A Fair Trade Book
Title: Something Real
Title: Something Real
Publisher: Kensington
Date: 2002
ISBN: 1-57566-866-1
Length: 337 pages
Quote: “Can't nothin' happen
in Calhoun without someone knowing about it...Small minds, large
mouths, houses too close together, too many folks fanning themselves
on porches putting more hot air into the humid sky, and ain't nobody
got cable.”
Something Real is
a romantic comedy about a minister's ex-wife who “lost everything
in the divorce...but weight, attitude and the fiendish desire to
continue playing the organ every Sunday next to her scowling ex.”
Half African-American and half Irish-American, Ruth loves to epater
les bourgeois more deeply than
she admits, which is her delightful problem with new flame
Dewey. She has no real reason to have a problem with his being White
(she's a natural redhead herself, although the jacket illustrator
forgot that), and she loves his children, but does he really really
enjoy confrontations?
As a
novel it's a perfectly predictable romance...but Something
Real is funny. Ruth's mean (and
often dirty) mouth plus J.J. Murray's sense of humor are good for a
chuckle on almost every page. If you want to preview it at a public
library, don't be sitting there giggling in the reading room! At
least take it home! There are other reasons why readers take romance
novels home, and although I am too mature, or too spiritual, or too old, or
something like that, I'd guess that Something Real would
serve those purposes also. In any case you will need privacy to
chuckle. If you're trying to practice abstinence, this might not be
the book for you; it depends on how hard you have to try. If you have children of a certain age, you'll probably want to hide this book from them. It's pretty frank, by which I mean that Grandmother would've said "filthy," but not in a disgusting way.
So this is a Fair Trade Book. As regular readers know, this means a secondhand book, of which I believe a clean copy is worth $5 per book plus $5 per package shipped, whose author is still living. If you buy it here (from salolianigodagewi @ yahoo.com) we'll send Murray or a charity of his choice $1. If you buy two copies, you send us $15, and we send Murray or his charity $2. If you buy three copies, you send us $25, because Something Real is one of those bulky new-style novels of which only two fit into a standard book-mailing package, and we send Murray or his charity $3.
And yes...of course, I'm still surprised that someone asked...this web site is interested in the more recent work of all authors whose older books have been offered as Fair Trade Books here. This web site still cherishes the dream that other writers will browse about here, discover each other's books, buy each other's books, and, upon buying anything here, earn the right to post a free advertorial for anything they might care to advertise. (The ideas of people who post advertorials, like the ideas of elected officials, are their own, and we'll publish anything they say that does not violate our overall site rules, which can be summarized as "Practice common decency while writing.") For those who've not noticed, at the end of each post on this web site are a few of what Google calls Labels. (Live Journal calls them Tags.) These are site-provided links you can use to open a batch of posts on the same topic, without reading all the irrelevant posts in between. Clicking on "book" should open a set of posts about books by both living and dead writers; clicking on "a fair trade book" should open a set of posts about books by living writers only. Either Label may be used to find something to buy if you want to post an advertorial. We enthusiastically recommend this course of action to all writers, and friends of writers, who want a free opportunity to market new books while they're still available in big-chain stores, from publishers, or from writers' private web sites.
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