This author participates in the Readers' Favorite Book Review Exchange Program, which is open to all authors and is completely free. Simply put, you agree to provide an honest review an author's book in exchange for the author doing the same for you. What sites your reviews are posted on (B&N, Amazon, etc.) and whether you send digital (eBook, PDF, Word, etc.) or hard copies of your books to each other for review is up to you. To begin, click the purple email icon to send this author a private email, and be sure to describe your book or include a link to your Readers' Favorite review page or Amazon page.
This author participates in the Readers' Favorite Book Donation Program, which was created to help nonprofit and charitable organizations (schools, libraries, convalescent homes, soldier donation programs, etc.) by providing them with free books and to help authors garner more exposure for their work. This author is willing to donate free copies of their book in exchange for reviews (if circumstances allow) and the knowledge that their book is being read and enjoyed. To begin, click the purple email icon to send this author a private email. Be sure to tell the author who you are, what organization you are with, how many books you need, how they will be used, and the number of reviews, if any, you would be able to provide.
Reviewed by Jon Michael Miller for Readers' Favorite
In Why Not Him, author Anila creates a character who narrates her own story, Zia Norton, “a self-made boss at the age of twenty-five—whoop! whoop! My business develops concepts and writes scripts for various entertainment genres.” Originally from St. Pete, she has graduated from a prestigious historically black university in Atlanta and is recalling mostly her four years there, during which she became of age (sexually speaking), and fell love with a man who eventually beat her to within an inch of her life. She forgives him, only for him to do it again. She struggles with her intense sexual being as it conflicts with her desire for true love. She is with two pals from childhood, Ja - a “sister” - and Quay - a “brother”- who watch over her but who fail to protect her from her tormentor. Zia fights to understand how love can turn so horribly ugly and how her own judgment can be so terribly wrong. Eventually, she finds a sympathetic counselor at college who guides her to some supportive self-insights. Zia tells her story in her own ghetto vernacular. She is brash and direct and does not hide her love for sex and alcohol. The author warns us that “this story is raw, edgy, and explicit.”
Her warning should be heeded. If you have any objection to near-pornographic descriptions of sex acts, Why Not Him will not be the book for you. And yet, the passages seem realistic for Zia’s uninhibited accounts of her desires and encounters, expressed in the language of the “street.” The point for me was, are the descriptions true to Zia’s character? And as I read, I came to answer, yes, they are. As Anila announces, the book is about love, and “love is a mf’er.” The book is about the search for love, almost at all costs; the violent abuse of love; and the journey toward recovery and hope. Zia may be unlike most of us in her frankness, ruthless honesty, and raging desires, but she is very much like all of us in our search for meaning in love and in life.