For Jude

This distinguished gentleman is my great-nephew Jude, the only child of my niece, Hannah, and her husband, Sully. Jude is a Rhizo kid which means he was born with a lethal form of skeletal dysplasia known as RCDP (Rhizomelic Chondrodysplasia Punctata).

Since entering the world in 2014, much of his life has been spent under the harsh fluorescent lights of neonatal care units, ever bracing for the next IV, the next seizure, the next operation. At age three, Jude has endured more pain than most of us will experience in a lifetime. His journey has certainly put my own hardships and struggles in perspective.

Because of the rarity of RCDP – fewer than 100 known cases worldwide – Rhizo kids and their families suffer mostly in silence, with astronomical hospital bills and little or no support from charitable organizations, their voices lost in the shuffle of more prevalent diseases such as cancer.

Sticks & Stones is now available on Amazon. If you purchase Sticks & Stones in any format, 100 percent of the profits will go to Jude. To learn more about Rhizo kids, please visit http://www.rhizokids.com.

Sticks & Stones

I was hoping to have this out for Christmas but we ran into a few post-production snags with Create Space so it looks like this one is going to be a New Year’s baby. Probably for the best since the novel takes place in 2018 anyway. It’s about a former KGB agent who gets abducted by aliens… definitely not. Come on, it’s a Malcolm Ivey novel. You know what to expect: crack pipes, syringes, sex, violence and dialogue slathered with f-bombs… That’s actually not true either.

This one is not even about a prisoner. It’s about an ex-prisoner. And it’s PG-13! Or at least as PG-13 as I get. After spending two years writing On the Shoulders of Giants, I wanted to shift gears and do something outside my comfort zone. Something challenging. And believe me, writing about the free world when you haven’t experienced it since long before the advent of Facebook, Netflix, or the smartphone is definitely a challenge. In addition, I plan on posting a new chapter to this site every Tuesday and Friday and my devout senior relatives and sheltered Christian nieces don’t need the harsh reality of prison life shoved in their faces twice a week.

But the main reason for this stylistic pivot is my great-nephew Jude, a special needs child from Charlotte, NC, and one of fewer than 100 RHIZO kids worldwide (to learn more, click on the “Incredible Jude” tab on this site). I’ve been wanting to do something special for him since With Arms Unbound, but there is an element of darkness in each of my first three novels that felt incongruous to his innocence. Not so with Sticks & Stones. It’s full of love and light and laughter. At least I think so. Hopefully the perfect fit.

So all the profits from this one will go to Jude. Judging by the torrential success of my other novels, this means I will soon be sending him a check for a whopping $62.75! But that’s sixty-two dollars more than I’ve been able to send him during his first three-and-a-half years of life. I’m just happy to be contributing. And you never know… we live in a world of infinite possibilities, right? Happy New Year everyone.

On the Shoulders of Giants

Here’s the back cover copy from my new novel, On the Shoulders of Giants, currently in production and due out this fall…

The last time Izzy James saw his mother’s trailer was through the rear window of a Dodge Aires driven by a social worker with the Florida Division of Children and Families. He was four years old. He spent the remainder of his childhood bouncing around the state foster care system. Always the outsider, introverted and awkward, he assumed he was exempt from things like friendship and love … until he met Scarlett McGhee.

Pharaoh Sinclair was born on a prison van. The illegitimate child of an unknown father and a crackhead mother. He grew up on the sidewalks of the Azalea Arms housing project, where gunshots and police sirens were as commonplace as the stench of the neighboring landfill. Molded by hustlers and pushers, with the dope game in his DNA, the lone soft spot in his concrete heart was reserved for his baby sister, Symphony. But could he protect her from the same streets that raised them?

From the sugar-white sand dunes of Pensacola Beach to the murderous Arthur G. Dozier reform school, from strip clubs to emergency rooms, from traphouses to courthouses to prison cells, On the Shoulders of Giants chronicles the intersecting journeys of a foster kid and a projects kid as they battle and stumble their way through adolescence into adulthood.

An exploration of race, part memoir, part coming-of-age, part thriller, part love story. This transcendent novel defies genre. A book within a book. More than a story, a living organism. A legacy. The only child of Ezra “Izzy” James.