Welcome to Interrobang?! Book Club’s Decolonize Your Bookshelf Summer series! The goal of this series is to introduce people to new authors and books that you might not see on Booktok or on common reading lists. We will focus on works by and about people in non-US/UK countries, and from non-white perspectives. This includes books from Indigenous, formerly enslaved, and displaced or immigrant peoples.
Given the goals of our series, some of the books might be a little hard to find! So we are posting the whole series now to give you plenty of time to track down the books from your library or local bookstore.
The series will take place the 2nd Tuesday of each month at Taplands Bar in Santa Clara.
May - Ghana - His Only Wife, by Peace Adzo Medie
June - Jamaica - Black Leopard, Red Wolf, by Marlon James
July - Indonesia - Fall Baby, by Laksmi Pamuntjak
August - Sudan/Australia - Hopeless Kingdom, by Kgshak Akec
***If there is enough demand we will expand to September with Island of a Thousand Mirrors, by Nayomi Munaweera, from Sri Lanka.
General Overview of a Meeting
Our meetings start with an icebreaker question and a chance for each person to introduce themselves. We then move to rating the book with a thumbs up/down/sideways. We spend most of the meeting discussing the book, including strong opinions, questioning why the author made the choices they did, personal reactions to the story and characters, and wondering how it could have been improved.
You don't need to finish reading the whole book to come to the meeting! However, if you haven't finished the book, please be OK with hearing spoilers.
About the Book - Black Leopard, Red Wolf, by Marlon James
In the first novel in Marlon James's Dark Star trilogy, myth, fantasy, and history come together to explore what happens when a mercenary is hired to find a missing child.
Tracker is known far and wide for his skills as a hunter: "He has a nose," people say. Engaged to track down a mysterious boy who disappeared three years earlier, Tracker breaks his own rule of always working alone when he finds himself part of a group that comes together to search for the boy. The band is a hodgepodge, full of unusual characters with secrets of their own, including a shape-shifting man-animal known as Leopard.
Drawing from African history and mythology and his own rich imagination, Marlon James has written an adventure that's also an ambitious, involving read. Defying categorization and full of unforgettable characters, Black Leopard, Red Wolf explores the fundamentals of truths, the limits of power, the excesses of ambition, and our need to understand them all.