Something Old, Something New (25 page)

Book Club
Questions

1. How did the title,
Something Old, Something New
, manifest itself in the
story?

2. Besides Trent and Lily's
relationship, who else did the title represent?

3. Which character's back story
surprised you the most and why?

4. How best can Barrett contribute
to Henry Adams?

5. Which scene(s) made you laugh?
Which one(s) broke your heart?

6. If you were a resident of Henry
Adams, which of the children would you most like to parent and why? Which one
would you least like to raise?

7. Was Tamar's anger at her
brother justified? What about Marie's at her mother and at Tamar?

8. Should Marie's son have
contacted her?

9. Talk about Trent's role as
father to Amari and Devon.

10. Should Devon have been made to paint the
fence alone, per tradition?

11. Discuss tradition in your individual
families.

12. What should Jack do about Rocky?

Author's Note

Something Old, Something New
marks our third visit to modern-day Henry Adams, Kansas. This installment is filled with humor, heartache, and a bit of mayhem in the form of the Oklahoma Julys. I hope you had as much fun reading it as I had writing it. I especially enjoyed working in the traditional flute played by most Native cultures, which is more akin in form and fingering to the Western clarinet. The
siyotanka,
as the Lakota flute is known, played a prominent role in my first Henry Adams historical romance,
Night Song,
and I couldn't resist resurrecting the concept for Trent and Lily.

Over the course of the series one of the main questions readers have been asking is: When will Zoey speak? That has now been answered and I'm looking forward to learning more about her multifaceted personality in the future.

As with the previous two books,
Bring on the Blessings
and
A Second Helping,
we leave Henry Adams with many still-unanswered questions. Will Leo and his company run roughshod over the rights of the farmers and lay their pipeline anyway? Is that e-mail really from Preston's grandmother? Will Rocky ever give poor Jack the time of day? And what about Riley—will he have to act as his own lawyer at the upcoming trial in order to save Cletus's bacon? In the words of the great Rocket J. Squirrel: Stay tuned, girls and boys.

Once again, I want to say thanks to all the foster parents and adoptive parents who've e-mailed me their stories, forwarded me pictures of their kids, and sent me blessings for writing a series that has touched their hearts. You've touched mine also with your commitment and love. Keep doing what you're doing.

According to statistics compiled by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 424,000 children were in state-run foster-care homes or facilities in 2009, and of that number, 57,000 were adopted. In many ways that's great, because in 2002, there were 520,000 children in foster care and 51,000 were adopted. However, you don't need a degree in math to figure out that if 57,000 were adopted in 2009, more than 360,000 are still waiting for a permanent home. Many of these children will age out of foster care on their eighteenth birthday and be forced to deal with a world that often lacks the support system they'll need to succeed. And yes, there are wonderful stories of children who have the smarts, drive, and tenacity to surpass even their wildest dreams, but unfortunately these stories seem few and far between.

As I noted in
Bring on the Blessings,
most of the children in the foster-care system are children of color, and the hardest to place are groups of siblings, children with special needs, and teens. My son was five when we adopted him. He'd been taken out of his home at the age of three because of abuse that left him hospitalized and encased in a body cast to heal his broken ribs and limbs. Although his maternal grandmother wanted custody, she was denied by the courts and he went into the system. But in social worker speak, he's called a survivor—a child who has come through the fire relatively whole.

When he came to live with us, he had issues. He had a very limited vocabulary for a child of five, had never gone out for dinner as far as we knew (not even to McDonald's), and had become accustomed to sleeping on a bare mattress due to bed-wetting problems. In those first few months, he wore us out. I have two younger brothers, so I was well aware of how much wild energy boys can have, but this little guy must have been drinking jet fuel after we put him to bed at night, because he got up every morning turbocharged. It made me tired just watching him. It was like having a curious wolf cub in your home: lots of zooming around and lots of destruction, from the antennae on my then twelve-year-old daughter's boom box to the odometer on my hubby's exercise bike. Nothing was safe, and it wasn't because he was destructive. It was because he wanted to touch everything in his brave new world, and sometimes knobs that look like they should turn and other things that look like they should bend don't. My daughter wanted to bury him in the backyard every day.

But we survived, as families tend to whether the children are biological or not. Although he was age ready for school, the rest of him wasn't; too much jet fuel for a classroom. When he did start kindergarten a year later, my husband and I tag teamed. Three days out of the week, I was in the classroom; the other two days, my husband was. Nothing like watching a labor consultant dressed in a suit playing in a sandbox with kindergarteners.

We got it done, however, and by the time our son started high school, the little wooden boy who came to us with a vocabulary that was limited to the word
motorcycle
and the phrase
gotta use it
had transformed himself into the Fresh Prince of our small, semirural town.

He was sixteen when cancer took my husband, his dad. His life was shattered, and during the eight years since, he's performed more stupid kid tricks than a mother can shake a stick at. For a while, I was the one wanting to bury him in the backyard on a daily basis.

Do I regret adopting him? Not in the least. His grief at losing his dad had nothing to do with being adopted and everything to do with love and how lost he felt when his guiding star dimmed. Getting him through senior year and beyond turned into such an adventure that my daughter suggested I write a book about him titled
You Did What?!

I'm sharing his story to say parenting is parenting, no matter where your children originate. Biological kids have been known to give their parents fits, too, so don't let the fact that a child may have issues deter you from opening your home and heart.

In traveling over the last two years to promote this series, I've cried a lot. Upon hearing stories from adoptive parents, foster parents, and adopted children about how much the Blessings series has hit home, or how much the Henry Adams kids remind them of the children they are raising, or the joy the entire family experiences reading the series, crying was all I had.

The folks in Henry Adams have readers and book clubs all over America talking about adoption, fostering, and volunteering, and I hope the discussions lead to some positive action on behalf of those 360,000 left behind. However, if only one person steps up, it gives one more child a shot at a life most of us take for granted. So if you can help, do so. The rigid rules that used to apply as to who can be an adoptive parent and who can't are finally changing as society realizes that only two questions are truly paramount: Will you love this child? Can you provide for this child? If the answers are yes, all that's left is the shouting.

So if this series has touched you enough to consider helping out a child in need, then my job here is done. Take it from me, you will be blessed.

Until next time,

B

About the Author

BEVERLY JENKINS grew up in Detroit and
majored in journalism and English literature at Michigan State University. She
has been featured in many national publications, including the
Wall Street Journal
,
People
,
Dallas Morning News
, and
Vibe
.

www.BeverlyJenkins.net

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for
exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

Also by Beverly Jenkins

A Second Helping

Bring on the Blessings

Deadly Sexy

Sexy/Dangerous

Black Lace

Edge of Dawn

Edge of Midnight

Midnight

Captured

Jewel

Wild Sweet Love

Winds of a Storm

Something Like Love

A Chance at Love

Before Dawn

Always and Forever

Taming Jessi Rose

Topaz

Indigo

Vivid

Through the Storm

Night Song

Credits

Cover design by Mumtaz
Mustafa

Cover illustration ©
Mandy Pritty

Copyright

This book is a work of fiction. The
characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author's imagination and
are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons,
living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

SOMETHING OLD,
SOMETHING NEW
. Copyright © 2011 by Beverly Jenkins. All rights
reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment
of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable
right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text
may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or
stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in
any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or
hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
e-books.

EPub Edition © June 2011 ISBN: 9780062092144

Library of Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jenkins, Beverly, 1951–

Something old, something new : a
blessings novel / Beverly Jenkins.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-06-199079-3

1. African Americans—Fiction.
2. Weddings—Fiction. 3. Family secrets—Fiction. 4. City and town
life—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3560.E4795S43 2010

813'.54—dc22

2010037385

11 12 13 14 15
OV/RRD
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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