Memphis by Tara M. Stringfellow pdf download

Details about Memphis by Tara M. Stringfellow PDF

Book Name: Memphis
Authors: Tara M. Stringfellow
Pages: 267
Genre: Domestic Fiction
Publish Date: April 2022
Language: English

Book Review:

Memphis by Tara M. Stringfellow this book for a really long time because as any avid reader knows your tbr or to be read list is very very very long i finally decided to pick it up because one i think the cover is gorgeous that blue and the hues that pop off the page kept staring at me

i was like you know what i'm finally gonna pick up this book and i'm really glad that i did so anyone who follows this channel follows any of my accounts they know that homegoing was one of my favorite books because i really like the flow through generation through time and memphis does something very similar however it is all within

the women in a single family back and forth so in this review what i am going to do is i'm going to give my breakdown of each woman and their character arc throughout the entire book and then give you my final thoughts so very briefly

this book is about a family of dynamic women that go through their own trials and tribulations that kind of maintain their own family legacy and so that's very brief very i want you to read the book if you read it please keep watching and one thing that this book does is it only flows through the women

so i love that the men they're there their perspective is necessary but it is not pivotal to the outcome of the book because the book is focused on the women so we're going to start with hazel so hazel is the matriarch of the family and so hazel has two children who are maryam in august then miriam has two daughters which are joan and maya and august has her son derek all of these characters are pivotal to the story

i just love the way it was unveiled and i love it hazel was living in memphis and she meets the love her life and the way in which they meet is in a segregated deli where in memphis she was accustomed to kind of moving

how she wanted to despite segregation and the particular delhi owner kind of allows her because he's in this black neighborhood you gotta kind of adapt to your environment so to speak

so she's notices a man she's so consumed by this man and in comes a white officer and he he tries to flex his muscle flex his power telling her like girl you better right the one that she's infatuated with tells her

i got you and he's able to get her out of this what could potentially be a hostile situation and from there his name is myron they fall madly in love myron builds this house myron takes care of her as a man should

but growing up in this segregated environment she is faced with having to lose her husband at an early age due to him being lynched so she goes down to the police station where he works and kind of gets sexually harassed by the white officers who are kind of trying to flex their racial

power over her um and myron tells her i don't ever want you to come to this station again and that same night he's his body is found in the river and when the officer comes she spits in his face and i was like yes

i really love the way the author painted the imagery of having to deal with that grief um and how she didn't uh wallow in it and especially what

i loved is how the community came together around her following the death of her husband how they looked out for her how they care for her and how her home became a staple within her community

then the way also within hazel's narrative how they spoke of the passing of dr martin luther king who of course died in memphis i thought that was beautiful our story really jump starts the north women's legacy within Memphis

so when hazel has her first daughter because she loses her husband while she's pregnant with her first daughter miriam she is having to raise this woman independently but as a woman with her own needs she ends up meeting august's father and having a baby with august whom

she also loses to being a civil rights activist and essentially to the racial segregation climate of the time so then let's move on to miriam first i think miriam's story is very powerful in that she's also meets her husband very young he pulls her away from memphis to north Carolina

she's doing everything she can as a wife he's a marine she's trying to hold him down but in the end he is abusive and she knows that this can't sustain and she's going to have to take her and her children away from this environment to protect her girls early in the book he is being sworn

into lieutenant and she decides to get super glam puts on these red shoes and he's just disgusted by her and it takes his best friend to tell her that red shoes are a trigger for him because that's what he saw on the little girl that they had to bomb in um the war and she says well good because that gonna remember the day i walked out his life and i said okay Miriam

i love you because in so many situations in real life we see women who stay in these abusive relationships for the kids and she was like i'm not doing it not doing it not doing it at all that was crazy so part of their story or the disillusionment of their marriage really starts after

they take a trip back to memphis and august the sisters son derek sexually abuses miriam's youngest daughter joan so jon is three and he sexually abused her with a hanger and i can't recall the age difference between joan and derek but he's of course older and i would assume he would know right from wrong not saying that he did or didn't i don't recall

but that happens and the dad whose name is jax is constantly weighing that over mariam like you let this happen to our daughter so that was where the disillusionment of their marriage begins and then

it just goes all down here from there where he then becomes abusive and she's like i got to go and the only way that she only place she can go is back to memphis where her father had built this house for her mother so the home is really the staple piece within the family

so when they moved back to memphis joan is reignited by these feelings of her abuser and being in the presence of her abuser and so when i get to john i'll talk about all that so miriam is having to navigate that and what i love is that she was able to rebuild her life post leaving her van

so we're talking about going back to school working countless hours just to put herself in a better situation because for all those years she was dependent on a man i loved that storyline loved it so if we go on to august august has kind of been the free-spirited more direct more aggressive sister

she's a hairstylist although her true passion was singing and so there's this constant creative artistic thread going through the women august although she has never been married ended up having a son at a very young age and following the sexual abuse to her niece she could just tell that her son was off and just let him be essentially he ended up running in with the wrong people and got sentenced to life in prison which i'll revisit again

so then we go back to miriam's children who are joan and maya we don't get maya's perspective in this book which i kind of wish we did that would have been something that i would have really enjoyed but we get more more of maya's perspective through drone and so joan she has to reface her sexual abuser which triggers a lot of anger and all kinds of different

emotions in her but she's also having to um navigate being in a separated home adjusting to realizing that her passion isn't although she excels in school her passion is art and having to confront that with her mother and kind of just all the intricacies of growing up um in a time with

9 11 happened in the way that it was talked about in the book is very beautiful the language and the use of this all in all joan's story is also unique in that each woman in this story turned to miss dawn or like the voodoo witch down the street for some type of guidance reassurance

assessment of a situation or something and joan did the same thing in which miss dawn told her you want that boy going go bury his comb in the backyard and he'll be out of your life and two years later he went to jail for life and i think miss don's character was so unique that it interconnected

all the women because she had been through each generation and it was a revisiting of just the community that exists in black communities that we are starting to lose we're losing recipes y'all and community is highlighted in a lot of aspects in this book and i love that so first we see it in their neighborhood the constant revisiting of the deli make sure

you go send this pie to stanley we also see it in the beauty shop this is another place a community where women are able to come together kiki laugh listen to music dance what have you we see um instances of community when um the dr king passed when her husband was lynched people came to the house to check up on her and make sure she was straight

i just loved that recurring subtle thing throughout the entire book i've never personally been to memphis and i really do want to go to memphis but this really made me feel like this is a good place for negroes all in all it is one of my favorite books i don't want to make this review super long because i probably could talk on and on about this book i think there were just

so many nuances that were addressed that i absolutely loved again community again the um use of how each generation had an issue with girl like don't grow me don't you know um i thought that was beautiful the imagery around quilts and the comfort that a blanket like a safety net can provide

i just think there are so many little nuggets in this book that make this such a dynamic story that i am probably going to rave about it for the rest of the year if not forever i would probably re-read this book eventually down the line because that's how much i enjoyed it um great storytelling great imagery great use of language and words i really really enjoyed it

but there's also a recurring theme of forgiveness which is very subtle and not even forgiveness in the intent that you have to welcome this person back but a forgiveness in letting go so we see that with miriam and jax where he comes back after she thought this guy died and she kind of is forgiving him we see that with joan and derek her visit to the jail kind of just letting that rock

now i am curious how maya's perspective would change the book whether for better or worse but how her perspective would change coming from someone even younger and someone who

just had a different lens on life i would also really like to know the whole t behind bird and august because i know she had eyes for him at the wedding she ends up doing a do with him in the salon but like was that derek's father is where

i was con thinking and i don't know maybe i missed that or read that too quickly but i would like to know that t um i'm not gonna make this any longer because i do want you to read it and i really like this book.

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