Real Men Knit by Kwana Jackson

I first heard about Real Men Knit by Kwana Jackson from Karen Grigsby Bates when she wrote and talked about it on NPR.  

In this book, Mama Joy has died and left her four adopted sons her knitting shop in Harlem.  We're introduced to this family, their hardships, their grief, and their grievances with one another. Kerry has worked at the shop in some capacity or another her whole adult life and offers to help them keep the shop running, but that longstanding crush she has on Jesse is making it challenging for her.

There are a lot of really good things about this book.  It's great to see diversity represented in romance novels.  I am imagining that the reason Karen Grigsby Bates loves this book so much is that she recognizes parts of herself in the main character.  It's lovely for me to imagine women opening up this book and seeing themselves in these scenes.

I like the idea that this is a real family with real struggles. The brothers aren't all super duper close and know everyone's business. The shop is struggling financially.  The main character is having a bit of a professional identity crisis.  This is how real life is.

But.  

This book was as boring as that lecture I attended once at grad school about the ethics of imbedding in voluntary political organizations.  

So much of this book was in the character's heads. Paragraphs were pages long.  The total conversation of the novel could have been written in three pages (I exaggerate...but probably not by much.)

More importantly.

There are some bad things happening here. There are terrible characterizations of women written . I don't want to read about how our main character "isn't like other women" and then read a takedown of someone else. I just don't.  If someone doesn't make the same life choices as you, you're free to acknowledge that, but you don't get to judge. I'm already Judge-y McJudgeson enough in my life - I want my fictional literature characters to be better.

It's also both utterly mundane. I want romance books about real people - I do! I don't need them to be billionaires, rock stars, or professional athletes.  But this book.  The "romance" was a couple of kisses and never a conversation about actual feelings.  (Don't get me started on the introduction of a vibrator that was never used - I felt like my Chekhov's vibrator was used against me.)  It was an utter snoozefest.  

This can actually be done. Consider the Montgomery Ink saga by Carrie Ann Ryan. She writes about blue collar, hardworking people in a realistic way. The stories are realistic, but absolutely exciting, hot, and unputdownable.  Now, Ryan's books are filled with white people, so you're not going to get that jolt of representation of a diversity of viewpoints, but I just want you to know that I'm not holding Jackson up to some unreachable goal. It can be done and I hope the next book in her series is better.