Category: Uncategorized

  • Spoiler-Free Review: Where The Crawdads Sing

    Spoiler-Free Review: Where The Crawdads Sing

    “Just like their whiskey, the marsh dwellers bootlegged their own laws”

    Author: Delia Owens

    Chase Andrews fell from the old fire tower… or was he pushed? As the sheriff investigates the strange death, he discovers a connection between the local girl “Marsh Girl” and Chase. No one knows the marsh better than Kya, the “Marsh Girl,” but does she know it well enough to kill a man without leaving a trace? Will Kya be locked up for murder? or will she stay in the marsh she loves, free and wild, where the crawdads sing?

    Kya is a very nice change of pace from the super competent female protagonist of many novels you get these days. Kya is a character living with trauma. She both craves and fears human connection. She wants to love and be loved, but her life experience has taught her that other people will only hurt and abandon her.

    Kya’s was abused/neglected/ abandoned by her whole family. Pa was abusive, Ma walked out, and her older siblings ran away from home. While Pa was good to Kya sometimes, he never cared enough to take her to school, buy her shoes, or teach her to read. Then one day, he went out drinking and never came home.

    Kya is a lot like a wild animal, acting on instinct and withdrawing in fear. It’s exactly what a child who raised themselves would be like.

    The murder mystery was the weakest part for me. I knew the truth of how Chase died VERY early on in the story. I don’t think the murder mystery was intended to be the point. It’s Kya’s story, and the mystery was a narrative device to drive the plot forward.

    There is a reason this book was so popular and it was quickly turned into a movie. Owens knocked it out of the park with her first novel! It is well worth the read.

  • Spoiler-Free Review: Doomsday Book

    Spoiler-Free Review: Doomsday Book

    “None of the things one frets about ever happen. Something one’s never thought of does.”

    Author: Connie Willis

    In a world with time travel, it would be only natural for it to be used to study history.

    When a young historian is sent into the Middle Ages, she thinks she was prepared for anything. The medical staff treating her made sure she was inoculated against all of the nasty plagues sweeping through England, but there is no inoculation for her heart. It’s one thing to read about abusive historical customs like child brides, it’s quite another thing to see the fear in the face of a little girl you have gotten to know as she meets her “intended” for the first time.

    The head historian fears sending someone to the 14th century due to the Black Death, but it’s back home at the college where a pandemic breaks out.

    Reading this book post 2020, was kind of chilling. Lockdowns, people ignoring the damage done to children, the rules not applying to certain people, I found myself double checking the copyright more than once. I assure you, it was originally published in 1993, and re-released in 2023. My copy was the re-released version so I don’t know if any details where updated after the 2020 pandemic, but the plot itself couldn’t have been.

    This is a very good, very sad book. I’ll tell you right now, this a story about a plague. A lot of characters die. It’s not a beach read.

    I do recommend this book, but I recommend you do some soul-searching and make sure you don’t have any COVID-19-related trauma before you read this book. I didn’t think I was traumatized by COVID-19 until the plague hit the college in this book prompting lockdowns that I found myself having to take a break. I didn’t realize that I had lingering trust issues around how public institutions handle public safety until I found myself upset at how the college handled the pandemic in this book.

  • Review: Cribsheet

    Review: Cribsheet

    A Data-Driven Guide to Better, More Relaxed Parenting, from Birth to Preschool

    Cribsheets Book Cover

    Author: Emily Oster

    I’m spending the bulk of 2024 pregnant. As a result, I am now knee-deep in pregnancy and child-rearing books.

    I bought this book because it promised to be a fact-based approach to parenting, that I thought my computer nerd husband would appreciate. I was disappointed. Oster is clearly cherry-picking research to support how she chooses to raise her own kids. I’m sure she’s a fine mother, I was just hoping for a more unbiased approach.

    Early in the book, Oster shares how she struggled with breastfeeding, So when she insisted that there is no benefit to breastfeeding I was floored. What?! excuse me WHAT?!

    I’m not interested in “Mom Shaming” but I believe in being honest with ourselves. Breastmilk has been shown to contain antibodies (Johnson-Hence) and doctors have been encouraging mothers to breastfeed since the Middle Ages (Stevens) I’ve been doing lots of my own research about infant health, and I agree with what author Andrea Freeman had to say about this issue in her book Skimmed: formula is fast food for babies. It is food, and at the end of the day that’s what is important, feeding your kids fast food is not neglect or abuse, but it’s not ideal. There are health issues women can have that make breastfeeding a non-option, and I’m not interested in shaming anyone, but formula is not the same as breastmilk.

    Oster even goes so far as to disregard attachment theory, pointing out that it has never been scientifically proven. That made me mad. Attachment theory (Fraley) is a scientific theory about how babies bond with their caregivers in correlation to the care they receive. Basically, it boils down to this: If parents don’t emotionally bond with their kids, the kids will struggle to form emotional bonds later in life. It’s not the kind of thing you CAN scientifically prove.

    It’s not exactly ethical to ask people to be bad parents to definitively prove your child-rearing theories. Helmut Kentler actually did that, and he should have been shot! (Aviv)

    I will be turning to other resources for parenting advice thank you.

    Sources:

    Aviv, Rachel. “The German Experiment That Placed Foster Children with Pedophiles.” The New Yorker, 19 July 2021, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/07/26/the-german-experiment-that-placed-foster-children-with-pedophiles.

    Fraley, Chris. “A Brief Overview of Adult Attachment Theory and Research: R. Chris Fraley.” A Brief Overview of Adult Attachment Theory and Research | R. Chris Fraley, 2018, labs.psychology.illinois.edu/~rcfraley/attachment.htm.

    Johnson-Hence, Chelseá B., et al. “Stability and Heterogeneity in the Antimicrobiota Reactivity of Human Milk-Derived Immunoglobulin a.” Journal of Experimental Medicine, The Rockefeller University Press, 7 Aug. 2023, rupress.org/jem/article/220/8/e20220839/214243/Stability-and-heterogeneity-in-the-antimicrobiota.

    Stevens, Emily E, et al. “A History of Infant Feeding.” The Journal of Perinatal Education, U.S. National Library of Medicine, 2009, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2684040/.

  • Spoiler-Free Review: The Chosen One

    Spoiler-Free Review: The Chosen One

    “I’m my mother’s first child, born when she was almost fourteen years old.”

    Author: Carol Lynch Williams

    Kyra Carlson has lived a very sheltered life. It’s just her, her mother, her father, his two other wives, and her twenty siblings… and the prophet.

    When the prophet announces that Kyra will be the seventh wife of an old man. Kyra makes the decision to flee from the polygamist society she’s always known, but leaving isn’t going to be that easy.

    My copy of the book contained an interview with Williams where she admitted that this book was based on stories of young people escaping from Fundamentalist Mormon Compounds.

    I liked this book. I’m no expert on the FLDS but I know that I want Warren Jeffs’ cellmate to do to him what he did to those little girls. As far as I can tell, I think the story here is accurate to FLDS like cults at least in the 1990s.

    The mobile library was striking to me. We don’t really have those here in New England and I don’t know why. Apparently, the rest of the country gets these cool buses driving around to parks and stuff bringing books and programs to the people; Meanwhile, in New England we sit in our Carnegie towers and cry that the children do not come.