The Homecoming Masquerade Girls Wearing Black 1

In a posh suburb of the nation’s capital, at the most exclusive high school in the world, the vampires who secretly run the government have created a game for America’s daughters of privilege. Show up to Homecoming in a black dress and you’ve entered yourself in a contest where the winner becomes a vampire, and the loser becomes the winner’s first victim. Only the wealthiest, most connected students can hope to win, so when new girl Nicky Bloom wears a black dress to Homecoming, everyone assumes she has a death wish. They don’t know that Nicky has her own agenda. As the dance continues into the night, they will find out that Nicky Bloom is far more than she seems.

In a posh suburb of the nation's capital, at the most exclusive high school in the world, the vampires who secretly run the government have created a game for America's daughters of privilege. Show up to Homecoming in a black dress and you've entered yourself in a contest where the winner becomes a vampire, and the loser becomes the winner's first victim.Only the wealthiest, most connected students can hope to win, so when new girl Nicky Bloom wears a black dress to Homecoming, everyone assumes she has a death wish. They don't know that Nicky has her own agenda. As the dance continues into the night, they will find out that Nicky Bloom is far more than she seems.

Still reeling from the events of the Homecoming Masquerade, Nicky Bloom must prepare for the second event of the Coronation contest: The Festival of the Moon. A week-long celebration of the immortals and the girls vying to become one, the Festival of the Moon begins with a wild party in the woods and ends with a date auction, where all the boys of the Thorndike senior class bid for the right to wine and dine one of the girls wearing black. With help from Jill Wentworth and the rest of the Network, Nicky dives headfirst into the world of lust, gossip, and intrigue that is Thorndike Academy. And as she and the other girls wearing black struggle for position, Nicky must keep her true identity a secret, not only from the other students at school, but from the vampire who is watching her every move.

It is a new semester at Thorndike Academy, and a time for new beginnings. For Daciana Samarin, it is a time to take control of the school after a lengthy absence. Eager to inject some excitement into a contest that has one girl far ahead of the others, Daciana rolls out a relic from her past, and invites the girls wearing black to explore its mysteries. For Jill Wentworth, it is a time to evaluate priorities, and determine if the potential rewards of her assignment at Thorndike are worth the risks. Ever the rationalist, Jill believes Washington has become too hot for the mission to continue. But with a changing of the guard atop the clan, there are new opportunities for the Network to explore, including one that just might keep Jill in town, despite the danger. For Nicky Bloom, it is a time of discovery. Having learned the truth about her family, and the memories that drew her across the ocean, she is prepared to face the truth about herself, and what she wants most in life. When she was in Italy, she had a chance to kill Sergio Alonzo and she didn’t take it. Now it is time for her find out why. The fourth and final book of Girls Wearing Black follows the seniors of Thorndike Academy in their final semester, when they will conclude the contest that will see one of them become a vampire, and another the vampire’s first victim.

In Matria Redux: Caribbean Women Novelize the Past, author Tegan Zimmerman contends that there is a need for reading Caribbean women’s texts relationally. This comprehensive study argues that the writer’s turn to maternal histories constitutes the definitive feature of this transcultural and transnational genre. Through an array of Caribbean women’s historical novels published roughly between 1980 and 2010, this book formulates the theory of matria—an imagined maternal space and time—as a postcolonial-psychoanalytic feminist framework for reading fictions of maternal history written by and about Caribbean women. Tracing the development of the historical novel in four periods of the Caribbean past—slavery, colonialism, revolution, and decolonization—this study argues that a pan-Caribbean generation of women writers, of varying discursive racial(ized) realities, has depicted similar matria constructs and maternal motifs. A politicized concept, matria functions in the historical novel as a counternarrative to traditional historical and literary discourses. Through close readings of the mother/daughter plots in contemporary Caribbean women’s historical fiction, such as Andrea Levy’s The Long Song, Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones, Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow, and Marie-Elena John’s Unburnable, Matria Redux considers the concept of matria an important vehicle for postcolonial-psychoanalytic feminist literary resistance and political intervention. Matria as a psychoanalytic, postcolonial strategy therefore envisions, by returning to history, alternative feminist fictions, futures, and Caribbeans.

Clippings from the Anadarko daily news concerning the Anadark High School class of 1951, their neighbors and contemporaries.