₦airaland Forum

try these exhilirating reads

http://bookstore.trafford.com/Products/SKU-000132025/A-Rose-in-Bloom.aspx


http://www.lulu.com/product/item/pathos-of-a-wilting-rose/17531071

Nice try!!!!

Thats why i said the story line is unpredictable. You couldn't imagine it was antything than abandonment, lol

Get the hardcopy or download mate!!!

n/b I'm not getting paid for this promotion.

Just gotta raise a deserving sista's profile

Well, the above is only an excerpt from the original book so you need to read the book to find out the rest of the story.

More on the prologue is available on www.lulu.com. search for Pathos of a wilting Rose and preview the book.

Cheers!!!!!

PROLOGUE

Ever reflected back on an event and wished you could reenact the exact moment when it hit you.

When you are left wondering if you can pinpoint your precise location or preoccupation at the time, i.e. recreate the moment when the muck hit the fan.

Your intent is not so much to re-live that moment but to freeze your reverie before it all went awry and repress it forever.

Try as she might, Nkiru couldn’t.

Instead she envisaged the day as it could have been, that fateful day 2 years ago which was no ordinary dawn. She could have tarried to get out of bed because there would have been no need to hurry. She might have been cheerful and even hummed a melody underneath her breath. She must have been happy. Just happy? No, ecstatic was more descriptive of her then state of mind.

They had just concluded the ‘iku aka’ or knocking ceremony the previous day and the formal traditional wedding ceremony will follow suit before the church or white wedding. Who wouldn’t have been happy? To cap it all, she and her beloved Obinna were intended to travel immediately afterwards to start a new life in the USA. There couldn’t possibly be a happier couple in the whole town of Ubi. None!

However, her residual memory of the exact moment when her world was overturned was a blur. What remained vivid in her mind was the fall, not a physical fall. You know just like the rug had been pulled from under your feet and you whirl in a free fall. She watched herself declining rapidly as she tumbled down an endless bottomless pit. Bizarrely, she also stood atop the gaping hole while her other self tumbled down. There was two of her, each image more real than the other. An out of body experience it is called.

She recalled plummeting incessantly, thumping down an endless cascade of stairs, her body flailing like a lifeless doll as it went thump, thump from one step to the next. Her eyes ached from watching the spectacle of her simultaneous endless drift while her observer body stood numb and standstill.

She felt drained, hapless, helpless and incapable of movement or reaching out to rescue her counterpart battered ostensibly inert body rattling along in a quick descent down the ditch.

She couldn’t recall when or how the fall broke, much less when or how the two images finally merged back into one. She was engulfed by blankness and was transported to a hollow shell devoid of pain or emotions. She found herself encased in limbo and suspended in time. She stayed frozen to that particular moment in time refusing to feel or acknowledge the prickly thorns that encircled her head.

Maybe if she stayed motionless for long enough, things will change. When she finally gets up, time would have reset itself back to her pre-plunge period. It wasn’t, couldn’t and shouldn’t be true.

She mentally shut herself down in denial refusing to acknowledge that Obinna was gone. In her thwarted troubled mind, she argued that the rest of the world was mistaken.
This was only a bad dream and the nightmare will be over as soon as she wakes up. She was just going to lie in bed, take her time and when she does wake up, it would have been a mere fluke, none of it real.

Alas, if only wishes were horses because she did wake up but it was not a dream. When she emerged from her cocoon, it was no pretty sight. She finally had to confront her reality. The impervious cocoon that she had encased herself in hoping that when she crept out, things will be fine had only offered her but a temporary refuge. Her desire to turn time back or restart from her comfort zone was just wishful thinking.
Life was far from a slate that she could wipe clean and rewrite. It is a master of its own fate; her part is to arbitrate with destiny.
She longed for a clean slate to rewrite her residual life and plug with only laughter, very little of S’s but no T’s of life.

Two years later and the numbness were yet to fully dissipate, the entire period riddled with pure anguish. Her heart threatened to burst out of its seams with sorrow as she contemplated her past.
She had refused to cry throughout that period. Her eyes were wide open but blind, ears receptive of sounds but she was deaf. She learnt how to cry with a smile and her smile was transformed into a smirk.

She had clutched her phone to chest, clung to it as if her dear life depended on it, grasping so tightly that the veins at the back of her hand were visibly outlined. She willed the phone to ring and waited expectantly for his voice at the other end.
“Hello Baby, it’s me.” She’d have heard him say because those are usually his opening line when he calls as if she would have mistaken him for any other.

She was failed by the phone which refused to ring with his name reflected on the interface? Why? Why? She had queried in anguish. Had they not suffer enough? The trials and tribulations they underwent was not enough penitence for their sins? Had they not propitiated the gods enough?
A myriad of questions, doubts, anger and various other different emotions clogged flittingly through her mind, flickering like the embers of a dying candle through her tormented soul.

The series of unrelenting queries flashed one after the other like the pages of a book left flustering in the face of the wind. She still didn’t have all the answers but was healing and trying to fully embrace the realms of her tragedy.
It was against the tenets of her religion to doubt God, query her fate or the powers above. She was supposed to stay complacent to destiny after all the Almighty Savior was crucified to atone for her sins, yet never queried his destiny. Which sacrifice is greater than that? He never uttered a single complaint. She recounted over and over again.

So who was she to complain? She should simply embrace her lot and get a grip but it was just too much. God, unbearable! She suppurated in anguish, albeit no tears or words escaped from her lips, just the blank stare that kept forcing her mother back on her knees praying the rosary while pleading for absolution and beseeching the Lord to intercede before her daughter loses her sanity.
But…but…why? She still remonstrated in vain, knowing no straight answers were forthcoming.
A conflict of emotions continuously ran through her mind but her torment was undiminished.

Time was supposed to be the greatest healer but her pain was raw. It stung worse than the sharp painful sting of a tincture of iodine applied to fresh wound.
She was usually upbeat, thriving on staying optimistic in the face of adversity but not anymore. Life had dealt her too heavy a hand. As if Obinna’s tragedy was not enough, she had to contend with the others too.
Her reoccurring trials beggared the aphorism ‘when it rains, it rains in torrents’ as a relentless torrent of mishaps dogged her very existence, one after the other.
Where does she start to recount her inveterate heartbreaks? The culmination of events that had rocked the root of her equilibrium nearly forcing her senses to desert her. She was still trying to rein herself in but as of yet was en-route to recovery.

Tears filled her eyes as memories of her beloved Obinna came flooding back, trickling down her cheeks as she gazed blindly up at the ceiling.

She momentarily caught sight of the shoddy chandelier in her bed-sit. She observed a little spider dangling precariously at edge of a stringy web from the chandelier. The tiny creature was spinning round energetically forming a webby mesh building a globe around the chandelier. Lucky spider, at least you spin your own world, she pondered enviously as she watched mesmerized by the spider’s adroitness at work. She turned away to glance around her nearly bare typical student digs.

Nothing mattered anymore.

If link wouldn't work, search title directly

Pathos of a Wilting Rose is a heart rendering tale and lucid portrait of our contemporary society. Nkiru Ubaka thought she had it all, a very promising future, affluent parents and lovable fiancé until the rug was suddenly swung from beneath her feet and she tumbles into a free fall. This book traces her spellbindingly transition from a once confident damsel through a devastating interlude that threatens to shatter her strong spirit. This is the much awaited and riveting sequel to highly acclaimed ‘A Rose in Bloom’. It also offers both permanence and an astounding insight into some of the characters portrayed in its prequel. In as much as these two books are intertwined, they are also separate entities. Pathos of a wilting Rose is an easy book to grasp even if you haven’t read the first.

www.lulu.com/contents/2662698

happy new year y'all

it did get a response from you, ha!

Fiction
Title: A Rose in Bloom
Author: Dr. Ejine Okoroafor-Ezediaro
Rating: Very Good!
Publisher: Trafford
Web Page: www.trafford.com/06-1468
Reviewed by: John Lehman | View Bio
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How to use the database of reviews



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This book takes flight about two-thirds of the way through when its contemporary African heroine, Nkiru, discovers the man she is engaged to is from a family of outcasts (and, from the perspective of her parents, their union would not only condemn them but also any subsequent children they might have). For readers in America or England to understand this culture's values we probably need to read about her less traumatic, earlier challenges: leaving school, going to work camp, the death of one friend and the marriage of another. These seem almost mundane at times but do give us the context so important to the final story.
The front cover, featuring an exuberant painting by Prince I. Nsofor, is gorgeous and the biography of the first time novelist Doctor Ejine Okoroafor-Ezediaro on the back plus the description of the book's contents are very appealing to a reader. The work does deliver on its promise to be a showcase, "a dichotomy of ideas, political as it is personal, as modern as it is traditional and as exotic as it is familiar." What I didn't like was some carelessness on the part of the publisher with regard to paragraphing and the occasional extra spacing between words. A good editor should have caught these as well as the overuse of clichéd phrases and occasionally awkward sentence structure, for example, "It was the first time that she had properly flown away from her parent's nest which was in contrast to her boarding whilst in secondary school when she still was under the tutelage of the teachers and seniors on daily basis."

The author is facile with dialogue, but she tends to zip through earlier episodes of the story without the descriptive detail that might allow readers to experience rather than understand them. The plot is too linear and the kidnapping episode should be more exciting than it is. However, with the last part—the forbidden marriage—there seems to really be something at stake (and some of the earlier information, such as Nkiru's father being badgered by his family to take on an additional wife because his doesn't bare a male heir, provides interesting foreshowing for that same father's interference with Nkiru's choice of husband). The traditions are complex and exploring the nuances of the old and the new is a strong point of "A Rose in Bloom." When background information is presented to us as straight exposition, the writer's story-telling inexperience is apparent, but when it is done to build drama (as happens in those last 150 pages) the story is stirring and memorable. Dr. Okoroafor-Ezediaro is working on a sequel. It will be interesting to follow her growth as a novelist. This is a very promising start.

no comments?

http://www.bookreview.com/$spindb.query.listreview2.booknew.17177

I am the self appointed agent for my friend and promise to continously update you with news, be it poetry or prose.

Whoever asked me to

I know but I believe she has great talent that needs to be nurtured.

cheers y'all.

Down memory lane

Remember the days of yore
When we marched, waving the flag
Green, white and green fluttering in the air
We deemed the sky our limit
We were future leaders of tomorrow
We were the giant of Africa
The oil boomed our immense wealth
Intensifying and typifying our hopes for a better tomorrow

Forty and more years later
We have marched two steps forward
And regressed five steps backward
Unlike wine, we failed to mature with age
Or learnt from our mistakes
Failing to adopt measures for the betterment
And progress of our once young nation

But what became of us as a nation?
What became of as a people?

A massive exodus of the populace
To lands afar in search of greener pastures
Or in frustrated defiance and away from
A land where leaders siphon millions while thousands starve
Yet sleep through the night undeterred by conscience
While kids starve and education is shoddy
Where few of the youth are decadence prone
Resorting to scams in the name of smart
Where reputation both home and abroad
Has sunk beneath reprehensible
As the rich get richer daily while the poor get poorer
For while the monkey toils, only the baboon chops
We once proclaimed our heritage with pride
But now almost scurry with head hung in shame
For fear of judgment and recrimination
The bad apples have completely spoilt the good
Whither our future?
Whither lays our fate?
When and how shall we mend?

The center and the grassroots are fallen apart
Shattered into pieces like a broken china cup

Who will pick the pieces?
Which generation shall mend us?

We are beating a hollow drum
And dancing the music of the dead
We mourn a live nation and
State lost in the wilderness
We ignored the sense of reason
That had shone like floodlight
And only the blind could have missed

We are a nation failed by its leaders
And culpable by our deeds
We chose to be blind when we could see
And deaf when we could hear
Until irreparable damages were done

We still have a chance at greatness
And resources to mend fences
We have the fortitude and resilience for a comeback
If only responsibility is adopted by every single one
Morality taught to plebs and priorities put in place

We can still be the Nigeria, the nation that we once hailed

unfortunately its not my personal write up but a friends.
anyway the actuua; book is due out early next year. you can check out her other books :

A Rose in Bloom @ www.trafford.com/06-1468
Whimsical Rhapsody @ www.lulu.com/contents/1091343

Thanks, will do. Cheers

Thanks Orinkala for your input.

I hope things are better at your home front.

Cheers

No comments from Orinkala and Seun?

hello,
I cant believe only two individuals can attest to this material, really guys

So if you liked what you saw, get your hands on

A Rose in Bloom, its on amazon too.

Then await the sequel coming out soon of which you have been given a peak ( prologue)

I have a feeling this is the block buster that we have all been waiting for, some one share my enthusiasm!!!!!!

Hey you out there, if this isn't a bonus then I wonder what is.

Well I hope you all know me by now but I've convinced my friend to  showcase a few pages of her new book. I've told you she is great. Now tell me if I am wrong.

  PROLOGUE

   Ever reflected back on an event and wished you could reenact the exact moment when it hit you. When you are left wondering if you can pinpoint your precise location or preoccupation at the time, i.e. recreate the moment when the muck hit the fan. Your intent is not so much to re-live that moment but to freeze your reverie before it all went awry and repress it forever. 
   Try as she might, Nkiru couldn’t.
   Instead she envisaged the day as it could have been, that fateful day 2 years ago which was no ordinary dawn. She could have tarried to get out of bed because there would have been no need to hurry. She might have been cheerful and even hummed a melody underneath her breath. She must have been happy. Just happy? No, ecstatic was more descriptive of her then state of mind.
  They had just concluded the ‘iku aka’ or knocking ceremony the previous day and the formal traditional wedding ceremony will follow suit before the church or white wedding.
    Who wouldn’t have been happy? To cap it all, she and her beloved Obinna were intended to travel immediately afterwards to start a new life in the USA. There couldn’t possibly be a happier couple in the whole town of Ubi. None!
   However, her residual memory of the exact moment when her world was overturned was a blur. What remained vivid in her mind was the fall, not a physical fall. You know just like the rug had been pulled from under your feet and you whirl in a free fall. She watched herself declining rapidly as she tumbled down an endless bottomless pit. Bizarrely, she also stood atop the gaping hole while her other self tumbled down. There was two of her, each image more real than the other. An out of body experience it is called.   
   She recalled plummeting incessantly, thumping down an endless cascade of stairs, her body flailing like a lifeless doll as it went thump, thump from one step to the next. Her eyes ached from watching the spectacle of her simultaneous endless drift while her observer body stood numb and standstill.
   She felt drained, hapless, helpless and incapable of movement or reaching out to rescue her counterpart battered ostensibly inert body rattling along in a quick descent down the ditch.
   She couldn’t recall when or how the fall broke, much less when or how the two images finally merged back into one.
   She was engulfed by blankness and was transported to a hollow shell devoid of pain or emotions. She found herself encased in limbo and suspended in time. She stayed frozen to that particular moment in time refusing to feel or acknowledge the prickly thorns that encircled her head.
   Maybe if she stayed motionless for long enough, things will change. When she finally gets up, time would have reset itself back to her pre-plunge period.
   It wasn’t, couldn’t and shouldn’t be true.
   She mentally shut herself down in denial refusing to acknowledge that Obinna was gone.
   In her thwarted troubled mind, she argued that the rest of the world was mistaken.
   This was only a bad dream and the nightmare will be over as soon as she wakes up. She was just going to lie in bed, take her time and when she does wake up, it would have been a mere fluke, none of it real.
   Alas, if only wishes were horses because she did wake up but it was not a dream. When she emerged from her cocoon, it was no pretty sight. She finally had to confront her reality. The impervious cocoon that she had encased herself in hoping that when she crept out, things will be fine had only offered her but a temporary refuge. Her desire to turn time back or restart from her comfort zone was just wishful thinking.
   Life was far from a slate that she could wipe clean and rewrite. It is a master of its own fate; her part is to arbitrate with destiny.
    She longed for a clean slate to rewrite her residual life and plug with only laughter, very little of S’s but no T’s of life.
    Two years later and the numbness were yet to fully dissipate, the entire period riddled with pure anguish. Her heart threatened to burst out of its seams with sorrow as she contemplated her past.
   She had refused to cry throughout that period. Her eyes were wide open but blind, ears receptive of sounds but she was deaf. She learnt how to cry with a smile and her smile was transformed into a smirk.
  She had clutched her phone to chest, clung to it as if her dear life depended on it, grasping so tightly that the veins at the back of her hand were visibly outlined. She willed the phone to ring and waited expectantly for his voice at the other end.
   “Hello Baby, it’s me.” She’d have heard him say because those are usually his opening line when he calls as if she would have mistaken him for any other. 
   She was failed by the phone which refused to ring with his name reflected on the interface? Why? Why? She had queried in anguish. Had they not suffer enough? The trials and tribulations they underwent was not enough penitence for their sins?  Had they not propitiated the gods enough?
   A myriad of questions, doubts, anger and various other different emotions clogged flittingly through her mind, flickering like the embers of a dying candle through her tormented soul.
   The series of unrelenting queries flashed one after the other like the pages of a book left flustering in the face of the wind. She still didn’t have all the answers but was healing and trying to fully embrace the realms of her tragedy.
   It was against the tenets of her religion to doubt God, query her fate or the powers above. She was supposed to stay complacent to destiny after all the Almighty Savior was crucified to atone for her sins, yet never queried his destiny. Which sacrifice is greater than that?  He never uttered a single complaint. She recounted over and over again.
   So who was she to complain? She should simply embrace her lot and get a grip but it was just too much. God, unbearable! She suppurated in anguish, albeit no tears or words escaped from her lips, just the blank stare that kept forcing her mother back on her knees praying the rosary while pleading for absolution and beseeching the Lord to intercede before her daughter loses her sanity.
   But…but…why?  She still remonstrated in vain, knowing no straight answers were forthcoming.
A conflict of emotions continuously ran through her mind but her torment was undiminished.   
   Time was supposed to be the greatest healer but her pain was raw. It stung worse than the sharp painful sting of a tincture of iodine applied to fresh wound. 
   She was usually upbeat, thriving on staying optimistic in the face of adversity but not anymore. Life had dealt her too heavy a hand. As if Obinna’s tragedy was not enough, she had to contend with the others too.
   Her reoccurring trials beggared the aphorism ‘when it rains, it rains in torrents’ as a relentless torrent of mishaps dogged her very existence, one after the other.
    Where does she start to recount her inveterate heartbreaks? The culmination of events that had rocked the root of her equilibrium nearly forcing her senses to desert her. She was still trying to rein herself in but as of yet was en-route to recovery.
   Tears filled her eyes as memories of her beloved Obinna came flooding back, trickling down her cheeks as she gazed blindly up at the ceiling. She momentarily caught sight of the shoddy chandelier in her bed-sit. She observed a little spider dangling precariously at edge of a stringy web from the chandelier. The tiny creature was spinning round energetically forming a webby mesh building a globe around the chandelier.
   Lucky spider, at least you spin your own world, she pondered enviously as she watched mesmerized by the spider’s adroitness at work. She turned away to glance around her nearly bare typical student digs.
   Nothing mattered anymore.

You are noble,Orinkala

Hello,

  Some of you might recognise me here and I enjoy all your postings. I'm a foreigner married to a Nigerian hence my affinity to you guys, I hope.

I've been trying to encourage my friend, dont worry I'm not receiving any payment but we need to get her books out there.

They are that good.

A Rose in Bloom @  www.trafford.com/06-1468 and Whimsical Rhapsody@ www.lulu.com/content/1091343.

I've caught a  glimpse of her upcoming sequel to A Rose in Bloom, That sure is a killer. I know the best of her are yet to come.

However who are the best editors, reviewers or contests etc. (I hope that when she makes it that she'll remember me but in the meantime, she is my charity case)

C'mon guys lets all brainstorm.

check out new poetry book

Whimsical rhapsody @ www.lulu.com/content/1091343

If you would kindly leave a mailing address, I'll let the author know. Cheers.

Check out new book by budding Nigerian author
Whimsical Rhapsody @ www.lulu.com/content/1091343

or previous

A rose in Bloom @ www.trafford.com/06-1468

Second book by budding Nigerian author

Whimsical Rhapsody

Check it out @www.lulu.com/content/1091343

Previous publication.


A Rose in Bloom @ www.traffoerd.com/06-1468

Hello,

     Can one contact you personally if so can you provide a private email address.Cheers.

A Rose In Bloom is my recent favourite. I am not even African but thouroughly enjoyed the book.

check it out www.trafford.com/06-1464

hello guys, no comments?

Here I am again, same spot
Same place but not same time
Walls are closing in around me
Everywhere I turn a bump
How long I can bear or last
Yet to show and yet to be known

Life is a rollercoaster I know
I have tried to ride the bumps
Exhilaration at some points
Fear at others and even sheer pleasure
At intervals, obvious trepidation

Woops of joy, cries of woe
Laughter, screams and yells
I turn around and it’s still the walls
Closing in and any escape possible?
Yet yonder I view a tiny glimmer of light

Holding on for a glimmer of hope
And I pray, Lord my only solace
Who has not failed me yet?
And I pray and beseech my saviour
The only and one option that never fails

Escape due and triumph is awaited
A survivor but only by his might
If the Lord would be with me
Then who would be against me?
As I pray the Lord to stay with me

Anyone read "A Rose In Bloom yet"?
Try link www.trafford.com/06-1468
would like to know what y'all think