OREO by Fran Ross

Oreo aka Christine Clark is the product of an African American mother and Jewish father.  Her parents divorced when she was a toddler and her father left the scene and never came back.  When she reaches her teens, she travels from Philadelphia to New York in search of him.  Oreo is a witty, smart and revengeful when she sees a person doing wrong to another person or animal.

 A satirical and witty tale that touches on feminism, ethnicities and idiosyncrasies, the author uses subtle Greek inferences in Oreo’s journey. 

I picked this off the shelves because it looked new and I was intrigued by the title.  Turns out the late author worked with the late, great comedian Richard Pryor.

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

I read this because I just finished reading The Old Man And The Sea and this was noted in the list of books also written by Hemingway.

Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley like each other but not enough to try to get together.  She is engaged, but finds the time to have amorous affairs with other men. Jake is jealous.   

A group of people fed up with life travel from Paris to Spain and attend a bullfighting festival.  That’s really all I have to say about this novel!

A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James

600 pages!  Wow.

Set on the Island of Jamaica, this fictional tale is told around the real shooting of Bob Marley back in 1976.  The author uses that setting and then writes his own version of what happened and creates his own characters that may or may not be involved in the shooting.

So many killings, I can’t keep count!  There had to be more than seven.  It’s only at the end that I get it. Some thugs have an encounter with a writer who is doing a magazine article about seven killings.  Alex Pierce is a writer for Rolling Stones Magazine.  He is hired to go to Kingston Jamaica and get a story on Mick Jagger. Somehow, he gets information on the shooting of the Singer and decided to tell that story instead.  The only problem for some people is that he writes about people who don’t want to written about.

This is a story with lots of characters.   There is a cast of characters page which was very helpful.  I read the e-book so I kept that page bookmarked to refer back to.  Especially with character names like Josey Wales because there is a Jamaican singer names Josey Wales.  No relation to the character in the novel.   I like how the characters inter-weave with one another, especially Kimmy.  She has seen things that could get her killed, but in the end she is spared by the death of the person who would kill her.

I can’t really say anymore because each character seems to have their own story and for 600 pages, the only main plot I can talk about is that someone tried to kill the Singer. 

I saw an interview with Marlon James on Well Read TV show and he explained the story was written around the shooting of Bob Marley, so the Singer character represents him.  Everything else is fiction!