with his Uncle Luther, he found a stash of old letters, and he read them. What he learned shocked him, and he had to leave Luther’s home immediately.

The problem was, Simon had nowhere to go.

Were you there? If not, can you imagine what it was like to live in 1965, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement? Readers who don’t know or can’t picture it will get an eyeful of what was possible inside “54 Miles.”

In setting his novel roughly in the years 1945 to 1965, author Leonard Pitts, Jr. doesn’t make reading this book easy. There are passages inside this novel that will make you want to wince and turn away and – caution! – they’re not for the weak-stomached.

Just remember, they’re essential to the story and to why the characters act as they do.

On that, you’ll enjoy most of these characters as they look to the past and future, working their ways through personal struggles and one of the more tumultuous periods in American history. Details help, making this books’ cast feel more authentic.

Be aware that “54 Miles” can be slow, at certain points, but stick with it and you won’t be disappointed. Especially if you’re a historical novel fan, this book will do you right.

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By Terri Schlichenmeyer
The Bookwurm Sez

Well, thank you so much to your co-worker.

That’s where you got this ick, this scratchy-throat, achy-body, upset-stomach, can’t-sleep virus. He sneezed and that’s all it took. Now you’ve got what he had and you’re trying not to spread it anymore.

As you know from experience, and as attested in the new book “Treating Violence” by Rob Gore, MD, epidemics affect everybody. In this book, the scourge is violence.

Once upon a time, Gore had a brother. Angel wasn’t biologically related to Gore, but within a short time after Gore’s parents fostered the young boy, they considered each other siblings.

They tussled and played together. Gore watched over his “brother” and when Angel got older, he did the same for Gore. But Angel was anything but an angel and, slowly, he turned to hustling drugs.

Gore says he wishes he’d done more to stop him. Eventually, Angel went to prison.

Growing up in Brooklyn, Gore knew that the streets were not kind to people who looked like him, people with Brown or Black skin, and he understood early how privileged he was.

He was granted – and sometimes squandered – the best education. In high school, after he was given a chance to “shadow” sports medicine practitioners and after he noticed a lack of Black people in medical careers, he saw his own future. Gore attended Morehouse College, with an eye toward helping Black and Brown people in crisis.

According to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Gore says, “homicide… is the number-two cause of death for Black males ages one to nine…” but there are ways to identify issues before they become dangerous, out-of-control problems.

The process moves through examination of a person’s childhood traumas and what happened to them as adults, followed by listening, validating, and asking for calm.

Gore understood this as a young doctor, and he decided to do something about it.

“Lack of funding was a roadblock” for it, he says, “but the seed was planted, and my conviction continued to grow.”

You’re tired of attending funerals, and tired of reading about another dead child somewhere. You’re ready to act. You’re ready to read “Treating Violence.”

Indeed, this book might light a fire under you.

Gore first explains what street violence does to Black communities and families, which is shocking and upsetting.

This begins his biography, which is a brief (too-brief!) set-up for how and why Gore ultimately founded Kings Against Violence Initiative (KAVI), an organization that uses trained volunteers to lower the anger level and any desires for revenge when someone is the victim of violence.

The story is a rousing one, but readers may feel a bit cheated by the rushed transition from Gore’s life and his work as an ER doctor, to KAVI. Information on KAVI and similar organizations may spur you to take action.

With the Surgeon General’s recent warning on gun use in mind, “Treating Violence” couldn’t be more timely or necessary. Find it, read it for the excellent biography and the ideas, statistics, and urgency – and get to work.

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