Welcome to KayDee Reads

 Dear readers, 

To love literature is to love life, and boy do I love life. I have never been a people person, I am slightly awkward and it is overwhelming. I never needed people when I had the characters of my favorite novels to keep me company. Imagine wanting to be rambunctious like Huckleberry Finn, mischievous like Junie B. Jones, adventurous like Harry, Hermoine, and Ron, or even curious like Alice. Literature has always been there to turn my day around when I'm anxious, scared, happy, overwhelmed, or sad. However, there were not many books that contained characters within their contents that represented who I was as a reader. As a child, you do not feel it nor do you care to, but as I got older, it made me become detached from one of my favorite activities. As a Black woman, my identity is all-encompassing. I cannot be anything other than that, and as a result, it started to interfere with how I approached novels. There has always been Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, and even Octavia Butler, but what about the genres that I love? Why did I have to shift my preferences just to feel represented? Where was my representation in Fantasy or even Romantic Comedies? It became infuriating to love reading, but feel as if reading didn't see me. About three years ago, I joined a Black-owned company that focuses on Black culture preservation through the lenses of Education, Media, and Social Justice. As an intern, it was my job to take over the Black List, which was a compilation of Black authors that we featured weekly. Each month has a theme, and our book club,*the footnotes, was born from this idea. My love for literature and my book collection has tripled. I think I own and read more books these days than I had in my first 24 years of life, and that says a lot. 

In the three years that I have curated the Black list and hosted the book club, I have been introduced to so many Black authors who have even opened my eyes to new genres. I read revolutionary works that I would have avoided in the past, because of my presumption that it was going to be too complex to enjoy. Boy, I was wrong. Maybe it is the excitement of having an abundance of Black literature at my disposal, or maybe it's because the paradigm shift of Black authors dominating literature has truly impacted literature in a way that literally enriches the words on the pages. 

This blog is going to be my journey in experiencing my favorite series written by Black authors. I will document my reactions, my expectations, and my personal recommendations. Please know that I am not an author, and will under no condition, discuss grammar and writing styles. However, I will occasionally offer my critiques. So Welcome to KayDee Reads, and buckle up, I have so many things and characters to share with you! 

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