LaShel
A delightful romp through the afterlife, exploring some of the absurdities of religious doctrine (and dicta) taken literally. I laughed out loud several times. It's verrry irreverent but I personally didn't find it offensive (ymmv, of course) - and I say that as someone who winces through some of the “jokes” in Book of Mormon: The Musical.
While the author painstakingly footnotes his sources, a lot of the jokes build off of a basic familiarity with Mormon teachings - I don't know that it would be as fun of a read for someone with little or no exposure to the LDS faith. Also, like other comedic fiction (the works of Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams come to mind) the book's plot and character development are secondary to the humorous escapades.
I enjoyed this debut work and look forward to seeing more from the author.
A really slow read. There are some beautiful passages, and it made me desperately miss Italy! On the other hand, the endless descriptions of the churches and dinners start to blur into each other and the snootiness was quickly tiresome. Also, this book would have really benefitted from some photographs and/or maps.
There's a lot of research in this book, and the author generally gives you enough information about the studies for you to evaluate their process, which is nice. In addition to being backed up by one or more studies, the nuggets of advice are concrete and not always intuitive (for instance, people are much more likely to lie “to your face” than in an email because of the psychological weight of putting something in writing, and even judges and police officers are very bad at telling if someone is lying by their body language and physical appearance whereas vocabulary queues can be quite reliable [people who are not telling the truth tend to use far fewer first person pronouns but a lot more third person pronouns than normal], so email might actually be the best way to go next time you are looking to get to the bottom of something).
Some of the studies were new to me, others I've heard of at least a hundred times (like the infamous “marshmallow test”). Because a lot of the studies were conducted decades ago some of the advice feels old fashioned (the dating chapter in particular incorporates a lot of assumptions about heteronormative gender roles), but again at least the author provides enough information about the studies to let the reader see where that might be happening.
Creepy and unsettling (in the best possible way). I could not put this book down.
The ending left far more questions than answers but I'm assuming that it's being set up as a trilogy.
I loved that it's a tiny bit queer, but also that there's no romance (I hate the predictable love triangles in YA sci-fi). A lot of the dread in the book is tied to the disorienting experience of being a young woman in a body that's changing in ways you can't control and don't fully understand, which was very effective. And I looooove the cover.
While I did appreciate the author's emphasis that the gender differences she describes are the result of socialization, not biology, overall this book didn't move or inspire me. That's odd because I usually really like books in this genre. I suppose I prefer bring told how I can better leverage my strengths (The Myth of the Nice Girl) than read about how damning my weaknesses are. And while the book also talked about how little girls are encouraged to “play it safe”, I don't think it adequately addressed how society so often punishes adult women for taking risks (like negotiating for a higher salary or even running for public office [Katie Hill comes to mind]).
This book was really, really hard to read. Not because it discusses what might happen to our planet and our species in the face of unchecked climate change, which it does and which I think is a worthwhile endeavor, but because of the time it does spend discussing solutions (which seemed beyond its scope).
The book ascribes plenty of blame to our individual actions (the last plane ticket you purchased put meters of arctic ice into the ocean, did you know) but insists that anything any one of us does (including not having kids, opting for a hermetic existence, and even self-immolating) is ineffectual and even silly in the face of inevitable catastrophe. It's not wholly fatalistic (the author seems to think that at least his hypothetical grandchildren will be okay if we “just” demolish capitalism and nation-states in the next few years) but still somehow entirely unhopeful and castigating. This may well be intentional (the author rails a lot against complacency) but I'm less useful, not more, when my anxiety is inflamed.
Overall I learned a lot about climate change, but it was not an exercise that was good for my mental health and it planted a lot of “weeds” in my headspace that, even if true, I don't appreciate (there's no point in saving for retirement, voting for greener political candidates is pointless, it's futile to try and make the world better). I am relieved to finally be finished with it.
I'd never heard of Akilah Hughes but I liked this book more than most comedian memoirs - it has a lot of heart and beautifully captures what it is like to be a middle-Millenial (including this gem: “I absolutely do remember a time before the internet but I don't think I ever felt truly myself before the internet.”)
The moral of this story - that people and their choices are complex and someone's circumstances have an outsized role in shaping both her actions and their consequences - is worthwhile, although I hope not novel to any readers. But this book was too long and the characters were almost universally flat and unlikeable.
This book assumes all families look the same - I think there are three sentences in the entire book acknowledging not all adults have children (but these are great habits to get in place before the babies come) and one sentence acknowledging that some women might have female partners or live with roommates or by themselves instead of with a husband. I don't remember seeing any sentences acknowledging the existence of single moms, divorced moms, couples who don't combine their finances, etc. This book might be helpful to the target audience, but it definitely won't work for everyone who “has too much to do” and the heteronormativity made this an exhausting read.
This book stressed. me. out. Not just because of the (vaguely familiar) pressure-cooker work environment it described, but because every decision the main character made was wholly bewildering. The fact that I could relate to her circumstances made it even more frustrating that I couldn't relate to her, at all.
This should have been a really interesting exploration of racism (given that the protagonist is a vampire who has been genetically modified to have dark skin and some other vampires hate her for it) but it read like really fluffy YA fiction following the adventures of an amnesiac Mary Sue whom everyone who isn't racist falls in love with. And the prejudice is confined to a small subset of traditionalist sticks-in-the-mud while everyone else is “good” which, yeah, that's exactly how racism works.
This could have included an interesting exploration of bisexuality (given that the vampires build “harems” that include both male and female humans) but the focus remains firmly on the male-female pairings (the main character has to find a vampire husband, her male human “first” is mostly okay with sharing her but only with women, humans bound to vampires of the same sex explain their fate is okay because they still get to have sexy times with opposite sex humans).
I expected an interesting exploration of gender (given what I had heard about the author going into the book) but it turns out vampires are matriarchal because female vampires are more biologically powerful (because they are “sexier”). That's it. It veers awfully close to gender essentialism.
On top of all this, let's throw in a bunch of sex scenes between a prepubescent vampire girl who looks about ten (but it's okay because ten in vampire years is 50 in human years) and a twenty five year old hairy man who literally can't stop himself because she's sooooo seductive (because she has the strongest vampire sexy powers ever and even her dad and brothers have a hard time controlling themselves around her).
This book was fine. The constant pop culture references were pretty distracting and won't age well. The characters were very well drawn, even enchanting, and I loved the imagry of the house. That being said, the plot itself was just okay. I felt a bit of whiplash being thrust back and forth from “it's magic!” and “there's no such thing as magic” often several times a page. I also couldn't relate to the main character's anxiousness (and I say this as someone who takes medication everyday for my own anxiety) and I felt like the book glorified senseless thrill seeking over actual courage.
Things I loved: The cover. The nuanced take on racial identity and racial passing, especially as the main characters' back stories spin out. Katherine. The weapons and clothes. The moral complexity and ambiguity in interactions with the no-longer-alive and the oppressors. The lack of a romantic subplot.
Things I liked: Jane (her internal dialogue was off to me, though). The treatment of sexuality. The setting (but did we really need two of them?). Many of the minor characters. The dialogue, especially between Jane and Katherine. The battle scenes (action scenes in books usually bore me into flipping pages but not these).
Things I disliked: The inclusion of some paper thin characters (especially the sex workers and the Native American character). The meandering to a cliff-hanger end (I didn't realize this was part of a series - if I had I probably would not have bought it).
Hoping this becomes a movie. And maybe a video game.
Thought this would be a fluffy, feminist, you-go-girl self help book. I've already read plenty but thought there might be something special about this one given its wild popularity. Turns out what's special about it is some really disturbing body shaming and ablelist body policing, a heavy layer of Christianity, excusing horrible male behavior with the implication that, well, you have to marry the guy you give your virginity to, and a really long, self-absorbed chapter about how unfair the foster care system is for rich white couples who already have biological children and aren't willing to take an older kid. I haven't hated a book this much in years.
First, the good. I loved the cover, I picked up some useful bits of inspiration for my practice, I was inspired by some of the witchcraft-as-a-movement bits, and as someone who has rejected Wiccanism because of the heternormative, reductive male-female duality I liked that this book is non denominational.
But then there's the womb talk. If you don't have one, have one that doesn't work, don't want to use yours to make a baby, have one that causes problems for you, have one that has to be medicated, or are past the age where you can use yours for baby-making, this book is at best dismissive and at worst actively exclusionary.
