Month: April 2022

memoir · nonfiction

Book Reivew: Golem Girl: A Memoir by Riva Lehrer

Stephanie3 Comments

I was going through my email a few weeks ago when I came across one from the Jewish Women’s Archive. They hold a few virtual author talks every now and then, and I’ve attended quite a few, all of which have been fabulous. The email was announcing the newest round, and one of the books sounded familiar. I looked it up on Goodreads, and sure enough, it was on my TBR! I picked up Golem Girl: A Memoir by Riva Lehrer (One World, 2020) from the library the next day and immersed myself in the world of art and disability activism.

Riva Lehrer was born in 1958. Her mother, a former researcher, recognizes her infant daughter’s spina bifida immediately. At this point in history, infants with disabilities like these aren’t expected to survive. Most are institutionalized, but Riva’s mother is sure she can care for her daughter’s complex medical needs. Riva becomes among the first of her generation with spina bifida to live to adulthood.

That doesn’t mean her life is easy. Everyone around her, including her family, defines her by her disability and by their own standards for her, constantly telling her that she’ll never have a romantic partner (she’s given a hysterectomy at age 15, ostensibly due to cysts, but disabled people were routinely sterilized at this point in history), she’ll never live alone, she’ll never hold down a real job. But she forges ahead anyway, living out her life as an artist, a queer person, whose disability affords a unique perspective of the world. Riva Lehrer’s art is displayed throughout the pages, offering the reader a journey through her career and the empowering way she views her friends and colleagues with disabilities.

This is a fabulous memoir (and it’s so beautifully Jewish!). Riva has lived a complex, fascinating life, and I wish I could sit down with her and hear more stories. She’s been through so many surgeries and medical procedures, and her success has obviously been hard-won; how could it not be in such an ableist society?

There are so many gems scattered throughout this book that provide such insight into what Ms. Lehrer’s life has been like, and what the world was like and how it’s changed (and how it hasn’t…) for those with disabilities. From the stories of her earliest days growing up in a hospital, to the way her parents and her teachers spoke to and about her, the dawning realization of her queerness and what that meant for her life, the casual mention of her countertop coming up to her mid-chest (the world really isn’t built for those whose bodies differ from the standard issue), her writing paints a very clear picture of a woman who has definitely struggled, but who has forged ahead despite not only the obstacles her health has presented, but those placed in front of her by both society and the people who loved her.

I really enjoyed this and was sad that it ended. Fascinating fact: I figured out about halfway through this book that Ms. Lehrer works (at least sometimes) in the same (very large!) building my husband does. I love when my reading life and real life collides. : )

Visit Riva Lehrer’s website here.

Follow her on Twitter here.

fiction

Book Review: This Close to Okay by Leesa Cross-Smith

Stephanie1 Comment

My goodness, it’s hard to get book reviews written these days. Homeschooling takes up ALL of my time from 8-3 and sometimes later (and during our breaks, I’m scrambling to get housework and cooking done, so there’s no review writing getting done there). What little reading I’m able to do gets squished in at night (and this month, I read a few books I don’t feel called to review (parenting book, book for my volunteer job, etc). I’m trying, I promise! It’s one of my goals this year to knock off all the ebooks on my list (since they’ve been sitting there for a while), and This Close to Okay by Leesa Cross-Smith (Grand Central Publishing, 2021) was the next one on that list to be available through my Libby app.

First off, this book centers on some heavy topics and comes with a few trigger warnings. This Close to Okay deals mainly with suicide, and the subject comes up often. There are also mentions of the death of a child later on, along with a scene (and brief mentions of the aftermath) of a burn accident. Make sure you’re able to handle these topics before picking up the book, and if now is not the time, take care of yourself and your mental health and go for a different book.

Driving home one night, therapist Tallie comes across a man standing on a bridge, poised to jump. Unable to walk away, she brings the man, who calls himself Emmett, back to her home, where she cares for him and the two begin to forge a connection. Emmett is a mystery; he won’t explain his past or what brought him to the bridge in the first place, but Tallie finds two notes in his jacket pocket that only compound the mystery of who Emmett is.

Emmett has run from his life and is making up for that by getting overly involved in Tallie’s (secretly emailing her ex-husband from a fake email account he sets up) and alternately considering returning to the bridge. Both he and Tallie are hiding things from each other despite their growing closeness, but Emmett’s secrets are beyond devastating. After a tragedy strikes at Tallie’s brother’s annual Halloween party and Emmett steps in to save the day, his secrets come out, and Emmett will be forced to reckon with what he wants his future to look like.

This didn’t really click with me. I think the first part of the premise – the therapist who stumbles upon a suicidal man on a bridge – was what brought me to the book in the first place, but what happens next – she takes him to her house?!?? – seems entirely unethical. I can’t imagine any practicing therapist worth their salt, who wouldn’t want to lose their license, wouldn’t go all-out trying to get the person some serious mental healthcare. I know, I know that mental health hospital beds are incredibly difficult to come by, if not downright impossible, but it seems to me that Tallie was at least obligated to try. Bringing a suicidal stranger into your home, as a single woman, seems unwise at best.

Emmett’s story, when it comes out, is terrible and tragic, but – spoiler alert – while he’s not Tallie’s client, the two of them hopping into bed together just days after he nearly killed himself seems unprofessional and unethical on Tallie’s part at best. It seriously felt icky to me. That said, I did like Tallie as a character, for the most part. She’s independent and thoughtful, focused on her future and building up her life after her divorce (which she’s still trying to heal from).

I didn’t dislike this one, but I had a difficult time getting past the initial, “Why aren’t you taking this suicidal man straight to the hospital?” That threw the whole rest of the book off for me.

Visit Leesa Cross-Smith’s website here.

Follow her on Twitter here.

nonfiction

Book Review: Free: Two Years, Six Lives, and the Long Journey Home by Lauren Kessler

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The American criminal justice system is a subject that fascinates and horrifies me endlessly; it has ever since I learned about the existence of for-profit prisons in my very early twenties. Since then, I’ve read quite a few books on prison and the court system, and when I saw Free: Two Years, Six Lives, and the Long Journey Home by Lauren Kessler (Sourcebooks, 2022) on NetGalley, I knew that was a book I needed to read. Huge thanks to NetGalley and Sourcebooks (of whom I’ve long been a fan!) for approving my request in exchange for an honest review.

Lauren Kessler has been teaching writing to prisoners for years. So much has been written about prisoners while they’re in prison; she wondered what happened after they left. How easy was it for them to rebuild lives? What made the difference between those who succeeded and those who ended up behind bars again? Ms. Kessler set out to follow six prisoners: five who had reached the end of their sentences and were returning to the free world, and one who was attempting to use the court system in order to shorten his sentence. All would face significant challenges.

There’s Arnoldo, who spent 19 years in prison but who used that time to grow into the man he knew he could be; Leah, with two children in the foster care system and an addiction to meth; Vicki, addicted to heroin and meth and with a long history of paper crimes (credit card fraud, identity theft, etc); Sterling, a juvenile offender who grew into a thoughtful leader while in prison and who is trying to have his sentence overturned; Trevor, whose sentence is overturned and who finds himself forming a life with his prison penpal; Catherine, imprisoned since her youth and released at 30, entering a world she’s never known as an adult; and Dave, who spent 34 years behind bars and who doesn’t understand anything about today’s fast-paced, tech-dominated society.

Lauren Kessler combines deeply emotional narrative with hard-hitting facts and statistics about the desultory state of the American criminal justice system. Free is replete with examples, from both academic studies and the devastating real-life effects, of what prison does to the people who spend time there, and how all of society is affected when punishment triumphs over rehabilitation. When 95% of prisoners will one day leave prison and return back to our society, shouldn’t we care more about how people are treated inside? Shouldn’t we be pushing more for rehabilitation over dehumanizing punishment, avoiding the learned helplessness that happens to so many prisoners and which serves absolutely no one? Lauren Kessler will have you reconsidering everything you’ve ever thought about what happens after the judge’s sentence takes place.

Free is a heartfelt plea for a more just society, a more just court system, and a world that seeks to understand and help rather than punish and discard. It’s a remarkable book that I cannot recommend highly enough, and that left me wanting to read everything Lauren Kessler has ever written. What a wonderful, thought-provoking book this is.

Visit Lauren Kessler’s website here.

Follow her on Twitter here.

fiction · historical fiction

Book Review: The Third Daughter by Talia Carner

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I belong to a few different book groups on Facebook. I’m not hugely active in any of them, but it’s always interesting to see what everyone’s reading and what they think about it as I scroll through my feed (although, annoyingly, there’s a lot of, “Has anyone else read fill-in-the-blank-with-this-New-York-Times bestseller???” and a weird amount of apron-string-strangling posts like “Is Great Expectations an appropriate read for my 17-year-old son?” ARE. YOU. SERIOUS.). A few weeks ago, someone in my Jewish women’s book group mentioned how much she was enjoying The Third Daughter by Talia Carner (William Morrow Paperbacks, 2019), so I looked it up, and whoa. Historical fiction about a period of Jewish history I had never heard of. Onto my TBR it went.

1890s Russia. Life is bleak for Jewish peasants. Pogroms are raging, poverty is rampant, hunger is the norm. Batya and her family are barely managing to eke out the most meager of livings when a rich Jewish man appears in town, offering marriage and a better way of life for the whole family. Though Batya is only fourteen, her parents agree to send her off to America with him, and that’s when the nightmare begins. This man is not a potential husband, but a pimp running a brothel in Buenos Aires, where prostitution is legal and young Jewish girls are trafficked in unimaginable conditions thanks to a Jewish crime ring known as Zwi Migdal.

Batya learns to cope with her life of being trafficked, depending on the support of the girls who live in the brothel with her, but she never loses the spark of what makes her her, and when the opportunity comes to take Zwi Migdal down, she warily agrees, on the condition that she finally get her family out of Russia.

This book obviously comes with many, many content warnings. Rape features heavily throughout this story, as do the various consequences of being trafficked in the 1890s. This is emotionally a very heavy book, so if you’re already dealing with a lot and can’t handle more, be kind to yourself and put this book off until you’re able to manage.

I knew nothing about this period of history prior to picking up this book; I hadn’t known that Buenos Aires was a hotbed of human trafficking, nor had I ever heard of Zwi Migdal. What a horrifying, soul-crushing nightmare the lives of these young women turned into. Their lives were constantly at risk from disease and murder (from their pimps, from their clients) and death due to being thrown out on the streets. After they’d outlived their usefulness to the brothel, there was nowhere else for them to go; even their own community misunderstood what was happening to them and refused them any sort of help or support. Devastation abounded for these women, and the best most of them could hope for was to be kept as someone’s mistress on the side, thus freeing them from a lifetime of forced prostitution to a parade of men.

Batya is a strong character. She’s far from perfect; she develops a tough exterior in order to survive, and this doesn’t always serve her well, but it keeps her adapting and alive. The conditions Ms. Carner describes are deplorable and frightening. While historical fiction often suffers from a sort of literary distance, the writing in this book keeps it feeling immediate and urgent. You’ll fly through the pages, desperate for some sort of positive resolution, because for anyone to live like this otherwise is unthinkable. That this story is based on the real lives of thousands of young girls is utterly heartbreaking.

Although this is an incredibly heavy book, it’s ultimately triumphant, though bittersweet, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s painful, but it’s a story that deserves to be told, read, shared. I’m glad it’s a book I spent time with.

Visit Talia Carner’s website here.

Follow her on Twitter here.

fiction · romance

Book Review: The Intimacy Experiment (The Roommate #2) by Rosie Danan

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I’m 100% always in the market for good Jewish representation in contemporary fiction, especially romance. There’s not a ton of it, so when I find it, I get pretty excited. That’s how The Intimacy Experiment by Rosie Danan (Berkley Books, 2021) ended up on my TBR. But sometimes books aren’t what we hoped for, and this was one of them. And that’s fine. Not every book is for every reader. Here’s the gist of it.

Naomi Grant is a former professional sex worker, star of many, many adult films, and now head of her own company whose aim is to teach people how to have good sex. Over the years, she’s developed the tough skin necessary for people who work in such a controversial industry. She wants to move into teaching in-person crowds, but no one wants to hire someone who’s known mainly for being in pornography.

Rabbi Ethan Cohen needs to get more people into his struggling synagogue with an aging congregation. What better than to invite a former adult actress to teach a series on modern intimacy? The board will LOVE that!

While Naomi’s series grows in popularity, she and Ethan grow closer, but a rabbi and a porn star becoming a couple? Naomi wouldn’t do that to Ethan’s life and career, and Ethan is wary of placing the demands of his career on anyone. And surprise, the synagogue board isn’t happy about having a porn star teaching classes…

This really didn’t work for me. Naomi’s entire personality is brash, angry, and unpleasant. She was rude even to her friends and co-workers, and while the whole point was that she was defensive and lashed out first before other people could attack her, it made her tiresome to read and I had a hard time believing anyone would enjoy spending any kind of time with her.

Ethan was fine as a character, but I didn’t quite buy his whole, ‘Being a rabbi is too difficult for anyone to marry me!’ shtick; so far, I’ve met one single rabbi, and all the rest have been married. I understand that being married to someone who is clergy isn’t always the easiest position; the hours are constant and it’s incredibly demanding. But for Ethan to act like it’s impossible? Especially as someone who is apparently super attractive and has women throwing themselves at him constantly? Nah. Not buying it.

I liked Ethan’s open-mindedness and his sex-positive attitude (Naomi’s as well, but as she seemed so damn angry about it, it was harder to enjoy anything about her). His gentle pushing of his congregation to be more modern was entirely believable. But overall? I kind of had to push myself in order to get through this, which is a clear sign for me that this book just wasn’t the one for me. It happens. : )

Visit Rosie Danan’s website here.

Follow her on Twitter here.

nonfiction

Book Review: Outsmart Waste: The Modern Idea of Garbage and How to Think Our Way Out of It by Tom Szaky

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Part of the reason I’ve been reading about trash and sustainability lately has been because of some of the material I’ve been covering with my daughter now that we’re homeschooling. I’m doing my best to raise a responsible kid who cares about the planet and who isn’t going to junk it up, to the best of her abilities. And it’s on me to provide a good example of what that looks like. I recently signed up for TerraCycle and became aware of some of their local drop-off points for certain items (link is for the US, but you can switch it to match your country, they’re everywhere!), and I learned that their founder has written several books. Why yes, I DID want to read them! Luckily, my library had a copy of Outsmart Waste: The Modern Idea of Garbage and How to Think Our Way Out of It by Tom Szaky (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2014). At 168 pages, it’s a quick read and one that will inspire you, however much you’re already doing, to do more.

Tom Szaky started out creating worm tea fertilizer in recycled soda bottles, but his business soon expanded into recycling those items that you usually just throw away because your local recycling company won’t take them: toothpaste tubes, juice pouches, toothbrushes, potato chip bags. Dirty diapers. Cigarette butts. There’s a use for everything out there, if only we look hard enough to find it. We don’t have to be messing up our planet the way we are; the fact that we are is a choice, mostly driven by economics. Tom Szaky wants you to understand this, and he wants you to work with him to change this.

Changing the way we think about garbage is the first step, and Outsmart Waste will set you on that path. If we can shake up our mindset in order to mimic nature just a little bit more, we could see some real change. Things could improve. That may mean a shifting of priorities, possibly retraining for some of us, but in order to assure a healthy, sustainable future, it’s eventually going to be necessary. Why not make this shift when we’re doing it by choice, rather than be forced by a ticking clock?

This is a quick read, and a brilliant book that’s capable of shifting mindsets. I’m not sure if it’s possible to read this without drastically reconsidering everything about how you live. We can all do better, and Tom Szaky is here to cheer us on.

Follow Tom Szaky on Twitter here.

Monthly roundup

Monthly Roundup: March 2022

StephanieLeave a comment

It’s me, the slowest reader in the world!!!

Okay, maybe not the slowest, but it sure feels like it. Now that I’m homeschooling my daughter, I get like an hour per night to read. Pretty much every moment of my life is dedicated to homeschooling, cooking, cleaning, and exercising. That’s IT.

Why yes, I am very tired, thank you!

I wouldn’t change things – I’m actually really enjoying teaching her, we’re having a lot of fun! – but I wouldn’t mind adding another hour or ten in the day so I could do things other than adult responsibilities. I’m very much looking forward to this summer, where we’ll have more of a relaxed schedule, and I can spend plenty of time out on my backyard swing, reading the days away.

Are you ready to see how little I’ve managed to read this past month?

Let’s get this sad, sad recap rolling!

Books I Read in March 2022

1. The Cold Vanish: Seeking the Missing in North America’s Wildlands by Jon Billman

2. How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith

3. Beautiful Country by Qian Julie Wang

4. Attainable Sustainable: The Lost Art of Self-Reliant Living by Kris Bordessa

5. Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash by Edward Humes

6. Outsmart Waste: The Modern Idea of Garbage and How to Think Our Way Out of It by Tom Szaky (review to come)

7. Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb (no review; read out loud to my daughter at bedtime)

8. The Intimacy Experiment by Rosie Danan (review to come)

9. Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative by Austin Kleon (no review)

10. The Third Daughter by Talia Carner (review to come)

11. Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World’s Most Notorious Diaries by Rick Emerson (NetGalley book; review to come in June)

That’s IT. It’s better than zero, but someone who’s read 19+ books in a month, reading so few feels…anemic. Sad. I’ve read a ton of children’s nonfiction that I haven’t listed here – maybe I should? The stacks we’re bringing home from the library are so enormous that I struggle to carry them. Maybe I’ll make a section on what we’ve read for homeschool next month. Hmm…

Nine of these books came from my TBR, at least!

State of the Goodreads TBR

Okay, so last month, we ended up with 156 books waiting patiently for me to get to them. Currently, we’re at…154! I joined a fabulous homeschooling group on Facebook for secular homeschoolers, and there was a really great thread on there one day about helping your kids become better learners and more focused, and they had some *great* book suggestions (I have one of the books in my library bag right now!). I’m definitely okay with my TBR growing so that my daughter can grow. : )

Books I Acquired in March 2022

None! We even stopped by the used bookstore one day and while my husband and daughter left with books, there was nothing I needed. : )

Bookish Things I Did in March 2022

The only thing I did that might fit into this category was to pick up a spring break activity bag for my daughter at the library! They made up activity bags for kids with STEAM-type activities, so we’re going to be diving in to some of those. I so appreciate living in an area with such great libraries!

Current Podcast Love

I’ve been mostly listening to BBC World Service at night. With the situation in Ukraine being so tense and frightening, I do my best to keep up to date with what’s going on. I don’t have all that much time to hang out on the computer these days, so those few minutes I listen before falling asleep do a lot to keep me informed.

Stephanie’s Read Harder Challenge

I finished A Room with a View by E.M. Forster this month! It’s something I’d actually read part of as a young teenager, and then I never finished, so I’m glad to have finally tackled it in full. It’s actually part of a three-books-in-one book for me; the book also contains Howards End and Maurice, so I’ll eventually get to those as well, just so I can have completed the whole book. Currently, I’m reading Everything You Need to Know About Asian-American History by Lan Cao, Himilce Novas, and Rosemary Silva. I’m very much enjoying it and finding the knowledge I’m gaining super useful for some of the history my daughter has been covering. This was a good choice to pull off my shelves!

Real Life Stuff

What a month!

I feel a bit like I’m on a hamster wheel that just won’t stop, and I’m getting flung around in circles. We get up at 7 and eat breakfast and get dressed; tidy up from 8-8:30; start school at 8:30; have lunch at 11; I start dinner at 11:45; back to schoolwork at 12:30; and we’re usually done with school around 3. (I have a really literary approach to homeschooling, so we do a LOT of reading together, which is why we’re not like the, “We get all our homeschooling done in two hours!” families. I envy them! My kiddo also isn’t very self-motivated yet, so I need to be involved with everything.) And then it’s errands and cooking and cleaning, and dinner, and exercise, and shower, and then every other night it’s my turn to do bedtime, and then I read, and then it’s bedtime.

Lather, rinse, repeat. This is quite literally what every weekday looks like; I write all my book reviews on weekends because there’s quite literally no other time.

I very much need more hours in the day.

I had yet another migraine this month as well, which makes three so far this year already (it may be four). I had an appointment with a neurologist, who prescribed me a different kind of rescue meds – which insurance promptly denied, so I guess I’ll just keep losing days of my life? It’s cool; I don’t need relief from (literally) blinding head pain that makes me vomit. I’m glad the insurance knows so much better what I need, in a medical sense!

It’s not all doom and gloom, though, I promise. This week has been spring break for my daughter, and we both really needed this lazy, relaxing week! I’m trying some new exercise stuff – HASFit on Youtube – and while I loathe exercising, I’m actually having fun with these two. Warmer weather is around the corner, and not this month, but probably at the very end of next month, I’ll be able to pull my swing out of the garage and spend long, lazy days reading outdoors again. And the organization that I volunteer with is scheduling more regular meetings, including a book club, so I’m looking forward to learning more with them. (So when you see me listing selections like this month’s, which is a book about Jesus, that’s why! This Jewish girl is happy to read whatever if it means she has a better understanding of the people she’s lending a hand to.)

So that’s where I am this month. What’s on the agenda for April? I’m virtually attending a discussion with Dr. Eboo Patel, author of Acts of Faith and creator of the Interfaith Youth Core, who is appearing as part of our parent education group’s author talks. I’m going to my synagogue to help pack Boredom Buster bags for kids served by our local rotating shelter program. Passover is coming, and my daughter turns 8 at the end of the month! We’re still not ready to do a big party yet, but we’ve got some fun activities planned for her. Going to be a busy month, but it’s a good busy.

Stay safe out there, friends! The pandemic isn’t over, though I know we all want it to be. I have multiple friends with COVID right now, and our friends’ 3-year-old has it as well. I’m still N95-ing everywhere I go; I’d *really* rather not get this in any form, mild or otherwise.

Happy April reading!