Review by  Tim'm T. West

In Leeke's debut novel "Love's Troubadours" the protagonist, Karma, offers a herstorical roadmap towards self-actualization and healing. It is a process that boils from the bottom up. The seeming calm sea of her performatively perfect lineage is the deferment and inevitability of Katrina. Karma finds herself in the disastrous muck of of a reality that cannot be guised by any ruse of happy prosperity and buppie elitism.

Karma's world is a post-pomo one where bougie boho and bap struggle, not as conflicting or schizophrenic identities, but identities seeking hopeful coexistence. This is the dilemma of the Negro who has betrayed both Dubois' talented tenth or Booker T's vocational ambition for whatever lies in-between. It is a new freedom not bound to the old Negro logic, but passionately committed to facing the brokenness and dysfunction of our lineage. We have always committed adultery, flirted with homosexuals, been depressed, needed more than salvation or heaven, and been more broken than we are willing to admit. Karma's story is the stench of Pandora's box finally released. It is the redemptive power of an exhale after one has truly grappled with the "in hell". It is Ms. Celie's letters discovered and giving birth to a new woman, always there, but needing permission through truth to live more truthfully. It is the ironic powerful destitution of the D.C. streets through which Karma confronts her yellow brick road.

In Leeke's detailed and vulnerable journal of a journey, we are reminded that, however wealthy or educated we become, we, like Karma, carry blood memory in our veins: it is the slave's spiritual, it's Billie's reverberating pitch, it is Miles' wail that, translated as words, would have better explained his blues. Karma's wandering lands her at a borderland where neither nostalgia for her past, nor projections of a future less certain than her education and privilege would care to admit, are comfort enough. The loves of her life become directional cues to her own journey home into a self-love that she can only find through the reality of her depression and psychological disarray. Her successful mapping requires that she fully undergo a self-archeology. Karma exercises an anthropology of self-- a deep digging into closets where dirty laundry is long overdue a nice thorough hand-washing and clothesline dry. If Leeke's story can be criticized for offering excessive detail into the life of its protagonist, it succeeds because it treats nothing in our living as insignificant: the songs we listen to, the shoes we buy, the people we see on the street, the buildings we want into and out of, are changed, as we are, thorough the interaction.

While Leeke's stumbling and unfailingly human protagonist uncovers the disjunction between her bougie upbringing and her resistance to the pretending it requires, the places, people, music, and art of Karma's life become the yellow brick road to her home. In Love's Troubadours, love is both noun and verb, both the thing we are and thing we do, when we can bravely face how tragically absent it is when we simply pretend we have it and do not. Leeke offers a vulnerable, exacting, and empathetic story of a real sistah who, up to the very last page, is still figuring it all out. Reading it, I am given a virtual comrade in my own journey through the wars my body and spirit have overcome in my becoming.

Tim'm T. West
Author of "Red Dirt Revival", "BARE", and "Flirting"