It is hard to know what to make of this book. It is a story written by a young white woman on a high school gap year who travels to Nepal and decides to open an orphanage and school there. On the one hand, it is just really amazing to hear her story of learning to run a non-profit, of initially raising the money by babysitting and dog walking at home in New Jersey before learning how to raise big money with fancy galas, and how she built the connections with locals to make her vision a reality.  On the other hand, this is so problematic.  The problems of white savior attitude and of the non-profit industrial complex are on display here in so many ways, but every time it was especially horrifying, she acknowledged it, really owned it.  She looks back on the experience with remarkable balance, at once telling the story of this audacious passionate young adult who does this amazing thing, while pointing out all the ways in which she should not have been doing this.  It made for a more more sophisticated and interesting read than I thought it was going to be when I started it.  She can't undo this thing she did--and it seems like she wouldn't if she could. She is still tied to this community that she fell in love with and where she build as an outsider with outsider ideals and money and approaches, but she also worked hard to work in tandem with locals who shared her vision and once the program was successful, she stepped further and further back, still fundraising and visiting/living there, but allowing the program to grow up and away from her involvement. Until at the end, the self-awareness of the push/pull of her privilege to choose to live there while still staying connected to the resources her Americanness provided was front and center of the story.  I am not sure I would recommend the book because at the end of the day, it is still a story of a problematic model of charity that I just can't get behind.

Not recommended.

I was entirely unprepared for this book. As a general rule, I love starting a new story with no idea what it is going to be about, but I was entirely unprepared to be in a mellow space only to start this book about a natural disaster occurring in a city I know well. It isn't post-apocalyptic.  It is the actual apocalypse--the moment when the world changes and the entire story takes place in that day, with flashbacks that fill in the backstory, but without a future whatsoever set out for the reader.  This is made even more vivid since the first person narrator is 9 months pregnant as the story unfolds.  It is entirely horrifying. The descriptions of Portland and the damage to infrastructure and neighborhoods and stores that I know well was scary. Overall, the writing was so good, really sucking me into the story, getting my heartrate up and making me invested in the story and characters. But, ultimately, while it is the kind of book that I have thought and talked about a lot since finishing it, I was just so unsatisfied with the story ending without resolution. We don't know anything about the future, about the world beyond the disaster, or any of the characters we met and learned about and got attached to along the way. I mean, this might be what happens in a future world like this, but in a story, I want more.

​Not recommended.

I went into this book not knowing anything about it, not even the genre, and I am actually really glad that happened because it meant that I was dropped into a story without understanding the context in which it was told, which I think made it substantially more interesting.  

Fundamentally, though, his is a survival in the woods story about our relationship with nature and living off the land in tune with the animals who live beside us. There is a lot of hunting and fishing and dealing with the bodies of dead animals, which I always dislike. I almost lost my mind reading Moby Dick in high school. But the way this was written was softer and you could feel the characters' reverence for the world and this made it tolerant for me.

It is a short book, making for a quick read with writing that is quite lovely.

Stop here, if you don't want spoilers. I thought that I Who Have Never Known Men was such a unique post-apocalyptic story. This book, written 2 years later, reminded me so much of that book.  Different setting and backstory, but similar in the way that both tell the story of the last human, alone amidst the ruins of a civilization.  Here, though, the story is softer as the last human lives out her life in the company of a bear and a puma.  

Ultimately, I am going to give it a soft recommend.

A intergenerational tale of trauma and resilience, this is a book that I probably should have liked a lot more than I did.  From the healing midwife to the witch trial to the women who raised children alone without men to the women who helped women end unwanted pregnancies to institutionalization of spirited women, the story took every trope from this genre and spun it out as far as it could go and beyond.  I felt like I have just read so many variations of this same story and that this one didn't really have anything new to offer. I know it was written to try to get me to feel the empowerment of survival, but I just didn't feel that. I mostly felt the tedium, the exhaustion of intimate violence, handed down generation after generation against women who did not fit the feminine expectations.  I think the book tried to do too much and as such there wasn't enough character development.  I might have liked it better if it slowed down, maybe covering one generation per book and made it an extended series where each lifetime and personality was explored more in depth and with more detail. There was so much here, I sometimes lost track of the characters only to go back and realize that the person I couldn't remember was newly introduced without any clear indication that was happening.
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​Not recommended.

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

​Recommend.

 YA romance at its absolute best, I can image that I would have loved this book even more if I was a foodie, too.  As it was, it was just a lovely, light read about two young gay guys in, the unlikeliest of romance novel settings, St. Louis.  An oenophile and a epicure from different backgrounds, questioning their life choices and their ties to family, while falling for each other.  For lack of a better term, the book is like the chef's kiss of summer beach reading.

Reading this on the heels of The True True Story of Raja The Gullible, I think I appreciated the sweetness of this book even more. The Iranian experience of Queerness in the 1960-80's in Iran as opposed to the Iranian-American experience of Queerness in the 2020's is jarring and reminded me just how much progress has been made and how much of it we have still been able to hold on to.

​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.

This tale builds an alternate reality that defies all rules of physics and common sense, setting a scene in which a parallel world exists of creatures who collect regretted decisions, turn them into birds and cage them. In that world, destiny is tattooed on a baby at birth and there is not free will or choice. It is fueled by the collection of regretted choices that people in this world don't want to or can't bear. They give away the memory of the choice in exchange for freedom from the weight of that choice.

Against this odd backdrop. the adventure is when the worlds collide and the characters explore what a life in which you did or didn't have choice would be like.  The fantasy of the story is quite odd as they jump through puddles that connect space and time, fly on origami cranes, and encounter zombie babies.  

I mostly did not find the fantasy world enthralling enough to overcome the too-obvious symbolism in the book and I didn't find the philosophical reflections about choice and destiny to be enough to overcome the lackluster worldbuilding.  For sure, there were lovely moments and some of the interpersonal relationship development was well done.  I can see how folks find this "enchanting," as the book cover suggests. I was just never really captivated by it.

​Not recommended.