Review: "Women We Buried, Women We Burned" by Rachel Louise Snyder

 

Women We Buried, Women We Burned by Rachel Louise Snyder
Published May 2023 via Bloomsbury
★★★★

Cancer took my mother. But religion would take my life. (loc. 379)

When she was a child, Snyder's life took an abrupt turn: her mother died, her father remarried, and Snyder was expected to switch from low-key Judaism to fervent conservative Christianity. It...did not go well. Years later, her life took another abrupt turn: she left the country for the first time and experienced cultures other than her own. (That went rather better.)

From the description, I thought I might be getting something along the lines of Putsata Reang's Ma and Me, although that might just have been the bits about Cambodia and travelling the globe. But in a lot of ways this is a fit for readers who loved Educated—harsh applications of religion, growing up much too young and also being spit out into the broader world with little understanding of how things worked, variations on violence. (I'll note that you can't go wrong with any of these three books, though you might draw different connections between them than I do.)

There is so much in here. Snyder tells a mostly linear story, and I think too much getting into the details here would detract from the reading experience, but I'll just say that she has the writing chops to tell her story well and to ultimately portray the complicated people in her life in all their, well, complicated glory. At one point there's a significant time jump, and it makes a lot of sense for the story, but it also means that I'm probably going to have to hunt up some of Snyder's shorter-form writing, because it sounds like her curiosity about the world has led her to story upon story upon story that could use books of their own.

This was not quite the book I was expecting, and it was better for it—because I never quite knew where the next chapter would take me, but I trusted that it would be somewhere interesting.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.