The sort of book I wished I’d been able to find when I was young.Īt first, I told barely anyone what I was doing. After a few tentative conversations with some of my writer friends, I started working on a novel-a young adult book about a smart black girl who lived in a city. I can’t sing, I can’t draw, and while I still love ballet, I didn’t feel an urge to return to dance class. The repetitive, structured, spreadsheet-oriented nature of my work often made me feel stifled. I couldn’t find books like that about black girls.Īfter I’d been a lawyer for about eight years, I found myself longing for some sort of creative outlet. I wanted to read fun books about smart girls who lived in cities and did exciting things with their friends. There were books about little black girls, but they were almost exclusively about little black girls during times of struggle: during slavery, in poverty in the early twentieth-century South, during the civil rights movement. When I turned those childhood favorites over to look at the picture of the author on the back, they almost never looked like me. I saw this pattern in so many of the girls in the books I read and loved as a kid: Anne, Emily, Betsy, Harriet, Claudia, Meg. I wonder, if they had, would I have rejected the idea out of hand? My vision of a writer has always been someone quiet, someone introverted, and-especially-someone white. I now wonder why no one in my life ever suggested writing to me. Many of my closest friendships-from childhood to the present day-started with bonding over a book. When I moved from the West Coast to the East Coast and then back again, I spent a small fortune shipping boxes of books across the country. Family legend says I learned to read at age three, and since then there have probably only been a handful of days when I haven’t read for pleasure. Until about seven years ago, I never had any ambition to become a writer, despite how much I’ve always loved to read. I’ve always been argumentative, so when I told my family I wanted to be a lawyer, their immediate response was: “That sounds right.” I put my foot on that path at age twelve, following my beloved teacher and mentor, and never wavered from it. Law school called to me immediately: I’ve always loved history and politics I watched the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings just a few years earlier with both confusion and anger I grew up in Berkeley, so political protest and activism was part of my life I basically memorized Schoolhouse Rock. Seeing her on that path made me-a young, book-obsessed, chatty black girl-realize that such a path was open to me, too. She was a black woman about ten years older than I was, and looked enough like me to be my older sister. Murray-Gill, left teaching and went on to law school the year after I was in her class. For the twelve years before that, in answer to the junior version of that question-“What do you want to be when you grow up?”-I always said, “A lawyer.” (For a while in childhood, the answer was “a ballerina,” but then I hit puberty and no longer had a ballerina kind of body.) For the three years before that, I was in law school. That’s the way I’ve answered for fifteen years. For most of my life, this has been an easy question to answer. They soon discover they have more in common than either of them expected, and as their deadline nears, Izzy and Beau begin to realize there may be something there that wasn't there before.īest-selling author Jasmine Guillory’s reimagining of a beloved fairy tale is a romantic triumph of love and acceptance and learning that sometimes to truly know a person you have to read between the lines.It’s one of the first questions we hear at parties, meeting someone new. But despite his standoffishness, Izzy needs Beau to deliver, and with her encouragement, his story begins to spill onto the page. He is jaded and withdrawn and-it turns out-just as lost as Izzy. Beau Towers is not some celebrity lightweight writing a tell-all memoir. How hard could it be?īut Izzy quickly finds out she is in over her head. So when she overhears her boss complaining about a beastly high-profile author who has failed to deliver his long-awaited manuscript, Isabelle sees an opportunity to finally get the promotion she deserves.Īll she has to do is go to the author’s Santa Barbara mansion and give him a quick pep talk or three. Overworked and underpaid, constantly torn between speaking up or stifling herself, Izzy thinks there must be more to this publishing life. When she first began her career in publishing right out of college, she did not expect to be twenty-five, living at home, still an editorial assistant, and the only Black employee at her publishing house. A tale as old as time-for a new generation.
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