Having the information in this book probably makes it worth reading.  The writing is rough.  Much of the book feels like a 5 paragraph essay, where there is a vague opening paragraph that tells us what the essay is going to tell us, then spends three paragraphs with introductory sentences giving an overview of the forthcoming paragraph, and then a paragraph summing up what has been told to you.  It is unfortunate that this format means the material in the book has been made into a book instead of into a long essay.  So much of the book should just have been cut.  I was so bored as paragraphs, maybe chapters, were spent telling us that we should came about indigenous folks from Central and South America without telling us why or giving us the details of the ways in which they have been oppressed and excluded.  The points in the book where we finally got to the details of these things were really interesting.  But getting there was so painfully slow going that what I really want is for everyone to spend time learning about the topic, but in a different, more efficient format.

Not not recommended.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is a story about stories, a sort-of memoir that writes about writing.  I really liked the premise of the book, which, in a nutshell, is to notice the stories we tell ourselves and others about our lives and to think about how those stories impact us and those around us.  I loved the narrative that reminds us to break intergenerational cycles of storytelling that harm us and our children. The indigenous lens focused perspectives I don't often read.  There was so much to appreciate here and to reflect on. 

The only problem was that the book did not draw me in.  It took me a very long time to finish. It was like the opposite of a page-turner--I got stuck on parts, put it down, and forgot to come back to it. It's slow pace, reflective voice while soothing and thoughtful just could not keep me engaged. The fact that this made me feel like it was a personal failing of mine that I could not mount the kind of love for this book that many people I really respect did just made me feel insufficient, which is of course a reflection on me and not the book, but nevertheless leave me unable to recommend the book, despite how much I really wanted to be the kind of person who would recommend it.

​Not recommended.

Having known nothing about Herbie Hancock other than the heavily electronic version of Rock It from my childhood, I was surprised by a lot of this memoir and I can image that for someone interested in jazz, jazz fusion, and the evolution of electronic music and particularly synthesizers, that this book would be fascinating.  I learned a lot about these topics, despite what might be surprised as a lack of general interest in them, which is one of the great things about reading in general.  Hancock's background in engineering, touring with Miles Davis, and general likeability made for good storytelling, even if it sometimes fell into the name-dropping trap that I often find so irritating in these types of memoirs. 

I will say that I found his lack of political engagement to be disappointing, especially considering the opportunities and relationships that he had connection to. The parts of the book where he wrote about his struggles with addition to crack cocaine were probably the most moving, but his repeated discussion of his Buddhist chanting practices reminded me of Tina Turner's memoirs (My Love Story and Happiness Becomes You) in terms of leaving me with a sense of superficiality.

I am definitely see what others love about this book, but I think I expect more emotionality from a memoir like this unless I have an independent interest in the historical topic.

Not recommended--unless you are a music or jazz lover, then I would recommend it for you.

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Written in 2015, I couldn't remember if I had read this years ago when it was released or if I had just heard about it and read excerpts, so I dug in and read it in its entirety and it holds up.  In fact, almost all of the main topics covered in this book about living beyond the gender binary and heteronormativity to which our systemic structures are beholden could have been written today.  These topics were not new in 2015, but this book was written at a time when the emerging, radical ideas from the era that preceded it had been academicalized and solidified with enduring language and a coherent world view that has stuck. 

This memoir is steeped in Queer theory and is well worth a read.

Recommend.

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This is a series of essays written loosely written around the concept of her experiences with her body, exploring disability, cancer, pregnancy, mothering, and autonomy. There is a lot to like here. Her discussion of using a wheelchair as a child and how this impacted her relationships with peers and others was insightful and provided a unique perspective.  The author is Irish, which put her discussion about choice and control over reproductive decisions in the context of the 12 women a day who, on average, left Ireland to terminate a pregnancy until abortion was finally legalized in 2019. This part of the book I found particularly interesting and covered topics that are not typically part of the American dialogue.

I found the first essays to be the best, with some of the later ones becoming a somewhat repetitive, which is I think a common flaw in essay collections that I wish editors would deal with before they release a compilation like this.  I would have recommended the book, but this dwindling of quality by the end had me finishing the book with much less enthusiasm than I had up until the somewhere in the middle and also a little bored.
Not not recommended. 

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This book is supposedly shelved as a YA book, but I found it to be much more sophisticated than that with layers to the story that could hold multiples truths at the same time. It is a harsh depiction of white feminism that is also able to appreciate the complexity of the criticism. To be able to honor the work without shying away from its imperfections, shortcomings, and both subtle and overt racism is not easy, yet here is done exquisitely.  

The book reads like a memoir and follows the growth of a starstruck college student from The Bronx as she moves in with a feminist Queer icon in Portland for a summer. On one level, it is a coming of age story, but it is just so much more than that.

Any white woman trying to be a supportive mentor to women and girls of color should make time to read this wonderfully nuanced and beautifully written book about the complexity of these relationships and how the insidiousness of racism and privilege are pervasive, even when white people are trying to do better.  I loved the layered relationships, the hard work reflected in the characters who were trying to hold people accountable and the ones trying to be held accountable, even when their failures were cringeworthy.

Set in Portland in 2003, the author's description of the quirkiness and cringy-ness of the city and its inhabitants conveyed the love-hate relationship that so many people have with the sometimes performative, sometimes genuine progressive and woo-woo culture there. From the public reading at Powell Books, to the hangouts in Pioneer Courthouse Square, to navigating the neighborhoods on foot and by public transit, it is fun to read a book about a city you know well.

Highly recommend.
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