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Review: Visible Empire by Hannah Pittard

Review: Visible Empire by Hannah Pittard

Posted on by lisaannreads

I received a digital ARC of this book from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on NetGalley. I’m grateful to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for their generosity and am happy to post this honest review. All opinions are my own.

Visible Empire: Epigraphs

Atlanta has suffered her greatest tragedy and loss.
-Mayor Ivan Allen

Many people have been asking, “Well what are you going to do?” And since we know that the man is tracking us down day by day to try and find out what we are going to do, so he’ll have some excuse to put us behind his bars, we call on our God. He gets rid of one hundred twenty of them in one whop…and we hope that every day another plane falls out of the sky.
-Malcom X at the Ronald Stokes Protest in L.A.

Foundation/Synopsis
The foundation of Visible Empire is the 1962 fatal crash of an Air France jet transporting 121 of Atlanta’s art patrons—the wealthy, white, upper-crust of the city. From there, Pittard builds her tale of those left behind—the grieving remainder of the muckety-mucks, the white serving class, and the subjugated black population of the city. From here we meet Roger, grieving the loss of his mistress and parents-in-law; Lily, reeling from the double-yet-different-losses of her parents and Roger; Piedmont, an African-American youth pulled into Robert and Lily’s orbits at a time of upheaval in his own life; and Stacy, a white serving class woman who sees an opportunity and takes it.

Invisible and Visible Empires
The title Visible Empire is actually a nod to the full name of the Ku Klux Klan—the Invisible Empire of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. If the Invisible Empire of the KKK is the shadowy, hooded phantoms that move at night, the overt racism of 1962 Atlanta is the Visible Empire. It is the status quo of wealth and privilege that is ignored until tragedy literally falls from the sky. Black men and women were beaten and died every day in the South in the 1960s and no one batted an eye. Over one hundred white people from Atlanta die, and suddenly the world is watching.

Pittard makes her intentions clear in the quotes she chooses for her Epigraph, including the two quotes I started this review with. The loss is seen as monumental to the city—The New York Times runs articles on this great loss and its impact to the city. In contrast at the time, The New York Times hadn’t once run an article on the massive loss of black life in the city in the preceding years. While most of us see the KKK as extremist and wrong, far fewer examine the status quo of white privilege that sees the loss of one hundred white lives as catastrophic and the poisoning of hundreds of black lives in Flint, Michigan as old news. Visible Empire was set in 1962 but in many regards could be set today.

Characters
The story is presented through a series of alternating character vignettes. Robert is a journalist, embroiled in an affair with a younger colleague who was on the doomed flight. Lily is Robert’s wife, pregnant with her and Robert’s first child, sent reeling at the loss of her parents and her abandonment by Robert. Intersecting with their story is that of Piedmont, an eighteen year-old black youth on the precipice of identity—faced with the choice of whether he will accept the status quo, keep his head down, and stay safe or whether he will stand and fight, link arms with other black men and women in the south saying that they have had enough. Finally there is Stacy, a character whose story is only tangentially connected to the Robert-Lily-Piedmont narrative. Stacy has grown tired of her hardscrabble life, believes she deserves more, and takes an opportunity to impersonate one of the left-behind upper class Atlantians.

Robert
Robert’s character is interesting—when I sat down to describe him, I can only come up with negative descriptors—he’s the epitome of white privilege, married into money, selfish, and willing to throw away everything—and yet—of course!—because he’s white, his bad choice roosters don’t really come home to roost. I should hate him. At times I did. But damn it, Pittard make me want the best for him. There’s something about him that made me want him to stop throwing everything he had away, to stop making bad choices, and to set things right.

Lily
Much like her name, Lily is the pure white character in the book. She’s the virtuous, wronged woman, the woman in need of rescue. While she’s one of the muckety-muck class, her tragedy makes her sympathetic and her treatment of Piedmont shows the reader that she’s not really like one of them. Lily is perhaps the most trope-y of the characters, acting her part as the damsel in distress. When Robert leaves, Lily starts to learn to stand on her own. Though Piedmont quickly enters her life and she gets another man she can lean on. I’m torn on whether I think she ultimately learned to stand on her own or just switched out her men. She’s likeable and it’s clear Pittard made an effort to make her seem independent. I’m just not entirely sure it worked. Where Piedmont became a vehicle to present Lily to the reader, in many ways Lily served that role for Robert. I had no problems with Lily as I was reading and was sympathetic to her and what she was going through; yet the longer I sit with the book, I’m not sure I really got to know her.

Piedmont
Pittard is a white author and I’m a white reader so my ability to analyze the characterization of Piedmont, the only black main character, is limited. With that said, of all the characters, Piedmont seemed the most well-rounded to me and was my favorite character. Where Roger’s wrestling with who he is as a man reeks of privilege and self-pity, Piedmont’s exploration of what it means to be a black man coming of age in 1962 Atlanta seemed real and drew me in. The choices he makes are understandable, though often unwise (so, fairly typical of an eighteen year-old). And yet, as a reader you still root for him. When he stands on his own or interacts with Roger, he is at his strongest. When he interacts with Lily, he faded a bit for me—partially as a consequence of Pittard using his interactions with Lily to provide opportunities for growth for her. I want the best for him and though I recognize he is simply a fictional character, there’s a part of me that hopes wherever he is, he turned out ok.

Stacy
Distinct from the Lily-Robert-Piedmont story line is that of Stacy/Anastasia. I have to admit that I hated her character, though this seems intentional on the part of Pittard. Stacy has a sympathetic enough backstory to give her a likeable dimension, though the choices she makes reveal fairly quickly that her brother’s accusation of her narcissism is accurate. Just when I was at the point of thoroughly hating her, there’s an unexpected twist in her story. She goes from being the con artist to the mark. This created a conundrum for me—I didn’t like her as a character, I felt sorry for her victim; but then these roles shifted. Stacy’s entire storyline, while intersecting with Lily-Robert-Piedmont enough that it didn’t feel entirely disparate, stood alone. It raised questions of who we consider victims and who we consider perpetrators. It introduced a “poor white” element to the story that was otherwise missing within the exploration of rich Atlanta’s relationship with its black population.

My major issue with Stacy’s storyline is the treatment of the two LGBTQ characters who appear in Stacy’s chapters. We are given enough background to see how they came to be the way they are (which isn’t to say how they came to be gay, but how they came to be the kind of people who make the kind of choices they make). Neither is portrayed particularly kindly and both are villains in their own rights—this negative portrayal felt stereotypical to me. An LGBTQ character can absolutely be a villain in your book; however, if you’re going to have negative gay characters, it feels like you should damn well include at least one virtuous one. To Pittard’s credit, everyone in this book is behaving badly except Piedmont and arguably Lily so it’s not like the only evil characters are gay; yet this treatment still felt unbalanced.

Recommended
Ultimately, I do think the point Visible Empire attempts to make is an important one.   The book is well-written and it moves at a good pace—my dislike of Stacy made her chapters feel long at times, though this had more to do with my feelings for the character than it did with missteps in Pittard’s writing. Pittard is obviously skilled at making you feel strongly about her characters—I rooted for Robert while being exasperated with him and thinking he did not deserve my affection. I felt sorry for Stacy at the same time I would never want to actually meet her in real life. Visible Empire isn’t going to make my top ten list for the year but if you are interested in historical fiction and/or books that explore racial themes that still apply, I do think it is worth your time. It is one I would recommend for someone looking for a book that reads a bit lighter in writing style but packs a message and for book clubs, since I think this book will draw a diversity of opinions.

Notes
Published: June 5, 2018 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (@hmhbooks)
Author: Hannah Pittard (@hannahpittard)
Date read: May 22, 2018
Rating: 4 stars

Review: The Secret Token by Andrew Lawler

Review: The Secret Token by Andrew Lawler

Posted on by lisaannreads

I received a digital ARC of this book from Doubleday on NetGalley. I’m grateful to Doubleday for their generosity and am happy to post this honest review. All opinions are my own.

To die is tragic, but to go missing is to become a legend…

Synopsis
In 1587, 115 British citizens come to colonize America disappeared from Roanoke Island, leaving behind almost no traces, except for the word “Croatoan” carved into a tree. In the four hundred-plus years since, little has been discovered to explain where these men, women, and children went. To date it remains one of history’s great, unsolved mysteries. In The Secret Token, Lawler sets out the history of the colony, the search for answers, and the meaning these answers would have on the racial and cultural identity of those who trace their ancestry to the island.

Structure
Lawler structures his book in three parts that read, in many respects, like vastly different mini-books. The first section is almost purely historical narrative setting up how the colony came to be, who the major players were on the relevant voyages, the historical struggle between Spain and Britain for (essentially) world domination, and how it came to pass that the colony was lost. This section reads like a straightforward narrative history that, to be honest, almost lost me. There’s only so much history of dead white men (plus Elizabeth) that I care to read. Though, I’m pretty sure Sir Walter Raleigh’s playboy ways were left out of the history books my public schools used. (And, in Lawler’s defense, he makes this section about as interesting as it can be, given the available historical record).

If this doesn’t sound interesting to you, take heart–the next two sections have an entirely different tone and slightly fewer white men. The second section focuses entirely on the search for the colony—beginning almost immediately after their disappearance and continuing to the presently obsessed archaeologists still sifting through the North Carolina marsh silt on their weekends. The first chapters in this section on the immediate search provided the bridge that segued into the (in my opinion) more interesting searches of the modern era. While some of this remains in a narrative historical style, Lawler begins to include himself in the story. He describes interactions with historians who not only provide Lawler the relevant history but express their frustrations and theories. This section also includes some of the more eccentric characters who are still out there searching. Their inclusion shows the hold the mystery of the colony still has on people, making the book feel relevant and a little bit tantalizingly voyeuristic. As Lawler is sucked deeper into the subject matter of his own book, his writing takes on hints of the obsession that infects many of those he’s interviewing and invites the reader along for this ride. In this vein, Lawler leaves no stone unturned—evaluating each archaeological and cartographic find, including the controversial (and possibly faked) Dare Stone.

The last section, and the reason this book earned my 3 ¾ stars, looks at the myth through the lens of race. One of the reasons this myth still holds such sway is that what ultimately happened to the Colony and to baby Virginia Dare—the first white child born in America—has lasting implications to both those who cling to white supremacy and those who claim first nation heritage in this part of the country. Within this section, Lawler also discusses how the area came to be home to many African slaves and their descendants, making this area of mixing bowl of races. When the government sought to maintain white supremacy, the Native American descendants were successfully pitted against their African neighbors in a bid to create a racial hierarchy that preserved white supremacy.

Race and Identity
My grandmother was born in North Carolina, one of twelve children and the eldest girl. Her name was Virginia Dare Moore. When I learned in elementary school that the first child born in the colonies was named Virginia Dare, I thought this was the coolest. Until very recently, when I thought about possible kid names (not pregnant, not trying), I thought about naming a girl after my beloved Nana. My dad had mentioned in passing on an occasion that my grandmother always hated her name and I never knew why. After reading this book, I suspect I know.

Beginning in the 1800s and particularly at the turn of the 20th Century, Virginia Dare was adopted as a white supremacist icon. One of the most likely possibilities of what happened to the colony is that it was absorbed into the local native population—there are no remains that suggest they died on the island (by natural or other means) and they did leave behind the word Croatoan (the name of a local tribe/area) carved in a tree. The problem with this answer to the Roanoke mystery if you’re a racist white woman who wants the vote but wants to maintain the white status quo, is that it necessarily means that white women mixed with native men (and vice versa) and had mixed race children. Enter virginal Virginia Dare who lived with the natives because she had no other choice to survive but stayed apart, a shining, white example completely without historical basis in fact.

On the other side, the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina is, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, the possible ancestors of the tribes who once lived on and around Roanoke Island. If the colonizers mixed with any tribe, their descendants may be members of the Lumbee Tribe. This tribe, while recognized by the state, is not formally recognized by the federal government, which means they are denied many of the benefits afforded to officially “recognized” Native American tribes. One possible method to solve the mystery would be to trace lineages of the White family in Britain (Virginia Dare’s grandfather) and compare the genes of those identified descendants to those in the Lumbee tribe. Many members of the Lumbee (and many Native Americans period), however, have resisted this suggestion. For some, there is the real fear that the information gathered would be misused (a belief well-supported by how our government has historically treated first nation peoples as well as the story of Henrietta Lacks). For others, there is a question of what it would reveal. A handful of Lumbee who have agreed to participate have discovered that their genetic markers indicate they are majority white and have significant African-American ancestry as well. For those in the community whose identity is defined by being Lumbee, by having native ancestors, these tests have the ability to call everything they know about themselves into question.

The myth of the Lost Colony of Roanoke is not then, just a straight-forward question of what happened to 115 people in 1587. Rather, the myth extends to the convenient and often false narratives we still tell ourselves about who is “pure,” who belongs, and who we are.

Recommended
As a Virginian with North Carolinian roots, I grew up hearing about the Lost Colony of Roanoke and thought it was fascinating. I was never told and never realized the significance the still mystery has to people today or the racial underpinnings of the theories. The Secret Token is a book that will stick with me for a while—much like A More Beautiful and Terrible History, it calls into question the history I learned as a child and the motives of the creators of our national history and myths.

Notes
Published: June 5, 2018 by Doubleday (@doubledaybooks)
Author: Andrew Lawler
Date read: May 30, 2018
Rating: 3 ¾ stars

Review: A More Beautiful and Terrible History by Jeanne Theoharis

Review: A More Beautiful and Terrible History by Jeanne Theoharis

Posted on by lisaannreads

I received a free copy of this book from Beacon Press via LibraryThing. I’m grateful to Beacon Press for their generosity and, because I was fascinated by this book, was happy to post this honest review. All opinions are my own.

The recounting of national histories is never separate from present-day politics. What of the past is remembered, celebrated, and mourned is at the core of national identity—and the process of what is told and not told is often a function of power…Racial injustice is America’s original sin and deepest silence. The ways the country came to honor the civil rights movement were not simply about paying tribute to these courageous acts and individuals in the past but also about sanctioning what will—and will not be—faced about the nation’s history and presence….While these tributes honored the movement, they simultaneously depoliticized the scope of the struggle, distorted the work of the activists honored, demonized Black anger, and obscured ongoing calls for racial justice through a celebration of a nearly postracial, self-correcting America.

Synopsis
In A More Beautiful and Terrible History, Professor Jeanne Theoharis examines the myths of the Civil Rights Movement and contrasts these

myths with the real history, the forgotten youths and women and the ignored cities in the North and West that featured prominently in the actual movement. While I was not terribly surprised by what Theoharis presented as the unvarnished history of the Civil Rights Movement (of course women were involved. of course segregation was occurring in the North), the history presented in this book is a sharp contrast to what I learned every February (and only in February) from grade school through high school. While memory fades over time and its been over twenty years since elementary and middle school, I will go so far as to say I think I learned more from this book than I ever learned in my history classes growing up.

In many ways, A More Beautiful and Terrible History reminded me of Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen. Theoharis goes one step further than Loewen (or than I remember Loewen going) and explains why these myths are so useful to those interested in maintaining the status quo. She demonstrates how these myths are weaponized against the current movement to delegitimize Black Lives Matter, #NoDAPL, and others.   These connections were the icing on the cake for me in this book—it is not enough to acknowledge that we have made history convenient in our retelling but to see why these myths were created, how they were useful then, and how they are being used now made Theoharis’s work an urgent, timely read.

Credentials
I will admit that one of the first things I did upon receiving this book was flip to the author’s picture. I was surprised to see that Theoharis is white. Her author’s note reveals that Theoharis’s family escaped the Armenian genocide that the United States still refuses to acknowledge. As she notes, “[g]rowing up Greek-Armenian in my politically active family made the importance of the histories we tell and those we deny potent and visceral.” With this foundation, Theoharis has published or co-published numerous works on African-American history, including an NAACP award-winning biography on Rosa Parks. (Unfortunately for me, this means that Rosa Parks isn’t addressed as deeply in A More Beautiful and Terrible History as I would have liked because Theoharis didn’t want to repeat herself.   The only logical result of this is that The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks was added to my TBR.)

A Readable Academic Work
A More Beautiful and Terrible History is a bit more of an academic book than I typically pick up for a non-fiction read. I tend to stick to more narrative non-fiction—having been a history major in college, I’d prefer my history now come in story form, please and thank you. And yet, when LibraryThing posted this book as a giveaway, I found myself drawn to it. Theoharis’s work is an academic work that I can see a professor assigning in American history or historiography classes. Her work is thoroughly researched and her sources are well-cited (the last thirty-plus pages are notes). The writing, while clear and concise, is not a narrative. And yet, with the minor caveat that it dragged a bit in the middle (as noted below), I found A More Beautiful and Terrible History to be surprisingly readable for a popular audience.

The depth of her writing made me take this book one chapter at a time—I only picked it up when I had the attention span to really dig into a chapter and sit with what she was saying. If I was tired or limited for time, I picked up something else. I recommend this as the way to read A More Beautiful and Terrible History. This isn’t a narrative to fly through, nor is it a book that deserves to be skimmed.

Organization
The book is organized thematically, with chapters examining the forgotten Jim Crow North, the long struggle that preceded the successes (i.e., the Montgomery Bus Boycott didn’t happen in a vacuum, nor was Rosa Parks an accidental activist), the racism of the “White Moderate,” the media’s bias against the movement, the placement of the Civil Rights Movement within the larger global anti-poverty and anti-war movements, the young people who pushed the movement forward, the women who led, and the active demonization of the movement by the government. Overall I liked this organization—I highlighted my copy on almost every page and this thematic structure will make it easier to find things later or revisit specific chapters. The only downside to this meant that certain examples were used repeatedly and, at times, started to feel repetitive. The fight to desegregate schools in New York, for example, appeared in chapters on the Jim Crow north, the long struggle, the media bias, and the importance of students to the movement. While a different point was made each time this example was raised, it did start to make the book drag a bit. I’m not sure there is a solution to this since a purely chronological presentation would have been difficult to follow and these large-scale but forgotten events were the perfect examples for the points Theoharis was making. If you decide to pick this one up and similarly feel the book dragging a bit, know that after chapter six (young people), these examples are replaced by new ones and the last third of the book picks back up.

Exceptionalism & Austin, Texas
As an Austinite, it is easy to believe we live in an exceptional city—we are the blue dot in the red sea. If we are exceptional then, the things that apply to everywhere else—racism, sexism, and homophobia—do not happen here. We are enlightened. We are different. We keep Austin weird.

And yet, several months ago, when there was a bomber leaving packages around the city, the first bomb barely made the news. The second bomb didn’t make national news until there was a third. The first bomb killed an African American man. The second an African-American teenager—a teenager whose talent and exceptionalism is highlighted every time he is mentioned. It is a grave loss to our community and to music that Draylen’s life was cut short. But this would be true even if Draylen had not been a rare talent at the bass but simply a C student who loved to play pick-up basketball. The city wasn’t really brought to its knees in fear until a bomb went off in an affluent, mostly white neighborhood. Austin’s greatest sin is that it believes it is exceptional while being just as racist as much of the rest of the country.

I have a friend who moved from Austin several years ago because, among other reasons, it just became too hard to be black here. To have her child be the only black child in his class. To be attacked in the carpool line by a angry Lululemon-wearing mom because her talk at Blogher about America not being here for people of color went viral. To know that if she called the police from that carpool line, it was likely Lulu-Mom who was going to be believed.

Conclusion
In many ways, Austin is a microcosm of what Theoharis presents in A More Beautiful and Terrible History. We have, as Austinites and as Americans, bought into the lie of our exceptionalism. We believe that this history was inevitable because America will always do what is right. We are self-correcting and needed only the nonviolent encouragement of Martin Luther King Jr. to correct what was an exclusively Southern problem.

As members of BlackLivesMatter and others calling for racial justice as demonized daily in the news, it is more vital than ever that we read works like this to see where we came from, what really happened, and the ways those in power and in the media use the lie of our exceptionalism to maintain a white status quo.

Notes
Published: January 30, 2018 by Beacon Press (@beaconpress)
Author: Jeanne Theoharis
Date read: May 26, 2018
Rating: 4 ½ stars

Review: The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer

Review: The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer

Posted on by lisaannreads

Faith Frank hired me, originally, based on nothing. She took me in and she taught me things, and more than that she gave me permission. I think that’s what the people who change our lives always do. They give us permission to be the person we secretly really long to be but maybe don’t feel we’re allowed to be. -Greer

Synopsis
The Female Persuasion tells the story of Greer Kadetsky whose life turned out nothing like she expected. She was supposed to go to Yale and yet finds herself at the local college, Ryland, where a chance encounter with Faith Frank—feminist icon—changes the trajectory of her life. It is this meeting and subsequent relationship that provides Greer the scaffolding of the life she builds for the next decade, informing who she is as a person, providing her the job that starts perfectly yet leads her to a moral crossroads. Interspersed with Greer’s chapters are stories from her friend Zee, Faith Frank, and boyfriend Cory. In these we see Zee build her own life, independent of both her parents and Greer; how Faith became The Faith Frank; and what it means to love your family and do “women’s work” through Cory. Even without a Trumpian figure, The Female Persuasion explores, with a casual wit, how it feels to live with and navigate through current gender politics.

Conflicted
I listened to the audiobook of The Female Persuasion with conflicted feelings—I found the characters interesting, the dialogue between characters snappy, and the writing fresh. Told from several points of view, The Female Persuasion gave me points I could connect in most of the characters.  I could also understand why the major characters were making the choices they were making—which isn’t to say they made only good choices. Rather, Wolitzer’s characters stayed true to their development such that they made choices consistent with who they were as people. At the same time, I felt this niggling discomfort each time I turned the audio back on in that the book, while engaging, fresh, and snappy, also had a glaring hole in it. The Female Persuasion might more accurately be titled The White Female Persuasion. While this review will be centered around the almost exclusively white lens here, I want to be clear that this is still a book I enjoyed and one I’d read again. I don’t regret the time I spent on this book and the writing style and voice pushed Wolitzer’s prior book, The Interestings, up my TBR list. Because I think it is important to recognize the limitations of works we enjoy, this review will be more negative than usual, particularly for a book that I gave 4 stars. Essentially—this review focuses on what cost The Female Persuasion that last star.

I should also note that there are many people who knew me as recently as five years ago who will find this critique out of place coming from me. To be transparent in where I’m coming from—I’m a relatively recent arrival at the Feminist camp as a refugee from complementarian evangelicalism. I am not well-versed in the scholarship. I’m aware that the concept of intersectionality within feminism was introduced by bell hooks, though I’ve not (yet) read her works. There are things I may get wrong in this review or, more likely, my critique here will be necessarily somewhat surface level—both because I do not have the foundation to make this a true critical analysis and because you’re here to read a book blog, not a ten page seminar paper. I welcome any critique you have—any point you think I’ve missed—as well as any books you think I should read. The only comment that isn’t welcome today is a defense of White Feminism.

Limitations
So why do I feel like the The Female Persuasion is a story limited to a White Feminist perspective? There are, in fact, a few characters of color, though with one exception, they are typically limited to peripheral characters—at Loci for example, Wolitizer mentions at least one woman as being of color but that description is where the representation ends. These women do not engage in any dialogue in the scenes in which they appear that raises any points related to how women of color have experienced injustices differently, how their layers of race and possibly class have made their experiences of sexism different. The only character who could be considered a person of color whose viewpoint is directly presented is Cory—Greer’s boyfriend who is a first-generation American of Portuguese descent. (A quick Google search indicates there’s an ongoing debate about whether people of Spanish and Portuguese descent who are not from Latin America “count” as white or not. I’m not about to wade into this debate. For purposes of this discussion I’ll “count” him as being of color since he is presented as having what is typically considered the immigrant experience—his parents don’t always speak great English and work traditionally menial jobs, like housekeeper. He also changes his name from “Duarte” to “Cory” to sound less ethnic.) Zee is Jewish, though how this might have impacted her experiences with sexism doesn’t really come up.

As I recall, the only place where a person of color comes close to engaging in any kind of discussion about intersectionality is Zee’s African-American coworker, Noelle. When they first meet, Zee is in a Teach-for-America-esque program in Chicago. Noelle is, understandably, skeptical of Zee’s qualifications as well as her commitment. This one section from Zee’s perspective in conversations between these two women is where race becomes a topic. And yet, it is a topic removed from the larger feminist discussion. Zee fits into the larger narrative as a character study of feminism—she is an example of the plethora of Gen-Y woman learning to stand on her own in this “Man’s World.” Her experiences of moving across the country to start something new felt familiar to me, the way it will to many women my age. And yet, the way race is slotted into Zee’s story, it’s done in a way that manages to separate the discussion from Zee’s experiences as a feminist. The introduction of Noelle would have allowed Wolitzer to have even just one character voice what it is like to live as both female and black and yet this never really happened. Zee is the most minor of the major characters and Noelle a missed opportunity within Zee’s development.

My Life On the Road
This omission in The Female Persuasion was made all the more noticeable to me having just finished Gloria Steinem’s autobiography, My Life On the Road. Steinem discusses early in the book travels around India and learning about what community organizing looked like there. When the National Women’s Conference took place in Houston in 1977, she described the efforts expended before and during the conference to make sure that women of color had their experiences and voices heard, including working with various groups within others—for example of Chicanas and Puerto Rican women who both had much in common and unique needs and concerns—to make sure that women of all groups were represented in the compiled list of recommendations made by the conference. Even though I had not listened to The Female Persuasion yet, I was struck over and over by Steinem’s diverse experiences, her insistence on being where the people were, not being the leader, and deliberately including women of diverse backgrounds. While Steinem is by no means perfect, she is generally recognized as having values and positions that are deliberately inclusive of women of color and different classes. Though it started slow, I found her autobiography fascinating and worth the Audible credit.

So then back to The Female Persuasion. As I noted when I started, I enjoyed this book. I could see myself in Greer and Zee (though Faith seemed a watered down feminist icon to me after Gloria).   While the writing wasn’t particularly fancy or “literary,” it was snappy in the way my friends and I are when we get going. And yet, there is this glaring hole. For me, as a white cis-woman, I am not directly harmed by the omission of women of color, except to the extent that only seeing people like me means I’ll never be exposed to stories unlike my own. There isn’t anything that I noticed that was stereotypical or trope-y, women of color just aren’t really there.

Doing Better
And yet, like the catchphrase “silence is violence,” absence is a problem here. It is far too easy as a white female reader to never read a story featuring a woman of color. I can pat myself on the back for being a feminist and enjoying this feminist book and never realize that I’m only imbibing stories of White Feminism. It is easy to purposefully or even inadvertently avoid being exposed to the ways that race and class intersect with gender to make harder for women at these intersections. To an extent then, it is incumbent on writers and artists who produce art that appeals to women, like The Female Persuasion, to intentionally produce diverse works and for publishers to publish and market them. While it was far from a perfect book, Jodi Picoult’s Small Great Things strikes me as a good example here—many of the people who read mass-produced contemporary fiction like Jodi Picoult probably aren’t reading a lot of hard-hitting stories that discuss the ugliness of white supremacy and what it is like to be black today. And yet, Picoult knew she had a platform and Small Great Things was the result.

At the end of the day, I truly enjoyed The Female Persuasion and think it deserves much (if not all) of the hype it is getting. I look forward to seeing what Wolitzer does in the future and hope that in future books, she features more diverse stories and characters.

Notes
Published: April 3, 2018 by Riverhead Books (@riverheadbooks)
Author: Meg Wolitzer (@megwolitzer)
Date read: April 26, 2018
Rating: 4 stars

Review: Text Me When You Get Home by Kayleen Schaefer

Review: Text Me When You Get Home by Kayleen Schaefer

Posted on by lisaannreads

I received a free e-version of Text Me When You Get Home from Dutton Books via NetGalley. I’m grateful to Dutton and NetGalley for their generosity in providing a copy for me to review. All opinions are my own.

“Text me when you get home” is not an aggressive rallying-cry like the anti-Donald Trump, pro-woman “This pussy grabs back,” but it does mark a sea change. It’s a way women are saying, through our care for each other, that our friendships are not what society says they are. We’re reclaiming them. We’re taking them back from the shitty words they’ve been smothered by for way too long:

Women can’t get along.
They’re probably lesbians.
Women who say they like each other are lying. What a bunch of catty bitches.
Women ditch their friends when they meet a guy.

What we’re doing by holding each other close in whatever ways we can is lifting our friendships out of these stereotypes. We’re not going to let the kinds of relationships we want to have be undermined any longer.

When I look back on my early life, I am not one of those women who can identify a string of close girlfriends. I fully admit that I was not the easiest child to be friends with—my social skills weren’t great, I was intensely competitive over intellectual things, and—quite frankly—holier-than-thou. For most of the first three decades of my life, religion provided a set of rules to follow. I was not a rule-breaker. Rule-breakers are bad.

What would have been a natural friend group among my peers at church constantly felt like an exclusive clique. I had no problem finding someone to sit with or hang out with during youth group events. But I would quickly come to discover during these events that I typically wasn’t invited when one of the girls wanted hang out one-on-one with someone or even in a smaller group. I was a second-tier friend, never best-friend quality. But for my proximity and attendance at the various church youth group events, even this semblance of having female friends likely would have nearly disappeared.

In high school, I did have friends I considered at the time to be close friends. Looking back, I can see that much of what prevented these friendships from being deeper was my own issues, including their legitimate fear of my judgment if they confided in me what they were doing or feeling. (Sex! The horror.) I didn’t realize at the time that these friendships were essentially one-sided. With my confiding in them but their being unable to return the trust. The result of this kind of relationship was the severing of these friendships once we went to college. I’m not sure I spoke to any of the girls I thought were my friends again after that, outside of running into them somewhere. Indeed, when I visited my parents in the years after high school, the only friend I ever made a point to see while I was home was male, my friend since first grade.

College was an improvement, with deep friendships at the time with two women in particular. And yet here too, “friends forever” didn’t last. I probably haven’t talked to these two women in almost ten years. While I have stayed in contact with two other women, the friend I have stayed closest with since college is, again, male. He is the person I always make a point to see when I visit my family.

It is only as a thirty-something woman that I developed the kind of female friendships Schaefer celebrates in Text Me When You Get Home: The Evolution and Triumph of Modern Female Friendship. I have my ride-or-die, show-up-at-my-house-at-midnight-if-I-call women now. We have a group text that is active at least once a day. They quite literally saved me when I was leaving my abusive ex-husband several years ago.

But Tell Me About the Book
While Text Me is, as the title indicates, a study of modern female friendship, it is equally a memoir. Schaefer grounds her exploration into the evolution of what female friendship means within her own experience. My experience detailed above (minus the oppressive influence of religion) is similar to Schaefer’s experience detailed in the book. Like Schaefer, I saw other women as my rivals. There was a scarcity of attention—adult approval, male gaze, teachers’ accolades—and girls were my competition. As an adult I can see that this is entirely untrue but it has taken decades to learn.

Schaefer dissects her time spent in high school, college, and shortly after having her priorities, time, and even relationships centered around men. This resonated with me as well. Having felt like I was being left out of deep female friendships that other women around me seemed to have, it was easy to fall into thinking that I was just better friends with guys. In many ways it was a comfort to me to see that Schaefer experienced this too—that in her job as a journalist and in her early adult years she also fell in this trap. One of the dangers here, as Schaefer identifies, is that as you center your life around male approval, you grow farther and farther from other women. This doesn’t even require that you have close male friendships instead—merely feeling like you have to be the kind of woman that your male acquaintances and coworkers approve of often means you have to seem to not be “girly” or like other women. This desire for male approval turns into pushing other women away. It was on the one hand heartening to see my experiences set out so clearly by another woman and sad to look back and see how so much of my struggle and feeling alone didn’t have to be this way. I made choices and this is my bed to lie in, yes, but these were also many of the choices society was pushing me to make at that time.

This book is, however, also about the evolution of friendships. After lamenting her male-centric experiences in the first few decades of her life (and providing the context and referencing studies that explain why she felt this way), Schaefer discusses the recent phenomenon of women delaying marriage and the role female friendships are playing for these women.

Lighter Nonfiction
As far as literary value goes, I found Text Me interesting and engaging, but much of the material stays fairly surface-level. (This isn’t necessarily a problem—many people don’t want to read an academic work and I mention this more so that you know what you’re getting if you pick this one up). For example, Schaefer discusses the myth of the mean girl and its uses to divide girls but stops here. She doesn’t take the analysis much farther, though this would be an opportunity to explore how society’s insistence on dividing women from each other is a tool of patriarchal power structures whose existence is ensured when women are separated from each other. Given how Schaefer structured her book, however, this level of critique would feel like a tangent. While she cites a variety of sources from interview quotes of starlets to published academic papers, the studies cited are centered around Schaefer’s personal revelations which makes the book both more personal but also, by necessity, less academic. There are endnotes so for readers who want to explore a topic more fully, that is an option.

Text Me is also absolutely peppered with pop culture references—while Schaefer details her experience as well as those of other women she personally talks to, the almost the entirety of the rest of her examples derive from pop culture. She cites Leslie Knope’s love of Ann Perkins as well as the women of HBO’s Big Little Lies. In discussing the history and evolution of friendships, she cites older television shows as well, yet even these I had mostly heard of. While this was effective for me as a thirty-something reader in 2018, it does make me question the longevity of this book.

Intersectional Experiences
It should also be said the Schaefer is white and this is her memoir. She makes an obvious effort to discuss pop culture featuring minority characters including Girlfriends, Living Single, Insecure, and The Joy Luck Club and even has a short section pointing out the lack of representation of friendships of women of color in pop culture. She devotes several pages to the friendship between Oprah Winfrey and Gayle King. And yet, the limitations of Schaefer and her friend circle as well as the under-representation of women of color on major television networks and in movies means the vast majority of Schaefer’s discussion and examples are centered around white women. In the next week I actually have a post planned to discuss Meg Wolitzer’s most recent book The Female Persuasion and its limitations of being centered in White Feminism, particularly as contrasted against Gloria Steinem’s autobiography. Which is say, that as a reader I try to consider things like the whether authors acknowledge the varied experiences of women of color and consider how the intersection of things like race and class make the burdens of being a modern woman that much heavier.

I don’t feel like Schaefer does present women of color often, and yet I perceived in her writing that Schaefer knew this was a limitation of her work and acknowledged where she could that women of color have different experiences and yet are less widely represented and considered. I think Text Me is a book that will appeal mostly to white audiences because it may be harder for a woman of color to see herself in Schaefer’s repeatedly white examples, and yet this isn’t a function of Schaffer’s blindness or willful indifference to this limitation.

Conclusion
I really enjoyed Text Me When You Get Home and blew through it in a few days. It was easy to read, particularly for a nonfiction book. I felt like Schaefer presents a story that will seem familiar to many women my age and the book is more effective for this connection. Schaefer made significant points about the way we socialize girls to dislike other girls and how women perpetuate their estrangement from other women by seeking male approval (difficult to fight given that positions of authority are often occupied by men), yet these points are largely made through her personal recollections or television examples. It was an interesting technique that could have gone off the rails but worked. I found the pop culture references to be mostly well-used though I also see how these may turn away some readers who would prefer to see more academic studies and less HBO.

Text Me made me really look back and see how my relationships with girls and women evolved in my own life over the last three decades. Looking back at the way I treated women who I wanted to be friends with, I’m left thankful for the women I have now—Ritz, Shelby, Brittany, Sarah, Elora, Rachel. For Paige, Erica, Kelly, Sara, and Carly—I’m sorry for the countless times I wasn’t a good friend to you when we were younger. I hope that in the years since Mount Pleasant, CHHS, and William & Mary that you found your ride-or-die women. Text me when you get home?

Notes
Published: February 6, 2018 by Dutton Books (@duttonbooks)
Author: Kayleen Schaefer (@iknowkayleen)
Date read: May 6, 2018
Rating: 3 ¾ stars

Featured Image and Photo credit: rawpixel

Review: Rainbirds by Clarissa Goenawan

Review: Rainbirds by Clarissa Goenawan

Posted on by lisaannreads

I received a free version of Rainbirds on CD from Penguin Random House via LibraryThing. I’m grateful to Penguin Random House and LibraryThing for their generosity in providing a copy for me to review. All opinions are my own.

 

“Remember this, Ren. Sadness alone can’t harm anyone. It’s what you do when you’re sad that can hurts you and those around you.”

Synopsis
Rainbirds follows Ren Ishida on his journey to the fictional, remote town of Akakawa in the wake of his sister’s murder. What should be a short trip to wrap up her affairs becomes an escape for Ren—an escape from the expectations and failures of his own relationships in Tokyo and into the life of the sister who hid so much from him over the last decade. Ren stays in Akakawa, taking Keiko’s job and moving into her rooms in a local house. The farther he steps into Keiko’s life, the darker things become, until it isn’t clear that Ren himself will survive the trip unscathed.

Genre
This is a book that perhaps was mis-billed for me. That is to say, I expected a thriller going into the book—the beginning chapters set in motion the story of a grieving brother, come to the small town where his sister lived and was recently murdered. Ren is on a quest to find his sister’s killer, though he quickly comes to realize he didn’t know her nearly as well as he thought. While this plot provides the scaffolding for the book, at its heart, Rainbirds is less a noir mystery and more a character study into grieving Ren. That said, the noir feel remains—this may not be a noir thriller but it starts dark and stays dark. Throughout the book, I had the feeling of impending storm clouds—an expectation, a crackling of electricity in the air, the surrounding foggy darkness. If you like dark, slightly creepy literary character studies, don’t let the early chapters turn you off. This book may be right up your alley.

Audio
I have mixed feelings about the audio of this book. On the one hand, I usually enjoy audio of any books set in different countries or with non-American characters. The audio usually adds to the experience, setting forth the cadence of the speech, the different emphasis and pronunciation of what are otherwise familiar English words. And the names and places are almost never ones I could get right without audio—case in point here, the book takes place in the fiction “Akakawa.” If I had to read that, I’d probably have emphasized (very incorrectly) the middle “kak” where the audio narrator pronounced it “Ah-kah-kah-wah” – no kaks involved.

But I digress. Rainbirds seemed like the kind of book I usually love on audio. My issue here, however, was that this book was gloomy in the extreme. I do most of my audiobook listening while driving so the combination of the gloomy mood, melodic male narrator, and almost no action meant that there were times when I had to stop listening. This was, for example, not the book I could listen to while driving three hours home at 1am after a concert and stay awake and alive.

This is not to say that I don’t recommend the audio of this book. The voice of the narrator was well-chosen and it was produced well—I just personally need a little more action in my audiobooks.

Lolita
One of the characters Ren becomes entangled with is a student at his cram school—Rio Nakajima, whom Ren nicknames Seven Stars after the brand of cigarette she smokes (much as Humbert Humbert renames Delores, “Lolita”). Though Rio is not prepubescent, she is seventeen and Ren (though in his early 20s himself) is her teacher. When the two inevitably become sexually involved—I say inevitable because by the time it finally happens it has been so long set up that it’s impossible to miss where this going—it reeks of Lolita. Seventeen is a good distance from twelve and she does attain the age of consent in the book; however, in the process of discovering what happened to Keiko, Ren also uncovers family events that have led Rio to be as damaged as she is. This is not a well-adjusted seventeen year old who happens to be wise above her years. This is a damaged, childlike, aged-too-fast seventeen year old who has no business becoming romantically entangled with her teacher. This entire relationship still bothers me, even though I finished the book over a week ago.

With that said, Goenawan is a talented writer—though Ren tries to avoid scenarios where he would be alone with Rio, the course of events forces the intimate meeting. The set up allows you to sympathize when Ren, even where the idea of a teacher engaging in a sexual relationship with a student is something that you normally think of as a hard line “no.” Though Rainbirds wasn’t ultimately a book I loved, the ability of Goenawan to make me empathize with someone I found morally problematic—during the very scenes I found problematic—makes me want to read her future works.

Connections
The characters were more interconnected than I expected, with the players forming a web—much like small town America, everyone knows everyone and one person is always related to another. These connections also created a bit of a subplot where Ren uncovers and solves another little mini-mystery as he digs for more information about his sister. These chapters could have felt like a tangent; however, learning more about the people in his sister’s life opened doors to him to learn more about Keiko. The diversions were short but worthwhile.

These connections and diversions also provided some unexpected little bursts in the book of “I didn’t see that coming.” The problem for me and why I’ve been sitting with this book is that, for all the little bursts I didn’t see coming, the one I would have wanted—the identity of the murderer and some kind of conclusion—never popped. Instead, the conclusion fizzled, like a balloon slowly leaking air.

Ending (Very, Very Mild Spoilers—No Killer Identified)
Having had more time to think about it, I found the ending ultimately unsatisfactory—Ren does achieve a sense of closure in that he (and therefore the reader) determines whodunit, but by this point, the story had petered out so much, that it felt lackluster. Does Ren even care that he got his answer? I honestly couldn’t tell. He’s discovered something of himself—something perhaps he didn’t want to know. Where the previous connections and reveals crackled, the final reveal felt as if it didn’t matter. If Ren didn’t care that he had his answer, should we?

And here I come back to the thought that perhaps this book was mischaracterized. When I set aside my disappointment over the finish, over the sense that the mystery was no mystery at all, I’m left with a character study. A slow-burn, creepily noir character study into Ren, yes, but more his sister. In searching for his sister’s killer, the person Ren really finds is her, but far too late to do anything about it.

Notes
Published: March 6, 2018 by Penguin Random House
Author: Clarissa Goenawan
Date read: May 2, 2018
Rating: 3 ½ stars

Mini-Reviews and a belated April Wrap Up

Mini-Reviews and a belated April Wrap Up

Posted on by lisaannreads

April Book Drought and Reading
I didn’t think I’d finished terribly many books in April, but looking back finished more than I thought–just almost none of what I planned.  The books I assembled at the beginning of the month wound up being overwhelmingly heavy in theme and tone, so this both slowed me down and caused me to insert some fluffy, unplanned reads to give me a break while keeping my momentum going–that’s a thing other people do, right?

The books I finished this month where Monster, Home Fire, The Last Equation of Isaac Severy, Evicted, Pachinko, Queen of Hearts, Salvage the Bones, Crenshaw, My Life On the Road, Meaty, and The Female Persuasion.  The last three of those are on audio.  So for April that’s 2742 pages read and 31 hours, 55 minutes listening.  For the year, 11,344 pages and 146 hours, 18 minutes listening.  Time well spent, I think.

This month was, however, an utter failure for #theunreadshelfproject.  While four of those books were ones I already own (and I bought but immediately read Home Fire so we’re counting it), Amazon gave away something like eight books for free for International Book  Day and I purchased Miss Burma during Independent Book Store Day.  So we’re deeper into the red on the unread books.  But still–five!  I read five books I own.  I may never catch up but it is fun trying.  One should always have goals.

Monster
I came across Monster in a list at the library about books for Black History month, in a If-You-Liked-The-Hate-U-Give-You’ll-Like-This list.  I would agree that it makes a good flight pick along with Dear Martin and The Hate U Give.  The three books consider similar themes and provide alternative sides to a similar experience.  Unlike the other two, however, Monster is the story of a teenager who wasn’t killed by police, but rather has been accused of felony murder for allegedly participating in a robbery gone wrong that left a man dead.  The book is written in first person narrated by Steve Harmon, the child accused of the crime–however, in order to cope with what is happening, Steve presents it as if he is writing a film for one of his classes.  The entire book reads like a screenplay.  This unusual device works, providing the remove Steve need to tell his story while still giving the reader a sense of what is happening around him.  Frankly, it also makes the book incredibly quick to read relative to the page length–I think I finished it in under two hours.  The book won the first Michael L. Printz Award (best book in teen literature), ALA Best Book honors, Coretta Scott King honors, and was a finalist for the National Book Award when it was published.  It was a powerful book, even more so for the unexpected gut-punch in the last few pages.  Just when I thought I could breathe, Walter Dean Myers delivered one last visceral blow that was true to the book and true to how black boys are treated in this country.  It’s not an easy read but one I recommend.

The Last Equation of Isaac Severy
I’ll admit that I was hoping for an adult Westing Game –this wasn’t that.  (Though it’s probably being unfair to hope for another Westing Game.)  This was a fun little diversion–a thriller set in the midst of a highly dysfunctional family after the patriarch dies.  (I guess novels set in well-functioning families don’t typically produce enough plot to merit books?).  Jacobs had a knack for presenting most of the characters in fairly well-rounded ways–even the minor characters weren’t flat or simply plot devices.  As a result I managed to sympathize with almost all of the characters–even the bad actors and hate everyone at some point–kind of how I feel about real people.  No one is perfect, everyone has their own internal motivations, and someone is always going to make a choice that I disagree with.   Though the sub-title of the book is “A Novel In Clues” and the book is about a mathematician, absolutely no math background is necessary to enjoy this book.  It wasn’t the best thriller but it was a diversion when I needed one and may be worth checking out if mysteries are your wheelhouse.  Though there’s a fair amount of death, there’s no gore.

Queen of Hearts
Queen of Hearts is being billed as Grey’s Anatomy in book form.  This is….accurate-ish.  There’s less going on in Queen of Hearts since Martin is working with less space than a Grey’s Anatomy season and the drama is (mostly) in the past, just come to revisit Zadie and Emma.  They’ve had a good run with relatively little drama since their intern years in medical school a decade ago, but that doesn’t make a good book.  Enter stage left, Zadie’s McDreamy from her first intern year, bearing secrets for what really happened ten years ago.  The book was deliciously fluffy and dramatic, had some mystery elements (what really happened that year?), but stayed pretty well in the popular fiction lane.  I was bothered twice by body-shaming comments made about people who were overweight.  This wasn’t surprising giving that Martin is herself a doctor and health professionals often seem particularly prone to assuming size is indicative of health, but was disappointing and distracting.  It also ended a bit too neatly (which is not the same as happily) for me–I think Martin could have left a few loose ends hanging and it would have felt more true to life.  Ultimately, if you’re looking for a fluffy, plot-driven beach read, Queen of Hearts is a good one.

That’s it for my late update.  You reading anything fun for May?  I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Header Photo Credit: Liv Bruce

MMD March: Stay With Me by Ayobami Adelbayo

MMD March: Stay With Me by Ayobami Adelbayo

Posted on by lisaannreads

I think I did believe that love had immense power to unearth all that was good in us, refine us, and reveal to us the better version of ourselves. And though I knew Akin had played me for a fool, for a while I still believed that he loved me and that the only thing left for him to do was the right thing, the good thing. I thought it was a matter of time before he would look me in the eye and apologise.

So, I waited for him to come to me.

Delinquent (Oops?)
I’m not sure I’ve been quite so delinquent on posting a book that had a sort-of-deadline built into its relevance but here we go. I read the MARCH book club selection for the Modern Mrs. Darcy book club and finished timely (March 4th!) and yet haven’t felt like I’ve had a chance to really sit down and process everything that is this book.

Synopsis
Stay With Me follows Yejide, a Nigerian woman who has been unable to have a child with her husband Akin. The story follows Yejide as she takes increasingly desperate steps to have and then keep a child.

Avoiding the Spoilers
It is hard to discuss this book without spoiling the events. This was a book I experienced with no extra information besides what appeared on the flap-copy. I didn’t know what exactly Yejide and Akin were willing to try or how each of those steps would result. This will be a short review—I want to review it because it is so well done but do not want to spoil any of the little events in the middle along the way. So I apologize now for my brevity and vaguess—do not let this deter you from reading but rather take it as a sign that you should pick up the book and see for yourself why I am rating it so highly.

Loss
The most prominent and obvious theme in Stay With Me is one of loss. There is the loss of children—each loss different in its means and impact—but also the loss of relationship and self. As is common in couples who experience this kind of loss, with each step Yejide and Akin take to have a keep their children, the two are driven further apart. Steps taken to have the child that will ultimately strengthen their marriage become the wedges between them. With each loss, Yejide also loses parts of herself. A chipping away so subtle that it isn’t clear until whole sections have been sheered off that this was happening. At a apex in the plot, Yejide makes a choice to initiate the loss herself—when you have had what you love most repeatedly wrenched from you hands, at some point initiating the coming loss feels like the only way to protect yourself, to try to keep a shred of agency. I am not sure I have ever read another book that explores the myriad facets of loss and its impacts so effectively.

Structure
The book does jump around a bit in time and narrator—the bulk of the story-telling is from Yejide’s point of view, though every third or fourth chapter is Akin. The chapters are not labeled so the reader has to realize the narrator has changed—this was somewhat disconcerting at times, though it was easy enough to realize this had happened within a few sentences. It didn’t bother me and it seemed a deliberate choice made by Adebayo to deliberately disrupt the narrative and leave the reader feeling as disrupted and off-balance as Yejide and Akin. The abrupt narration change did, however, both some readers—the handful of negative reviews on Amazon mention this. The time jumps are labeled, so while they are also abrupt at times, it is clear you’ve moved forward or backwards in time.   This kind of structure almost never bothers me—I like non-standard devices and techniques and I like to see authors play with things like this. This is, however, something it keep in mind if this style is something that usually impacts your ability to connect with a book.

Characters
To me, Yejide was a likeable narrator, drawing me in. Though we have nothing in common on paper—I have never even been to Nigeria, I have never tried to have a child—her experiences and the way Adebayo has her narrator speak to the reader made me feel a connection to her. She is well fleshed out—flawed but in ways that make sense for her experiences. She makes terrible choices at times, but by the time these happened, I connected with her so deeply I understood why she made the choice and was making it along with her. Stay With Me is a fascinating character study and makes me want to read more of Adelbayo’s work.

Because Yejide is the main narrator, I had a biased view of Akin. I felt affection for him early, as he supported Yejide. But as he and Yejide few further apart, I came to pity him, to see him as weak. Here again, this speaks to the power of Adebayo’s narrator. Stay With Me manages to simultaneously present Akin in the way his wife sees him, to have her thoughts color his presentation; yet just enough of his own character shines through here and there in his chapters that you still see him as a fleshed out person. He isn’t merely a foil or a plot device for Yejide’s development. He is his own character and I enjoyed digging for his real personality under Yejide’s assumptions about his motives.

In the discussion Anne hosted with Adebayo for book club, it came up that some people found all of the characters unlikeable and they struggled to finish. I was surprised by this assessment—Yejide and Akin seemed like people to me. Real people are not always likeable. And perpetually likeable characters are boring. Adebayo introduced both Yejide and Akin so thoroughly that I understood why they were making the choices they made; I understood why they were hurt and thus why they hurt others. I didn’t find either of them irredeemable or so distasteful that I wanted to stop reading.

The other fun little note that come up during the discussion is that all Yoruba names mean some thing. For Yejide, anyone who met her would know someone died before she was born—they would assume her grandmother but in Yejide’s case it was actually her mother who died giving birth to Yejide. Akin’s name means a courageous man—an ironic touch the more you get to know him.

Highly Recommended
I feel again that I need to apologize for being so vague—I feel like I’m saying “You should read this book but I can’t tell you why! You just should!” Obvious triggers surrounding child loss notwithstanding, this is a book I highly recommend if you like character-driven books. There are also sufficient events to keep the book moving, with moments of crisis, so even those who need more heavily plot-driven books will find something here to keep them reading. The entirety of the action occurs in Nigeria and Adebayo is herself Nigerian (I believe she said she was Yoruba), making this a book for both #diversebooks and #ownvoies.

Flight Pick — Americanah and the value of listening to books by foreign writers
Anne’s flight pick to read with Stay With Me was Chimamanda Adiche’s Americanah. I actually “read” (listened) to Americanah early in 2017 so I didn’t revisit it last month. I felt like listening to Americanah last year was particularly helpful—there is a cadence to the writing that was accessible to me as a white American reader that wasn’t available if I had only read the book. Indeed, having listening to Americanah I felt like I could read Stay With Me and even Freshwater better—the speech and cadence of the Nigerian English stuck with me and aided my reading. If you haven’t ever listened to an audiobook of a Nigerian writer, I recommend your first book be one you listen to—it will make the experience of that book and subsequent books richer.

Notes
Published: August 22, 2017 by Knopf
Author: Ayobami Adebayo
Date read: March 4, 2018
Rating: 4 ½ stars

Featured Photo Credit: Alexis Brown

Review: Educated by Tara Westover

Review: Educated by Tara Westover

Posted on by lisaannreads

I received a digital ARC of this book from Random House on NetGalley. I’m grateful to Random House for their generosity and, because I was fascinated by this book, was happy to post this honest review. All opinions are my own.

I started Educated as part of a buddy-read with Rachel of Reading Brings Joy, thinking I was behind because everyone else had already started. And then I finished the book approximately thirty-six hours later, pausing only to sleep and fulfill my dog-walking duties at the Humane Society. Had I been reading this during the week, I might have called in sick to finish.

Synopsis
Tara Westover grew up off the grid in Idaho, raised by survivalist parents whose distrust of the establishment extended to traditional schooling and medical care, relying instead on an extreme version of Mormonism and faith-healing. In her formative years, Westover endured extreme neglect at the hands of her parents and physical abuse at the hands of an elder brother who was never held to account for his assaults. When Westover was sixteen, she was admitted to Brigham Young University where the world expanded in ways that would leave her irrevocably changed. For Westover these changes were ultimately incompatible with the person her family expected her to be. Educated is the story of how Westover, now a Ph.D. in history, was formed by her childhood experiences, survived them, and even thrived in spite of them.

Every Trigger Warning for Everything, Ever
The story featured in Educated needs every trigger warning. Westover and her siblings suffered pretty severe physical abuse, extreme neglect, and shocking child endangerment. There is some of the most triggering gas-lighting I have ever read and, if memory served, just about the only trigger warning this book doesn’t need is rape—though misogyny and gender-based verbal and physical abuse occurs. For people leaving oppressive faith subcultures, portions of this book may also be triggering as much of the abuse within Westover’s family was cloaked in religious language to excuse the oppressors and justify their actions. While I found this book absolutely fascinating and was able to push past some of these triggers for me, this is not a book to read if you are in a place where you need to be gentle with yourself or are particularly triggered by child abuse, gas-lighting, or spiritual toxicity.

Controversy
The Amazon reviews for this book are a bit different than most since mixed in with the general reviews are reviews submitted by family members and family friends. Several of the family members who are still within the fold gave the book one star and claim it’s all fiction (This is probably half of the current one-star reviews). The boy Westover dated in college, Drew, posted a review and indicates that the sections that are within his knowledge are presented accurately.

Her brother Tyler at one point also posted a review, though his was slightly less congratulatory. He questioned Tara’s recollections of some of the events, though he admitted within the review that he wasn’t there for some of the events she described. He seems to have taken his review down since I can’t find it anymore—if I recall it was a three or four-star review, so overall positive and supportive for her.

Stranger than Fiction
Some of the other negative reviews question the overall veracity of the story. Westover’s memoir is fascinating in a terrifying way—it’s one of those truth-is-stranger than fiction and if this weren’t her real life, her editor would have been telling her to tone it down. I am hoping/assuming that after the Frey debacle many years ago, memoirs like this are more thoroughly fact-checked than they used to be. I’m not bothered by family members still toeing the party line in the Amazon comments, but the book is so fantastic that it screams for a fact-checker to confirm at least the scaffolding of the story—Westover’s absence of a birth certificate, absence in school, lack of a documented medical history, and other things that woud be independently verifiable.

I would also assume (dangerous, I know) that Westover as an academic would understand what it would do to her reputation and career if she were caught fabricating this kind of memoir. It isn’t meant to be an academic exercise but I can’t imagine many prestigious universities want to give tenure to professors or otherwise employ historians caught fabricating New York Times Bestsellers. With this in mind, I’m left with believing Westover’s story as the truth. She’s the victim, she has no real reason to lie, and the consequences of this being fabricated are far too damaging to make it worth the risk to her professionally.

Delivery
Westover’s delivery is matter-of-fact—so matter of fact some reviewers have commented on it sounding almost rote. For a less eventful story, this delivery would have definite drawbacks, chief among them putting the reader to sleep. For Westover’s story, however, it worked. She doesn’t have to use lyrical language or drip adjectives over her sentences to gain attention and doing so would have been overkill here. The action here very much speaks for itself.

With all of the craziness of Westover’s childhood events, the story moves at a pretty quick pace. There are no idylls in the wildflowers, save for the occasional sentence about the woman in the mountain who watched over Westover as she grew up at the foot of the mountain. There aren’t really “slow” parts so much as there are slightly less-shocking moments in between the shocking ones.

The only criticism I have of Westover’s delivery is that it did feel at times like one horror after another. I wondered if there were good times Westover could have shown. I was left with the sense that a kind of Stockholm Syndrome kept her in place, which could certainly be accurate. But even the worst parents can have some redeeming moment—some snippet in time when they are capable of showing love.  I didn’t feel Westover showed the reader any of these times (or if she did, it made no impression and there could have been more). I believe it was hard for Westover to leave—but the hits-keep-coming feeling and the sense of why it was so hard to leave would have been better modulated with a few more moments of levity and love, if they were available for Westover to tell us.

Recommended
Though this is a work of nonfiction, Edcuated is so fast-paced, this work almost served like one of my palate-cleanser thrillers—I gobbled it up and it reset my reading after a string of more literary and slower works. The emotional rollercoaster in the book is work, but the reading of it isn’t. If you are in a place where this book won’t be triggering, this is one I highly recommend.

Notes
Published: February 20, 2018 by Random House (@randomhouse)
Author: Tara Westover
Date read: March 31, 2018
Rating: 4 stars

Review: The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky by Jana Casale

Review: The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky by Jana Casale

Posted on by lisaannreads

I received a digital ARC of this book from Knopf on NetGalley. I’m grateful to Knopf for their generosity and, because I enjoyed the book, was happy to post this honest review. All opinions are my own.

She thought of herself as little fragments drifting into the universe into tiny pieces and then she thought of each little fragment as separate and singular to herself, and she could not tell if she were only the fragments or if she were ever anything bigger than that….The last thing she heard was the sound of her own heartbeat, improbably consistent, uniquely her own…The sound of her heart to herself, a sound she’d heard so many times, as sound she barely ever listened to.

Synopsis
Leda is a Boston college student, a daughter, a postgrad, a fiancé in love, a young mother, middle-aged, and then elderly. The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky follows the lifecycle of a woman just beginning her life until she closes her eyes for the last time. In the intervening decades, Casale takes us on a journey of what it means to come of age and then to simply age in a time when what it means to be a woman is constantly in flux.

Identity
At it’s heart, The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky is about the woman we envision ourselves to be when we are young—not as children, but in those college formative years, when the world feels open and full of possibility (assuming of course that you are at least middle class and white—this book probably isn’t going to appeal to you if you aren’t).   As a result of this focus, this book made me uncomfortable, not because of any particular topic touched upon by Casale or even any particular choice Leda makes, but rather, because she reminded me of a time in my life when I wasn’t sure who I was—something that was frankly true until about four years ago. I could be the girl who reads Noam Chomsky. Or, more likely at nineteen, I can be the girl who sees someone reading the book and wants to be the girl who reads Noam Chomsky. The girl who wants that to be how people think of her. Like Leda with the Chomsky book, I carried around an idea of who I was and who I wanted to be for a long time, until life circumstances forced me to accept that the idealized version of myself I was trying to be was killing me. My Noam Chomsky had become the albatross around my neck. We do eventually see Leda settle in to her own skin, though there are times when it is clear that maybe that isn’t something that’s fully possible—there is always someone you’re trying to be, some version of yourself that you want to grow into.

Time
Casale makes a slightly unusual choice for a coming-of-age novel—unlike most novels of this type, Leda is always coming of age—we follow her from one life stage to the next into old age. There is no end to Leda’s growth, she never arrives at any particular, set point and specifically never becomes the woman who reads Noam Chomsky.   The decision to follow Leda through her entire adult life is interesting—the book spans the decades of her entire life, meaning there were times I connected to her and then we passed that point where I could. Indeed, by the sheer nature of the passage of time and changes of Leda, it is hard to imagine that any one reader can fully identify with her. At some point, Leda’s life experiences so outpaced mine that it went from feeling as if I were chatting with a friend over coffee to watching a movie purely as a bystander, with no direct engagement. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing—by the time Leda’s life experiences passed mine, I cared enough about her to keep reading to see where she ended up. I just couldn’t relate any more.

This sprawling narrative did mean that time passed rather more quickly at the end, and I don’t love a novel that accelerates significantly in the last chapters. It was also somewhat awkward in the writing of these last chapters because I thought of Leda as being around my age, placing the end chapters in a future at least forty years from now. With the rate at which technology is developing and changing the way we interact, it meant the Casale had to keep some of the background and action here necessarily vague. This wasn’t a novel about the future—it was a novel about growth that by necessity had scenes in an unknown future. Casale had taken Leda so far that she was almost duty-bound to finish with her, but the constraints of the unknown future impacted these chapters and gave them less depth than the more hearty chapters in the middle of the book.

Feminism
In a world where woman are told to stand up for themselves and to stop apologizing, it is easy to feel as if the expectations of being a feminist are just as hard to fulfill as the ones we’re supposed to be escaping from. Casale captures this tension with Leda—Leda shouldn’t want to move across the country for her partner’s job, and yet she does. Does this make her a bad feminist? When she has a daughter, she doesn’t want her daughter to want the Barbies, but is it feminist or anti-feminist to steer her away from what she loves to something less symbolic of the constraints of womanhood we are supposed to be escaping from? Sometimes being a woman is exhausting—you will almost certainly always being disappointing someone on both ends of the spectrum here, too burn-your-bra for the patriarchy but still too barefoot-and-pregnant for the feminists. It is simultaneously a liberating and constraining time to be alive and Casale captures this tension in relatable ways with Leda’s development.

Style
The initial choppy writing style threw me off at first and if this weren’t a book I had gotten on Netgalley and felt I had to push through to review, I likely would have stopped after a chapter or two. As Leda ages, her voice becomes more confident and the choppy style diminishes, settling into a more readable rhythm. All that to say, the writing isn’t going to win any awards but the style choices that make it more difficult to read initially do fade into a more standard, flowing narrative. It is nowhere near as terrible as Lilac Girls, my evergreen measuring stick for subpar writing.  Casale really started to hit her stride for me when she started describing the pretentious hipsters who populated Leda’s writing seminar in Chapter Six—the chapters are short and it is worth pushing through to this point. I’m not usually a proponent of pushing through if you don’t have to, but I do think this book takes some time to settle in to and it’s fair to give it at least eighty pages before you decide to abandon Leda.

Verdict?
In the end, this is a book that I wound up enjoying and would rate as better than average. I wouldn’t recommend this book widely, rather its one of those books that I would recommend to specific people after knowing them and having a feel for their reading lives.

Notes
Published: April 17, 2018 by Knopf (@aaknopf) available for pre-order now
Author: Jana Casale (@janacasale)
Date Read: January 27, 2018
Rating: 3 ¼ stars