particular the way that wealth leads to the abuse and trafficking of vulnerable women. 

​Recommend.

Now, this is a well crafted novel.  The plot, the characters, the writing...it has it all.  Breadcrumbs laid out at the beginning are revisited at the end, characters grow and change and remain flawed, and things happen in unpredictable, but plausible ways.  The side quests, the small moments of interactions between characters, and the way it all comes back together in soft, satisfying ending just really struck a chord with me.  

I love a story about friendship and this is a great story about complex friendships. Childhoods steeped in pain, each for a different reason, lived side-by-side in the same town, isolated from each other and yet right there together.  I found it so powerful.  

​Recommend.

This is the rare memoir that really explores a childhood of abuse and neglect with raw insight.  The poverty, emotional abuse, assaults, and neglect that these kids experience is couched in the context of the emotional highs of being in a family struggling with mental health and addiction.  The systemic failures of schools, child welfare, and communities are rampant and painful.  Even as we can see what is coming, it still is a shock to hear related.

It isn't as easy as providing housing, since much of the time the parents made choices to live in cars or uninhabitable spaces when housing was available.  They made decisions to prioritize adventure and a counter-cultural lifestyles at the expense of stability, feeding themselves candy and alcohol while the children actually starved. They moved when child welfare became involved, made the children leave behind their most precious possessions for no reason, and vacillated between telling the children they were smarter and better than everyone and vicious teardowns.  

All of the abuse their mother experienced at the hands of their father existed in contrast to his sometimes adventurous, carefree, fun-loving charm in ways that caused so much confusion for the kids.  While their mother was experiencing this violence, though, she failed to protect them not only from their father, but also from sexual abuse by the random people that circulated around them.  The layers of trauma the kids experienced and lack of outside support to put it in perspective is well described here, culminating in a moment in college where the author is taking a class on poverty.  When discussing homelessness, the teacher calls on her to discuss the causes and she responds that sometimes, people just chose that lifestyle. This was absolutely consistent not only with her childhood, but also with her parents' situation at the time she was taking that class.  The teacher shames her in front of the class, asking, "What do you know about poverty and homelessness?" and once again, no one steps up to validate her experience or provides her with support.  It was just a absolutely heartbreaking that even when she is building this new life that might pull her out of that poverty, this is what she is met with.

I was disappointed that the ending didn't do much to tie up themes and bring things together in the way I have come to expect from a really good book.  Granted, this is harder to do in a memoir of a life that is still being lived, but I nevertheless was left unfulfilled in the end.  Even with that, I think it is worth reading.

​Recommend.

It would be hard for this book to contain a more stereotypical gay uncle character who ends up the primary caregiver for children without significantly altering his lifestyle  It might have been over-the-top in places, but it was so celebratory of the Guncle's relationship with the children, the way he stepped in to care for them in his own unique, non-traditional way while they were all three grieving the loss of the children's mother that it feels ridiculous to criticize the use of the trope.  I found once I let myself let go of rolling my eyes at the things like wearing the kaftan, having cocktails in the afternoon, the throuple next door, and so on and let myself just enjoy the story of a quirky relative who steps in to care for children in need, I did in fact just enjoy it.  Set against the background of traumatic grief over the death of loved ones, it really is just a sweet story of an unusual family doing what needs to be done to meet the needs of kids. Despite the background, it is mostly funny and light.

​Recommend.

One of the things like I love about is project is coming to a book with absolutely no expectations of what is to come.  At first, I did not realize this was a memoir at all and I didn't realize until I had finished it that it had been out for more than a decade before I read it.  The early part of the book in particular was written like my favorite type of intergenerational novel, where we look at family history and weave a story together from there.  Here, the author develops the story of the two sides of his family during WWII--this Japanese grandparents who are removed from Vancouver and sent to Alberta, losing everything they worked for and built during their time in BC and his Scottish grandfather who, at the same time, was fighting for Canada in Japan and who was ultimately a prisoner of war there.  This part of the book is excellent.  I particularly love how he does not shy away from the horrors of the Canadian government, not just in how they treated Japanese-Canadians and Canadians born to Japanese immigrants in Canada, but also in how they made decisions about young white Canadians fighting in the war.  It was a juxtaposition that we do not often see setup like this and I found it captivating.  

There are times in the book where I felt like a stronger editor could have been more aggressive with the delete key as the story slowed to more genealogical narration than storytelling for a bit, but just after I started to lose interest and couldn't track the minor characters being mentioned, the story jumped to the story of his own parents and his childhood, which was very different that the earlier part of the book. Here, the loss of his mother to addiction was painful in its descriptions of how that impacts a child and a family.  His struggle in his relationship with her could have benefitted from more forgiveness of his younger self and less blame for choices he made in those terrible circumstances when he was still quite young.  My heart ached to remind him that none of that was his fault and it wasn't his job to take care of her when she was drinking. For a book about forgiveness, I wished it had more of that theme in there.

The theme of forgiveness, though, is well played here as the grandchild of very different set of grandparents who were able to look beyond the racial conflict that ruined their young adult lives by a government that expelled them or sent them to war.  At the end of the book, the commentary on how you can hate what happened and wish it hadn't while at the same time understanding that the author is who is because of those decisions is reflected on at a time when he is working in government and finds himself in the very room where earlier prime ministers and advisors made the very decisions that led to those horrors with what appeared to be very little regard for the impact on his grandparents and the generations that followed.  

I am having a difficult time deciding if I recommend it or not, but only because of that one section that was just kind of boring. All in all, I think it is worth reading--when you get to that part, maybe just skim it or speed it up.

​Recommend.

PS. I am marking it as a war novel, even though it isn't, but this is because it is written about war in a way that feels like a novel, so folks that enjoy those stories are going to appreciate those parts, I think.

The premise of this book is that sleep is important and the entire world would be a better place for everyone if we all slept more.  I particularly loved some of the facts that have come from the research and there were a lot of suggestions that I would love to see implemented. For example, everyone knows and research supports that we need sleep to heal from all types of physical and mental difficulties.  So, why aren't hospitals designed to facilitate sleep?  With so many useless beeps and alarms that just get ignored anyhow, why can't we figure out a way to keep things quiet in the room where a patient is sleeping and have the needed alarms go off at the nurse's station?  Such common sense.  I hadn't thought of that before.

Another thing I learned, which I love, is that we do our very best learning in the time just before we are ready to fall asleep.  The narrator told us that if we fall asleep while he reads the book to us that he won't be offended because 1, sleep is important and 2. knowing that we are learning the most when we are falling asleep means that he is happy that we are learning.  I have to say, it did change how I react when students yawn in class or look like they might be nodding off.  Now, I just look at them and think that is the part of the lesson that they will retain the longest.

All of that said, it took be months to finish this book, which is really unusual for me. I just kept falling asleep and having to go back to pick up where I left off, which was often only a couple of minutes after I started,  The narrator really lulled me to sleep fast.  Because I was borrowing it from the library, I had to reorder it multiple times--waiting for ages since there is a long long waitlist for it. And I most definitely could not read it while driving or getting exercise or really doing anything other than nodding off.  Given how much trouble I had finishing it or staying focused enough on it to stay awake, I don't know that I can really recommend it, unless you are looking for something lovely and interesting to listen to as you enter your most effective learning window before you fall asleep.

​Not not recommended.

I wasn't sure what to make of this book when I started it.  The first half of the book is a fairly dry history of the KKK in the mid-west in the 1920's. The subtitle of the book is The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them, so I kept waiting for the woman who stopped them to show up in the story.  She definitely did not show up the way I was expecting. 

I think we all know that there is a correlation between men who join the KKK and men who rape and assault women, but this book is a brutal account of that part of their history. We don't talk enough about this connection. This book explores that and focuses on  an unusual court trial.

Well worth the read.

Recommend.

Another great read this year, this is a fictionalized story that brings home the Missing or Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) movement in a nuanced story about "family" and the complex meaning of that word, especially in the context of harms that are too deep to be forgiven. Set in Nova Scotia and Maine, it centers in part on cross-border indigenous migrant workers who picked summer berries for white farmers.  It is really hard to talk about this book without spoiling the story because the core themes unfold slowly. By the time the themes reveal themselves, it wasn't a surprise they were coming, but it didn't end where it began.  Suffice it to say that this is worth reading and has timely and timeless themes of family separation because of both casual and systemic racism that transcends generation and causes ripples of pain, as well as ripples of love.

Recommend. 

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For the first half of this book, I was entirely unimpressed with the book. I did not like the characters. I was horrified by the whole premise where the addict kills his kid when he drives drunk on morning. I hated how the author played with emotion, making me simultaneously hate the guy, but also eel so sorry for him and his situation.  The relationship with his wife, his mother, his father, and his mother-in-law, all portrayed with raw pain and in the first act, this just felt like a poor attempt to manipulate the reader.

But, about half-way through the book, everything shifted for me. I had no idea what was coming, so I didn't know what I was getting into.  I think is is probably why I ended really liking this book a lot.  I want to preserve that for you if you are going to read it, so spoiler alerts ahead here...

SPOILER ALERT!!!!!!


This is essentially a book about the need for prison reform.  It is absolutely heartbreaking to experience the incarceration of an addict whose trauma is killing him.  The brutality of prison, the lack of services, the sexual abuse, the psychological torture, all of it was raw and complicated.  This unlikeable guy, who killed his kid, who lied to his wife, who is passive aggressive and narcissistic, and who lacks significant insight into his psyche doesn't deserve what happens to him in prison--no one would.  There are moments of joy and connection, but those are outweighed by layers and layers of pain, bad luck that just compounds and is heartbreaking -- up to the end when COVID hits the prison.  

END SPOILER ALERT??

Sad from start to finish, this is worth reading for the thought-provoking analysis of the criminal responsibility in an era of retribution.

​Recommend.

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This is a really fun, light, engaging romance with likable characters. Bonus points for one of my newest favorite plotlines--pandemic lock down stories.  I thought the whole premise was clever.  Set in the writing room of late-night comedy show (a la SNL), it is funny and poignant. It is a fresh story. The foreshadowing is solid, but not obvious. It isn't a traditional romance, but it is a love story with some steamy moments. It is unusual to have this mix and it worked for me.  Double bonus points for a great character in recovery where that isn't the focus of the book, just a background feature.

Definitely recommend this one!

Click here to purchase this book and support My 50 Bookish Friends blog project.