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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I really do not understand the cultural obsession with serial killers and I definitely shy away from books, movies, and shows with these themes.  So, I was surprised when this was recommended for me, especially after I ​started it and wondered what the allure was that led to the recommendation.  Turns out that it was actually a really interesting book, with way mor complexity than I was expecting. I really liked the characters--struggling with their own experiences not only of trauma, but also from the incredible systemic failures of institutions that don't listen to women and don't believe them when they do. Adding to this, the very real phenomena of people showing up that you think are going to help, but actually have their own agenda and just end up causing more harm in their pursuit of that was described here with heartbreaking detail and accuracy.  

It turned out that I ended up really liking this book.  The character development over years of story, moving both backwards and forwards in time during the telling was effective and I was really drawn into the unfolding narrative as it moved from a story that looked like it was going to be about a serial killer, but instead was about the women tangentially impacted by the violence and indifference of so many men in so many ways over the course of a lifetime--and ultimately a story of the friendship of resilient woman committed to exposing the truth about the crime itself, but also everything that happened in its wake.  

It was a great book to read on a trip when I had time to ruminate on the story when I wasn't reading and really sit with its emotional impact.

​Recommend.

I don't know all of a sudden in the last two years I am getting a plethora of horror recommended to me.  Prior to last year, I didn't even know there was a "feminist horror" genre.  Perhaps it is because Here Lies A Vengeful Bitch ended up being a surprise (to me) 2025 hit, I find myself unexpectedly in what turns out to be not just suspenseful, scary stories, but actually terrifying ones with these twist endings that are disturbing.  The graphic violence in this book pushed me to the point of almost throwing up at one point.  It was too much.  Just too much.  

Yes, the plot was clever and progressive and maybe even ultimately empowering at some level in a warped kind of way, but it was also just sad and depressing, as well as gross in places.  

Did it also suck me in and create a ghostly world that I was invested in and wanted to know what happened? Also, yes. But, I am not sure I ended up wanting to know--even though the writing was good and the plotting above average.

SPOILER ALERT:

*******
While this is a book that starts as a story about a woman caught in an abusive relationship with her house, in the end it is actually her husband who is the abuser. All the rest is the story survivors convince themselves is true in other to survive--is it mental illness, a failing of religious faith, or is it really the ghost in the house there to protect you from your abuser?  There is perhaps some comfort in the Good-bye Earl/Janie's Got a Gun/kill-your-abuser-to set-you-free narrative, but at some level the fantasy that it frees you doesn't hold together for me anymore and this story is no exception. When it turns out it was the supernatural house that that killed him, then turned on the cops, but let her and her daughter survivor--well, it was just a bit too  much for me.
*******

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.