A New Bloom

Yep, I admit it: I am late to the game. However, better late than never, right?Street Kingdom was Douglas Century‘s debut novel. From 1999.What had happened was, I found a hardback copy of this book during #OperationFindTheGarage and after reading the liner notes, scurried into the house with it clutched to my breast like a long-lost treasure. I tucked the book cover on my bookshelf for safe-keeping and squirreled away with the text as often as possible until I reached the end.Is it wrong to fall in love with a book?Nah.I actually fell in love with Kingdom but found myself in a quandary — I needed to know what happened next. Note the small print below the author’s name in the image above. The newer version has an epilogue. Mine doesn’t have that. I suspect it offers more information on the protagonist, which is what I was craving as I closed the back cover.I know. You want to know what made me fall in love with this particular book, don’t you?While it takes place in New York, it took me home to Jersey. Sure, there were bits that took place on the southern side of the Boroughs, but those identified spots were still far removed from my birthplace and stomping grounds for the most part. Yet, the club names and the descriptions of places, sounds, lingo and the rest put my right there. I miss most of that ol school East Coast slang.Some of it has made it to 2016, but it’s different. The random sprinkling of mo-fo (you know what I’m talkin’ about) in a conversation has morphed into something else today and here. Then? It was a term of endearment as much as it was a challenge. The Five Percenters? Hadn’t thought about them in an age (Gods and Earths … it was all love, wasn’t it?). And there’s so many more stops I could make on memory lane, but then I’d be revealing too much.What can I say? Get yourself a copy. If you get a copy with the epilogue, give me a hint of what you find there, wouldya? Help a sista out.And if you run into Mr. Century, tell him I’ll probably be stalking his Amazon page to buy more books.