Episode Details

Get ready for Hester, one of Sarah’s favorite heroines of all time — and Beverly Jenkins’s Indigo, which Jen just read for the first time! We’re talking historical romance, the way romances feel important, sex and intimacy, and all the reasons why everyone should read Beverly Jenkins right now.

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Next week, it’s the second half of our book recommendation, stump Sarah & Jen AMA. The following week we’ll release a tiny little stocking stuffer for our Christmas Day episode, but we’re back in business on January 1, with the seasonally appropriate (at least in title) Born in Ice, by none other than the queen herself, Nora Roberts. Read Born in Ice at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Kobo or your local indie.

Show Notes

• Jen now has critic crushes on Diego Baez and Walton Muyumba. Liz Taylor who is kind of a big deal in the book world wrote an amazing book about Chicago's first Mayor Daley called American Pharaoh.
• Thanks to the Lincoln RI public library for being awesome.
• There's actually a lot of great resources for how to teach slavery to kids, so do better white teachers.
• Here at Fated Mates, we are LaQuette stans. Listen to her talk about discomfort and how important it is in her RITA speech last year.
• Colson Whitehead's Underground Railroad is an absolute tour de force. Here is a cool site mapping the world of the novel.
• If you don't know about America's history of lynching, you should learn all about Bryan Stevenson, who spearheaded the effort to create a Lynching Museum. The site Without Sanctuary preserves the history of these postcards (Content warning on that site for obvious reasons.)
• Gone with the Wind is an example of the pervasive and terrible "happy slave" narrative, which appears over and over aga