Review: "The Ministry of Thin" by Emma Woolf

The Ministry of Thin by Emma Woolf
First published 2013
★★

In 2012, Woolf published An Apple a Day, a memoir (drawn from a Times column that she wrote) about trying to recover from anorexia. In 2013, she followed up with The Ministry of Thin, in which she takes an extremely unscientific look at the pressure that girls and women are under to look and sometimes act a certain way.

And...I can only think that Woolf was still deep in her disorder when she wrote this. She speaks of anorexia as a thing of her past, but she also says that I literally don't go near butter (loc. 267); wonders whether, despite her anorexia, she was ever actually mentally ill (loc. 2597); describes women who don't have 'fuller figures' as 'the perfect ones' (loc. 3167); argues repeatedly that size is purely down to behaviour rather than, e.g., genetics; and tries unconvincingly to argue that she doesn't have a problem with fat bodies:

This [fear] is the way I feel about fat in food. However, fat as body shape seems quite different. It interests me. I wonder what it would be like to become very large. (loc. 606)

but then continues with fun things like this:

I know it's easier than it sounds. I know that, despite having come close to death, I would still choose battling anorexia over battling obesity. No one wants to be fat. Everyone wants to be thinner. (loc. 760)

The book isn't entirely about body size—Woolf also talks about, for example, the pressure to be made up a certain way (she tells us that the fact that she sometimes leaves the house without mascara is down to 'my own laziness' (loc. 1643))—but as far as I can tell most of this book is her attempt to delude herself into thinking that she's perfectly healthy and normal now, and any residual terror of butter or disdain for fat people is just natural because she's a woman in today's (or 2013's) society. I do not recommend reading this if you have ever had an eating disorder. I do not recommend reading this if you have a bigger body. I do not recommend reading this in general.

Woolf was still only very recently into some semblance of recovery when she wrote this. It's been ten years, and I really hope that things have continued to improve for her. But...somewhere along the way, I wish an editor had looked at this and said, 'Look, interesting concept, but let's table this for a few years until it feels less raw and you can think about actual science and research instead of your continued tithing at the Church of Thin.'

Children's books: "Explore Under the Earth" and "Explore the Rainforest" by Carly Madden

Explore Under the Earth by Carly Madden (Happy Yak)
Explore the Rainforest by Carly Madden (Happy Yak)

Diving into the world of picture books!

Explore Under the Earth takes Evie and her dog Juno down through the layers of—surprise—the earth, learning a bit about each layer as they go.

I love the varying sizes of the pages, which allow for something tactile and colorful. The order seems backwards to me (surely the pages should get smaller as Evie and Juno go down deeper into the earth?), though it would take a total and probably difficult rewrite to start at the earth's core and work outwards, so I can see why the author opted to do otherwise. It's easy to see how this concept would translate well to other shaped board books—a triangular mountain book, perhaps? Another partial circle for one about rainbows? The possibilities go on and on.

Young readers can continue Evie's adventures in Explore the Rainforest, which takes Evie and her dog Juno up, up through the layers of the rainforest, each page a bit larger as they climb through the trees.

This makes for a colorful and instructive read, with lots of layers in the illustrations and plenty of little details to attract young readers. The format is a lot of fun, combining whimsy and practicality. (The font is quite small, though—adults, have your reading glasses at hand!) Either of these would make a fun gift for a young child who is curious about the world.

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

Short story: Review: "A Welcome Reunion" by Lucinda Berry

A Welcome Reunion by Lucinda Berry
Published August 2023 via Amazon Original Stories

A chilling look at what comes after: when Hannah knew her before, Janie was a violently abused child—someone in need of help, support, love. But Janie's disturbances went far deeper than that, and there was no recovering from what she did.

She's eighteen now. An adult. Released from juvenile detention, her record locked, going by a new name—and prepared to set the world on fire. And Hannah isn't prepared to see it burn.

This story is set sometime after Berry's The Perfect Child. It's not necessary to read that first—I have not, and I didn't realize until I'd finished the story that it's a follow-up to a full-length book. I suspect (having skimmed some reviews for the book) that this will go a ways to satisfy readers who hoped for more of an ending to the book, but the creepiness of the violence in this story tells me that I will have to save consideration of the book for a day when I'm in the mood to be unable to sleep at night.

All told, a satisfyingly creepy shot of writing that begs the question—how far would you go to keep your world in one piece, and to keep someone else from destroying it?

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

Review: "Trail of the Lost" by Andrea Lankford

Trail of the Lost" by Andrea Lankford
Published August 2023 via Hachette
★★★★

2015: A young man goes into the wilderness and disappears.
2016: A young man goes into the wilderness and disappears.
2017: A young man goes into the wilderness and disappears.

In Trail of the Lost, Lankford chronicles three disappearances on the Pacific Crest Trail—Chris Sylvia, Kris Fowler, and David O'Sullivan—and the efforts made to find them. A park-ranger-turned-nurse, she got involved in one of the unofficial searches almost by accident, but once she was in, she couldn't turn away.

I read Lankford's Ranger Confidential in 2016, and it left me with the sense that she had loved her work but was deeply burnt out by the time she left. This proved to be a better fit of a book for me, partly because I adore both thru-hiking books and search-and-rescue memoir, but also because Lankford is uniquely qualified to write it. Lankford more than had the qualifications to take part in the search efforts, and she proves here that she also has the research and writing skills to weave a very complicated story. This is three stories in one, mixed with numerous others—because inevitably, over the course of years of searching and researching, Lankford and the scrappy team of searchers she was involved with stumbled across, or were asked to investigate, other missing-persons cases. No spoilers, but what the investigations turned up varied widely.

Most missing-person cases in the wild are resolved quickly, but that was not to be the case for any of these three. It makes for a twisty and turny ride, with leads including a cult, multiple psychics, questionable science (read: the kind of science that the book is here to critique, not to promote), drone footage, solo accidents, accidents involving other people, and much more.

One thing that might turn some readers off: Lankford has a tendency of mentioning mental illness in the context of crime ("...a thirty-two year-old man with a history of mental illness..." (loc. 3148*); "...mentally ill fugitive..." (loc. 3638); "...attacked by a mentally deranged man" (loc. 4539); etc.). It's never a main point of the story, but then, neither is any of these individuals' mental health relevant to whatever parts of the story Lankford tells. Again, not a big enough part of the story for me to draw conclusions, but enough to mention...and to remind anyone who is still reading that people with mental illness are far more likely to be victims of violent crimes than to commit them themselves.

Overall, a fast and gripping read if you're drawn to wild spaces, mysteries, and stories taking place in the intersection of those things. May be of interest to readers of Kathryn Miles' Trailed and Jon Billman's The Cold Vanish.

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

*I read an ARC, and quotes may not be final.

Review: "Skating on Mars" by Caroline Huntoon

Skating on Mars by Caroline Huntoon
Published May 2023 via Feiwel & Friends
★★★★

Super sweet middle grade read about ice skating, gender identity, navigating friendships and middle school cruelty, and grief. I picked this up for the skating aspect but stayed for the grief processing, which feels on point—shifting understandings of identities when someone important is not there to learn about it is something I've thought a lot about in the past year (though in a different context than Mars has), and it's handled in a nicely understated manner here.

Some of the gender identity stuff feels a bit more heavy handed (there are lessons here), but I think that may be reflective of the fact that not only am I not the target audience (I'm almost three times Mars's age), but Mars's generation is learning about gender identity at a much younger age than my generation did, and the lessons are correspondingly age-appropriate and sometimes simplified. (I'm not sure when I first met someone who wasn't cis—or rather, was openly not cis—but I'm guessing college, and that wasn't because I was particularly sheltered but rather because at the time we hadn't really gotten past discussing the LGB part of things. Cue a whole bunch of learning on the fly!)

It's fascinating and cool how much things have changed in a few years—fifteen years ago I was struggling to find lesbian books, let alone lesbian books that didn't involve homophobic violence, in the LGBTQ selection; ten years ago I could find trans books in the YA section at the library; now I can find books that further subvert the gender binary in the middle grade crop of books. It'll be interesting to see what comes next.

Review: "To Walk It Is to See It" by Kathy Elkind

To Walk It Is to See It by Kathy Elkind
Published August 2023 via She Writes Press
★★★

There is a saying: An adventure is not worth telling if there are no dragons. (loc. 127)

I say that I'm a semi-reformed nomad, and it's books like these that keep the 'semi' part of that in play. Surely I could lace up my boots, lock up my apartment, and go out into the mountains for a few weeks...or months?

When Elkind and her husband Jim wanted an adventure, they did that: they picked the GR5, a route that winds from the Netherlands all the way down to the south of France. As the kilometers slipped by, the route got tougher—but so did they.

This is the second book I've read in as many months about the Grande Randonnée network (the first was The Twenty, about the GR20), and my goodness it fuels the wanderlust. Elkind and her husband had pretty quiet dragons on the trail, all things considered—occasional wrenches thrown in the works, but it would be stranger if there were none in 98 days of walking! Her dragons tend to come more from within, when looking back at years past. I'm particularly intrigued by Elkind's writing about her dyslexia, for which she did not receive adequate support as a child—not learning to read until grade seven—and the fact that she ended up teaching elementary school, with a focus on reading. We teach what we need to learn, she says (loc. 775), and I wonder how much else that might apply to.

I read piles and piles of books about the Camino before I walked that, and another stack or two after—perhaps these books about the GR trails herald a new adventure? One can dream.

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

Review: "Nobody Needs to Know" by Pidgeon Pagonis

Nobody Needs to Know by Pidgeon Pagonis
Published August 2023 via Little A
★★★★

My chromosomes chose intersex. My doctors chose girl. And I was left to endure the consequences. (loc. 1337*)

Pagonis was told a lot of things about their body as a child—some of which turned out to be true. Others turned out to be warped truths, and still others turned out to be blatant lies. And then there were the things that Pagonis wasn't told.

In Nobody Needs to Know, Pagonis chronicles a journey of surgeries and imposed otherness punctuated by revelations: as a kid just starting school, as a preteen, as a first-year in college. It was that last revelation, which led Pagonis to seek out their medical records, that set them on a route to activism—in particular, a drive to change the system that made Pagonis's body not their own for so long.

I'd learned early on, in the days after the surgery while lying in that hospital bed and during all the checkups that followed, that my body wasn't my own. It didn't belong to me. It belonged to everyone else. It belonged to the people who could "fix" it, to the people who wanted to study it, to the people who would use it. (loc. 945)

I've read enough about what it means to be intersex to understand one very simple thing: the best cosmetic intervention is no cosmetic intervention. There are too many stories of infants having parts cut off or sewn up so that they look more "standard," irrespective of what that might mean for identity or quality of life, and ignoring the fact that these infants will eventually grow up to be children and then adults with opinions and feelings about their own bodies. This is just one of those stories, and as far as I know such surgeries are still the norm rather than the exception. But Pagonis highlights some other devastating experiences as well—such as being a kid in hospital expected to strip down and bare all for any set of doctors who wanted to come by and take a look, without being told the truth about why they were in hospital and without an understanding that they could say no.

Two things that I would have really liked to see here: first, though there are some ties to trans activism, I'd love to know where the people fighting against intersex rights (such rights including the right to not have nonconsensual cosmetic surgery) stand on questions of trans rights. Pagonis touches on this a little, in terms of hospital policy, but I suspect that there's a different kind of enormous disconnect in how conservative politicians view the matter.

And second, research. I do not need the hard numbers to be convinced, but that doesn't mean I don't want to see the hard numbers anyway. Late in the book, when Pagonis is talking to doctors who perform these surgeries, the doctors' argument (as Pagonis tells it) boils down to "It makes the parents happy if their kids' genitals look normal!" I desperately wanted a retort of "Here's what the peer-reviewed research says about what those kids say about their own damn genitals when they grow up"—but I don't know what sorts of studies have and haven't been done, so barring that, I'd have liked some discussion about surgeries continuing despite the long-term impacts not having been studied in sufficient detail.

If you don't pick up the book, it's still worth checking out Pagonis's Wikipedia page and reading more about their experience and advocacy work.

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

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

Review: "The Dos and Donuts of Love" by Adiba Jaigirdar

The Dos and Donuts of Love by Adiba Jaigirdar
Published June 2023 via Feiwel & Friends
★★★

Puns and Bake-Off-inspired YA! I'm here for that.

I've read more than my fair share of YA rip-offs (not a criticism) of the Great British Bake-Off, and they've been hit or miss. The thing I love most about Bake-Off is how relaxed it is—the bakers are all highly competitive, yes, but mostly they're competitive with themselves. The stakes come from wanting them all to succeed rather than pitting one against another. (It probably helps that there's no cash prize—people get a different kind of aggressive when there's money involved.) For that reason, I tend to find it disappointing when bake-off rip-offs lean heavy on the manufactured drama. I'm here for the cake descriptions and to be sad when any contestant goes home, not for food fights and hair-pulling.


For the most part The Dos and Donuts of Love strikes a nice balance. I love that Shireen's ex is never portrayed as evil—Shireen wants to cast her that way, yes, but it's more complicated than that. There's some ~~kitchen drama~~, but a lot less than there could be, and while it definitely looks like the producers are trying to add turmoil, they never really succeed. It's maybe worth noting that while this is marketed as YA, it could go down to MG without too much trouble—as it is, it feels on the younger side of YA.


In other places I'm not really convinced. There's...not a lot of creativity in the food? It's a very short competition, with about as many multiple eliminations as single eliminations, but even then most of the dishes are skimmed over at best, leaving the pacing feeling uneven. It kills me that, tasked with making something chocolate, Shireen and her partner settle on chocolate cake and then...consider their planning done. What kind of chocolate cake? Vegan? Flourless? Double chocolate? Filled with hazelnut mousse? Chocolate orange? What kind of frosting? There are literally thousands of options, and the fact that non-foodie me knows this but Shireen doesn't seem to consider it is...concerning. With few exceptions, her baking choices are all pretty basic, and I wish I'd gotten a better idea of where any of the contestants might go with a bit more creativity. What Bangladeshi inspiration could Shireen—as she says she wants to—bring to her baking? Tell me what a Bangladeshi-inspired donut would taste like! I want to try it!

But then, the judges don't seem to mind. Two contestants make macarons twice over the course of the show, and two others make donuts twice, and even though the entire thing is...five or six episodes long? (I could probably work this out, but I'm just going to guess), nobody comments on the repeats. They're planning everything from scratch, apparently, without any knowledge of what to plan for (to my understanding, not how baking shows usually work—usually you at least have a sense that you'll have to make, e.g., a cake and a bread and a pastry, so that you can plan to infuse your bread with basil or whatever and the crew can buy any specialty ingredients needed for your recipe), but I can't help thinking that the 'top' junior bakers in Ireland should be able to think a bit more creatively, even on the fly.

So overall...cute enough, and I'm thrilled to see more Bake-Off rip-offs (no joke. Someone write more! I might run out!), but not quite hitting that sweet spot. Fill in the donut plot holes, and then we can talk...

Review: "Lovingly Abused" by Heather Grace Heath

Lovingly Abused by Heather Grace Heath
Published 2021 via Palmetto Publishing
★★★

I've been reading a lot about conservative American religion of late, especially Evangelicals and the Quiverfull movement. It's not a new reading interest of mine (it's a very, very different world from the one I grew up in), but a few things have made this not-so-fringe group get more publicity of late, and consequently...more reading material. So I picked up Lovingly Abused after watching the Amazon docu-series Shiny Happy People, for which Heath was interviewed. Heath was raised in the Institute in Basic Life Principles and its Advanced Training Institute, which is to say that she was homeschooled using the IBLP's so-called Wisdom Booklets—which in turn is to say that her education was, ah, lacking. Real school curriculums don't hand out actual tests asking "How do show love to a homosexual?" or show a video of a man limping and ask "What do you think is causing this man to limp?" (40), Heath writes. (The answers, if you're curious: you become a 'prayer warrior' for the homosexual—but not a prayer partner, because that could lead to temptation!—and the man is limping because of his extreme bitterness caused by Satan.)

These were the cult classics. I later learned this is an actual term for media geared towards a specific audience, but I mean it in the literal sense. This would have been convenient to know when I spent an embarrassing amount of time arguing with outsiders that films such as Monty Python and the Holy Grail or Clockwork Orange weren't even approved cult movies, let alone classics. (82)

IBLP is not in and of itself a religion: it's an organization that peddles its services to any number of conservative churchgoers. Heath describes attending conferences with Calvinists and Mennonites, Amish people and Baptists. But it has all the hallmarks of a cult: a leader taken as charismatic; a highly authoritarian structure with one leader at the top; an us-or-them mentality; a distrust of the outside world; suppression of questioning. Heath was taught that sexual abuse was the victim's fault, that dinosaurs and humans coexisted, that a seven-year-old girl sharing a hymnal with a seven-year-old boy was slutty and inappropriate, that touching a dead body would defile her, that her role as a woman was to be wife, mother, subservient.

You know that quote from Billy Graham's wife, "I don't believe in divorce, but I belive [sic] in murder?" I'm surprised none of my relatives have that cross-stitched on throw pillows. Throughout my whole family tree, we have rapists, incestual pedophiles, child molesters, spouse and child abusers, thieves, drug addicts, and a murderer. But I was the first one ever to get a divorce. My family simply didn't believe in divorce because, you know, it's important to have standards. (159)

Health is very clear about the disservice her homeschool 'education' did to her and the damage it wrought, but she's also clear-eyed about her parents' motivations—in particular, that her mother was trying to do right by her kids, and IBLP/ATI presented a path forward with what felt like security, a contrast to her mother's unstable childhood. It's a story that seems to be common: parents getting their families into IBLP because it sounds better than their stressed situations; kids bearing the brunt of the consequences. Heath tried, year after year, to fit into the mold—but eventually, the straws piled upon the camel's back became too much, and she started to choose her own future over the one her upbringing demanded of her.

As a book, it's somewhat hit or miss. Heath has a wry, dry humor, and it's very necessary in the face of the abuse, neglect, and control she describes. She also has the evidence to back it up: she's not talking just about 'here's my memory of this experience' (which would in itself be valid, to be clear), but she also has the materials from her homeschooling 'education' and an entire trove of IBLP references to pull on. It's entirely worth checking out her social media accounts after reading the book to get more visuals. That said, I would love it if Heath's role in Shiny Happy People led an established publisher (Lovingly Abused is self-published) to reach out and work with Heath on polishing an updated version of this. It's such a powerful story but sometimes feels all over the place—the structure is sometimes chronological and sometimes thematic, and at times repetition feels more like catharsis than like something that best suits the story. It makes a great deal of sense in the context of Heath not having had access to formal education until she was an adult, and to me it was worth it for the combination of context and personal story that the book offers, but I suspect that there's a potential version of this book that could reach, and resonate with, a much wider audience.

Review: "Disobedient Women" by Sarah Stankorb

Disobedient Women by Sarah Stankorb (@sarahstankorb)
Published August 2023 via Worthy Books (@worthypub)
★★★★

When girls are taught "Biblical womanhood" equates with purity and submission, they are trained to feel responsible for protecting men from their allegedly God-ordained sexual appetites—dress modestly, avoid front-to-front hugs, vow virginity until marriage—but also obliged to yield to authority figures: their pastors, fathers, men. Through one lens, they are delicate, precious. But through another, easy prey. (loc. 870*)

For decades, the Southern Baptist Convention has been a conservative stronghold in the US, holding firm to a patriarchal view of religion. Think purity culture, think fighting against marriage equality, think forbidding women to preach. And think sexual abuse: for decades, the SBC covered up abuse by leaders and more generally men in the church, blamed women (and girls) for men's crimes, and told survivors over and over again that their voices were not to be heard.

Not all women listened. And it's that story that Stankorb documents in Disobedient Women: sometimes it started with a blog post, and sometimes with a tweet, but over the years a growing number of decided that it was time for something to change. They started sharing their stories, swapping information, and building databases of the men the church had, again and again, protected from the consequences of their crimes.

If you're familiar with the IBLP (think: the Duggar family, Bill Gothard, and the recent docuseries Shiny Happy People) and the way it has contributed to change in the American religious landscape, a lot of this will feel familiar. Stankorb did not grow up directly in it, but she felt the reverberations in her own upbringing, and her research is meticulous. This is not a book about religion or faith—it's about one of the ways that religion has been used to mask grabs for power and to abuse those with less power. I'm fascinated by the points Stankorb makes about blogs and social media doing things that traditional journalism could not:

Wartburg Watch covered the extreme theologies of popular pastors and broke abuse cases journalists couldn't touch. It is immensely difficult for journalists to get editorial approval on a story about sex abuse allegations without charges; it requires deep fact-checking, a willing editor, and a publication taking on potential liability risk. But reporters have more readily covered the fact of a blog post making such claims, and in this way, Parsons helped create an end-around for getting media coverage of the stories she worked to corroborate. (loc. 1160)

Eventually, these voices added up, reaching a critical mass loud enough that they could no longer be ignored. And yet this can only be the beginning: Over the course of these years that started with reporting on the bloggers and then following my sources' advocacy on social media, writes Stankorb, the countermovement for reform has changed shape too. This book, in many ways, represents a snapshot in time. Much as the reckoning begun with those in this book has rocked the church, in other ways, a needed shake-up is only beginning (loc. 3125).

This is one of many recent books that are continuing that shake-up, and it's a good one to have on your shelves.

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

*I read an ARC, and quotes may not be final.