Candice

A little heavy handed in its depiction of allopathy being evil and apathetic, but otherwise a lovely story that includes a lot of plant knowledge.

I thought this book was lovely.

3.5⭐️? — It's a bit dated now and the size of the book is awkward to handle, but there were some interesting insights in it. I liked how there were many suggestions for each mitzvot and some were listed in stages of increasing difficulty of observance, so someone could choose to start with a manageable change. The footnotes with book suggestions and Appendix with the Talmud page and other info were helpful too.

I enjoyed some of the grounding / meditative techniques. Some of history provided was a little woo-y and incomplete.

I mostly enjoyed this. It was a quick read and while it is a little dated now, I thought it did a good job talking about how things have gotten more progressive and how each movement has evolved.

But.

There is a single line of semi-acknowledgement in it that I think is probably going to make people throw it in the trash. And maybe that's why I don't see this book on any reading lists when it otherwise was great?

Hint: It's about Messianics.

Quick read and a fun little adventure. While it does list the literature the various stories are based on in the end, I wish it had more of an appendix discussing the meaning/lesson of each in a kid-friendly way.

Fascinating! I bought “Castle” for homeschooling this year but haven't read it yet. I read this one just for fun because of my interest in Latin and Rome and whoa! It's incredible. I decided to just buy all of Macaulay's books.

Grim.

3.5?

First, this is not a high drama sensational lesbian prison novel, as some reviewers seem to have expected. This is not the TV show.

There may be familiar characters you recognize by tiny snippets of their stories, but ultimately this is a memoir of Piper's life as she remembers it during her incarceration and as she made the best of a bad situation. And yes, she was a white woman of privilege when she went in and she openly acknowledges that throughout the book and that she had a different and unique experience because of it. But I can also respect that she recognized and actively pointed out the unfairness of her preferential treatment, even if she did occasionally take advantage of it. And after she left prison, she didn't just “cash out” with this book deal – she became a strong and continuing advocate for other incarcerated women and for prison reform.

I flip-flopped a lot through this book, equally liking and disliking her, and my rating is not a reflection of my opinion of her as a person. This isn't a piece of fiction with a perfect protagonist who always says and does all the right things.

I read this fairly quickly and found the day to day anecdotes, routines, and the relationships she made fascinating. Her voice transitions back and forth between her WASP upbringing to prison slang to personal desperation to advocate. It's clear there was a measure of personal growth and a deep sadness for the plight of the other women she was incarcerated with who didn't have her advantages in life. Overall, this is a well-written, interesting memoir and I'm glad to have read it.

This book was hilarious and spot on for a child raised in “the truth” in that time period. I'm guessing that those reviewing this poorly either do not understand what a memoir is, what growing up as (and recovering from life as) a JW is like, or have no grasp on sarcasm or sardonic humor.

Yes, parts of it are dark and terrible decisions are made with no seeming understanding of the consequences, but you also have to take into account that children raised as JWs are growing up in a totalitarian, mind controlling organization which leaves you completely terrified of and unprepared for the real world -- which Kyria addresses sardonically in the last chapters. It takes years, decades for some, for recovery from this kind of emotional stunting and trauma and she probably wasn't "out" for many years before the publication of this book. For a "snapshot" in time sort of memoir from a person who probably wasn't fully recovered at the time of writing, I think the ending is perfectly rounded.

This is a gem and I regret not buying it sooner. If you are DF'd or actively in recovery, you may be triggered by this book because it doesn't hold back.

This should probably come with content warnings because I honestly had no idea who the fish guy was when I started reading... but also the fact that I didn't know made it all the more of an eye opener.

Holy shit.

The second half of the book was definitely in the category of “why the fuck wasn't I taught this in school?!”

I read all the pages, so I'm marking it read. I have a rough idea about who a few characters are and how a few characters died, but it's still very much a work in progress because I have eleventy-billion notes that I need to digitize so I can search them more effectively. I have a pretty good idea of how individuals are clued and referred to and introduced, so we'll see if I can submit a solve by December.

If you liked this type of puzzle book, may I also humbly recommend you go buy “S.” by J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst? You won't regret it. And also because I need people to talk to about it with the furor that people talk about this book. (ETA: While an audiobook does exist, sort of, you need a print copy.)

Absolutely fascinating & Audible narration was great.

Some stuff was a little far out, but overall pretty interesting. I'm definitely saving some of the recipes for later.

Solid meh.

Almost 400 pages of small talk with forgettable people and NPCs. There's a “Love in the time of Cholera” feel about the situation with the male character, but even less endearing.

First page is great, ending would have been great (or at least worthy of a cheesy 90s Tom Hanks romance) if the middle had actually had any character depth, banter, or real INTERACTION OF ANY KIND between the protagonists.

The “Choose You Own Adventure” style is fun and unique in a romance novel. A light and fluffy sort of read if you have a love/hate relationship with romance novels, as it playfully mocks the genre and reader.

I didn't hate it, but it felt like a mash up of mediocre term papers and BuzzFeed articles. A bit repetitive and meandering.

More memoir than bulleted list of How-Tos. I like memoirs and it's well narrated, so I enjoyed it. The dildo bit made me laugh. I wish there was an accompanying PDF to the audio with the jam recipes.

A lot of really beautiful, poetic things in here, but sometimes it gets kind of nebulous and hard to grasp.

“The Friendly Orange Glow” by Brian Dear was a fascinating tech history by a master storyteller. I knew nothing about PLATO when starting the book, as most of the events and innovation took place before I was born, but now feel as if the technology, along with people and places that built and ‘hacked' and enriched the community surrounding it, are my old friends and familiar haunts. Some readers may be put off by the long-windedness of some of the personal stories and anecdotes, but I found that they added a surprising richness and cohesiveness to the book and a offered a delightful buildup to some mind-blowing revelations of this lost technological history. I was given a free ARC from Penguin's First to Read program, but my opinions are my own, etc.

While I love Rabbi Rami's writings and general slant on things, I think this book was a little repetitive and choppily written. I found the related “How to Be A Holy Rascal” audiobook to be MUCH better.

This is a book that's best read without reading the full synopsis first. While this is a memoir, it feels more like a psychological thriller that you don't want to put down. I felt so swept up in the meet cute and love story and the building of their lives together, that I didn't see the red flags. There were times when I felt the author was overreacting to this or that, because of hormones or sleep deprivation or general neuroticism, but then... was she? Because if she'd just ignored the things that happened altogether and stopped digging, how much longer would the lies have gone on? This book lets you live simultaneously through the infatuation of the honeymoon phase and the moment-to-moment panic, fear and shock about the things that happened as she discovered them. Heartbreaking and powerful.

Received advance reader copy free from Penguin Random House's “First to Read” program. My opinions are my own, blah blah blah. You know the drill.

An absolutely wonderful book and perfect to read aloud to the kids.

I'll be honest, I had a hard time starting this since it starts on and uses 9/11 and the events following it as a backdrop. It's still a raw day for me. But I kept reading and eventually found I didn't want to put the book down and that the backdrop was fairly respectfully interwoven.

I loved the writing style – someone narrating the story of their life, or at least the highlights, as they remember them with small intimate details that still stick out through the fog of memory. The memories are immersive and flash by you, making the foreshadowing very subtle. You only get bits and pieces of memory– the perceptions of what happened over a lifetime, the questions about what could have happened instead, the things that were left unsaid, the choices made. If you're completely honest with yourself, no one looks back on their life and says, “I made all the right choices. I wouldn't have done anything different and I'm not remotely curious about any other paths my life may have taken.”

The protagonist isn't perfect, but no one is, and in the end, I am left hungry for the other perspectives we didn't get to see and for what recent and future thoughts and choices may be made and/or remorsefully questioned going forward. As an individual, constrained to our own perspective and singular experience, those other perspectives and alternative paths are things we would never be privy to anyway, so that hunger is completely fitting with the tone of the book.

Received free review copy from First to Read, opinions are my own, yadda yadda.

2.5 - 3

I hate rating memoirs because it feels like a personal judgement on the author's life choices. I didn't know anything about the author prior to reading the book. There are a some points I could relate to and her loss is tragic, but the book jumps around a lot with details that seem unnecessary/distracting. She just comes across as so self-absorbed that I have a hard time rating this work objectively.