Fairytales, chance encounters, relationship woes, splendor in the grass, la vie en rose….isn’t this thing called love one of the highlights of our lives as human beings. From teenage crushes on tall handsome boys with the bow legs or the dark handsome one who wore cologne that made you swoon, or the Guy in College who spoke with the halting foreign accent and arrested you with his intelligent piercing eyes and pinned you to his heart. Are you still searching, flirting, aching for love or aging in love like fine wine. Yass! First Loves, Soulmates, Dreamgirls. This it. Love. It’s Epic. Cosmic!
Well, it’s that or it can be the Seismic Shit Reel where you emerge batter bruised, dazed or ‘thoroughly wibbed’ as one of my aunts likes to term it or ‘you can’t believe a thing that has happened to you‘ as another one of my aunts codified it. Yet another aunty felt so disenchanted with her former prince that when the scales fell from her eyes, she characterized him as ‘a trifling frog under a bank.’ You watch the women in your life and how they navigate love and you do like my mother told me, “When you step in filth, you wipe your feet, cry you a river, and then you dip. Build a bridge. Get over it.”
Affairs of the heart…. Oh It may be that your experience is a blissful 77 year long love of a lovely lifetime like Jimmy and Rosalind fame or the heartrending Wahala of Nelson and Winnie Mandela, or Stuff you couldn’t make up like that Strangulating and Triangulated Trauma of Lady Diana, Prince Charles and His Lover. Whatever it is, if we get born, we are bound to bump up against that thing called Love, furtive fumbles in the dark, ecstatic forays at noonday or orderly, orchestrated rose covered pathways to the altar: arranged, spoken for, signed, sealed, mutilated and delivered.
Romance Novels sometimes (and for good reason) get a bad rap because the characters and their fantastic lives are often so far removed from life as the average human knows it. What does a young teen in Gaza want to know about what love is? What does she need to see and hear to be able to dream again? What slivers of hope about love does a young rastafarian daughter hold dear, as she wrestles with the iron of patriarchy that pierces her soul and stifles her womanhood?
Does a young cobalt covered, Congolese Child give a care about caressing kisses on her chapped lips when all she has to look forward to is a creepy crawdaddy who crawls all over her innocence, breaks her apart, shatters her life into a thousand sordid tales.
And who is that tall and stately Sudanese Soldier who stands under the sycamore tree staring into nothingness, mulling over a murky past, and fielding only fog as he frets for his fabricated future? Will he find the bride price for the girl his heart desires when he can’t even pay for the bribe to keep himself alive. Will he, Will he Wail a holla Will he Willa Walla Halla What a walahala what a hapa lu hallelu halla balla Allah Baba Help him Dream Again.
Sometimes you have to dip a way from the Real and escape into the genre of Romance Reels to refresh, reflect and recharge so you can Dream Again, Write Again, Love Again.
Thank You Author Ann Marie Bryan for doing just that with your uplifting Novel sets Dream Again and Love Again. Please note gentle reader that those Mcintosh Brothers are a hella hot and heavenly!
Le' D-ash 