Review: "Becoming Free Indeed" by Jinger Duggar Vuolo

Becoming Free Indeed by Jinger Duggar Vuolo
Published January 2023 via Thomas Nelson
★★★

When Jinger (Duggar) Vuolo was growing up, the rules were clear: follow Bill Gothard's seven principles, don't ever step out from under her parents' (and more to the point, her father's) authority, and her religion would protect her. But step outside the "umbrella of authority" (later rebranded as the "umbrella of protection") and you set yourself up for downfall.

It was in many ways a very sheltered upbringing—but then Jinger* grew up, and for the first time she had conversations about religion that were not held in an echo chamber. And then she got married, and she took another step outside that echo chamber. And then—well, let's come back to that.

As a book, it's...pretty specific. It's not really a memoir: the stories in here are few and pointed, and it's clear that Jinger has carefully selected the parts of her life that she is willing to talk about and brought those out for the book. Considering that she grew up on television with little say in what parts of her life were made public—and then had private details about abuse made public—this is not unreasonable, but it does not making for a particularly exciting book. Rather than a memoir, this is...the current version of Jinger's theological reckoning, I suppose. So much of the book is about 1) what Gothard said, 2) why that's wrong, and 3) why what her current church preaches is right.

Coming back to the and then: the teachings under which Jinger was raised have come under quite a lot of scrutiny, and she freely criticizes them. But...her husband studied for his MDiv (and now I think PhD?) at a seminary connected to a church, John MacArthur's Grace Community Church, that has also been under recent scrutiny (e.g., for kicking a woman out of the church because she left her abusive husband), and it's the communications guy at that seminary who did the ghostwriting on this book. Although Jinger talks a good game about having studied the bible and come to her own conclusions, it's hard to read this as anything other than propaganda for a particular viewpoint and associated church—like a different echo chamber. I'm a liberal heathen and her beliefs aren't likely to ever align with mine, which is fine, but...I suppose I find it sad and frustrating to see these shifting beliefs so much in lockstep with what her husband and her husband's seminary believe.

Jinger talks about disentangling rather than deconstructing her faith, because in her view deconstructing involves walking away from faith and she wants to make clear that she's still Christian and has never questioned the validity of the bible or the status of Jesus as her savior. Again, we do not share a belief system, but I've always thought that faith should be able to stand up to such scrutiny. One of the stories Jinger tells in this book to explain why she didn't throw Jesus out with the bathwater is about her husband getting putty stuck in his hair when he was a child, and his mother taking hours and hours to detangle it rather than cutting it out (195). But it feels like an imperfect metaphor (truth by analogy?) to me, because...what would have happened if the hair had been cut off to remove the putty? It would have grown back. Instead I think what she's done is stripped off the wallpaper of her faith to find the paint underneath, but she's not interested in then removing the paint to see what might be under that, and whether she wants whatever's underneath or a fresh coat of the same paint color. (Or new MacArthur-striped wallpaper. Whatever.)

Critical thinking was not important as I was growing up, writes Jinger, because what was there to think critically about? There was a right and a wrong way to do everything (157). I am genuinely glad for her that she can see this as a gap in her education and something that is worth working on, but...those gaps are still there. Take this late-in-the-book look at why she still holds the beliefs that she does: First, I trust the Bible because it has proven again and again to be historically accurate. There are hundreds of prophecies in the Old Testament. Those are predictions people made about what was going to happen in hundreds, if not thousands, of years. All of them came true. Every single one. That includes the prophecy that the Messiah would be born in a small town called Bethlehem (Micah 5:2). And the strange, specific prediction that the Messiah wouldn’t break a single bone when He died on the cross (Numbers 9:12). If you take the time to read what the Bible says, you will discover all kinds of stories that can’t be disproven. (201)

I'm in no way a biblical scholar, and I don't know what events from the bible have been proven or disproven—but as far as I can tell, what Jinger is saying here is that she believes in the bible because the bible says it's true (and she's then citing New Testament plot points as proof that the Old Testament is accurate). That's...not how critical thinking works? It's a great example of circular reasoning, actually. And "can't be disproven" is not the same as "has been proven".

Oh, this makes me tired. Three stars because I imagine that to Jinger this is a wild departure from her upbringing, and wildly different from anything she could have imagined believing for the first two decades or her life. But I can't recommend this as a book, and I hope that she can continue to grow and change and think in ways that haven't been vetted by a given church.

*First names for clarity

Review: "Find Your Frame" by Craig Whitehead

Find Your Frame by Craig Whitehead
Published September 2023 via Frances Lincoln
★★★

In Find Your Frame, Whitehead takes readers through some of the things he looks for when working as a street photographer. You can get a sense just from the cover what sorts of images he's attracted to—bold, tightly framed, making use of angles and built-in borders.

It's a very non-technical book, better suited to lay readers or beginning photographers than to (for lack of a better term) working street photographers. Whitehead's emphasis begins on, and circles back to again and again, finding the shot—not on focus or lighting or color correction or aperture or...I'm not a professional and I've run out of technical terms, so I suppose I'll leave it there, but in any case, if the book wants you to work on anything, it's training your eye to think how you might frame a particular shot, and then having the patience to wait for all the necessary elements in the photo to line up. Less about taking the shots and more about finding them, I suppose.

Whitehead talks quite a bit about shots that don't become the final version of the picture—e.g., when you shoot twenty frames of the same thing, but only one of them ends up being published—and I wish that more of those images had been included in the book; seeing the rejected or second-best shots, or perhaps more of the surrounding area that was cropped out, feels like a lesson in and of itself.

It all sort of begs the question of how much photographic "eye" can/should be trained and how much is more innate—I'd love to send a few beginner photographers out into the world with this book as their inspiration and see whether they gravitate to similar or very different shots—and I can't answer that, but if you enjoy Whitehead's photographic style this makes for an eye-catching coffee-table book.

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

Review: "Not One, Not Even One" by Nancy Christine Edwards

Not One, Not Even One by Nancy Christine Edwards
Published February 2022
★★★

In the late 70s, Edwards left Canada to work as a community health nurse in Sierra Leone. It was never going to be a permanent move, but the impressions those years left—those are permanent.

The decades between the experience and the writing of the book are the book's strength and its weakness both. The benefit of that long time, of course, is that Edwards has had years and years to think on her experiences, understand them in context, and think over what was effective and why—and what was less effective and why.

Should we ask women to boil their families’ drinking water? That was a sure-proof way to decrease rates of gastroenteritis, but boiling water required firewood. Firewood had to be carried from farm to village. I consumed almost three litres of drinking water a day, more when I walked to the villages. I did the simple math. A polygamous household of ten adults required at least 30 litres of drinking water daily. That was one and a half jerry cans of water, which had to be carried from water holes to villages or farms. It was beyond unreasonable to expect women to boil that much water on three-stone fires, and in what? They had two communal household pots—one for rice, the other for plassauce. Boiling all drinking water was both the medically right and impossibly wrong message. (128)

Edwards clearly understands the limitations of her work in Sierra Leone, and the book is stronger for it. There are some things that she couldn't answer then and can't answer now, and as much as I love questions with answers...I prefer it when people understand that they don't have all the answers.

Some of the research Edwards did—because she spent time in Sierra Leone not just as a nurse but also as a graduate student doing research—has such unexpectedly sad results. That is...you can expect some sad statistics, given time and place and context (maternal mortality rates, etc.). But there's also this: Paul and I put the completed baseline questionnaires in green garbage bags and locked them in the wooden cupboards of the Bo-Pujehun project office. As far as I know, nobody ever looked at them again. During interviews, families had shared their raw emotions about live births, stillbirths, and deaths of women and children. Responses had been recorded in tick boxes, with a few words of explanation sometimes entered in the margins. Each event had been converted to a single, data-entry keystroke and then anonymously summed and buried in the calculation of health status indicators. Locking the questionnaires in dark cupboards metaphorically silenced the fulsome stories of hope and joy; of sorrow and tragedy. (258)

I so hope that someday such interviews can be done again in similar communities, but with the goal of (with informed consent, obviously!) recording and sharing the full stories rather than just the bare data. No shade to Edwards' research at the time, of course, just that there's so much that can be said in oral histories and personal stories that can't be captured in tick boxes. I said above—and I think this is relevant to this theme about personal stories—that there are upsides and downsides to the long time between Edwards' work in Sierra Leone and the writing of this book—the downside is that it's harder to get full portraits of the people in the story when those memories are decades old. I'd have loved to get a better sense of more of the individuals Edwards lived and worked with, more of a sense of their stories and individual lives. It's a fascinating book regardless, but one to go in looking for more of a broad-strokes, data-driven perspective than one that focuses on individuals.

Review: "Beautiful and Terrible Things" by Amy Butler

Beautiful and Terrible Things by Amy Butler
Published October 2023 via The Dial Press
★★★★

I grew up in a religious tradition in which women warmed casseroles, taught children's Sunday school classes, and sometimes—with the endorsement and supervision of the male pastor—taught women's Bible study classes. It's not that I had ever heard anyone preach or teach about specifically why women couldn't be pastors, it was just that I'd never seen a woman pastor. I honestly didn't even know such a thing could exist. (loc.137*)

Butler was perhaps an unexpected pick for a minister: growing up conservative and evangelical, her understanding was that if she wanted to be involved in ministry, her best bet was to be a preacher's wife. But in college, something shifted: she realized that she had more options than she'd thought—and then, as she sallied forth on the path to ministry, she learned over and over again how hard that would be as a woman in a very conservative tradition.

Beautiful and Terrible Things is a memoir in essays, structured partially around lessons Butler learned—and the people she learned them from—in her years in ministry. I don't live in her world, so I didn't realize until I was midway through the book that she's a prominent figure in the evangelical world—the first woman pastor at more than one historic US church, and one who has been very successful at both growing church membership and (as she describes, and as far as I can confirm from outside sources) bringing the churches she led into a somewhat more modern age.

But it sounds like a hard, hard path at times. In earlier years, Butler was involved in churches affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, which...does not exactly have a stellar record when it comes to women's welfare. And her family was not ready to see a woman minister either: years later, after I'd been a pastor for more than a decade, I paid him [her grandfather] a visit in his retirement home. When I approached his chair and kissed him hello, he grabbed my hand and pulled me close, looked me straight in the eyes, and said: "You are the biggest disappointment of my life." Love never managed to penetrate that hardness; those were the last words I ever heard him speak. (loc. 293)

The book is not all, or even primarily, about those earliest years, but they're necessary to set the scene for the ups and downs to come. It's worth noting that the book is fundamentally about people rather than about religion—that is, while readers who are shocked by the idea of women in ministry (or women wearing trousers) will probably have a hard time getting beyond the basics, it's written with the explicit understanding that not all of Butler's readers will share her views, and that she does not expect them to. I am a Christian minister, she writes, and in that work, I have a personal conception of God. But I want to leave space for what you imagine God to be, too, if the Divine is a reality in your life at all. Whatever God is for you, I hope that looks like a lavish and unrestricted love (loc. 65).

I could go on (and on), but I'll leave that here. Interesting and timely; I will be recommending especially to some minister friends who have faced similar challenges.

*Quotes are taken from an ARC and may not be final.

Children's books: "I Ship", "Kayaking", and "Brains"

 

I Ship by Kelly Rice Schmitt, illustrated by Jam Dong (Millbrook Press)
Kayaking by Tanya Kornienko (Books to Hook Publishing)
Brains by John Devolle (Pushkin Children's Books)

Back into the world of children's books! This time, a set of books aimed at exploring the world...and the mind.

I Ship is an absolute delight of a picture book that gives children a look at the shipping industry. The simple style of the illustrations belies just how much detail has gone into them—there's so much for kids to examine and explore. The text has some rhymes and alliteration, explaining the complexities that go into a container ship's journey, but it's the illustrations that are really the standout. (More detailed text at the end of the book provides more information for kids—or adults—who want to know a bit more, including a glossary, explanations of some key jobs, and some quick facts.) There's also a nod to the Suez Canal blockage of 2021, which might be of more interest to adults than to child readers (kids of an age to read this are almost certainly too young to remember that particular Internet drama!) but is entertaining nonetheless.

I would have loved this as a kid, and I wasn't even the sort of kid who was into trucks and ships and planes and so on. But I would have spent ages looking at the illustrations, what with the cargo and the land details and the soothing colors. What a great read.

True to its title, Kayaking is an exploration of kayaking—here, on Ukraine's Dnipro River. Part love letter to the water and part love letter to the place, this is both informative and beautifully illustrated. Don't expect a lot of plot here; the book is more about exploration and quiet adventure. It would be useful for kids who are soon to go out on a kayak (or canoe) for the first time, but in 2023 it's also nice to see books that offer a picture of Ukraine other than, well, what's been in the news for the past year and a half.

Quiet and lovely—my favorite illustration is the seagull on pages 6–7.

Did you know that an octopus has a main brain...plus eight mini-brains, one in each tentacle? You do now! Adorable and informative, Brains introduces young kids to the basic science of how brains work. Deceptively simple, full-page illustrations help kids visualise what's going on inside their skulls...just don't try taking off the top of your head at home! (Honestly, I sort of want to see someone take the the illustration of the brain sending messages to muscles to make them move and turn it into a Halloween costume.)

It looks like this is part of a broader series of books about various scientific concepts and facts, and while I haven't read the others, this one looks like a great addition to an early-elementary classroom bookcase—and, if they're anything like this, the other books could be lined up right next to it.

Thanks to the authors and publishers for providing review copies through NetGalley.

Review: "The Blackwoods" by Brandy Colbert

The Blackwoods by Brandy Colbert
Published October 2023 via Balzer + Bray
★★★★

The Blackwoods have been in Hollywood for decades, and acting even before that. Success has always come with a price, but there's no denying that they've made it. But when Blossom, the matriarch of the family, passes away, the family comes up against answers to long-asked questions—and some new questions as well.

Colbert couldn't write a bad book if she tried, and I don't think I even read the description before I shelved this as to-read. She describes the book as her "ode to Black Hollywood", and the book fills a niche that I hadn't given enough thought to before now—I've read my fair share of YA Hollywood books featuring (thin, rich) white heroines, but far, far fewer featuring BIPOC heroines or paying tribute to the ones who paved the way.

The Blackwoods slips back and forth between generations of women, from Blossom's mother, Flossie, to Hollis and Ardith, two of the younger generation. What I love most is that many of the climactic moments come relatively early in the book, leaving the characters to handle the fallout throughout the rest of the book. Also, because the book follows multiple characters, the big moments they each have are allowed to be parts of their story (and the family story) rather than taking over the narrative completely. I won't go into detail, but a number of things go down throughout the book that could be a book's main conflict, and I loved the sense that the book wasn't willing to limit the story to any one of those things. Readers may also like Martha Southgate's Third Girl from the Left, which (if I remember correctly; it's been a while) takes a grittier look at Black Hollywood, especially blaxploitation films.

If you struggle with the intro, I'd suggest carrying on to see if the next chapters fit better. I don't love either the intro chapter or the final chapter, neither of which feels as present and natural as the rest of the book.

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

Review: "Brutes" by Dizz Tate

Brutes by Dizz Tate
Published February 2023 via Catapult
★★★

2.5 stars? I don't really know what to make of this. In Brutes, a pack of young girls runs wild through the Florida suburbs. Brutes, their mothers call them, as they tease and taunt and torment, as they use their scorn and their soulless stares to keep each other in line and outsiders uneasy. Brutes, their mothers call them, but I think I would go with feral.

Most of the novel is told in the first person plural: we. The occasional chapter brings us into something closer to the present day, when these feral children have grown up to be marginally less feral but no more happy adults; those adult chapters are told from individual perspectives, but because the girls are so closely enmeshed in their younger years, they are hard to tell apart even as first-person-singular adults. As children, they are obsessed with a somewhat older girl, Sammy, and with the search to find Sammy, who has gone missing from her bedroom and cannot be found. Has she been murdered in the nearby building site, drowned in the lake, abducted by a stranger? If the girls, who aim to see everything while others underestimate them, know anything, they're not saying. They're too busy directing fire ants towards their mothers' sandals and practicing seduction and cutting every single other person they meet down to size.

There's something rotten in the state of Florida, and that rot permeates every part of these girls' lives. Only late in the book do we start to understand what they, too, are starting to understand. I suspect that there's a lot of symbolism and undertone here that I'm missing, and that I would have gotten more from it with a more consistent first-person singular perspective. Even a feral one.

Review: "In Light of All Darkness" by Kim Cross

 

In Light of All Darkness by Kim Cross
Published October 2023 via Grand Central Publishing
★★★★

A parent's worst nightmare: Polly Klaas was safe at home, in her bedroom, having a slumber party no less—and then she was gone, and despite her friends' eyewitness accounts investigators had barely a clue of who had taken her or whether she was still alive. The odds were against them, and against Polly.

Although true crime (in this case a decades-old, solved case) is not Cross's usual material, she had unusual access to information about the case: her father-in-law was the FBI agent who ran the case at the time. While the simple facts of the story are common knowledge, then, Cross had access to research material and interview subjects that most journalists would not. I didn't have much knowledge of the case going in—you know early on in the book how it ends, but I avoided looking things up until I'd finished reading—but I read Cross's earlier book of narrative nonfiction (result: I will never live in Alabama) and was impressed by the blend of research and storytelling. The same holds true here: Cross knows how to build a story and a set of characters, and she knows how to weave in the critical details that bring the case to life.

In some ways what makes this most interesting—since, again, it's not a new or recent case—is the discussion of various changes that came about because of the Polly Klaas case. These ranged from procedural (which agencies worked together, and how) to policy-based (learning to not treat witnesses who were children as, basically, suspects) to legal (California's much-debated "three strikes" law and its many problems). I'm also fascinated by the work done to create sketches of the suspect. Two were released to the public—one done early on, after initial interviews with the friends Polly was with when she was kidnapped, and another later on, by a different sketch artist who had a different approach. I haven't been able to find the first sketch online, but there's a picture in the book, and what's striking to me is that the second one is better, but—maybe it's just my untrained, unartistic eye, they're both actually very good. It's impossible to know, but I'm curious about what the lasting impression of the first sketch would have been had the second one not been done. (Much was made of the possibility that the kidnapper had (or hadn't) been wearing a yellow bandana, and I have to say that I did spend much of the book wondering "But when is somebody going to point out that he could just take the bandana off?")

All told, a gripping—and carefully told—story. I like my true crime meticulous rather than salacious, and Cross hits the mark here.

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

Review: "Trouble the Living" by Francesca McDonnell Capossela

Trouble the Living by Francesca McDonnell Capossela
Published September 2023 via Lake Union Publishing
★★★★

1997, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland: For Bríd, home and country are everything—but hers is a country divided. She is her mother's daughter, both determined to have a free and united Ireland at any cost. But she is not the apple of her mother's eye, and as the clock ticks forward they both say, and do, things that will haunt them for the rest of their lives.

2016, Los Angeles County, California, United States: Life with her mother is all Bernie has ever known—her mother, who asks repeatedly for promises that Bernie will come home, and who wants Bernie to need no one else, and who sometimes stays in bed for days. Bernie knows nothing about her mother's life before her, and between Bríd's secrets and Bernie's occasional recklessness—and as the two timelines converge—things come to a head.

Passive myself, I'd been shaped by others until I became potent, frightening, with the potential for disaster. (loc. 675)

Unusually for a dual-timeline story, I was fully invested in both plots and storylines. I'm reluctant to give too many details about the plot, as I think it's better to let the story unfold without knowing all of the themes straight away, but I will say that there are heavy themes of family, mother-daughter relationships, history (sort of) repeating itself (but also not really), and independence/choice. Every time I read about the Troubles, too, I'm reminded of how little I really know about that time and place, and I appreciate the way the Troubles are woven into the fabric of Bríd's life in Ireland, neither the intense focus of the story nor pushed to the background.

I will say that this isn't going to be a book to everyone's tastes: there are some hot-button topics in here, and even with that aside, both Bríd and Bernie make decisions that are...influenced by the rashness of youth, let's say. But I'm less interested in what decisions characters make (although: also, on board with certain decisions Bernie makes later in the book) and more interested in how they make those decisions, and what happens in terms of character development as a result. I love that romance is only barely a blip in the book and that not everything can be tied up with a bow by the end.

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

Review: "Undiscovered" by Gabriela Wiener

Undiscovered by Gabriela Wiener
Translated by Julia Sanches
Published September 2023 via HarperVia
★★★

The strangest thing about being alone here in Paris, in an anthropology museum gallery more or less beneath the Eiffel Tower, is the thought that all these statuettes that look like me were wrenched from my country by a man whose last name I inherited. (loc. 87*)

We all have skeletons somewhere in the familial closet. Sometimes they're out on display, sitting at the dinner table—but Wiener's family skeletons were displayed more prominently than most, in European museums. Not their literal skeletons (this particular analogy is perhaps a little confusing, whoops), but the artifacts that Charles Wiener, an Austrian-French explorer, had looted from Peru and brought to France. Not long after he left Peru, a Peruvian baby was born bearing the last name Wiener, and in many ways it was this history that Gabriela Wiener's family in Peru was most proud of: here was their connection to history, to prestige.

For years my dad treasured this book with its dozens of costumbrista etchings of Indigenous life, keeping it stashed away in a special part of our library. Every time I tried to cozy up to it and linger in its pages, I wound up shutting it in horror. I just couldn't read it the way so many others did: as a fascinating nineteenth-century travel account. More than that, I couldn't brush aside Charles's vile assertions about so-called savage Indians. That man—cruel, violently racist, and blinkered by his Eurocentrism—has nothing to do with who I am today, no matter how much my family has chosen to glorify him. (loc. 238)

In Undiscovered, Wiener sets out to learn more about Charles's travels in Peru—and what they might mean for her own identity as a Peruvian woman; as a Peruvian woman living in Spain; as a Peruvian woman living in Spain in a polyamorous relationship with a Peruvian man and a Spanish woman.

I think it's safe to say that Charles Wiener is the least interesting part of her story.

This is described as a blend of fiction and nonfiction, and I'm not clear just how much of this I'm supposed to take as fact—I read it primarily as fact with the exception of the sections in which Wiener imagines important moments in Charles's life, but I'm not sure if it's more interesting if that's the case or if there is a great deal more fiction blended in here. (And where do I hope that things are more true, and where do I hope that they are more fictional?) I realize I'm trying to build something out of pieces lifted from an unfinished story, writes Wiener (loc. 399), and in a way that feels accurate to this book, too: Charles's story is incomplete (he was not a big enough name that his whole life can be readily picked apart and examined), and her own story is still being written.

Much of the book is about unpicking colonization and what it means in Wiener's own life—again, as a minority woman living in Spain, with a family history marked by colonialism—and I'm fascinated and horrified by, well, a lot of it. (See the Wikipedia article on Expo 58—specifically, the section on the human zoo—for some of that; it staggers me to think that some of the people involved in that could still be alive.) The book may be reading for its discussion of polyamory alone, but it's far more interesting in the context of political and family history—and learning that truths you have held your whole life may be more complicated than you thought. I think I'm due for some more historical-political reading...

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

*Quotes are taken from an ARC and may not be final.

Review: "Angel Mommy" by Linda Krikorian

Angel Mommy by Linda Krikorian
Published 2000
★★

Well, it is what the title promises. This is written in part as a letter to Krikorian's children, and in some ways I think that's the saddest part of this—it's an in-case-I'm-no-longer-here sort of thing, written from deep within the depths of an eating disorder, but...I have to think that if one's parent died, receiving in exchange a blow-by-blow account of the illness that killed them (or at least was a major factor in their life), including descriptions of being unwilling to gain weight even for the sake of a healthy pregnancy (not the author's fault—eating disorders are a mindfuck—but still), would be just about the last thing one wanted.

It's been more than twenty years since this was published. I hope Krikorian has found some peace and balance since then, and that her children have many, many more positive memories to look back on.

Review: "People Collide" by Isle McElroy

People Collide by Isle McElroy
Published September 2023 via HarperVia
★★★★

In a studio flat in Bulgaria, Eli wakes up to a new perspective: he has somehow slipped into the body of his wife, Elizabeth, and Elizabeth—along with Eli's body—is gone. What follows is a romp from Bulgaria to Paris to the US Midwest as Eli follows the clues of Elizabeth's disappearance and tries to make some sense out of what comes next.

Without question one of the odder things I've read recently, People Collide stands out for not asking the obvious questions. Eli and Elizabeth are together in an opposites-attract sort of way, with Elizabeth powering through on a Type A schedule and Eli drifting through life. In a subversion of Hollywood expectation (anyone else remember "On Thin Ice" with Tara Lipinski?), he takes his shift into Elizabeth's body in stride, sinking into the new body rather than questioning it and trying to both hold on to the commentary he imagines from Elizabeth and apply his own self to the experience.

People Collide is not a novel of a trans experience, exactly, but it is impossible not to see the connections. There would be so much to explore in a paper on this novel—if I'd read this as a grad student in a lit class I'd have been all over it for allegory and metaphor and symbolism. (Also, if I'd read this in grad school it probably would have been in a short-story format—in a way this feels like a very long short story.) You have to be ready to accept the unexplained and let the story take you where it wants to, but if you're in the mood for it those are some interesting places indeed.

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

Review: "Fire from the Sky" by Moa Backe Åstot

Fire from the Sky by Moa Backe Åstot
Translated by Eva Apelqvist
Published September 2023 via Levine Querido
★★★

In northern Sweden, Ánte is sure of a few things: he loves the traditions of his Sámi upbringing. He loves his village and can't imagine a future somewhere else. He loves his best friend, Erik—and he also can't see a life in which he can be both a reindeer herder and gay, something all but unheard of in his village.

I read this largely because I have read precious few books that take place among reindeer-herding communities (maybe 2) and even fewer by writers who are themselves Sámi (0). I love that this presents a modern take: Ánte is a reindeer herder, yes, but he's also a teenage boy who wants to hang out with his friends, play video games, and go to parties. Reindeer herding is in his blood, in his past and present and future, but it's largely in the background of the book. That feels very realistic for this day and age, and I'm here for that.

There's also a fascinating side plot about a book Ánte ends up with, one that is in part based on Herman Bernhard Lundborg (d. 1943) and his work. The short version: racism is everywhere, and the Sámi, like other minorities, were subject to scientists hell-bent on their eugenics-heavy theories. It's a piece of history I wasn't aware of (I'm only loosely familiar present-day struggles for Sámi rights—basically, the few things that make it into the mainstream news—and not at all with historical struggles), and it's one of the things that troubles Ánte throughout the book.

The book is translated from Swedish, and I'm not sure if it's the original writing or the translation but the phrasing does get quite awkward in places. This is perhaps exacerbated by Ánte's situation—he is an angsty teenager trying to figure out how he can reconcile two parts of his identity—but it sometimes took me clear out of the story. (That said: the copy I read had yet to be proofread, so the final English version may feel smoother.)

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

Review: "Aerospace Nurse" by Virginia McDonnell

Aerospace Nurse by Virginia McDonnell
First published 1968
★★★

Ah, the delights of 1960s YA. In Aerospace Nurse, Terry becomes—you guessed it—a nurse to astronauts. Very little of the book is actually about astronaut nursing life, though, as first Terry has to get her bachelor's of nursing, join the Air Force, get some experience, become a flight nurse, and eventually apply to be an aerospace nurse. (It is, as you might expect, quite the ride!)

Some nice things here: Terry has a boy-next-door waiting for her, and—it's the 60s, remember—he's convinced that the thing to do is for Terry to give up her silly career aspirations, marry him, and live a nice dull life. When Terry questions her nursing skills, Johnny's answer is simple: "Take my fraternity pin," he said. "That should prove what you're worth and where you belong in this life" (37). Terry sticks to her guns—she's just told him that "Before I can be a wife, I have to be a person in my own right" (37)—but she's told over and over, by numerous characters, that Johnny won't wait around forever, he's been terribly generous to "let" her pursue her education/career before making a decision about marriage (note that she hasn't even committed to going steady with him), et cetera. (The sixties, man.) Johnny's ultimately a decent guy, to be clear, and this is not unusual for YA/romance books of the time. It's just...still kind of wild to me.

Meanwhile, the nursing: it's a thing in YA nurse books of the era for the book to be really, really enthusiastic about girls taking up nursing—it seems there was something of a nursing shortage, so the characters in these books all wax rhapsodic about the amazing opportunities they have, and the friends they make, and what a wonderful chance it is to do something for their country, et cetera et cetera. In this case, because Terry joins the Air Force, we also hear about the amazing things that nurses were doing in World War I, World War II, and the Korean War. What's that? No, no. Those are the only wars. Definitely no chance of Terry being sent off to some...other war. Oh—wait—you mean Vietnam? No, no, nothing going on—oh, okay, Terry pops over to Vietnam for five minutes when she's on holiday in Japan, as a favor when another nurse gets sick and can't do some sort of murky medevac flight, because that's definitely how it works in the Air Force. But the only thing Terry ever has to be worried about in Vietnam is whether her skills will hold up. That's it. Nothing else to worry about, no guns no blood no guts no gore, and if you join the Air Force as a nurse in the 60s you're definitely more likely to be selected to train as a space nurse than to be sent...somewhere...else.

Ahem.

Shall we talk about romance? Let's talk about romance.

I won't say too much except that Terry ends up with two options—Johnny, the boy next door who wants her to quit work and start popping out babies stat, and the mystery man with whom she has an instant sizzle of connection. And why can I not say too much? Because Terry has approximately one conversation with the mystery man—we learn his name and his job and that he's the precursor to the alpha male that runs amok in contemporary romance—before they decide that they're made for each other, baby, and if she doesn't say yes when he proposes then as her Air Force superior he'll order her to do so.

And really, what more could a girl want in a space-doctor-cowboy?

Review: "Counting the Cost" by Jill Duggar

Counting the Cost by Jill Duggar
Published September 2023 via Gallery Books
★★★

Much of Jill Duggar's childhood was chronicled for television. The fourth child and second daughter of the (infamous?) Duggar family, her family got bigger and bigger—and with it the media attention grew too. A television special, another television special, a reality TV show...

And then the scandals started, and Jill* started to see that not everything she'd been taught was true, and the incredibly sheltered way in which she'd been raised did not always offer the level of protection that she'd been promised.

Now, I've never watched 19 Kids and Counting or any of the other shows and specials—I've didn't grow up with TV and I can't stomach the thought of sitting through those shows now—but I've long found the overall story fascinating for being so wildly different from the way I grew up and the way I live now. It doesn't take much time on the Internet to make it clear that the rosy portrait that the family has tried to portray is not all that it seems, but the family has historically, for the most part, presented a united front. Even when Jill's sister Jinger wrote her second memoir—a treatise on why what she believed as a child is wrong and why what she believes now is right—she was very careful to say only positive things about her parents.

But with 19 kids in the family, plus assorted spouses and next-gen folks and relatives and hangers-on...the odds have always been pretty good that someone would break rank. And when Jill appeared in the Amazon docu-series Shiny Happy People (which covers the abuses and other problems of the religious homeschooling organization in which she was raised), and then announced this memoir, it became clear that that person was going to be Jill.

This is not a tell-all, per se: Jill is very careful not to tell her siblings' stories, and she is also very careful not to lump her parents, Jim Bob and Michelle, together. But it does paint a damning portrait of Jim Bob, who—as Jill describes it—maintained a manipulative, at times verbally and emotionally abusive level of control over the family, especially (but not only) when it came to money. And she brings receipts: most staggering, perhaps, the long letter detailing from Jim Bob detailing the money that had come out of his bank account to cover things for Jill—to justify why she'd never received any of the money he had told the IRS that she had. (That's called tax fraud, by the way. Unclear if Jill is aware of that, although I'm quite sure that her husband, who helped ghostwrite and previously worked as an accountant, is.) Or, when Jill finally got her hands on some numbers and realized that when she gave birth, the resulting specials had put some $100,000 in her father's pocket—none of which she'd seen, and none of which her father wanted to part with to cover the hospital costs.


And things that might seem small, or innocuous, but point to a greater habit of hypocrisy: rules being loosened for the sake of more entertaining television; viewers seeing the family shopping for groceries only when the film crew was around and TLC was paying for the nicer food, not when the family was living on bean sandwiches; timelines being bent for the sake of TV; the family and the IBLP preaching and preaching and preaching about the "umbrella of protection", in which Jesus protects men, who protect their wives and children, and then instead Jim Bob protecting his son, and only his son, at the expense of his daughters.

Jill's views will probably never really align with mine, but it's clear that she's come a long, long way from the approval-hunting girl she describes at the beginning of the book. (If you know anything about the fundie world, this will speak volumes: she grew up with the KJV as the only valid translation of the Bible; her current church uses a different translation.)

As to the writing: It's a little rough in places; the publication date was pushed up following the wild success of Shiny Happy People, and the editing was definitely rushed. Jill and her husband did work with an experience ghostwriter, though, which makes a world of difference. It's definitely better read if you're already familiar with the basics of the family story, or willing to not quite follow everything in parts of the book, but if you are familiar with the story...it's a pretty explosive read.

*Normally I'd use last names for authors, but for the sake of clarity I'm going with first names here.

Review: "Mandy" by Julie Edwards

Mandy by Julie Edwards
First published 1971
★★★★

I've been in a mood to reread some childhood favorites this year, partly so that I have a record of them later on (too easy to forget what books you read two years ago, let alone twenty or thirty years ago!). Mandy is one of those—a girl at an orphanage, with basically a decent life but desperate for the security of family, for a home of her own. (Also, if I'm honest, I always loved this because we called my grandmother Mandy.) In a lot of ways this feels very idealised (not to paint all orphanages with one brush, but...I doubt orphanages in the 60s or 70s were as cheerful, supportive, and laissez-faire as the one described here), but I think there's something terribly universal in dreaming of a place of one's own—which Mandy seeks, and finds in various ways, here. I'd forgotten how few of the other characters at the orphanage are described in any detail (it's really only one other girl Mandy's age, plus some adults), but overall the book has stood up well to the test of time.

Review: "Inverse Cowgirl" by Alicia Roth Weigel

 

Inverse Cowgirl by Alicia Roth Weigel
Published September 2023 via HarperOne
★★★

It's a season for memoirs about growing up intersex: I read Nobody Needs to Know by Pidgeon Pagonis (mentioned in Inverse Cowgirl, because the intersex advocacy world is small) earlier this year, and with Weigel adding her voice to the mix, I hope this heralds an era in which intersex people feel that they can talk more freely about their experiences.

This is likely one where how much you enjoy the book will depend largely on how well you connect with the authorial voice. Words that come to mind: punchy, chatty, rapid-fire, manifesto, y'all. (Tattoos.) Weigel comes in swinging and never really stops—she's quick to call out structures (and individuals within those structures) doing, and perpetuating, damage to her community, and as quick to call out her own privileges and shortcomings and learning experiences. Formally, this is a memoir in essays (with a common theme of the experiences that led Weigel to her tattoos), but I'd posit that a lot of context would be lost if you tried to read any of the essays solo.

Two things that I really would have liked from this book: first, Weigel focuses heavily on her advocacy and political work, especially later in the book, and as a reader that's something that I've never been very interested in. No criticism of the work itself, obviously, just that it tends to read to me as "and then I did this thing and then I met that amazing person" (perhaps reflective of the exhausting nature of campaigns and advocacy work). I would have been interested to see her talk more about things like HRT—a necessity when your reproductive organs have been removed, but a necessity with consequences, such as loss of bone density and spending your life on medication that insurance might well not pay for. I'd have loved to read more about knowing she had a "condition" but not knowing the word "intersex" until she was in her twenties(!!), and knowing that (minor spoiler, but small point in the book) she had other family members who were intersex. In the latter case, I doubt she could have gone far while maintaining privacy, and I respect that, but my gosh that would be a fascinating line of inquiry.

The second thing I really would have loved is a direct exploration of the intersections between sex and gender, and what it means to Weigel to be intersex and also to firmly apply the label of "woman". Weigel touches on this a little, but it sounds like she (luckily) never had to question her gender identity, which might have been interesting to discuss. This might be an area in which I'd like to see more science—I really don't have a sense of how often assigned gender (or assigned sex!) feels true to someone whose body, as Pagonis puts it in Nobody Needs to Know, "chose intersex" rather than "boy" or "girl". And perhaps the science simply isn't there—Weigel notes, after all, that there's a dearth of knowledge on how intersex bodies develop in the absence of, e.g., nonconsensual childhood surgeries, but as far as I can tell there's just a dearth of knowledge on the personal experiences of intersex people in general, because it's a topic that's so long been taboo. (Ooh, can someone please curate a book of essays by intersex folks with varying experiences and from varying generations and locations?)

Overall, an interesting look at an experience that isn't talked about enough, and hopefully one of many voices sharing stories about this in the next years.

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

Review: "Cleat Cute" by Meryl Wilsner

 

Cleat Cute by Meryl Wilsner
Published September 2023 via St. Martin's Griffin
★★★★

On the field together, they're good...off the field together, they're better.

I ended up thinking a lot about the evolution of lesbian romance as I read this. When I first started reading lesbian fiction, I went to the library armed with a handwritten list of books carefully sourced from the pages of Fun Home. (It was the 2000s North Carolina, so it's a minor miracle that the library had any of the books on my list.) When I started finding lesbian romance (definitely not at the library in North Carolina), it was so uniformly terrible—this does not mean that I did not love it, but it was terrible—that I classified almost the whole genre as Bad Lesbian Romance. I was pretty sure that Good Lesbian Romance also existed, but the more general realm of Lesbian Romance was so small to begin with that my chances of finding the good stuff were...not great.

Guess what? It's 2023. There's a whole lot more out there now, and that means there's a whole lot more good stuff. Even now I'm still getting used to the idea that I can pick up a lesbian romance and it won't be full of cartoonishly evil white men with slicked-back hair, chomping on their cigars as they leer at women and make plans to topple the gay agenda.

Enter Cleat Cute: manages to hit some of my favorite tropes (I don't give a whit about sports in real life, but I do in lesbian romance) and some of my least favorite tropes (misunderstandings as conflict) and pull it off...all without threats of violence, homophobia, or violent homophobia. (What can I say—my standards have been permanently damaged by some of the drivel I inhaled in the naughties.) Even the "misunderstanding" trope is pulled off with some aplomb. I tend to grumble about plots that could be resolved dozens, if not hundreds, of pages earlier if the characters would just talk to each other, but what's interesting here is that Grace and Phoebe...they do talk to each other. They do communicate. And when wires get crossed, it's rarely in a Big Dramatic way, but in a "oh, these are two people who see the world from different angles" way. It's genuinely refreshing.

Quibbles, per usual: There is some setup for a villain, but that plotline doesn't really go anywhere. I'm actually glad of it—Evil Villains Who Are Evil are high on my list of eyeroll-inducing romance tropes—but it still felt like it fizzled out. I'm also curious about the choice to push some of Phoebe's "figuring her brain out" stuff (vagueness to avoid spoilers!) into the black hole between the last chapter and the epilogue, as it left me wondering in which ways her experience of the world is different, and is the same, with new tools at hand. Let's call it three and a half stars, rounded up for the sheer volume of happy energy that Phoebe brought to my reading experience.

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

Review: "Romance Is a Wonderful Thing" by Ellen Emerson White

Romance Is a Wonderful Thing by Ellen Emerson White
Published 1983 via Avon
★★★

Ellen Emerson White is one of my all-time favorite YA authors, and I don't turn down a chance to read one of her books—even if it's an old-school, out-of-print, out-of-date romance novel. It's sort of staggering to think that this was published so close to The President's Daughter, which kicked off a truly excellent series. That's not to criticize this book unduly—you can see in it some of the rhythms of conversation and humour that White has developed more fully in her later books, and her patterns of mother-daughter relationships, and it's overall engaging. (Also, it—and I think at least one of her other books?—was published while she was still in college, which boggles the mind.)

But yes—the language is dated, and the relationship is...I'm not sure what the right term is, but I'm leaning towards 'heavy-handed'. Trish is the prototypical good girl and Colin the prototypical 80s bad-boy hero, which is to say that if you scrape off the barest layer of spackle, he's not actually a bad boy at all. He's busy failing all his remedial classes, for example, but with a little bit of encouragement from the right people—voilà! Honors student. He actually reminds me a fair amount of Jack, the love interest in Long May She Reign, only in that book White had had quite a bit more writing and life experience to draw on, so Jack and Meg are able to be rather more complex characters than Colin and Trish.

This is forty years old, and unless you're already a fan of Ellen Emerson White's books and curious about what she was writing decades ago, I wouldn't bother...but it makes for a pretty fascinating comparison to her better-known books.

Review: "Gay Poems for Red States" by Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr.

Gay Poems for Red States by Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr.
Published June 2023 via University Press of Kentucky
★★★★

This slim volume is doing the world of a layered memoir, but in standalone pieces of verse. Carver grew up bone-poor in rural Appalachia, poor and gay and knowing that there was still space for him—even in his rural homeland.

Gay Poems for Red States (not a fan of the title, but oh well) takes readers through Carver's youth and into adulthood, through the years with teachers who could see his potential and the adults who couldn't hear anything other than his deep-South accent. I couldn't find a particularly quotable piece of "A Guy Named Casey Who I Had Never Met", but it's my favorite poem of the book—a moment that speaks to the importance of seeing others like you be accepted, and perhaps even more so to the importance of symbols of hope.

Here's hoping that this one makes it into a lot of high school libraries. Is it too much to hope that it can be stocked in Florida high schools...?

Review: "The Last Girls Standing" by Jennifer Dugan

The Last Girls Standing by Jennifer Dugan
Published August 2023 via G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers
★★★

It's summer, and we all know what that means: time for some summer-camp horror. In <i>The Last Girls Standing</i>, Sloan has already survived a summer-camp slaughter—but she's not sure she'll ever really recover. The only person who can calm her fears is Cherry, the other survivor...but as time goes on, Sloan is no longer sure that Cherry is being completely honest about what happened that night...and she's no longer sure of anything else, either.

I enjoyed this to a point—possibly I enjoy summer camp murder books so much because I never went to summer camp myself—but as the book wound down I had to wonder: what actually happened here? Without spoiling the plot, I'll say that a lot of the book comes down to Sloan's mental health, but in pursuit of this the other characters are wildly inconsistent, to the point that by the end of the book I still had no idea what was real and what was all in Sloan's head. That might be the point, but it felt more plot-hole-y than intended to me. (And...I'm no expert on PTSD, but I don't think this is, ah, an accurate representation.) Largely engaging but not one I'm likely to return to.

Children's books: "Peekaboo Jungle" and "Peekaboo Pets" by Surya Sajnani

 

Peekaboo Jungle by Surya Sajnani (Happy Yak)
Peekaboo Pets by Surya Sajnani (Happy Yak)

Back into the world of picture books!

Peekaboo Jungle and Peekaboo Pets are cloth books with lovely, understated illustrations and foldaway panels hiding small surprises for young children. Made for children too young to read, there's an appealing textural element. I particularly liked the fish illustration from Peekaboo Pets).

I accessed digital ARCs, so I can't comment on production quality, which may be a factor when considering books made for people small enough to prefer to chew on them rather than read them! I wouldn't have minded some brighter colors—the muted colors seem more to an adult's aesthetic than to a baby's—but the design is clean and consistent. They'd be great infant gifts, especially paired with a related plushie.

Thanks to the publisher for providing review copies through NetGalley.

Review: "Buffalo Flats" by Martine Leavitt

Buffalo Flats by Martine Leavitt
Published April 2023 via Margaret Ferguson Books
★★★

In the Northwest Territories, Rebecca has a dream: a plot of land owned under her own name, ideally left wild and untamed, where she can dream and talk with God. There's just one problem: it's the late 1800s, Rebecca is a girl, and girls can't own land. Even a grown woman can't own land, unless she's a widow.

Rebecca's quest for her spot of land is a through-line that drives this book, but it's nowhere near the overarching story. Rather, this is a year or so in the life of a Mormon pioneer girl as she—along with her friends and family—struggles to survive in a promising but harsh climate, and as life throws one thing after another at them. One of the better parts of the book is that the bad lands with the good: people live and people die, and there is no guarantee that all will turn out well.

Rebecca is devoutly Mormon, a theme that comes up again and again in the book. It's functionally Mormon fiction, which (along with it being historical fiction) puts it well outside the range of my usual fiction. But I found myself drawn more and more in as the book went on—I think partly because most of the growth Rebecca does throughout the book has little to do with religion, and partly because of that take-the-bad-with-the-good approach. It's also worth noting that Rebecca has attitudes that would have been very liberal for the time and frankly in some places would <i>still</i> be considered liberal, and (perhaps to keep the book relatively light?) she's always given more support than challenge on those attitudes.

Two omissions keep me from rating this higher: first, I don't know much about First Nations people in the Northwest Territories in the late 1800s, but I'm pretty sure they were there. As far as I can tell, though, every character in this book is white, with nary a thought for the people who were on the land before them. And second, plural marriage: this was common among the LDS at the time, and the people—Leavitt's ancestors—on whom the book is based were polygamous. But there is, again, no mention of that here. Leavitt says in the author's note at the end that she opted not to write about this part of their history because it was not written about in the book of family history that she drew on, but...I don't know. I suppose I wonder whether it wasn't written about in that family history because either 1) polygamy had only just gone out of fashion—the LDS church turned away from it in 1890, the year the book starts, so that Utah could become a state—and the topic was touchy or 2) when Leavitt's ancestor went north to Canada, he left one of his two wives behind, and she ceased to be important. Perhaps both—Canada also outlawed plural marriage in 1890, so it might have been tricky for immigrants to bring two wives north. But...in a story willing to tackle a few complicated subjects, it feels like something that is omitted for the sake of modern sensibilities.

I'm not sure I'd read more along these lines, but it made for an enjoyable and engaging deviation in my reading.

Review: "Shrink" by Heather Morrall

Shrink by Heather Morrall
Published 2010
★★

There were four years between the publication of The Echo Glass and Shrink, and (from what I can remember of The Echo Glass) not much improved in that time. I genuinely appreciate the effort to portray a version of anorexia that is not The Worst Case Doctors Have Ever Seen, but the execution just isn't there. Flat writing, choppy dialogue, limited character depth, and truly, truly terrible therapists. (The first one tells Eloise that she's not a priority because she's not inpatient; tells Eloise—who is seriously underweight—that she'd have to lose a ton of weight to be a day patient, let alone be an inpatient; and on it goes. The second one also tells Eloise that she's not anorexic because she's never been hospitalised and that she's good at 'pretending' to be anorexic because she's maintained a dangerously low weight as opposed to continuing to lose weight.)

There's probably a point to be made in the book about the lack of training that many medical professionals and counsellors receive regarding eating disorders, but they're portrayed as such nasty, horrible creatures that they're hard to take seriously.

Points for effort and intent, but I can't recommend this.

Short story: Review: "The Scenic Route" by Christina Baker Kline

The Scenic Route by Christina Baker Kline
Published September 2023 via Amazon Original Stories

It wasn't exactly pleasant. But I felt safe in the van. Boundaried. My life was small, and nobody I encountered knew anything about me. (loc. 203*)

Jess hadn't planned for #vanlife, but #vanlife is where she ended up—no more husband, no more job, no more house, no more son. In "The Scenic Route", Christina Baker Kline lets us peer through the window into Jess's life: how she got here and where, maybe, she's going.

It's interesting to read this from Kline because, although she's written contemporary novels, the only two books I've read by her have been historical. "The Scenic Route" is distinctly contemporary, touching on a few things specific to time and place: Instagramming #vanlife, wilderness programmes for teens, et cetera. (Jess does have an Instagram account, by the way, and you'd better believe I looked it up—an account by the name mentioned in the book exists, but alas, it does not seem to have anything to do with this short story. I'd have found it very funny, and impressive, if Kline had been secretly building an IG account to go with the story.) More than anything, though, I wondered whether this either started as an idea for something longer; it doesn't feel like a snippet of a novel, but (while everything is tied up within the story) there's certainly enough, thematically, for something much longer if she chose.

I don't dream of #vanlife (or even of van life), but it is something that intrigues me in reading—a different world, so many different reasons for living in it.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy of this short story through NetGalley.

*Quotations are from an ARC and may not be final.