This book really grew on it.  It started so slowly. The third or maybe fourth Iranian book this year, I found the initial development of backstory to be tedious.  But, somewhere along the way, I was gripped by the storytelling and really appreciated the way the characters grew into complex relationships that intertwined and made seemingly horrible people understandable. And of course all of the trauma caused by all of the things that happen during times of resistance and revolution and revolt.  I ended up really appreciating the story, the romances, the family dynamics, the politics, the heartaches, the life choices people make...really well written, well plotted, and well edited.

​Recommend.

This started off as a pretty typical adoption story memoir about inter-racial adoption in the PNW, but turned into a really compelling story of family, love, and what-could-have-been.  Instead of a tidy tale about how the early 80's white adoptive parents didn't appreciate how racist small town Southern Oregon was and how they didn't address her cultural heritage, we got something quite different. I wrongly anticipated this was going to be a Holt International-type fraud case that I have read quite a bit around.  I was so surprised to find that while the first part read that way, that is not where the story went at all.  Even the first part, which was almost a stand alone story of childhood longing to belong, was way above average in terms of writing and I found it neither trite, nor self-absorbed. Her compassion for her adoptive parents is evident and complicate and was really moved by the nuance of that relationship--even in the first part of the book.
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As the progresses and she explores connection with her birth family, the story is not what she--nor the reader-- expect. It is both simpler and more complicated, but the ultimate question about whether she was "better off" having been adopted out is never presented as an easy one. The relationships with the birth family unfold in much the same way as the rest of her relationships, with depth and emotional layers that are so often left out of memoirs like this that have an agenda they want to develop.

Recommend.

If you liked Daisy Jones & The Six, you will probably love this book.  It is written in that same interview style, in this case for a documentary film about the main characters.  It feels a little choppy in the beginning as you get to know the characters and figure out who is telling which parts of the story, but once that clicked, I just could not stop reading. 

The foreshadowing was so suspenseful and just when you thought that everything was wrapping up, there was a whole new era in their lives to come--which is one thing I do like about audio books in particular: If you aren't watching the screen, you have no idea if you are 5 minutes or 5 hours from the end.  With a paper book, you always know how much farther you have to go.

I appreciated the flawed characters. Their abusive childhoods and drive to be elite athletes, even when the established sports organizations didn't want them or were only interested in exploiting them.  The relentless focus on winning, not just for the main characters, but for all of the athletes and coaches, and the complexity of their lives when the competition wasn't just on the ice.  I was so captivated by the motivations of the characters, but also their complexity.  No one was all good or all bad.  Everyone had depth.  

The plot itself was complicated enough to keep me focused, the writing was solid, but the character development was what I jut couldn't look away from. I love the unexpected, untraditional ending that felt way more in line with the developed story than a conventional love story epilogue.  

​Recommend.

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.

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.

In child abuse prevention work, we often talk about how important it is to teach children that they should not keep secrets. We distinguish between secrets and surprises.  Secrets eat away at you and causes harm, but surprises re something that you share when the time is right, like a birthday gift.  This book really explores how family secrets can tear families apart, ruin relationships, and ruin lives while at the same time recognizing that sometimes big secrets might need to be kept to keep people safe. In a climate where being trans (or an undocumented immigrant or having had an abortion or being a survivor of child sex abuse, for example) can be dangerous, more and more people are keep things secret in a way that was more common in the 1980's and earlier.

The book is about a family with a trans daughter in a town where they decide that isn't safe.  They relocate as a family and decide she is going to be stealth, not telling anyone she is trans and living life as if she was cis-gender, as if she had been identified female at birth.  The entire family is tasked with keeping this secret, including that daughter without fully thinking through the implications of how that would play out, even in a progressive city.  

As a young adult book, it is a decent read.  The ending is both not really an ending, but also too neatly tied things up in a way that seemed both unsatisfying while also too being too clean.  I am not sure how to explain that better, other than to say it left me unimpressed.  

I will say that while there were a variety of things here that fell a bit flat, there are so few narratives about trans kids, particularly in the context of supportive families navigating really tough issues and particularly in stories without a traumatic ending for the trans character, that I am going to give this a soft recommend.

​Recommend.