Well it seems I have been reading too much again lately and had to divide the last review into two again because fifteen reviews was just a smidge too much. And I’m sure they will come thick and fast this summer with Summer Reading starting June 1st (as I always tend to read more to get to my 1000+ points/minutes, usually get about 2400). Please bear with me. I will attempt to be more expedient in completing my reviews.
Let’s Talk About It: The Teen’s Guide to Sex, Relationships, and Being Human by Erika Moen and Matthew Nolan
I had read about this book on Publisher’s Weekly I believe and they had given it a great review, but I was skeptical that our library would get a copy, so I was pleasantly surprised when I randomly discovered it in the graphic nonfiction section when I was going to pick up a different graphic novel. The author apparently does comics about sex and adult toys, so she is well versed in the source material and talking about it. I thought this was a nice, body positive, culturally diverse, and same-sex couple positive view about sexuality, gender, relationships, consent, dealing with rejection and jealousy, masturbation, pornography (not in a gross way, but in a constructive way as part of a conversation about sex). Now that being said, it was chock full of naked people and genitalia, you get real up close and personal and probably more scientific stuff than you ever wanted to know, but the author is definitely thorough. I liked that she made it conversational, like the book starts out with a group of teens playing Spin the Bottle/Seven Minutes in Heaven and neither of the teens that get picked know what they’re doing so it starts the conversation about liking each other and consent and how you handle starting a new relationship. The only part I didn’t like was the one about the STDs. As the blogger for Forever Young Adult commented “The entire chapter about safe sex only deals with birth control (and never mentions the concept of unplanned pregnancy). The only nod toward sexually transmitted diseases [came in the form of a brief mention of HPV, herpes, and HIV/AIDS]. Yeah, HIV isn’t the death sentence it was thirty years ago, but AIDS still kills a million people every year. You also have to take a very expensive cocktail of drugs every day for the rest of your life. And herpes can be symptomatic, with outbreaks that may never go away. I know the authors are trying to destigmatize STDs, but perhaps you should take the issue more seriously. There’s a difference between shame and being cautious.” Overall, I enjoyed it and would recommend it to more teens. Recommended for ages 14+, 4 stars.
Cinderella is Dead by Kaylynn Bayron
I picked this one, as it had been on my to-read list forever, for the first Teen Book Club program I’m facilitating at my library. At first I thought it was super whiny and I didn’t think I would be able to finish it, however, I stuck with it and it got immensely better. Sixteen year old Sophia knows what she wants in her life, she just wants to marry her best friend Erin and live the rest of their lives together. However, she lives in a totally repressed patriarchal society, two hundred years after Cinderella met Prince Charming. Teen girls are required by law at age sixteen to attend a ball and be chosen by a man based on how well they dress/look, who will take care of them any way they see fit, for the rest of their lives. If a match is not made, the girl disappears and is never heard from again. On the night of her ball, she desperately flees from it and ends up in Cinderella’s tomb. She meets a completely different girl named Constance, who turns out to be a distant relative of Cinderella and her stepsisters. She shows Sophia the real story of Cinderella and her family and how they fought against the crown for years. Will Sophia be able to defend herself and those she loves from the evil king and defeat the patriarchal rules of the kingdom? Or will she become just another missing girl?
I normally don’t like Cinderella retellings because it’s always a little too “happily ever after” for my taste. This one got a little dark to be honest, and I kind of liked that, because it made it more real. This version had a black queer Cinderella who kicked butt and took names. She stood up for what she wanted and with help was able to overcome her difficulties. Plus Constance was pretty awesome, I may have been a little smitten. However, as other reviewers have said, the world building did fall a little flat and I can’t believe that the town just let all this crap happen for two hundred years and no one spoke up. Not the parents of the missing girls, not the family of the ones who were forfeited to the king, or really anyone who saw this crap going on and stood up for what’s right. The plot twists were good and kept me on my toes (once the story got going at the ball). It was a unique take on a classic fairytale, so I would recommend it to 13+ and give it 3-1/2 stars.
The House of Hades written by Rick Riordan
Originally read Jan-Feb 2014:
This book was a non-stop action fest, but also had plenty of character development as well to keep the story going. As usual, this series introduces me to lesser-known Greek and Roman mythology that I might not have seen unless I was very thorough. I applaud Rick Riordan for his addition of a gay main character, something I’ll admit I wasn’t expecting from a well-known children/young adult author who also happens to be Southern (I too am a Southerner and we aren’t generally known for our open-mindedness, with exceptions of course).
The story picked up right where The Mark of Athena left off. Frank, Piper, Hazel, Leo, and Jason are taking the Athena Parthenos statue to Epirus, Greece to stop Gaia and close Doors of Death from the mortal side. Nico has joined the crew as well, as is the only one who can locate the doors. Meanwhile, Percy and Annabeth who fell into Tartarus in the last book are attempting to close the Doors from the Underworld. Only no mortal has ever survived walking through Tartarus, so there is a lot of pressure from their end. All of the demigods do a lot of growing up in this book, which in Frank’s case is literal and everyone else’s figuratively. The Greek and Roman gods are warring with each other, so they’re no help at all. The demigods must rely on themselves and each other if they are going to get through this. The book ended on a cliffhanger though, so I’m dying to know what happens next (have to wait a year till next book comes out). Recommended for ages 10+, 5 stars.
Re-listening to this with my son (March 28-May 20, 2021): My son thought this one was hilarious, even though they went to some pretty dark (literally and figuratively speaking) places.
The Salt Roads written by Nalo Hopkinson
I picked this one as a Magical Realism book for my personal book club, as I wanted to read something different. I normally tend to gravitate towards Latinx writers for this particular genre, so I was glad to know that they had this in a Canadian-Jamaican queer author. It was a really fascinating book, though incredibly weird. The book takes place in three different time periods, and the only way I could identify where it switches in the narration is because of the different accents. One warning I will give is that while I very much enjoyed the story, it did have a lot of graphic sex in it, both gay and straight, which is fine but the frequency with which these ladies performed it was numerous as two of them were basically sex workers.
The first story was about a lesbian Guinean healer and midwife named Mer on the island of Saint Domingue (before it became Haiti) who lives on a sugar plantation as a slave. It talks a lot about Mer’s relationship with Tippingee, who she has a relationship with and assists her in healing duties, but also the extreme discontent of the Guinean slaves on Saint Domingue right before a slave uprising. The second story is about Jeanne Duval, a mixed-race actress in Paris , who is the long-time mistress of Charles Baudelaire, the poet and first translator of Edgar Allen Poe into French. Both she and Baudelaire were based on real people. Jeanne relies entirely on Baudelaire and his generosity (or lack thereof at times) in order to support herself and her aging mother. The third, much smaller story, is about Thais, also called Meritet, who is an half-Nubian half-Greek Egyptian whore at a local tavern in Alexandria. Her and her best friend eventually go to the Holy Land and she accidentally becomes Saint Mary of Egypt, the “dusky saint”. Mer was probably my favorite character, as hers was the most interesting and also she had the greatest connection to the goddess. My only caveat to this was the descriptions of how the white owners treated the slaves was horrific and hard to listen to, to be honest.
Connecting all three of these characters is the African goddess Ezili aka La Siren, who periodically takes over the body and controls these women and their actions. This of course, is the fantasy element of the book. Ezili travels in the godly realm and jumps into their bodies as she becomes bored with one storyline and wants to move to another. As Althea Ann, a reviewer on Goodreads from Jan 13, 2015, says “There are many parallels between the lives of these three women, even separated as they are by time, geography and circumstance. Each is caught on a low rung of the social hierarchy due to circumstances beyond her control. Each ends up in a land far from that of her birth. And each must make choices about who to love and who to cleave to.” Also each woman is a bit tragic in regards to who she falls in love with and how that situation ends up. 3-1/2 stars.
The Call of the Wild written by Jack London
This book was the teen pick for our “One Book, One Phoenix” program as part of Summer Reading. I did not select it, nor would I have picked it on my own as I’m not a real fan of survival stories, but it was chosen and I’m helping to do a book club on it, so I decided to listen to it. I have never read any Jack London before, so wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Well, if you like books that mention the word “primordial” and “virility” a lot and talk about dogs as if they were men, then this is the book for you! Buck, a half-Newfoundland (St Bernard) half-Scotch Collie dog, is the main character of this book. He is a trusted family pet for years at the Judge’s house in California until he is stolen and taken up to Alaska/the Yukon territory as part of the Klondike Gold Rush (which started in the 1890s, though this book came out in 1903) to become a sled dog. Buck is abused and made to fear the club and the whip, the main instruments of sled dog training back in the day (and honestly a bit hard for me to listen to). He goes through several owners before being sold to a group of inexperienced American gold hunters who end up starving half the team to death and killing the rest and themselves, but from which Buck is thankfully spared from by his refusal to go out on some thin ice and being adopted by the benevolent stranded John Thornton. Their relationship seems to be more loving than anything Buck has known in the Yukon, even though he himself is starting to “go wild”.
The title, according to this Encyclopedia Britannica article, says this about our main character, “As Buck is forced to adapt to the wild, his primitive instincts begin to surface.” This is the call of the wild and it is proved further at the end of the book after some Native Americans kill his master John Thornton and Buck goes a bit mad, killing many of them. “Buck then ventures into the forest and becomes the leader of a wolf pack. He becomes known by the Yeehats as Ghost Dog; because of his swiftness, his shadow is all they can glimpse. Despite being fully wild now, Buck still returns to the place of Thornton’s death each year to mourn the loss of his best friend.” The other bit I thought was interesting from the Britannica article was it talking about the themes of the book, i.e. “naturalism, individualism, and Social Darwinism,” seen mainly through the way he adapts to his surroundings, i.e. “at first he submits to “the law of club and fang,” doing all he can to avoid beatings and fights, but, as time progresses, he becomes more self-concerned. He fights Spitz [the lead dog from his second owners] willingly numerous times, an individualistic act as well as a manifestation of the “survival of the fittest” concept important to social Darwinism. Buck’s final transition into a full strong individual who has triumphed over others is the moment he realizes John Thornton is dead, which removes any remaining tethers to the civilized world. After this Buck encounters a pack of wolves that he will come to lead; his strong individualism gives him the power of leadership.” This was way more than I got out of it to be honest, but it is a fascinating interpretation. It is with some amusement that I note that Jack London himself quit school to go join the Klondike Gold Rush himself but didn’t find any and came back poor and decided to turn to writing instead, becoming one of the highest paid authors at the time, circa 1900-1910. I personally was not a fan of the racism in the book towards Mexicans and Native Americans. Recommended for ages 14+, 3 stars.
It’s Been a Pleasure, Noni Blake written by Claire Christian
Noni has been living her life for other people her whole life and she’s exhausted. She is a middle school teacher so she takes care of other people’s kids, she got out of a long relationship in the last two years but is unable to move on, and her best friend is a happily married gay man with kids. One day she decides to take an impromptu trip to Europe to have sex with the one of the people she had a thing for in her twenties but they just never got together. She starts texting her, immediately hitting it off, and they plan to meet up in London. Only things don’t exactly go as planned. Eventually after a lot of soul-searching, she decides to create a Pleasure List and implement this into the last part of the trip. It is because of this that she meets Beau, a Geordie tattooist in Edinburgh. Will she be strong enough to do what needs to be done? Will she ever live her life as she wants to live it? To find out, you have to read this book. 4 stars.
Overall I really loved this book. I can definitely see myself in Noni and the way she handles things. While I have never gone through all the things she did, I can definitely identify with the way she thinks and eventually decides to turn her life around. I also loved the bi-representation as there never seems to be enough bisexuals in romance, at least ones that are empowered. I love her and her friend Lindell’s observations, such as this gem on page 29 from him, “I think aging is actually just getting used to yourself, you know? Getting used to the way you are, the way you work, the way your process things, the weird things that make you unique. I think we spend so much time early on figuring that out, or fighting against it.” This one took me awhile to figure out. As a plus-size girl, it is hard to equate what you see in the media with what you actually experience with other people. It took a long time, and one very patient boyfriend, to see myself as the beautiful person he sees me. It took forever for me to accept me as me, and not the version I wanted to be if I lost weight.
Later, Noni is having a bit of a panic attack before she leaves Australia and goes into the bathroom to calm down, and realizes that she is “scared of the change, of fucking it up. Of the unknown. Of being happy. It feels selfish. It feels indulgent. It feels like I’m a fucking idiot for being upset about going on holiday and focusing on doing what feels good,” from pages 96-97, because she’s never done anything just for her because she wanted to, it was always about what other people wanted. I felt like this after my divorce, going over and over again whether I had done the right thing and doubting the one thing that, though incredibly hard, was very much the right thing to do.
Noni’s pleasure list on page 157 has a lot of thing that I personally want to do but because of one reason or another, I haven’t. Items like “wears things she wants to wear, not because they suit her shape” and “feels confident enough to do anything on her own,” and “doesn’t spend hours and hours feeling nauseated or anxious or running things over and over and over again in a guilt-fueled spiral” are definitely still works in progress for me. I think I’ve gotten better at things like “takes credit for her work”, “values her own opinion and instinct”, and “allows good things to happen, and allows herself to make mistakes.”
The Double Happiness Cookbook: 88 Feel-Good Recipes and Food Stories by Trevor Lui
I like these kinds of cookbooks, where you create fusion cuisine and talk about how your childhood (in Lui’s case being the child of immigrant Chinese in Canada who owned a Chinese restaurant) and what you liked as a young adult (the chefs in LA like Roy Choi and Spanish chef Albert Andria) influenced the kind of chef you end up being. Reminds me of David Chang of Momofuku. I think I’d rather go to his restaurants to try out a lot of this food, but I did find some recipes interesting, like the Coconut Chia Pudding with Minted Peach, Ginger-Green Tea Beef with Cilantro-Ginger Aioli and Crispy Noodles, Sunday Shanghai Noodles, Chilled Noodles, and the Turn the Lights Down Low non-alcoholic drink. 3 stars.
The Emotional Load: And Other Invisible Stuff written and illustrated by Emma
I had enjoyed her first book in this series, The Mental Load, and was looking forward to reading this one. It continues where The Mental Load left off, talking about the emotional load that women deal with on a daily basis. The book talks about sexual consent and what is/isn’t rape, sexual harassment vs seduction, and the belief that “the role of women is above all to be desirable to men” from pg 25. The emotional responsibility of all of that alone is overwhelming, let along all the rest of the stuff discussed in the book.
There is a chapter on a police officer named Erik who worked throughout France and his experiences with racism and corruption within the police. I found the chapter called “Michelle” to be very fascinating as it talked about how women feel compelled to feel responsible for not only their emotional well-being, but that of everyone around them, and this manifests at work through emotional labor – the way we express our emotions depending on the expectations of others like providing a plant for the office or baking a cake for everyone or being in charge of birthday or retirement cards at the office or even providing care for an ill partner even though they can take care of themselves and may not return the favor if it was the female that was ill. The last bit got me especially as that relationship eventually morphs into the role of mothering, which is exactly what happened with my ex.
In the chapter called “It’s all in your head”, on page 152 Emma talks about “turning a feminist topic into a psychiatric issue is nothing new, like women who denounced rapists in the early twentieth century were accused of being hysterical by the medical profession. Or even today the mocking of women who express their anger is aimed at keeping them in their place, by saying things like ‘Aww, what’s the matter, having your period?'”. In Chapter 9, entitled “Just Being Nice”, I was introduced to a term I had never heard before. “Benevolent sexism is all about treating women like fragile little creatures that must be protected,” from page 207. As it explains on the following page, this means “putting women on pedestal and lauded for their supposed feminine qualities while they’re being thought of as incompetent in other areas.” Her example was welcoming a new female employee to the firm and asking for her help decorating, while assuming she can’t read blueprints, even though she drew them herself. It is meant to be well-meaning, and often expressed as gallantry, but the men that do it get nasty if the woman decides she doesn’t want it. Overall, it was a very informative book, even if it did drag on a bit about the bourgeoisie and labor practices in the middle. 3-1/2 stars.
Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds
Originally listened to July 2018: I probably wouldn’t have picked this up on my own if I wasn’t using it as part of a teen verse novels booklist. It’s not a topic that jumps out at you to pick up. Will’s older brother Shawn is killed right in front of him. Will must follow The Rules (Don’t Cry or Snitch and Take revenge on whoever has hurt your family/friends) and exact his revenge on his brother’s killer. So he puts a gun in his waistband and takes the elevator down from the 8th floor down to the lobby. I liked that the author, in the notes at the end, called the book a combination of “A Christmas Carol meets Boyz in the Hood” and that’s pretty accurate. It honestly took me awhile to figure out if the people were all in his head or actually real. Basically, at every floor in the minute it takes to get from his floor to the Lobby, he sees all these important people in his life that were killed by guns, and each gives insight into Will and his brother Shawn, how things have come to a head with Shawn’s death, and how Will is handling or sometimes not handling his grief.
I also loved that the whole point of the book, according to the author, is for everyone to gain a little empathy into the lives of others, and the author does this by forcing us to experience Will’s pain at his brother’s death and giving us an insight into how things have been for his family and friends. In this review (https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-ghosts-of-gun-violence-jason-reynolds-long-way-down/#!), the author also said “Even though this book is an obvious warning against gun violence, it is also meant to humanize young people in the midst of all of this.” I adored the poetry form that he decided to do the novel in and language he used was gorgeous and rich, despite the hard-to-hear subject matter. I really enjoyed this book and very glad I decided to listen to the audiobook read by the author because only an author knows how to put the right emphasis on the words. Highly recommended for ages 13+, 5 stars.
Re-reading for Teen Book Club (May 31-June 3, 2021) the print version: I wanted to do the printed version this time to bookmark parts I liked so I could discuss them with the teens. I enjoyed reading it too and the verse novel format is so perfect for this story. I hope we get more teens to this meeting because this should make for a super fascinating discussion.
Hermione's Knapsack 