Month: June 2023

memoir · nonfiction

Book Review: Stolen by Elizabeth Gilpin

Stephanie1 Comment

I’ve been appalled by the Troubled Teen Industry in the US ever since reading Maia Szalavitz’s Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled Teen Industry Cons Parents and Kids, and when I recently learned about the existence of Stolen: A Memoir by Elizabeth Gilpin (Grand Central Publishing, 2021) in The Elissas, about her experiences as a teenager forced into this industry, it immediately went onto my list. And then into my stack of books it went on one of my last library trips.

As a teenager, Elizabeth Gilpin was stolen from her bed in the middle of the night by two dark-clothed strangers and hustled off to an outdoor camp for troubled teens, where she spent the next three months hiking, living outdoors full-time, and starving, subsisting on things like raw oatmeal and uncooked raw beans. This was her parents’ first solution to her teenage behaviors such as being argumentative, dating, going to parties, drinking, and being angry. After completing this program, she was shipped off to a ‘therapeutic’ boarding school whose techniques for healing these teens (whose problems ranged from anorexia to heroin addiction to depression to attending parties and drinking to being gay) were modeled on the Synanon cult. Healthy!

Instead of helping these teenagers to develop a healthy sense of identity and deal with their feelings, this ‘school’ responded by shaming the students in its care and abusing them physically and emotionally, making them repeat on a daily basis how worthless they all were. Is it any wonder that one by one, far too many of Elizabeth’s classmates began dying as soon as they left the school? The trauma these schools impart lives on long past graduation, and Elizabeth Gilpin’s memoir is proof positive of that.

Anyone even considering sending your child to one of these places needs to read this book (and Maia Szalavitz’s as well). These schools and camps are entirely unregulated; it’s like sending your sick grandpa into an abandoned building with a sheet spray-painted with ‘HAWSPITTLE’ flapping outside. DON’T DO IT. Elizabeth lost weight; she was injured; the adults were physically and emotionally abusive and manipulative, and not a damn thing was done to actually help her or her classmates grow into confident, capable adults able to cope with their problems and the stress of the real world. These camps do nothing but damage kids who are already hurting. They’re not the solution.

I’d love to see another memoir by Ms. Gilpin, if she’s up to it, about her relationship with her family and what that’s been like. I *think* she said she’s worked through a lot in therapy over the years, which, to me is amazing; I’m not sure I’d have it in me to still be able to have a relationship with my family after they sent me to one of these places. That’s some *serious* work, and I deeply hope her family has done the work as well in order to understand what she went through. My heart breaks for her and others who have suffered because of this unregulated, unsafe, bullshit industry.

If you enjoy the memoir genre, this is one you don’t want to miss.

nonfiction

Book Review: The Facemaker by Lindsey Fitzharris

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It was another Wednesday ‘what are we reading this week’ thread in my online book group where a friend mentioned reading The Facemaker: A Visionary Surgeon’s Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I by Lindsey Fitzharris (Allen Lane, 2022), and of course another friend from that same group knows the author and her husband, because it’s nothing if not an extremely small world, right??? The premise of the book immediately appealed to me, so onto my TBR it went.

World War I is known for being horrifically bloody and deadly. The destruction power of weapons was upped massively compared to previous wars, and medicine had yet to catch up. What that meant was a lot of soldiers with devastating injuries, but when you think of war-injured WWI soldiers, you think of someone on crutches, maybe a bloody bandage wrapped around his head, maybe missing an arm or a leg below the knee. You don’t think of someone missing their entire lower jaw, or of having no nose, or just having a gaping hole where the middle of his face used to be. All these weren’t uncommon injuries at the time. The shooting power and accuracy of guns had increased, and men were having their entire faces destroyed.

Enter Harold Gillies, a surgeon able to see through such wreckage and begin to devise methods to repair some of the damage. He developed techniques that basically invented the entire field of plastic surgery and facial reconstruction, techniques that are still used today. Whereas people use to recoil from these men in public, his surgeries (sometimes numbering in the dozens for one single man, all spaced out so that the patient would have time to heal) gave them a new lease on life and far more normalcy than they could have expected otherwise.

Warning: there are pictures. They’re not pretty. Even the ‘after’ photos aren’t easy to look at. The descriptions of some of the injuries and surgical procedures, while not being excessive in number or content, made my stomach turn. It’s hard to read about. But this is a part of World War I – and war in general – that I haven’t seen discussed a whole lot. What happens, what does life look like, when a soldier comes back from war with massive facial injuries? What does the healing process look like? What does life look like afterwards for that person, and what is their place in society? If you’re not a pacifist before reading this, putting yourself in the injured soldiers’ shoes will definitely make you one.

Fascinating book about an aspect of the first World War that’s definitely not taught in school.

Visit Lindsey Fitzharris’s website here.

Follow her on Twitter here.

fiction

Book Review: Tricks by Ellen Hopkins

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I’ve read a few of Ellen Hopkins’s books in the past; despite being absolute bricks, they’re written in verse, so they’re not hugely long reads. But they all deal with traumatic subjects, so they’re…a lot. I picked up a copy of Tricks (Margaret K McElderry Books, 2009) and this was no different. What a gut-punch of a book. 

Told via the viewpoint of five teenagers (only a few who eventually meet) living very different lives, Tricks delves deep into the circumstances involved when minors get involved with or are forced into prostitution. There’s a boy struggling with a gambling addiction who’s also trying to keep his family financially afloat after the death of his stepfather, a girl whose prostitute mother has never truly taken care of her, a girl whose mother heavily favors her older sister… Each story is its own tragic arc, and each teenager ends up in the hideous position of having to have sex for money in order to survive.

The average age of a minor involved in prostitution in the US, Ellen Hopkins informs us, is twelve, and if that doesn’t make you feel like vomiting up everything you’ve ever eaten, I’m not sure you’re actually alive. Each story in this book is like watching the naïve characters trying to outrun a boulder barreling down a hill. You know what’s going to happen, and it’s almost physically painful as it gets closer and closer. Ms. Hopkins is a master of showing the devastation sex trafficking wreaks on the young, and on the desperation of the characters that forced them into this. I’ve been fortunate in my life, but as someone who does NOT have a way of taking care of herself financially, the way I was able to relate to these kids and their fear and desperation to survive hit really, really close to home. 

There’s a sequel, but I’m not sure I’ve got the mental space for it any time soon. This was a really, really tough read.

Visit Ellen Hopkins’s website here. 

Follow her on Twitter here.

fiction

Book Review: The Wedding Dress Sewing Circle by Jennifer Ryan

Stephanie1 Comment

I love books set during World War II, especially books set in England (I fully blame my childhood love for Back Home by Michelle Magorian), so after reading The Kitchen Front by Jennifer Ryan last summer, I immediately put her next book, The Wedding Dress Sewing Circle (Ballantine Books, 2022) on my TBR. While her last book centered around food rationing in Britain during the Second World War, this latest one focused on clothing. While that also interests me, I was a little unsure about this going in, but all my uncertainty was allayed within the first few pages. Jennifer Ryan is amazing.

The Wedding Dress Sewing Circle is a multiple narrative of three women struggling to survive the changes of 1940’s small town England. Cressida Westcott has had to leave her fashion designer life behind in London after her home and business were bombed to rubble; she’s now staying at the estate of her deceased brother and getting to know the niece and nephew she’s never met and trying to figure out her future. Violet Westcott is snobby and looks down on everyone in a lower class than she; everything changes for her when she’s called up for service. And Grace, pastor’s daughter, engaged to a man she feels no passion for, is dutifully serving her community and never once thinking of herself…but she should.

While Violet struggles, then flourishes in uniform, Cressida and Grace take charge of the community at the local sewing circle, repairing Grace’s mother’s moth-eaten wedding dress and then revitalizing other dresses for the many war brides in need of them. Through clothing repair and design, both women discover themselves and what they want for their futures as the war rages on around them.

Loved, loved, LOVED this. Jennifer Ryan paints such a full, fascinating picture of the constraints of British rationing and she absolutely nails the tough, can-do attitudes and spirits that made it all possible to survive. Women sewed, mended, stretched, repaired, made do, and they inspired each other to keep at it and keep going even under great strain. Ms. Ryan also examines the changes in attitudes about class during this time of upheaval, which I thought was extremely interesting. Violet goes from snobby and Regina George-esque to a Rosie-the-Riveter type, but it’s done in a way that’s entirely believable, and it’s not long before you’re cheering her on. And Grace, naïve yet determined, learns to take charge of her own life. And everyone has a love story, each of them perfect for the time, and sweet and magical in their own ways.

I really enjoyed this book. It made me want to be part of their sewing circle or start my own (not sure where I’d do that, or who would be interested in darning socks with me…). I wish we could have a mass revival of the attitude of ‘make do and mend;’ it’s money-saving, resource-saving, and earth-friendly, everything so many of us are concerned about these days. Maybe that’s why books set during this time period appeal to me so much…

Anyway, this was an absolutely lovely read, and I highly recommend it. 

Visit Jennifer Ryan’s website here.

Follow her on Twitter here.

nonfiction

Book Review: The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime that Changed Their Lives by Dashka Slater

Stephanie3 Comments

Book friends are really the best, aren’t they? A few weeks ago, in our weekly ‘what are you reading’ book discussion, a friend said she was reading The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime that Changed Their Lives by Dashka Slater (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2017). I checked it out on Goodreads and immediately clicked the want-to-read button, because the premise so intrigued me, and on a recent trip to the library with my oldest child, who has been doing a lot of reading from the YA section lately, I grabbed a copy of this book from the small YA nonfiction section. And I wasn’t disappointed. If you’ve ever thought that crime was cut and dry, black and white, lock them up and throw away the key because crime is committed by horrible people, this is a book that will have you reconsidering everything you thought you knew.

Sasha, an agender teenager, was riding the bus home from school one day when another teenager, Richard, who was getting rowdy with and being egged on by friends, lit their skirt on fire, thinking it would only smolder before waking Sasha up, and that this would be a good prank. Instead, Sasha’s gauzy skirt lit up, leaving them with second and third-degree burns over something like a third of their body. Richard is arrested and charged with a hate crime, tried as an adult despite the fact that he was a teenager, and in a way that leaves him facing life in prison. But the story isn’t as simple as ‘this kid committed a hate crime, lock him up and throw away the key.’ Dashka Slater does an amazing job of taking a hard look at a lot of complex topics, and she does it all in a way that’s accessible to teens learning to understand these issues.

Heavy subjects here. A good portion of the book deals with gender and gender identity; Ms. Slater was learning about the topic herself and lays everything out in a way that’s easy to understand. Sasha was lucky to be born into a family and community of people who accepted them for who they were, amongst a crowd of friends who rallied around them and loved them unconditionally. Richard, who grew up in a family and a community mired in poverty and violence, wasn’t so fortunate (to be entirely honest, his family seemed completely normal; I really felt for his mother while reading this); the choices we as a society make about poverty and who deserves what lead to communities beleaguered by the problems Richard’s community faces. We also compound the problem by immediately absolving ourselves as a society of any responsibility for these problems and the crime they so often lead to, and this is obvious in the way that Richard was quickly charged as an adult, with life in prison on the line. We also like to discount the science of brain development and ignore the fact that teenage brains are not adult brains. They make stupid, shitty, impulsive decisions because their brains are literally not yet fully formed. It’s like sending your newborn to their room without dinner because they waved an arm they’re not fully in control of and hit you in the face. We all know it takes babies a few months to even figure out they can willfully move their arms and hands around and use them with purpose; teenage brains are the same in terms of development, but instead of understanding this and incorporating that knowledge into our society, we’ve turned that completely normal underdevelopment into a problem for which the only solution is throwing the whole teenager away.

The strength of Sasha and their family in this book is enormous; their understanding and willingness to look beyond their own pain and the media’s narrative is remarkable. I’m not sure I would be so quick to understand or move on, honestly; I like to think I *could* get there, but it would take some work. The pain and bewilderment of Richard’s friends and family was a lot to read about. They were confused, still struggling with the realities of their everyday lives while trying to figure out why Richard did what he did and trying to be supportive while he fought to even have a future at all. 

This was just so sad and hard to read, and Ms. Slater does such a fabulous job of illustrating the depth of problems in our society surrounding all the issues covered in this book: understanding of gender, safety for LGBTQ+ folks, poverty, income disparity, violence, the many, many problems with our justice system, and so much more. I read this all in one day, but it’s a story that will stick with me forever.

Visit Dashka Slater’s website here.

Follow her on Twitter here.

fiction · romance

Book Review: Mr. Perfect on Paper by Jean Meltzer

Stephanie1 Comment

I really enjoyed Jean Meltzer’s The Matzah Ball; lighthearted Jewish fiction is right up my alley! I put Mr. Perfect on Paper (MIRA, 2022) on my want-to-read list, and finally, finally I got to it! (What with my participation in the Pop Sugar Reading Challenge, it’s taken me a bit to get to some things!). And not a bit too soon, because I’ve been needing some lighter reads.

Dara has a successful life – she’s the creator of the wildly popular J-Mate, a Jewish dating app, a continuation of her mother’s and grandmother’s Jewish matchmaking. She owns a lovely place, she’s set financially for life, she’s got a staff of people who cater to her every whim…and she’s got anxiety. Massive anxiety. Part of the draw of learning to code when she was younger was that it was a job she could do alone, at home, and it spoke to her perfectionist tendencies. But for all her Jewish matchmaking, Dara’s alone, and as much as she loves her beloved almost 90-year-old bubbe, Miriam, Dara’s coming to the realization that soon, she’s going to be more alone than ever.

Chris is struggling. After the death of his wife, he became a single father to a tween daughter, and as if that weren’t tough enough, his job as a newscaster on a lighthearted show about good news is in danger. If ratings don’t pick up, he and his daughter will have to move out of New York, and like they need more upheaval. When Dara and her bubbe appear on his show and become an instant hit, Chris figures out a way to save everyone: his show will follow Dara trying to find the perfect Jewish husband. It takes Dara some convincing, but she’s in.

But sometimes what’s perfect on paper doesn’t work in the real world, and as Dara and the very not-Jewish Chris spend more time together, they grow closer. Can the two of them find a way to make it work?

Such a cute book!!! Dara is headstrong and committed to her Judaism, which I of course loved. She loves everything about Judaism (SAME, GIRL), and is an enthusiastic participant in its rituals and her community. She takes care of her grandmother, Bubbe Miriam (content warning here; Bubbe is 90 years old and dying of brain cancer, but she’s still getting around pretty well), and she deals really well with her own anxiety, which sometimes stops her in her tracks (yet she knows what she needs to do until it passes). She’s driven, smart, and always thinking about her people, and I really liked that.

Chris is doing his best, but he’s still struggling after the sudden death of his wife. He was thrown into single fatherhood of a tween daughter who’s right at that age where tweens go from being a charming kid to an absolute pill and then right back to charming again. Work struggles abound; he misses hard news and isn’t so thrilled with this low-ratings good news show he’s on, but he’s doing his best to handle it all. Dara and her commitment to Judaism throws him for a loop; he’s willing to learn more for her, and that’s admirable. Not everyone is.

There were quite a few times I laughed out loud during this book; Dara is shockingly accident-prone and her reality-show-style dates are an anxiety sufferer’s nightmare. Jean Meltzer truly created a character with a lot of grit here; for Dara to continue on with the search for Mr. Perfect on Paper in a believable way is a testament to her skill as a writer. As someone with anxiety, I would have crawled in a hole and absolutely died, but Ms. Meltzer had me believing in Dara’s return to televised dates. (And can we get a picture or a video of Bucky, the bow-tie-wearing vegan golden retriever???)

Super fun book with a lovely, realistic ending. I enjoyed this, and I’m looking forward to reading Ms. Meltzer’s next book, Kissing Kosher. 

Visit Jean Meltzer’s website here.

fiction · middle grade

Book Review: AfterMath by Emily Barth Isler

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With school shootings being a disgustingly regular event in the US, I knew I had to read AfterMath by Emily Barth Isler (Carolrhoda Books, 2021) when I learned about it. It took me a bit – the book was located in another local branch, and I hadn’t been over there since before the pandemic started, but we made our way back there somewhat recently (the last ‘other’ library we had yet to go back to), in order to find a book my daughter wanted, and I grabbed this and a few other books while we were there. It’s a middle grade novel, and a quick read, but it’s worth it.

Lucy’s family has been through a lot recently. Her brother, sick his entire short life, has recently died of the heart defect that ruled the family’s life for five years. Lucy and her parents have moved to a new town, one that was devastated by a mass shooting in the elementary school several years before. The students are still dealing with the fallout: trauma, PTSD, grief over missing their friends and siblings who were killed, and the town has never recovered. Lucy’s also grieving, but she’s not sure how her grief – they always knew her brother’s heart defect was fatal –  fits in in this place so consumed by its unexpected trauma.

She doesn’t quite fit in, and befriending Avery, the school outcast whose estranged half-brother was responsible for the school shooting, doesn’t do her any favors. But her math teacher, Mr. Jackson, and the after-school mime club he sets up is her saving grace, and what turns out to be the saving grace of a lot of students who are desperate for an outlet for their pain and confusion.

This is a really heavy book and would probably best be read for sixth grade on up (its reading level is likely lower than that, but there are a lot of heavy subjects in here, a lot of discussion of death, grief, family trauma, who has the right to feel what, etc. While a kid younger than this could handle it, I think sixth through eighth graders will have the appropriate emotional maturity to more clearly understand the depth of this book. Which is really something to say in a country where whole classrooms of first graders are being mowed down. Anyone writing a version of this for the Early Reader set? *sigh*).

Lucy is struggling, and her parents aren’t handling their grief well either. Dad is particularly bad off, vacillating between actually trying and shutting everyone out, and Mom compensates by getting over-involved. Lucy’s shaken; her parents are still able to commute to their same jobs, so everyone else has something stable in her life but her. She was torn from her school and her friends, and now she’s thrown into this new school where kids introduce themselves by how they survived the shooting. It’s a strange new world, and Lucy’s not sure where or how her grief over the loss of her brother fits in in a place like this.

Her math teacher, Mr. Jackson, is an absolute gem of a character. He listens, he notices which students need extra attention, he pushes them just a little outside their comfort zones in order to make them grow. And he’s not afraid to show his emotions. There were a few really well-written scenes in which he witnesses the kids being stressed or traumatized by things like fire drills, and he shows them how sad and angry he is about what they’ve had to go through because of the shooting. Kids need that. I think a lot of us have just accepted that lockdown drills and the like are part of our daily landscape, but this SUCKS. We didn’t have to do this when I was a kid in the 80’s and 90’s. This SHOULDN’T be normal, and we SHOULDN’T have a list of schools longer than my entire street full of kids that have witnessed the murders of their friends and classmates. I’m really, really impressed that Emily Barth Isler was insightful enough to show her readers through a trusted and thoughtful character that none of this is normal, none of this is okay, and all of this is wrong. Kids shouldn’t have to practice what to do if someone comes to murder them, something they actually see and hear about happening on the news constantly here in the US.

Heavy, heavy book, but insightful and well-written. This would be a good read for parents and kids to read together, especially when yet another mass shooting happens and kids ask questions.

Visit Emily Barth Isler’s website here.

Follow her on Twitter here.

fiction

Book Review: Yours Truly by Abby Jimenez

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I’ve loved everything I’ve read by Abby Jimenez (See: here, here, and here), so when I needed to read a book published in the spring of 2023 for the Pop Sugar Reading Challenge, I leapt at the chance to put Yours Truly (Forever, 2023) on my list. Somehow, I managed to miss the first book in the series, but all of Ms. Jimenez’s books work as standalones, so I knew I’d be okay (although I’ll definitely go back and read Part of Your World at some point!). 

Dr. Briana Ortiz isn’t having the best time in life. Her divorce is about to be finalized, her brother is in kidney failure and horrifically depressed, and she’s just found out she’s not the shoo-in for a promotion that she thought she was. That last one is probably going to the new doctor in her ER, whom Briana dislikes immediately. But first impressions aren’t always spot-on, and when Jacob sends her a letter, apologizing for their disastrous first meeting, Briana is charmed. 

Jacob has suffered from severe anxiety his entire life, and his new job isn’t making this any easier. He’s already off to a rough start there, and adding to his stress, his brother is getting married…to Jacob’s ex-girlfriend. Life’s on a bit of a downward spiral, but after apologizing to Briana, the gorgeous ER doctor who immediately understands his anxiety and what it requires, Jacob falls, hard. 

When Jacob needs a fake girlfriend to accompany him to his brother’s wedding-related events in order to not look quite so pathetic, Briana readily agrees, but the situation and the slowly developing feelings between the two are complicated when she finds out that Jacob is also her brother’s soon-to-be kidney donor. Communication is key, but she’s maybe not quite there yet, not after her ex burned her so badly. Briana will have to learn to let go of the past and accept all that Jacob is offering her.

GAWD, this was SO GOOD. Abby Jimenez can write chemistry between characters like no other. I swear, I spent half this book sobbing over the deep emotions that she absolutely nailed, and the other half sighing and swooning over the connection between Briana and Jacob. As someone who has dealt with anxiety her entire life, I really appreciated how Jacob’s severe anxiety was portrayed, and how Briana just got it, accepted Jacob for who he was, and didn’t try to blow him off or dismiss his feelings. I wish everyone were that accepting and understanding (instead of just acting like I’m not trying hard enough or that I’m just lazy and don’t want to do something, instead of simple things like making a phone call being as frightening as a pit of slithering vipers). She absolutely nails how overwhelming social situations can be, and how insurmountable things can seem. Briana’s acceptance and reactions are every anxiety sufferer’s dream.

As is Jacob’s unconditional love. He’s just so there every moment for Briana, even when she freaks out (likely because he already knows how that feels). He’s so steady, putting himself out there despite his anxiety, and it’s all just so swwwwwwwwoooooooooooooooooooooon. Total book boyfriend right here. I could not have loved his character more.

One of the best novels I’ve read this year, and definitely the best romance I’ve read so far!

Visit Abby Jimenez’s website here.

Follow her on Twitter here.

memoir · nonfiction

Book Review: The Elissas: Three Girls, One Fate, and the Deadly Secrets of Suburbia by Samantha Leach

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Browsing through NetGalley, I came across a title that intrigued me: The Elissas: Three Girls, One Fate, and the Deadly Secrets of Suburbia by Samantha Leach (Legacy Lit, 2023). A brief glance at the blurb had me hitting the REQUEST button: this was a tale about the nightmarish Troubled Teen Industry, something that’s interested me ever since reading Maia Szalavitz’s damning exposé on the topic, Help at Any Cost, years ago. I was so thrilled when I saw that I’d been approved, and I took a deep breath, settled in with my kindle, and began to read.

Author Samantha Leach grew up with one of the titular Elissas, a born-to-be-wild child who absorbed far too many of the cultural messages that surrounded her, growing up in the early-to-mid 2000’s in a cultural landscape laced with Paris Hilton and Girls Gone Wild, about what a woman’s role and place in this world should be. Proudly proclaiming at the beginning of her teenage years that she wanted to be a slut, Elissa’s path into adolescence is fraught with risky sexual behavior, drinking, and drug use. At fifteen, her parents ship her off to a school in Nebraska that promises to reform her behavior, part of the unregulated Troubled Teen Industry that’s allowed to function with little-to-no oversight in the US and has been responsible for a truly horrifying number of child deaths. 

Using Elissa’s story, along with the stories of two friends she became close to at this school, Alyssa and Alissa, Ms. Leach illustrates one of the least-discussed problems of the Troubled Teen Industry: these schools serve as holding pens at best, mirrors of the US prison system at worst, for struggling teenagers, teaching them how to do little more than survive in a strict, closed system, and giving them none of the tools to navigate the outside world and the behaviors and issues that so concerned their parents in the first place. One by one, in the brief years after graduation, each Elissa dies, likely due to behavior related to the problems that got them sent to this Nebraska school, leaving behind a trail of pain, anguish, grief, devastation, and so, so many questions.

While the author’s writing style wasn’t always my personal cup of tea, I do think she achieved her goals of memorializing her friend and exposing what’s likely the least talked-about problem of the Troubled Teen Industry. Much has been made, and rightfully so, of its lack of oversight and the harsh punishments doled out to the students in their care, but there’s so little follow-up and no real statistics to tell what their programs actually do in the long-term, and thus it seems that they’re not preparing students for the outside world and to return to their former addiction, the temptations waiting for them, the challenges and struggles they’ll face when they return to the same environment they were living in before entering these “schools.”

There are those, Ms. Leach notes, who are helped by the Troubled Teen Industry, teens who take what they need from the incredibly expensive schools their parents ship them off to and end up the better for it. The Three Elissas is not a story that documents anything close to that. It’s not Maia Szalavitz, but it’s a cautionary tale all the same. These schools, Ms. Leach shows, are not places to send your children if you’re hoping for a long-term solution, and the tragedy of the three young women – Elissa, Alyssa, and Alissa – are proof enough. 

Many thanks to NetGalley, Legacy Lit, and Samantha Leach for allowing me to read an early copy of The Three Elissas.

The Three Elissas is available for purchase on June 6, 2023. Support your local bookstores!


Follow Samantha Leach on Twitter here.

Monthly roundup

Monthly Roundup: May 2023

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Summer break is HERE! WOOHOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Friends, this has been a month. We limped along to the end of school, everyone in the house got COVID (still not 100% sure where it came from), the weather yo-yo’ed like no one’s business, but happy days are here again, and I am so, so very glad. Technically, tomorrow is our last day of school, but we’re not doing anything super crazy intense right now, just a little bit of writing and lots of reading about cool stuff, as befitting the end of the year. I hope you’re all hanging in there as well.

Let’s get this recap started, shall we?

Books I Read in May of 2023

  1. Homesick: My Own Story by Jean Fritz (read out loud to my daughter)

2. Action Park by Andy Mulvihill and Jake Rossen

3. Where the Jews Aren’t by Masha Gessen

4. Unfuck Your Habitat by Rachel Hoffman

5. Vincent’s Starry Night and Other Stories by Michael Bird

6. Fire and Rain by David Browne

7. The Giant Book of Tiny Homes by John Riha 

8. Overbooked by Elizabeth Becker

9. Jacob Have I Loved by Katherine Paterson

10. Jewish Literacy by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin

11. Pickled Watermelon by Esty Schachter

12. A Man Called Ove by Frederik Backman

13. You Just Need to Lose Weight and 19 Other Myths About Fat People by Aubrey Gordon

14. Born to Kvetch by Michael Wex

15. Yours Truly by Abby Jimenez (review to come)

16. Aftermath by Emily Barth Isler (review to come)

17. On Division by Goldie Goldbloom (review to come)

Okay month for reading; NOT a great month for reviewing. I caught up in a mass review here, but that’s what happens when COVID takes you down for like a week. Some months are like that, though, and that’s okay. I did make the reading I got done count: six fiction, eleven nonfiction. Eight of these books came from my TBR; TEN were for the 2023 Pop Sugar Reading Challenge! Speaking of which…

Reading Challenge Updates

I’m killing it! My 2023 Pop Sugar Reading Challenge sheet is filling up nicely. I’m waiting for one book to be released, but I’ll be finished with this pretty soon. It’s been a fun time. Here’s what I’ve got so far:

I’ve really enjoyed doing this. It’ll be nice to get back to fulltime focusing on my TBR, but I’ve loved discovering some new-to-me authors and books I wouldn’t have picked up otherwise. I’ll talk a little bit more about this below.

State of the Goodreads TBR

Last month, we left off at 116 (in the teens!!!). This month, we’re now at…

111 books!!! Slowly, slowly making my way to a more manageable TBR.

Books I Acquired in May of 2023

My daughter and I did go to a library book sale earlier in the month. I came home with a giant college textbook of poetry (something I’d like to read more of), and two books on Hebrew: one for kids (but good for me, because I’m still learning!) and another for adults, more on the history of the language, which is pretty cool. Looking forward to reading these in the near future!

Bookish Things I Did in May of 2023

Nothing that I can think of, other than the book sale I mentioned above. There are two of them I’ll be able to hit in June, which I’m seriously looking forward to. I did drop off a few of our books in local Little Free Libraries, so that makes me feel pretty good. : ) 

Current Podcast Love

I listened to a LOT of Crime Junkie when I was sick. I always do. I don’t know what it is about murder shows that’s so relaxing when I feel like crap, but there you go. I listen to History This Week when I’m falling asleep at night, and Digging Up the Duggars when I’m doing my volunteer work or exercising. 

Stephanie’s Read Harder Challenge

So, this is going well, and also I’m changing it up a bit temporarily!

Normally, I set the timer and read for 30 minutes. I was reading one O. Henry short story and then using the rest of the time to read from On the Road by Jack Kerouac, BUT… I’m at the point where I need to read the longest book on my TBR for the 2023 Pop Sugar Reading Challenge, and that’s The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America by Frances Fitzgerald. This beast of a book clocks in at a whopping 752 pages. It’s fascinating, but it’s also a little bit dry, and also it’s incredibly information-dense. It’s not exactly light reading, and honestly, while I want to have all the information from this book inside my brain, if this were the only thing I was reading, I’d go nuts. So I’m reading it in 25-page portions, one per day, and that’s taking the place of my normal 30-minute Read Harder time. I knew this would be a tough book, so I specifically planned to read it during the summer, when I had more time. Once I finish this, it’ll be back to O. Henry and Jack Kerouac!

Real Life Stuff

So, COVID sucked! (No shit, right???) It wasn’t the worst I’ve ever been sick, but I felt like crap for a solid four days. Mostly flu-like symptoms like body aches, fever for one day, a cough, a little bit of congestion, tiredness, and generally feeling awful. My oldest had a nasty cough, my husband had a little bit of cough and congestion, and my daughter just had a runny nose for a day. (So of course I was the one to do all the cleaning of the constantly junked-up kitchen the entire week. *eyeroll* I’d haul my carcass out of bed, clean the kitchen while my husband and daughter were playing on the living room floor, and then go back to bed. Because apparently cleaning kitchens is only a skill I possess. No one else can make dishes go from the sink or counter to the dishwasher.)

My last appointment with the dentist was far enough away from my onset of symptoms that I’m not 100% certain that’s where it came from (and irony of irony, even if it was, it was my shortest appointment, I was only unmasked for about four minutes, and the only person I saw was double-masked. See why I’m not sure it came from there?). Either way, it’s not something I want again! I sure hope science comes up with a vaccine that truly prevents us from getting COVID sometime soon, because who has time to be down for a week multiple times a year???

We’ve reached the end of our first full homeschool year, and I’m glad we made it. I’m also glad we found what works best for my daughter, and that I’ve learned to be more flexible in terms of scheduling. I’m not sure what school is going to look like this upcoming year. We made a lot of progress this year in terms of figuring out what works well for my daughter, but…she needs to be around other kids. She needs some social interaction. I need to not have her fight me over every. little. thing. My mental health honestly kind of sucks right now, and part of it is because all I do is parent, cook, clean, exercise, and read. I’d like for her to go back to public school, so that’s a conversation that needs to happen soon. *sigh*

What’s up for June besides figuring all of this out? Two book sales, my oldest’s birthday (they’ll be 21! Holy COW, how did that happen???), and hopefully, a lot of reading on the porch in the summer heat. It’s nice and shaded out there, and I have 111 books on my TBR to tackle…

Wishing you all a lovely start to the summer (if it’s summer in your part of the world!). Be well, friends.