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.

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 is a strange novel that is hard to classify.  It follows Raja and his mother for 50+ years following the many changes in Lebanon starting in the 1960's. Through times of prosperity and joy to war and devastation, Raja's life as a gay man is filled with times of love and light and some times of darkness and hatred, including extended scenes of sexual abuse. I really don't know what to make of the book overall.  Parts of it gave me a glimpse into a life and a time and a community I hadn't ever read about before, which I always really love in a book.  Part of it was bleak and full of family dysfunction.  The community bullying and othering reminds us how universal those themes are, across time and place and culture.  The sexual abuse was complicated, but explored consent in the context of captivity in a unique way.  The theme of things not always being as they seem from the outside is also well explored here in ways that I haven't developed well in other contexts. Huge bonus points for an ending in which a survivor just embraces his anger, refuses to feel guilty or not forgiving their abuser, and finding their own path of survival that doesn't take anyone else's opinion into account.

It isn't an easy or fast read and it is the opposite of light.  Even when it is openly funny, I find that humor to be harsh.  All of this leads me to a not not recommended, although I know I will be recommending it for some people.

​Not not recommended.

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.

​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.
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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.

I wasn't sure what to make of this book when I started it.  The first half of the book is a fairly dry history of the KKK in the mid-west in the 1920's. The subtitle of the book is The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them, so I kept waiting for the woman who stopped them to show up in the story.  She definitely did not show up the way I was expecting. 

I think we all know that there is a correlation between men who join the KKK and men who rape and assault women, but this book is a brutal account of that part of their history. We don't talk enough about this connection. This book explores that and focuses on  an unusual court trial.

Well worth the read.

Recommend.

For the first half of this book, I was entirely unimpressed with the book. I did not like the characters. I was horrified by the whole premise where the addict kills his kid when he drives drunk on morning. I hated how the author played with emotion, making me simultaneously hate the guy, but also eel so sorry for him and his situation.  The relationship with his wife, his mother, his father, and his mother-in-law, all portrayed with raw pain and in the first act, this just felt like a poor attempt to manipulate the reader.

But, about half-way through the book, everything shifted for me. I had no idea what was coming, so I didn't know what I was getting into.  I think is is probably why I ended really liking this book a lot.  I want to preserve that for you if you are going to read it, so spoiler alerts ahead here...

SPOILER ALERT!!!!!!


This is essentially a book about the need for prison reform.  It is absolutely heartbreaking to experience the incarceration of an addict whose trauma is killing him.  The brutality of prison, the lack of services, the sexual abuse, the psychological torture, all of it was raw and complicated.  This unlikeable guy, who killed his kid, who lied to his wife, who is passive aggressive and narcissistic, and who lacks significant insight into his psyche doesn't deserve what happens to him in prison--no one would.  There are moments of joy and connection, but those are outweighed by layers and layers of pain, bad luck that just compounds and is heartbreaking -- up to the end when COVID hits the prison.  

END SPOILER ALERT??

Sad from start to finish, this is worth reading for the thought-provoking analysis of the criminal responsibility in an era of retribution.

​Recommend.

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The premise of the book was interesting enough, but the execution was kind of dark and broody.  A golem and a jinni find each other living parallel lives from Syria to New York, navigating a life of otherness, interspersed with kindness from strangers they befriend and lovers they become entangled with in various ways. I did appreciate the historical depiction at the end of the 1800's in those locations.  Overarching themes of loneliness and trying to connect when your very nature seems to disallow for connection make this a melancholic,  intellectual read. In some ways, the ways in which the golem, in particular, avoided abuse of lovely people who protected her and her secret was heartwarming, but the overall mood of the book left a sad haze over me that I couldn't shake and didn't love. But I for sure can see how folks who love this type of fantasy could love this tale.

Not recommended.

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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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