Surfnetkids Grownup Fiction Book Club-After-1

SURFNETKIDS GROWN-UP FICTION BOOK CLUB Got shopping? Get discounts! Visit Surfnetkids: Coupons, Deals and Bargains for hundreds of discounts from dozens of online stores. week's book: AFTER by Marita Golden FROM THE BOOK JACKET: After joining the police force and building a family with his wife, Bunny, Carson Blake is finally in control of his life in the enclave where African American wealth and privilege share the same zip code with black American crime and tragedy. Both Carson and his wife have great careers and three beautiful children. Carson is a devoted father, determined not to be the father that Jimmy Blake was to him. But while his son Juwan's astounding artistic talent is his fathers pride, the boy's close relationship with classmate Will conjures up emotions and questions in Carson that threaten to spill over and poison the entire Blake family. And then, one night in March, nearing the end of a routine shift, Carson stops a young black man for speeding. He orders Paul Houston to exit the car and drop to his knees. But when Houston retrieves something from his waistband and turns to face Carson, three shots are fired, one man loses his life, and two families are wrenched from everything that came before and hurled into the haunting future of everything that will come after. When it is revealed that Paul, a son of educators and a teacher in Southeast D.C., was holding only a cell phone, Carson's carefully woven world begins to unravel. *New to the book club? Just click on the Missing Read link below for any shops you may have missed. Go to: (Today's book starts after the "Dear Reader" column.) Reader, The other day I discovered some notes I'd written for a column over three years ago. After I finished reading them I was grinning from ear-to-ear, they were cute. So why hadn't I ever followed through and written a column? And now, how was I going to remember what I was thinking way back then? Two pages of notes from so long ago--yes I remembered where I was when I wrote them. My husband and I were on a long weekend, staying at a very nice hotel and I was hanging out down by the pool, people watching and writing. But the details of the day certainly weren't fresh in my mind. So I was very pleased with myself, because at least I'd jotted down a few one-liners, little gems, whatever you want to call them, things I'd heard people say, but I'd never be able to remember them now--at least not verbatim. When I see or hear something that I think will make a great column I need to write down the specifics word-for-word, immediately, because I won't be able to duplicate them. Sure, I can paraphrase what was said, but the words I end up with will never turn someone's head, like they did mine, when I first heard them. I imagine writing a column from decrepit notes must be like putting a jigsaw puzzle together. I'm only guessing, mind you, because I've never actually put a jigsaw puzzle together (other than a 6-piece puppy puzzle when I was a kid). But I imagine if I were going to try to master a jigsaw puzzle, one of the first things I'd do is put the outer surface together. Then I'd look for big masses of color, or objects in the picture that were easy to identify, and hopefully after I found all of those pieces it would start to become clear what to do with the leftovers. And that's pretty much how putting together old column notes goes for me. The outer edge is what the column is about, the masses of color are the voice in the column and the objects in the notes are the one-liners. Arrange them in some sort of order and then take inventory on what I have left. Oh yeah, and there are always that were so relevant at the time but I didn't leave myself enough clues to be able to figure them out three years later. (I guess throwaways would be a no-no when you're doing a jigsaw puzzle.) It's the kind of column that takes a lot of patience, the same kind of patience I imagine it takes to finish a 1000 piece puzzle. Typing up my old notes hasn't inspired me to actually tackle a jigsaw puzzle, but I was inspired to buy some puzzles and some journals--and I'm giving them away today to readers. Write or put together a puzzle--your choice. I'm giving away two Travel-sized Puzzles, (small and compact with a case) and I have four journals, two light blue ones for women and two plain black ones for men. To enter the drawing for a Travel Puzzle or journal and to see some photos of readers who've won "stuff" in the past, go to: Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends. Suzanne Beecher AUTHORBUZZ: Win free copies of books you'll read and never forget from these terrific authors; Emma Holly, "Demon's Fire;" Lesley Dormen, "The Best Place to Be;" William Haywood Henderson, "Augusta Locke;" Leanna Ellis, "Elvis Takes a Back Seat;" and Mariah Stewart, "Mercy St." Go to: * * * *Read the Classics: DANGEROUS LIAISONS by Choderlos De Laclos and enter the free Penguin Classic's Drawing. Go to: Surfing the Net with Kids: shop me: Missing an shop? Go to: =====TODAY'S We Begin a New Book! AFTER by Marita Golden (fiction) Published by Harlem Moon an imprint of The Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group a division of Random House, Inc. Copyright 2006 by Marita Golden ISBN: 9780767917780 To reference this shop: AFTER (Part 1 of 5) Congratulations to the winners of last week's giveaway of "The Soloist" by Steve Lopez: Bob Guyan, Wanda Updegraff, Bill Kleine, Linda Hightower, Winnie Price, Emma Amaya, Cherub Beard, Robye Sue Parker, Jean Nutile, Victoria Dolikian, Karole Sutherland, Robyn Bennett, Janet Richter, Emily English and Jeff Payne. *This book contains adult language* Chapter One The bullets discharge from the muzzle of Officer Carson Blake's sixteen-round Beretta with the tinny, explosive popping sound of a toy gun. He will not remember exactly how many shots he fires so wildly. Fires with pure intent. Fires, he is sure, to save his life. In the first seconds after the shattering sound of the bullets subsides, he would say, if asked right then, that he had fired every bullet in his gun. Never before has his gun been so large. Never before has it weighed so much. He's dizzy and breathless. His heart beats so fast, he can't believe he is still standing. When he shoots the man, everything, all of it, unfolds as if in slow motion. He wants to look away. He dares not turn his gaze. The first bullet boring through the man's thick neck riddled with razor bumps, the force twisting his head to the side, as though he is looking with those astonished, horribly open, not yet dead eyes to see where the bullet comes from. The second bullet piercing the skin of the black leather jacket, lodging in the flesh of his shoulder. The third bullet, fired at his groin, bringing him to his knees and then onto his face, sprawled flat out on the parking lot forty feet from the entrance to the Chinese restaurant The House of Chang. Carson stands staring at the man on the pavement, his body a bloody heap illuminated by the fluorescence of the mall parking lot lights, and sees the cell phone a few feet from the man's hand, and he prays for the ground beneath his feet to shift in a cataclysmic rumble and swallow him whole. "A cell phone," he thinks, unbelieving. "A cell phone." Not a gun. He hurls a howl, deep and guttural, into the night. Sinking to his knees, he touches the man, turns him over onto his back, sees the bulbous, bloody wound in his neck, smells the sharp odor of his sodden groin, desperate now to find, to feel, a pulse. There is none. There is only the cell phone. Looking up in desperation, Carson sees a sky unfamiliar and frightening, in which he can fathom not a single star, a vastness that makes him wish for wings. Carson tries to stand but cannot, and he crawls a few feet away and vomits. When there is no more sickness to spill from his gut, he wipes his mouth and shouts at the dead man, through trembling lips stained with a blistering splash of tears, "What the f uck were you doing? Why didn't you just do what I said?" There is nothing on this night that hints at disaster. After twelve years on the force, Carson can tell when a shift will be h ell on wheels. On those shifts, the dispatcher begins reciting an address and an "incident" (car crash, domestic disturbance, robbery, brawl, accident, murder) even before Carson is belted behind the wheel. Then there are the calm, quiet shifts when hour after hour he's numb with boredom, cruising the nine square miles of his police service area, and after a couple of hours he begins looking for a safe place to park and take a nap. But he can't get bored. Because bored he won't see the obvious--the missing tags on a beat-up hoopty driven by a carload of young punks looking for trouble and determined to find it. But this night he is bored by 9:45, when he walks into a 7-Eleven near the litter-filled streets of a housing project known as "The Jungle" to buy coffee and a doughnut. Carson ignores the group of high school-age boys hanging out in front of the store at almost ten o'clock on a school night, rapping, jonin', joking, lying. Matches waiting to be struck. "Don't they have homes?" Carson wonders for the thousandth time, then recalls what he has seen in some of the homes these boys live in-- rats, roaches, three kids sleeping on the living room floor, toddlers playing near stacks of crack cocaine, no heat in the winter, stifling ovenlike apartments in the summer, overworked mamas, long-gone daddies. Those homes make the parking lot of 7-Eleven seem a step up in the world. Still, why the h ell were they standing outside to talk? "Just hangin'." He'd read somewhere that this was street corner culture, an integral part of the Black experience. Some urban ritual. But this is Prince George's County. No inner-city street corners here, like in nearby D.C. "But niggahs," he thinks sullenly, can turn anyplace into a ghetto. Nearly all the arrests he's made, all his stops, involve boys like the ones he barely looks at as he passes by, feeling them grit on him with a steely stare because he's a police officer. To them he's a cop and he is, in their eyes, the enemy. He's fed up with arresting young Black males--aimless, directionless, often involved in non-violent crimes that set the stage for all the s hit that hits the fan in their young lives. Just last week he was called to the scene of a shooting and saw a kid no more than seventeen, dressed in spanking new jeans, Air Jordans, and a Phat Farm sweatshirt, loaded into the Emergency Services vehicle, "dead." Shot in the back while standing outside a Popeyes, from the passenger side of a Crown Vic that careened past the spot where he stood munching on a spicy chicken breast and a biscuit while talking to his baby's mama. The car didn't even slow down to make the hit. As Carson watched the EMS vehicle drive away, he wondered how many hits the kid had made. Revenge, payback, and a brutal, bloody synchronicity ruled the lives of too many of the young men he arrested. He saw precious few truly innocent victims. Predators, that's what he calls them, kids like that who walked into a convenience store in Oxon Hill and tried to rob it at 5 a.m. and ended up stabbing the Korean owner to death. "What the f uck?" Carson sometimes wonders. "Godd amn, my people, my people," envisioning the future of the race in every act and every choice these young men make. He's tried to talk to them, standing in groups like these or in handcuffs in the backseat of his cruiser, but he might as well be speaking Mandarin. (continued on Tuesday) =========BUY this link to get the best price on this week's book: To locate or purchase OTHER BOOKS use this link: =======SHARE THE can forward this shop to your friends and relatives. Encourage them to join our book clubs. It's a great way to stay in touch even if you live thousands of miles apart. comments or book suggestions? Contact me, Barbara J. Feldman, at: Inc., 991C Lomas Santa Fe Dr. #415 Solana Beach, CA 92075 You are currently Purchased to as: To Purchase send a blank shop to To join any of the free Surfnetkids Book Clubs, visit:

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