KAREN’S KILLER BOOK BENCH: Welcome to Karen’s Killer Book Bench, where readers can discover talented new authors and take a peek inside their wonderful books. This is not an age-filtered site, so all book peeks are PG-13 or better. Come back and visit often. Happy reading!
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WHEN FORTY BLOOMS
Black & African American Romance
BY JACINTA HOWARD
BLURB
A rare birthday. A second chance. A woman finally choosing herself.
Simone Harris has always known how to hold it down. For her son. For her clients. For the sports agency she built from scratch. She keeps things running, keeps herself moving, and keeps her heart tucked safely out of reach.
But this birthday feels different. It falls on a leap year, a date that only circles back every so often. A rare kind of day that feels like it arrives exactly when it’s meant to. The kind that makes you pause and ask what you have been pushing through just to keep going. In that stillness, something begins to surface alongside it. Fatigue. Questions. The quiet ache she has learned to ignore.
She is not falling apart. Still, something is shifting. The pressure she has lived under feels heavier than it once did. And as she begins to listen to what her spirit has been trying to say, the past reappears, bringing with it a familiar comfort, unfinished conversations, and a quiet invitation to feel again.
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WHEN FORTY BLOOMS
Black & African American Romance
BY JACINTA HOWARD
Excerpt
“What?” I ask, catching Jackson’s gaze as the bartender walks away, a small smile playing at my lips.
His gaze trails over my face, dipping from my lips, which are bare aside from blush-pink lip gloss, to my collarbone, down to my crossed legs.
“Forty looks good on you.”
My body warms at the way he’s looking at me, and I grin. “I’m technically not forty yet.”
He lets his gaze trail over me again. “Then that dress looks good on you.”
Our gazes connect and I inhale, then let the breath out slowly. “Thank you.”
Jackson has always liked me in orange. I don’t want to think about whether I subconsciously wore the color tonight knowing there was a chance I might see him.
“So how you feelin’?” he asks, his gaze perceptive as ever when I lean back in the high-back barstool and suck in the damp island air. The music has switched and now eighties yacht rock is overhead, the watery R&B sounds of Hall & Oates softly floating in the air.
“Not as heavy as before I landed,” I answer.
He nods, his gaze skimming over my face again, lingering on my lips for a beat. “Good.”
“I had a dream about you the other night,” I admit after another second.
He looks at me, brow arched, a trace of amusement dancing in his eyes. I dream a lot. Sometimes the dreams are surreal, a hodgepodge of abstract scenes involving people, sometimes people I’ve barely even met, in absurd situations, like getting their hair washed over my grandmother’s kitchen sink. But sometimes, they border on premonition, a thin outline of things to come, or light sketches that fill in the blanks on past things.
There were many mornings when I’d roll over in bed, eager to share my latest dream with Jackson. Sometimes I didn’t even have to say anything. He’d just open his eyes and peer at me sleepily. “What was it about this time?” he’d ask, his baritone early-morning groggy, half amused.
“What was I doing in the dream?” he asks now as he takes a swig of his beer.
“We were high up on Spaghetti Junction, and I was having a panic attack. You were trying to talk me down from it.”
“What’d I say?”
I shrug. “I don’t remember exactly. Something along the lines of ‘Drive, baby, just drive, you’re okay,’” I say, attempting to mimic his deep voice.
He laughs. “So did it work?”
“No. I woke up just when we were about to fall off the edge.”
“Damn,” he says, chuckling before he takes another swig. “Did we actually hit the ground?”
“Um, no. If you actually ever land when you’re falling in a dream, you wake up dead.”
Jackson laughs again. “That sounds like some sh*t you made up.”
“Nah, google it.”
He rolls his eyes, still smirking when he sets his beer on the bar counter. “So what do you think it means?”
I shrug. “I dunno. Something? Nothing? It was just weird. I actually dream about you pretty often,” I admit, my voice quieter.
Jackson doesn’t look up as he wipes condensation from his bottle slowly with his thumb.
“And what do you think that means?”
About Author Jacinta Howard…
Jacinta Howard is an Atlanta-based author and culture journalist with over a decade of experience writing about music, art, and pop culture.
Jacinta’s work has appeared in, and Rock The Bells, where she served as an editor. Her 2022 article on Atlanta’s Magic City wings was nominated for an American Society of Magazine Editors Award, and her exploration of the Atlanta University Center’s impact on hip-hop was honored in The City of Atlanta’s Hip Hop 50 Time Capsule.
As a lifelong music lover, Jacinta’s experiences in culture journalism naturally influence her novels, which explore the complexities of relationships, personal healing, and true intimacy. Named a USA TODAY-recognized author and two-time RONE (Reward of Novel Excellence) Award nominee, her books have been featured in USA Today, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Book Riot, and OkayAfrica.
When she’s not writing, she’s relaxing on a beach with her family, a good book, and a great playlist.
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Links to Jacinta’s websites, blogs, books, #ad, etc.:
Amazon Kindle: https://amzn.to/4kxCO8J
Amazon CD: https://amzn.to/4lJw08W
Website: https://www.jacintahoward.net/#/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jacintahoward/
X: https://x.com/jacintahoward
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jacinta.howard
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/jacintahoward/
Happy Reading!
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Special Giveaway: Jacinta will gift a paperback copy (U.S. only) to two lucky readers who comment on her Karen’s Killer Book Bench blog. Good luck!
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Thanks, Jacinta, for sharing your book with us!
Don’t miss the chance to read this book!
Thanks for sharing your intriguing book. Sounds really interesting.
Oh the possibilities and I want to see them play out…
Thanks, Jacinta, and thanks, Karen, for the introduction.
Welcome to Karen’s Killer Book Bench, Jacinta. I love the description of your story, and the excerpt. Second chances and learning to live your life for yourself are tough for many women. I’m looking forward to reading how Simone handles it. Thanks for sharing your book with us today!
nice cover
This sounds really good.
Thanks for the chance, sounds good!