Welcome to Litsy!

In this cafe, where the food is not so good and the name of the owner is not Bailey, you will learn about the story of some clients. Set in 1948 after WWII, where black people lived in marginality. In the cafe, they will ask for Eve who will help those she will accept in her house. This is a powerful novel. Those client‘s stories are so sad and hard 😢I still found that some stories were not so well connected for me but⬇️

When your life is unlivable, make your way to Bailey‘s Cafe for as long as you need. The people who stop in to the cafe are outcasts. The forgotten or reviled. But at Bailey‘s they are accepted and given the opportunity to pass on.

Bailey's Café is a 1992 novel by award-winning American author Gloria Naylor. The novel consists of a loosely intertwined group of stories, all told in first person, about the owners and patrons of Bailey's Cafe, an apparently supernatural establishment, set nominally in New York City, whose entrance can be found from different places and times.

⭐️⭐️⭐️?

BAILEY‘S CAFE offers a diverse, well-written take on the classic cafe-between-worlds setup. It rarely judges its characters, all of whom have wandered in from the 1940s. At first, I thought I‘d love it.

Trouble is, most of these interconnected stories focus on terrible things happening to women and girls. It‘s bleak and painful and it takes a long, long time for any hope to emerge. I did appreciate it in the end, but I can‘t like it.

BAILEY‘S CAFE is shaping up to be one of those books I understand but don‘t like. There‘s so much violence and cruelty that I‘m having trouble appreciating the stories, even though I can recognize their importance when I set myself at a distance. I‘m kind of dreading the back half.

TW for everything, basically.

The book‘s brutal, but I did get a little #audiodecorating done yesterday while I listened. So, that‘s something.

I'm currently reading four books. I'm finishing up my last Gloria Naylor novel "Bailey's Café" and reading RF Kuang's The "Poppy War" for a book club. Not pictured is my current audiobook Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and the Care and Feed of Ravenously Hungry Girls by Anissa Gray.

What are you reading heading into the weekend?

#fridayreads #currentlyreading

We always make a point to visit the little free library in Oak Bluffs when we vacation on Martha's Vineyard. I scored and found this almost new edition of Gloria Naylor's books. So maybe this fall I will read the three I own. I love #freelittlelibraries

#readsoullit Day 4 Book that Made You Cry. So many of the characters' stories in both of these books deeply moved me. Baldwin in particular always does something to me. #blackhistorymonth

The first time I read this was involuntary, for a humanities class, so naturally I hated it. I gave it another try, thinking I may have not been fair in my assessment, but I was. While there are certain pages that shine, the entirety just feels like different stories forced clumsily together. Nah.