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.

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.

I am on a roll of just really good reads and this one was just no exception.  Where the book starts is absolutely not where the book ends up and I did not see that coming!  The suspense!  The twists!  The unreliable narrator & all the unbelievable things that happen take buying a house in a tight market to a hold new level of competitive. I just don't even know why I liked it, but it definitely pulled me in and kept my attention. One of those train wrecks you can't look away from or stop reading about.  I don't even know what just happened there. And I should not have liked it so much.

Recommend.

Typically, I am not a big fan of stories told via a series of letters, so this book had a lot to over come and, small spoiler alert, it did not.  It started just really disjoined and boring and this went on for a really long time-- at least half the book.  I dutifully plugged along wondering what all the hype was about.  

And then, all of a sudden it got really interesting.  The unlikeable main character started to show some likeable qualities and I started to have some compassion for her. An aging attorney, losing her sight, she is a prolific writer of letters and emails to friends, family, acquaintances, and authors. The story unfolds as these letters are written, making it a one-sided narration. For most of the second half of the book, where we watch her explore her grief over the loss of her child, is heart wrenching and compelling.  The problem was that once she unloads the horrific secret she has been holding about that death, I was just unimpressed and found it someone misogynistic.  The book itself has a tread of distain for her commitment to her career, at the cost of being the kind of parent that society expected her to be.  That the ultimate conclusion of the book reinforced those stereotypes--that a working mother is inherently negligent and her children will suffer or even die because of that--just didn't sit right with me. I am surprised how many professional women are drawn to this book, but perhaps that is the internalized message we have all received that career women are terrible moms.  No thanks.

​Not recommended.

​Spoiler alert: You cannot rape someone into not being vegetarian anymore and hitting someone struggling with mental health isn't going to cure them. The protagonists husband and father didn't get this memo and the fact that her entire family turns on her in an effort to force or trick her into eating meat was horrifying.  The story starts off strong, quickly taking a dark turn into abuse and control that illuminates how that extends to women's bodies.  The cultural pressures to conform depicted here in South Korea plays out differently in North America, but isn't entirely different at its core.
END SPOILER ALERT

This book stayed with long after I read it. It was hard to read and it was painful to reflect on.  In the end, I am recommending it, but with a strong note that I know it will not be for everyone.

Once in a while a new biography is released about someone I know nothing about that tells the story of a part of history that I don't know anything about that just blows me away. This WWII spy story was published in 2019, but I didn't hear about it until this year and I really want everyone to read it. I have been sharing this story with lots of people because it is inspiring and so unknown.

Virginia Hall was an American woman living in France before and after it was occupied by the Nazi regime and she developed a shockingly effective network of spies and intelligent agents. The sexism was blatant and adding to that was the discrimination she experienced as an amputee. Her network included sex workers and nuns, farmers and shopkeepers, locals and immigrants, and the everyone underestimated her, if they even noticed her. She used this to her advantage in the most clever ways. She was committed to fighting fascism from the inside and she was a brilliant strategist.  I was inspired by her willingness to stay and return even when she after her cover was compromised -- going so far as to have her teeth filed so she would look different. That she managed to hide in plain sight, even with her disability reflects both her braveness and the discrimination all around her.

This is a profile in anti-fascist courage that is a must read, especially in an era where examples of bravery should be celebrated.  Read it!

Highly recommend.

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Just because there is a "surprise twist" ending that makes someone not creepy doesn't mean that their behavior isn't creepy.  The wealthy, benevolent old man troupe whom we are supposed to love and trust, while thinking he is sweet and quirky just didn't sit well for me. It is obvious throughout the book that there is more to this buy who shows up in a town and extracts everyone's life stories, always tainted with a trite, judgey, Christian message just didn't play for me the way it did for many other readers.  As the protagonist works his way through meeting everyone in town and getting them to share their life with him, we get a tour of the whose who of Christian failings--early on starting with the abortion regret story, but continuing with so many preachy, trite messages.  

As if that wasn't bad enough, the book is slow paced and boring.  I kept waiting for a plot to develop in which he was actually a serial rapist or con artist, anything to make it interesting.  I think we are supposed to be drawn in by this slow paced old guy who slows everyone down and "sees" who they truly are and empathizes with their pain, but really I was just irritated with such a obvious ploy to clock Christian propaganda as literature.

Absolutely do not recommend this.
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Written from the perspective of a young girl born to a Danish mother and deployed American serviceman, the story unfolds as the narrator lands in Portland, Oregon, in the 1980s to live with her father's mother and sister.  So much nuance here as she discovers what it means to be Black in the US, first living with her parents in Chicago and then living in Portland.  From the beginning, it is obvious that she has experienced a trauma. Her mother is dead, her father is absent, and she spent a long stint in the hospital. 

As the story unfolds, we learn snippets of her past, as she grows up an outsider living with her grandmother, not Black enough or white enough, her quest to find her place is a beautiful coming of age story and neatly demonstrates how little trauma was understood in the 80's.

​recommend.
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This YA coming of age book was a surprise hit with me. Set in Brooklyn, it is a raw coming of age story that demonstrates the complexity of urban violence in the lives of teens.  Sneaking out with friends to a party you aren't old enough to go to, spats and disagreements with friends, and intricate family dynamics transcend the time and place of the setting and the overlay of how the character with Tourette's Syndrome is treated by others add compelling depth.  That he takes up knitting to manage his ticks was a favorite plot point for this long-time knitting advocate.  The scene where his brother tries to steal yarn for him at the fancy yarn store was heartwarming and heartbreaking all at the same time--which is always one of my favorite book moments.

​Recommend. 

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This is a sequel to My Name is Lucy Burton, which I read as part of my 2017 reading challenge. That was a year when I had categories of books that I was reading from and I can't remember which category this fulfilled.  I had trouble finding books to fill those lists the few years that I did that and started asking for recommendations, which is how I ended up ditching that list and just taking recommendations for my yearly booklist. 
In any event, I did not write reviews back then, so I decided to reread My Name Is Lucy Barton after reading the first chapter of this book in order to remember the backstory.  In retrospect, this wasn't necessary to appreciate this story, but it did help connect many of the relationships in the book.
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And there are a lot of relationships in this book.  There are a ton of characters and the history between them is complicated. I often felt like I do when I visit friends in a close-knit community or try to join a new group of people who have been tight for a long time.  There are all these backstories that touch on each other and it is hard to keep up with how they all touch on each other.  This makes the details of the book hard to keep track of and sometimes I would be well into a new storyline before I realized these were the same people from another storyline. In many ways, this is the magic of this series. It really makes you feel what Lucy Barton's small town life with judgy, hurtful people was like--and not just for her.  Those who bullied her, those who were indifferent to her, and those who saw and helped her in big and small ways are all portrayed sometimes in sympathetic ways, sometimes not, and most often in both ways at the same time. 

There is so much depth here, so much hurt. Child sex abuse and sexual assault play prominent roles as they play out in families and relationships in ways that fill in the backstory for many characters. It is the story of kids who were bullied and kids who did the bullying and kids who were both bullied and did the bullying and how this plays out in their adult lives.  The emotion of childhood trauma, indeed sometimes of torture, is on painful display here--told with a perspective that conveys deep empathy for the damage done and the damage done to the people caused the damage.  It is heart-wrenching the whole way.

Recommend.

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