Review: "The Head That Wears the Crown" by Mariah Stewart

The Head That Wears the Crown by Mariah Stewart
Published October 2023 via Montlake
★★

It's as classic a trope as ever there was: an American everywoman, in this case a single mother of two teenagers, discovers that she's not quite everywoman after all—she's the heir to the throne of a tiny European nation...and they want her to take on the crown more or less right now.

I have read more than my fair share of these books—enough to seriously consider renaming my Goodreads "kings and queens" shelf "princess fantasies". (So far, I have resisted. Valiantly.) I know what to expect, and I know that the point of these books generally is the fantasy, and just about everything else comes second. But oh gosh, although I kept my expectations modest here, they just...weren't met.

It's two things, I think. First: worldbuilding. (This to me is the great tragedy of it all—and the common weak spot in princess-fantasy books—but I suspect most readers will struggle more with the next point. We'll come back to that.) I should note, here, that I have historically been Very Bad at suspending disbelief (there's a reason I don't read more speculative fiction), and that if I'd put any work at all into changing that, this might have been less of a concern for me. It might be less of a concern for other readers. With that in mind...

I was really pleased to read, early on in the book, that St. Gilbert is meant to be a former Soviet Union (satellite?) country. Why? Because that's relatively uncommon in these princess-fantasy books; normally the books are all about that French-English-Italian aesthetic, and I really wanted to see how it would treat a country with a more Eastern European background. I hoped too soon: St. Gilbert is located between Switzerland and Italy, roughly (if I had to guess) between Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn. Why does this matter? Because...neither of these countries touches a single Soviet country. It doesn't make any sense for St. Gilbert to be located there. It doesn't make sense that St. Gilbert—a former Soviet country with almost no international ties, located between countries that speak French and Italian and German—would use English as its national language. It doesn't make sense that they would be convinced that there's absolutely nothing in this spectacular mountainous region that would draw tourists, leaving the country deeply impoverished. It doesn't make sense that the country doesn't seem to have a single Soviet-style building. (My mother pointed out that maybe Annaliese just doesn't notice, but I think it's more that Annaliese doesn't realise that there's a particular style of build specific to the era/regime, and that she doesn't realise it because the author doesn't take it into consideration. Even if St. Gilbert didn't sustain damage during WWII—look up Soviet architecture in Hungary and you'll see what sorts of construction they should have had.)

And that's just...how so much of the book goes. This "poor" country has a Swiss bank account that nobody but the heir (that's Annaliese!) can touch, and the council running the country has never tried to get the money out (or reach out to Annaliese, or her mother or grandmother, to get their help to do so)—even though this one bank account can basically make the country wealthy overnight. There is so little tourism in the country that there is not a single hotel or BnB, and I literally cannot think of a country where that would make sense. Tuvalu—least visited country in the world, according to the Internet—has hotels. Afghanistan has hotels. North Korea has hotels. St. Gilbert does not. Annaliese discovers a staple product that is basically magical and decides to use it to revitalise the economy, carefully controlling its distribution so that outsiders can't buy it outright—and even if I can believe that nobody in the world has noticed this magical project before, I don't understand how she's going to 1) revitalise tourism, 2) use the promise of this product to do so, but then 3) keep it out of the shops while 4) still allowing locals access to this very, very staple product. St. Gilbert can't sell their cheeses abroad because they're made from unpasteurized milk, but a quick Google is enough to tell me that all they'd need to do is age their cheeses for 60 days to sell them in the US...and there's nothing stopping them from selling cheese in the EU. Annaliese is variously called "Your Highness", "Your Grace", "my lady", "madam", and "Your Majesty". I'm not sure which is correct per their protocol, but what I am sure of is that they have a protocol, and they aren't following it.

And second, plot. This is all but a conflict-free book. The first half of the book involves Annaliese arriving in St. Gilbert and being pampered. A castle, a staff, the most delicious food she's ever tasted, room after room of heirlooms that have been tucked away just waiting for her return—she makes some hmmm sounds about updates, sure (one of her first suggestions is that the country will need more parking lots), but very little happens. Around two-thirds of the way in, we get the first conflict: Annaliese goes up against the council that has ruled the country for decades and has no particular reason to want to dilute their power. But she comes prepared: she whips out her proverbial flyswatter, tells them to "Yo. Slow your roll" (loc. 3666*), and has the entire council eating out of her hand in the span of a single meeting.

Around three quarters of the way in, we get to the real conflict: There is somebody in St. Gilbert who does not think an untried American should be on the throne. This is, again, a pretty classic conflict point—and the thing is, he's not wrong. Annaliese claims dedication to St. Gilbert, but whether or not she even has citizenship is questionable (truly—she and her sisters wonder at some point), and she says that she wouldn't become monarch if she had to give up her US citizenship, and...guys? I also would not want a monarch whose perspective is "okay, I guess I'm responsible for this country now, but my other country is always going to come first". It's a miracle that there is only one person in an entire country of some 600,000 people who is unhappy with the new status quo.

In short: This might make a good read for someone who wants, basically, stress-free wish fulfillment and not much by way of heft. I can see this, and perhaps its possible successors, marketed in that way—books where plot and character development and so on are beside the point, and the reader is just in it to imagine that they're a princess, or that they've inherited a tropical island, or that...uh...they're hired at the best library in the world and told that the job is theirs to shape. This is written as a standalone, but there are hints that there may be more books to come—Annaliese's sisters are both making moon eyes at specific men within a few minutes of meeting them (oh—technically this is a romance novel; Annaliese has her tall-dark-handsome guard who isn't really characterized beyond "dedicated" and "gallant", which I guess allows the reader to insert whatever characteristics they prefer—but it's a very, very small part of the book), and at the end Annaliese is wondering how to solve the next problem. I'm not sure whether hypothetical further books would follow her sisters or continue to follow Annaliese as her childhood dreams are fulfilled, but if any future books follow her sisters, I wouldn't be surprised to see extended descriptions of high-end cooking equipment and baked goods (Roe) or room after luxuriously refinished room (Ceil). But...get yourself some industrial-strength locks for whatever case you pack your disbelief away into.

And a side note... Absolute best misspelling I've seen in ages, and at least 50% of the book was worth reading for this alone: milk toasty (loc. 3923) instead of milquetoast. I really hope the proofreader has a strong grasp of tenses but misses milk toasty.

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

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

Review: "On Human Slaughter" by Elizabeth Bruenig

 

On Human Slaughter by Elizabeth Bruenig
Published October 2023 via Atlantic Editions
★★★★

The death penalty has been carried out in the US for as long as the US has been around—just over half the states still allow it, and some of those states are doing their damndest to carry it out. But state-sanctioned killing has gotten more difficult to, uh, execute successfully—companies that produce the drugs that are used in lethal injection are loathe to sell them for those purposes, other methods (firing squad, electric chair) have fallen out of favor, largely due to the optics, and...well. Even when the state has lethal drugs on hand, as Bruenig chronicles, things do not always go to plan.

Bruenig is a journalist who has written extensively about the death penalty, and On Human Slaughter is a compilation of articles she wrote on the topic in 2022. As you can guess from the title, she does not pretend neutrality—she's clear in her stance that, separate from whether the death penalty is humane (I'm going to go with no), the way in which it is carried out in the US is often, in direct defiance of the 8th Amendment, inhumane: workers fumbling for hours to insert needles into veins; workers performing cutdowns, probably without anaesthetic, when that fails; prisoners convulsing as drugs flow into their bodies; shrouds of secrecy and lack of accountability because nobody in the system wants to admit that what they consider "standard procedure" is either not standard at all or, if it is standard procedure, making a mockery of basic ethics and humanity. And then there are the things less talked about: that the family of the accused is often treated as guilty by association; that when somebody is put to death, chances are that other innocent people are losing a father or brother or son (it's almost always men on death row) as well; that many of the people sentenced to death have backgrounds that indicate that they never really had a chance in life to begin with.

I'll note that I prefer that Bruenig is clear in her stance—while I'm willing to read a well-researched, well-thought-out take in favor of the death penalty (if someone can explain how the death penalty in the US can ever be ethical when it is so unevenly applied across race and class, I'll read it, but I'm not going to hold my breath), the last book I read on the death penalty was not nearly as impartial as the author seemed to think, and I'd rather know where the author is coming in. I don't think her writing will change any fervently pro-death-penalty minds, but if it's something you've never really thought about, it's likely to be an eye-opening read.

There is a caveat, though: On Human Slaughter is outdated even before its publication date. The articles are, as far as I can tell, presented exactly as they were published in the first place, with no updates of language or information. Sometimes this is little things ("Last year", "Last Thursday", "In April of this year"), but sometimes it's bigger things: The trial [Glossip v. Gross] wrapped up earlier this month; a decision is expected as soon as mid-May, and the defense attorneys are hopeful (loc. 284); When, as I expect, the jury in Florida decides to put Cruz to death (loc. 371)...these are two of several instances where we're left hanging because something that has since been decided had not been decided at the time of writing. In the latter case, Bruenig comes back to it in a later article, but in the former, that's the end of Glossip and the constitutionality of midazolam. I can (and did) look up the results of these things, and I got over the cognitive disconnect eventually (call me slow, but it took a while); still, I found myself wishing that slight revisions had been made (e.g., instead of "Last year", we might have "In 2021"; "In April of this year" could be "In April of 2022") and/or that bracketed notes or endnotes had been included in chapters where there have been updates since the writing. I'd also hope (not sure how realistic this is) for a foreword and/or afterword from the author—something that speaks more generally of this, outside the time-sensitive context of these articles.

Overall, not a read for the faint of heart (and time sensitivity is frustrating), but I'm very glad we have writers as incisive as Bruenig willing to tackle the subject in so much depth.

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: "How to Say Babylon" by Safiya Sinclair

How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair
Published October 2023 via 37 Ink
★★★★★

The countryside had always belonged to my father. Cloistered amidst towering blue mahoes and primeval ferns, this is where he was born. Where he first communed with Jah, roaring back at the thunder. Where he first called himself Rasta. Where I would watch the men in my family grow mighty while the women shrunk. Where tonight, after years of diminishment under his shadow, I refused to shrink anymore. At nineteen years old, all my fear had finally given way to fire. (loc. 80*)

Growing up in a strict Rastafari household in Jamaica, Sinclair learned above all to guard herself against the dangers of Babylon: against imperialism, Christianity, atheism, white people, impurity. Her parents loved her and her siblings fiercely, fought for them to get the best education possible, but at the same time, her father's adherence to religion, and his dissatisfaction with his circumstances, got more and more stifling. He would do anything to protect his daughters from Babylon—even if that meant destroying them in the process.

Years later, while retracing the history of my family's journey into Rastafari, I would eventually come to understand that my mother felt called because she wanted to nurture, and my father felt called because he wanted to burn. (loc. 352)

This is such a complicated, heart-wrenching story, and it is absolutely beautifully written. I didn't know, going in, that Sinclair is a celebrated poet, but I guessed that she was a poet within a few pages of the book. One of the things I love about poetry (or, poetry done right) is that it calls for such precision of language, and when a poet can translate that skill into prose—not an easy job—it can be phenomenal. Part of Sinclair's story is about learning to hone her skills as a poet, but even when she's writing about writing (a memoir topic I approach with extreme caution), she's writing as well about survival. Because her father could hold her back from the gates of Babylon, but he could not make her desire the restricted life of subservient daughter, subservient wife, voiceless poet.

I'm not sure where Sinclair is going as a writer from here, but wherever it is, I'll follow.

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 Christmas Swap" by Talia Samuels

The Christmas Swap by Talia Samuels
Published October 2023 via Alcove
★★

It's a classic setup: Ben needs a date for the holidays, and Margot needs a place to go. In public, they'll be together; behind closed doors, it's strictly platonic. But there's a twist...in the form of Ben's sister, Ellie. Who is a lesbian. As is Margot. And when sparks inevitably fly, it's not between the "happy couple".

On the whole this is cute and fluffy, poised to be a fun winter read. There's a fair amount going on—Margot is still reeling from the fallout of her previous (toxic) relationship, Ellie is trying to prove to her parents that she's moved on from her partying days to string lights and picnics, and Ben is sufficiently ashamed of being chronically single that, well, Margot is there for Christmas. I'm on record many times saying that I don't love Evil Villains Who Are Evil, but I do appreciate that the other characters understand, often better than Margot does, why it might be hard to fully disentangle from her ex. And I love the occasional silly plays with language: I'm feeling very strange about the strange thing with the strange stranger. (loc. 187*)

Where I get stuck, though, is with this: When Margot and Ellie get together, it's with a thoughtlessness so extreme that it borders on cruelty. They absolutely don't mean any cruelty—they're both nice women with a side of pumpkin spice. But there's never a point at which they consider that sneaking around to date each other, when Margot is there to play-act as Ben's girlfriend, might hurt anyone. Nobody suggests that they hold off on their attraction for a couple of weeks, or discusses how it's going to feel to Ben to have to either 1) come clean to his family about hiring a girlfriend for a week or 2) not come clean but instead pretend, a month or two down the line, that it's totally fine that his ex-girlfriend is now dating his sister. Margot is looking forward to telling Ben everything, but only so that she has someone to giggle and gossip with, because she's now viewing Ben as her best friend. (There's actually something quite intriguing in Margot's decision to view a relative stranger-come-fake-boyfriend as her best friend—it might be reflective of the shakiness of her other friendships and perhaps the damage that's been done to her sense of what a relationship should be, thanks to the toxic ex. Or it might be something else! In any case, it would have been interesting to see that explored in more detail.)

So I wanted to cheer Margot and Ellie on, but in the end I was mostly just sad for Ben. It works out, of course (not a spoiler! It's a romance novel, so of course it works out—and you can see the shape of things working out coming from quite some distance), but I spent most of the second half of the book trying to figure out what would have made the whole thing sit better with me. Telling Ben earlier, perhaps, or postponing the real dating until the fake dating was over, or at the very least Margot and Ellie acknowledging that the whole thing had the potential to get very messy very quickly...or Ben not so quickly and unreservedly getting over his hurt and humiliation, or them trying to tell Ben, or even the characters all being ten years younger and just a bit more...understandably thoughtless. Again: as characters, they aren't written as bad people, but...with a lesbian romance novel, I don't want my overarching takeaway to be sympathy for the straight, cisgender, "best friend" of a man.

I was very much looking forward to this—it wasn't the book for me, but I hope I'm the outlier here and that it'll work better for other readers.

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

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

Children's books: environment: "Pitter Patty Finds Another Day", "The Power of Snow", and "Coyote's Wild Home"

Pitter Patty Finds Another Day by Andrew Hiller, illustrated by Yvonne Frederick (DreamPunk Press)
The Power of Snow by Bob Raczka, illustrated by Bryony Clarkson (Millbrook Press)
Coyote's Wild Home by Lily Kingsolver and Barbara Kingsolver, illustrated by Paul Mirocha (The Gryphon Press)

Diving into the world of picture books! These three are all designed to teach kids something about nature and the environment...and sometimes a bit more than that.

In Pitter Patty Finds Another Day, Pitter Patty wants acceptance, just like everyone else—but she's a cloud, and when her raindrops start to fall, the people down below start to sing: Rain, rain, go away...

This makes for a fun, playful look at clouds and weather. I read this in June, when my area was expecting the driest summer on record, and I'd welcome Pitter Patty in the skies any day. The illustrations are simple but richly colored, and children will enjoy the occasional rhymes (and of course the 'Rain, rain, go away' song!). If there's a follow-up, I'd like to see Pitter Patty make a friend or two, and maybe some child-friendly explanations of how clouds come to be, since Pitter Patty's rain doesn't come from nowhere!

In a colder part of the year, The Power of Snow is a sneaky, sneaky math lesson, wrapped up in gorgeous illustrations on a winter day. Snowflakes play and twirl, flurry and swirl through the pages. I love the illustrator's note at the end about how she ensured the right number of snowflakes per page, and I guarantee that many a child will try and try to count them all.

I'm reminded a little of the picture book The Doorbell Rang, which I checked out from the library over and over again as a child and which also (admittedly, a bit more stealthily) slides a math lesson into the pages. Kids who don't want to learn the math, or just aren't ready to think about exponential growth, can still enjoy the illustrations and rhymes, but this might spark a math interest for others.

And finally, Coyote's Wild Home tells two parallel stories—one of a young coyote, just beginning to learn about the world outside its den, and one of a young girl, also learning about the wild that exists outside her usual borders.

This is written for slightly older picture book readers, or to be read by adults who don't mind a longer read—there's a fair amount of text as the book shows readers what a young coyote's day in the woods might look like versus a young camper's. It's a love letter to the wild, and the end of the book provides more facts about coyotes and why they're important to the environment.

The illustrations of the woods and the coyotes are gorgeous and rich. I don't like the illustrations of the humans quite as much (I think something about the girl's depiction reminds me of that eerie quality of AI art), but the level of depth on the trees in particular is fantastic. A good summer read, especially if you're planning to get out into the woods with young kids anytime soon!

Takeaways: Each book serves a slightly different purpose and targets a slightly different audience. The Power of Snow is the one I'd most like to stock kids' bookshelves with, but Coyote's Wild Home would be a great resource when taking kids out into the wild, and I could see Pitter Patty as part of a kindergarten unit on weather.

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

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.