Month: July 2023

nonfiction

Book Review: All the Living and the Dead by Hayley Campbell

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A few months ago, a friend of mine mentioned she was reading All the Living and the Dead by Hayley Campbell (St. Martin’s Press, 2022), and her description of the book intrigued me. I’ve read Mary Roach and Caitlin Doughty and found them both fascinating in different ways, so this book, about the death industry and the people who work in it, seemed right up my alley. And it was! But be warned: this book feels a lot heavier than those by Roach and Doughty. 

Trigger warnings for (unsurprisingly) a whole lot of mentions of death via various causes, including illness, accident, and mass tragedy. MAJOR content warnings for death of infants, including one specific infant whose death and subsequent postmortem procedures stuck with the author, and a chapter about a specialized midwife whose job it is to deliver babies who aren’t going to survive. PLEASE be aware of this before you read, and if there’s any reason this may be too much for you at this time, be good to yourself and read a different book. This was heavy for me to read, and I’m usually pretty tough when it comes to reading the tougher stuff.

Journalist Hayley Campbell embarks on a journey to discover the realities of those who work closely with death. From detectives to crime scene cleaners, embalmers and cremators, gravediggers and cryonic preservers, researchers and bereavement midwives, she interviews, participates, researches, learns, and comes to understand what the lives are like of those whose daily lives are centered around death. Some of these folks always wanted to go into the fields they’re in; others seemingly stumbled there. Some are bitter and jaded by their profession; others have developed an almost otherworldly sense of compassion. The differences are curious and thought-provoking.

Along the way, Hayley Campbell witnesses autopsies and cremations, deals with a lot of stress and questions surrounding the western cultural attitude toward death, and learns about herself and what she’s capable of handling. 

Whew, this was a heavy, heavy book. Some of the folks Ms. Campbell followed have been deeply affected by their work, to the point of bitterness and anger, and I felt bad for them. Anyone dealing with death on a daily basis has a tough job, and these people really seemed to struggle with both that and a lack of fulfillment (which is understandable. Their services are absolutely necessary, but seeing what they see, I get it). The chapters where Ms. Campbell includes description of an infant’s autopsy (and the subsequent mentions of this in later chapters, because even she struggled after a certain incident when the technician stepped out of the room; I won’t get into descriptions here) and her interview with the bereavement midwife (a specialty I’d never even heard of until reading this book) are a LOT, and they’re things that will stick with me forever. This book has definitely given me a more expansive respect for the people who work with the dead in all aspects.

Incredible book, but be aware of your mental state before diving in, and take breaks or step away if it’s too much.

Visit Haley Campbell’s website here.

Follow her on Twitter here.

fiction · romance

Book Review: Only When It’s Us by Chloe Liese

StephanieLeave a comment

For one of my final selections for the 2023 Pop Sugar Reading Challenge, I had to read something that was self-published. I had to dig a bit to figure out what I wanted to read, but eventually I stumbled upon Only When It’s Us by Chloe Liese (self-published, 2020), and I figured I could use a good romance novel to lighten things up. 

College soccer star Willa Sutter is struggling with her business math (I think it was) course. Instead of helping her like a normal person, her professor demands that she get the notes from Ryder, the lumberjack-looking dude who sits next to her and who has been steadily ignoring her all semester. Willa’s not thrilled about this, but she knows that in order to keep her place on the team and become the next big women’s soccer star, she’s going to have to suck it up and ask Ryder for help. Also, her mom is in the process of dying, so life is just an all-around shitshow right now.

Ryder is sick and tired of his professor brother-in-law meddling in his life. A bout with meningitis freshman year has left him mostly deaf, and since he’s still figuring out hearing aids, things are a little complicated. His family is extremely accommodating, however, texting with him constantly, even when in person, in order to make sure he’s included. Ryder hasn’t spoken since his illness, though, and now that he’s supposed to be working with Willa, life has gotten a lot more complicated. The two of them have chemistry, sure, but they can’t seem to channel it into anything functional. Just arguments.

But over time, Willa and Ryder grow closer, the two of them realizing they’re a good match for each other, but old habits die hard, and it’s difficult for both of them to let the other in. But slowly, slowly, in the slowest of slow burns possible, they get to where we all knew they’d end up in the first place.

This was a bit of a slog for me, to be honest. I felt like it stretched on way longer than it needed to be, and Willa and Ryder’s banter didn’t do anything for me. I felt like it was trying really hard to be sexy and cute and for me it was just kind of annoying. Willa had issues with her dad walking out, and her mom was dying but she just never spoke about it? (And this was another one of those stories where the main character is a college student and needs to study, has a job, is the team’s star player and thus needs to be going to practice and games and working out all the time, and her mom is actively dying in the hospital, and, like…none of this stuff happens with the frequency that you’d expect? There are games and an occasional practice, and some study sessions with Ryder here and there, but Willa’s schedule doesn’t seem to be nearly as crammed full as one might suspect for a working student athlete who has a dying parent. And I realize this verges on the territory of, “No one on TV ever uses the bathroom!”, but it didn’t seem realistic to me how often Willa had down time.)

I wasn’t much feeling the chemistry between Willa and Ryder either. Ryder was just a little too perfect, and Willa could be so prickly that it got annoying (and despite their budding relationship, Ryder didn’t learn about Willa’s dying mother until really far into the story, which felt odd and not super realistic). To be honest, I was kinda glad when this was done. A lot of people really liked this, though, and it wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t for me, and that’s fine. Some books are like that. : )

Visit Chloe Liese’s website here.

Follow her on Twitter here. 

nonfiction

Book Review: We Carry Their Bones: The Search for Justice at the Dozier School for Boys by Erin Kimmerle

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A few years back, I remember hearing about the Dozier School for Boys and the absolutely horrifying allegations of abuse that occurred there. There have been a few books that have come out about this place that I’m aware of, and I’ve always felt like I needed to read at least one of them, so when I heard about We Carry Their Bones: The Search for Justice at the Dozier School for Boys by Erin Kimmerle (William Morrow, 2022), I added it to my TBR. 

In recent years, former students and family members of former students of Florida’s Dozier School for Boys have begun to step forward and demand justice for the terrible abuse suffered at the hands of the guards, teachers, and administration. Beatings, starvation, rape and sexual abuse, and murder were all regular occurrences, not that the state of Florida would admit any of this, but the still-traumatized former students and the families of students who never came home know the truth. Forensic anthropologist Erin Kimmerle steps in to lead a search of the grounds, and the results are far more shocking than anyone could have predicted.

Even getting permission to search the grounds – doing scans of the ground to see if there’s even anything there, zero disturbing of the dirt – is fraught with bureaucracy. The local court system foils the investigators at every turn. Townspeople, whose livelihoods and local economy depended on the school for years, are loath to admit that anything was ever amiss with the school or its employees. Congressmen and congresswomen and the then-governor have to step in (thank goodness this took place under a completely different governor, because I’m fairly certain today that the survivors’ search for justice would be scoffed at as being too ‘woke’ to do anything about, sigh). And when Ms. Kimmerle and her team are finally able to begin their work, it turns out that more boys died at the hands of adults at the Dozier School for Boys than any paperwork mentions. 

This all makes for a very intriguing story, but to be honest, I found the writing a little dull. It plods on with a ton of detail about the archaeology, like, absolutely massive amounts of detail, which, to a lay person like me, didn’t much hold my interest. I’m more here for the emotional side of things: how did all of this affect the survivors and the families whose children went missing while at this school? What does the townspeople’s attitudes do to them? How does the search and the exhausting amount of bureaucracy affect the author? I wanted more of that and less description of machinery and equipment. I did learn some fascinating facts about how to tell when the earth has been disturbed, though, which is something I never really thought about before, so I definitely appreciated that.

Fascinating story, but the telling of it was bogged down a little too much with technical details for me to really connect with it. 

Visit Erin Kimmerle’s website here.

fiction · romance · romantic comedy

Book Review: Unorthodox Love by Heidi Shertok

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My heart always does a flip whenever I see Jewish books on NetGalley. It’s even better when I have time in my reading schedule for them. I requested Unorthodox Love by Heidi Shertok (Alcove Press, 2023) as soon as I spotted it, and then waited. And waited. And waited. And when I was finally approved, of course I already had a stack of books I needed to get to first! Such is the way of a reader’s life. But when I was finally able to dive in, I discovered a read that had been worth the wait. 

At twenty-nine and unmarried in a community where young women most often get married by their early twenties, Penina Kalish is practically geriatric in the Orthodox world. A medical condition ensures that she’ll never have children, and as this is something extremely important to Orthodox Jews, Penina knows she’s damaged goods and unlikely to find a husband. The dates she does go on, set up by a feisty but out-of-touch matchmaker, never go well. So Penina focuses on her family, her volunteer work holding babies at the local NICU, and her job at a local jewelry store. She’s doing her best to make her life as fulfilling as possible, no matter how much she wants what she can’t have.

But everything changes the day a handsome stranger walks through the NICU. This man, Sam Kleinfeld, ends up being Penina’s new boss, the son of the jewelry store’s owner. He’s filthy rich, incredibly handsome, Jewish (though not Orthodox), single (or is he?), and more than a little grumpy. As Penina gets to know him, she realizes how easy it would be to love him, but she’s damaged, he’s not Orthodox, and there’s that super gorgeous, bikini-sporting doctor who keeps tagging him in Facebook photos. So many reasons he’s off-limits.

But as Penina struggles to keep her heart in check and help save her sister’s house, she’ll learn a thing or two about how not damaged she is, what makes a person whole, and maybe she’ll fall in love along the way.

Super cute romance. It’s set in an Orthodox Jewish community, but as Sam is a secular (non-religious) Jew, he needs certain things explained to him and thus he serves well as a point of education for readers who may not be familiar with terms and traditions common among the Orthodox. Penina truly is Every Woman, dealing with not just health challenges that have set the course for her life, but with everyday bouts of awkwardness, like coffee spills, wardrobe malfunctions (a very minor plot point is Penina’s role as a modest fashion influencer on Instagram, which was fun), and constantly managing to say the wrong thing, especially while nervously babbling to fill the silence. Same, girl.

Sam is gruff, a little rough around the edges, but with a good heart. His status as a bit of an outsider, as non-Orthodox, is what allows him to more fully see Penina; to him, she’s not broken or missing something essential like she’s learned to think of herself. Their relationship, always following the strict rules of comportment laid out by Orthodox Judaism, grows, twisting and turning as Penina begins to accept that despite her lack of ability to have children, there’s nothing wrong with her. While at times I felt Sam was maybe a little too gruff (or at least too gruff for my liking, but that’s a personal preference), the two make a good pair.

The ending was exactly what I expected – not just the usual romance HEA, but…I won’t give any spoilers, but in that context, it’s the only acceptable solution. How realistic it is, I don’t know; it’s one I’ve seen before in other outsider-falls-in-love-with-insider type romances, and it always pulls me out of the story just a little bit because I’m wondering about the practicality of it, and how it would work out long-term. But overall, Orthodox Love is a cute, fun romance that gives you a peek inside a world most people aren’t familiar with, and I love that.

Unorthodox Love will be available at your favorite retailers July 11, 2023. Huge thanks to NetGalley, Alcove Press, and Heidi Shertok for allowing me to read and review an advance copy. Support your local bookstores!

Visit Heidi Shertok’s website here.

Follow her on Twitter here.

memoir · nonfiction

Book Review: Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Failed a Generation by Jon Ward

StephanieLeave a comment

Little fascinates me more than religion and its intersection with human behavior. Why do people turn to a particular religion? What keeps them there? What does their involvement look like, and what leads them to leave it behind? It’s these perpetual questions that had me clicking that ‘want to read’ button on Goodreads when I learned about Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Failed a Generation by Jon Ward (Brazos Press, 2023). And this book did not disappoint.  

Jon Ward grew up mired in evangelical Christianity. If you’re familiar with this world, you’ll recognize some of the names of the pastors and preachers who surrounded him. He was fully in, sold out, and adhered to all the principles he learned from his pastor father and the church during his childhood and adolescence. But as he grew older, Jon had questions that couldn’t be answered to his satisfaction, he began to realize that the teachings he’d absorbed so fully weren’t serving him well as an adult, and the hard right turn the evangelical church took to becoming a more political institution didn’t sit well with him at all. Working as a journalist opened his eyes to the hypocrisies and contradictions the evangelical church was making, and Jon began to move further and further away from what he’d grown up believing was the only way to live.

This is a deeply thoughtful, well-written memoir that delves into the tangled mess of the modern day evangelical church. It’s an excellent follow-up to Frances FitzGerald’s The Evangelicals, which I just finished, describing what happened to evangelical churches in the Trump era and picking up where that book left off. It’s eminently more readable and less academic (and less exhausting!) than The Evangelicals, though, which I highly appreciated. Jon Ward hasn’t been immune to the familial fractures caused by adherence to right-wing values amongst the evangelical community; he recounts many instances of how his family’s dedication to the Republican party overrode the teachings of Christianity, how much their conversations hurt him, and how this led to family members not speaking to him for years. I appreciate his honesty here, and I’m thinking an awful lot of folks are going to be able to see themselves in this memoir and identify with the pain he felt.

There are a lot of explanations of church history and functions, but not in a way that bogs the memoir down with information; rather, these brief asides only clarify what Mr. Ward experienced and illuminate the bigger picture. This is a well-thought-out, deeply honest memoir (boy, did I appreciate how Mr. Ward admitted his absorption of evangelical ideas about men and women affected his marriage. I wish more men were this introspective about the damage thata adherence to strict gender roles amongst the evangelical community damages not only women, but whole families. The whole idea of ‘If Mama’s not happy, ain’t nobody happy!’ is true. You can’t raise kids to be adults who understand they deserve to feel fulfilled by demanding their primary parent – because let’s face it, in families that subscribe to this mindset, mothers do the bulk of the hands-on parenting – derive fulfillment from only one role), and I imagine it can’t have been easy to write. I truly hope this book explodes and is read by all those who need it.

(Side note: I was getting in my car to drive home from an outdoor meeting with a local permaculture/sustainability group when I caught the tail end of an interview on NPR. It was deep enough into the interview that no names were mentioned, but as the interviewer and interviewee spoke, my brain started whirring, and I went, “Wait, is that Jon Ward???” And sure enough, it was! If you’d like to listen to the interview, you can find it here.)

Visit Jon Ward’s website here.

Follow him on Twitter here.

memoir · nonfiction

Book Review: The Hate Next Door: Undercover Within the New Face of White Supremacy by Matson Browning with Tawni Browning

StephanieLeave a comment

Between watching the increasingly disturbing news, seeing the evidence myself on Twitter, and recently reading a few books about the subject, the fact that white nationalism and hate groups are growing isn’t a surprise. It’s all horrifying, but if you pay even a little attention out there, you’ll see evidence of it all over. So when I was browsing NetGalley and came across The Hate Next Door: Undercover Within the New Face of White Supremacy by Matson Browning with Tawni Browning (Sourcebooks, 2023), I immediately requested it. It’s a difficult subject to read about, but I think it’s necessary to be informed. I was grateful when NetGalley approved me, and with more than a little trepidation, I downloaded the book and began reading.

For over twenty years, Matson Browning worked undercover with white and Christian nationalist and other sovereign citizen groups, including groups who took it upon themselves to patrol the border (under zero authority other than the one they assigned themselves due to the color of their skin or the place of their birth). He got to know white supremacists, KKK members, churchgoers who interpreted their scriptures in such a way that they were confident Jesus agreed with their hateful and xenophobic opinions, criminals of all sorts (including murderers), people who would later get murdered, and people he never would’ve assumed would be part of these groups, including pastors, teachers, members of the military/veterans, and police officers, including some newer recruits in Mr. Browning’s own unit.

The attitudes of the people Mr. Browning, posing as a white nationalist named Packy, works with are disturbing, hateful, and frightening…but what might be even more disturbing is how little anyone in the US seems to care about the existence of these groups. Mr. Matson’s fellow police officers weren’t much interested; the higher-ups whom he worked for seemed to roll their eyes and sigh every time he infiltrated a new group. Murders – even murders of multiple people at once – were brushed off, simply because these weren’t the regular Black or Mexican street gangs. How bad could a bunch of white guys be?

Very bad, in fact. The Hate Next Door and Matson Browning’s career is a testament to that.

Matson Browning, along with his wife Tawni, who also went undercover with him, shows over and over again how deeply dangerous these groups are, and how they’re everywhere in the US. In this disturbing account of a career spent investigating one of America’s many dirty little secrets, the authors provide story after story that will have every reader taking a closer look at everyone they know. 

The Hate Next Door isn’t an easy, relaxing read. It’s the kind of read that will have you sucking in a quick breath as you realize the danger Matson Browning put himself in in order to infiltrate these groups. It’ll have you side-eyeing the people you work with, your neighbors, the person in front of you at the grocery store. It will change the way you look at everyone around you…but it also gives a little bit of hope. There *are* people who leave these movements behind, and Mr. Browning provides a basic list of things you can do in order to maybe steer a friend or colleague away from this path (a long game, for sure, but worth it). 

This is a disturbing book, but a tragically necessary one. Read it to understand better what’s hiding in plain sight everywhere across the US and, sadly, also around the world. 

Many thanks to NetGalley, Matson and Tawni Browning, and Sourcebooks for providing me a copy of this excellent book to read and review. The Hate Next Door is available on July 4, 2023. Support your local bookstores!

Monthly roundup

Monthly Roundup: June 2023

StephanieLeave a comment

Arright, friends, here we are in July!!! Mid-summer, and it’s been a weird one.

Cold temperatures. Almost zero rain. So much smoke we’ve been stuck indoors several days with the worst air quality in the world (not an exaggeration, unfortunately). I don’t love that; that means zero nature walks for us and no reading out on the porch for me. Huge thumbs down on that one.

But I’m surviving (ISH; still not doing great), and at least there’s reading getting done, along with a few other projects, so. Yay for that?

Anyway.

Let’s get this recap started, shall we?

Books I Read in June of 2023

1. Disobedience by Naomi Alderman (no review)

2. Mr. Perfect on Paper by Jean Meltzer

3. The Fifth Beatle by Vivek J. Tiwary (no review)

4. The 57 Bus by Dashka Slater

5. The Wedding Dress Sewing Circle by Jennifer Ryan

6. Esperanza Rising by Pam Muñoz Ryan (no review; read out loud to my daughter)

7. Great Events of the 20th Century by Readers Digest Association (no review; read a few sections every night for months)

8. Living More with Less by Doris Janzen Longacre

9. Tricks by Ellen Hopkins

10. Bayou Magic by Jewell Parker Rhodes (no review; read out loud to my daughter)

11. The Facemaker by Lindsey Fitzharris

12. Stolen by Elizabeth Gilpin

13. Testimony by Jon Ward (review to come)

14. The Evangelicals by Frances FitzGerald (no review; I’ll talk about this below)

15. We Carry Their Bones by Erin Kimmerle (review to come)

16. Only When It’s Us by Chloe Liese (review to come)

17. All the Living and the Dead by Hayley Campbell (review to come)

I feel pretty good about this month! There’s been a lot of days of reading out on the porch, where the only noise is traffic from the highway and not my husband and daughter screeching and screaming as they run back and forth in front of me (OY). It’s why I love summer so much; I can escape the noise of the house. I’m a little behind in terms of posting, but really, not much! Another reason I love summer.

Seven fiction; ten nonfiction; one graphic nonfiction. ELEVEN of these came from my TBR!!! Three were read for the 2023 Pop Sugar Reading Challenge. Speaking of which…

Reading Challenge Updates

REGARD THIS BEAUTY!!!!!!!!!

The sole reason it’s not finished yet is that the book I’ve picked for that final category doesn’t come out until July, and I’m already on the waiting list at the library for it! I’ve really enjoyed doing this challenge, but I admit I’ll also be really glad to be done with it and continue to blast through my TBR. Phew! This has been a LOT of reading! If I have a chance, I’ll make a post specifically about this challenge when I finish it.

State of the Goodreads TBR

Last month, we left off at the happy number of 111 books; this month, we’re beginning at…

103 BOOKS!!!

I’m almost down to double digits, y’all!!!

Feeling pretty good about this.

Books I Acquired in June of 2023

It’s been used book sale heaven around here this month! Check out these gorgeous piles!

Some are for me, some are my daughter’s. I’m looking forward to diving into all of them! We’ve got another used book sale in July, but the big cram-everything-you-can-into-a-bag-for-$10 sales are done until next year, sigh.

Bookish Things I Did in June of 2023

Just the book sales!

Current Podcast Love

Still listening to Digging Up the Duggars while I do my volunteer work. At night, I’ve been listening to American History Tellers as I fall asleep at night. I really like this one. History is a good subject to listen to as I fall asleep; there’s no loud music, there’s no funny bits to get me laughing and NOT fall asleep, and I already know the outcome to everything, so it’s not anxiety-provoking. This one works well for me!

Stephanie’s Read Harder Challenge

When we left off, I was reading a combination of O. Henry short stories and On the Road by Jack Kerouac (UGH; I’ll be glad to be done with this. Dude sucks), but I put those aside for a bit to tackle the scariest category in the 2023 Pop Sugar Reading Challenge: the longest book on your TBR. And that book, for me, was The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America by Frances FitzGerald, an absolute brick of a book at 638 pages of readable text (more if you count the notes and index, but I didn’t read those) and incredibly information-dense. To be entirely honest, without this challenge, I likely would’ve let this sit on my TBR for years, intimidating the hell out of me, until I finally deleted it in shame, but because of this challenge, I picked it up and read 25 pages per day, usually out on the porch. It wasn’t always easy; the book started off pretty slow for me, but it picked up when the timeline got to about the 1950’s, and I started to enjoy it then – but those daily 25 pages were a LOT. But I did it, I read the entire thing, I finished, and I’m feeling pretty proud of myself!

I’ll get back to O. Henry and Jack Kerouac (ugh), but there are a few parenting books I want to tackle this summer, so I’ll be using my time usually reserved for this project to wade through those.

Real Life Stuff

Oy, y’all. 

I’m not going to sugarcoat it; I’m struggling right now. Life is tough. There’s just so much going on, and I feel like I’m carrying a lot.

Still doing my best to figure out what the heck to do with my youngest for school. She NEEDS to be around other kids; that much is obvious. And to be honest, I think she learns better from people other than me. But she still has a LOT of anxiety about the pandemic; I took her to a play put on by the local two-year college at the library, and she really struggled at the beginning with all the other unmasked people in the room (we’re still masking), and in the building as a whole. She made it through, but she didn’t want to stay there and freaked out every time someone coughed or sniffled (and with the air quality being so poor here because of the smoke from the wildfires, there was a not-zero amount of that). I’m worried that if she goes back to school, she’s going to be so anxious and panicked that learning will be difficult. But she obviously misses being around other kids (and the homeschool group options around here kind of suck, so…). Do I send her back and just deal with her anxiety (and possibly getting sick; so many parents have had so many complaints about their kids just being sick all year long), or do I keep her home and protect her from illness but she ends up feral from not having adequate social interaction? WHICH PROBLEM DO I CHOOSE? 

My older kid has come out as transgender, and I love her forever and always no matter what. I’ll be referring to her as my daughter and she/her from here on out, so y’all know. It’s just other people that make this stressful; I wish this world were more understanding and accepting. Maybe do something kind for someone else today, to help make life a little easier for someone else, okay? 

I’m trying to take care of my mental health right now and am considering going to see a therapist as well. I’m dealing with a lot of stress, some of pandemic-related, some not, and I’m also trying to get out of the house a little more (not easy when you’re the only one wearing a mask in indoor situations, and not easy when I’m terrified of bringing home COVID again). I showed up to a local permaculture/sustainability group’s outdoor art event this month, and I’ll definitely go back again, because those are absolutely my kind of folks. It was a lot of fun. : )

Take care of yourself, friends, and be kind to one another. So many of us are carrying so much right now, and you can’t necessarily tell that just by looking at someone.

Wishing you all a lovely July!