Tag: book review

memoir · nonfiction

Book Review: A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy by Tia Levings

StephanieLeave a comment

My horrified fascination with cults and high-control religious groups began early in my adult life and continues to this day. Name a memoir written by a survivor of religious trauma and/or abuse and the odds are good that I’ve read it. So when I learned that Tia Levings, an incredibly brave woman whose story featured heavily throughout the Amazon Prime documentary Shiny Happy People, was coming out with a book, I smashed that want-to-read button on Goodreads so quickly and so hard, I’m surprised my phone screen didn’t shatter. And when that book, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy (St Martin’s Press, 2024), was offered up for review on NetGalley, I went running. I knew this book was going to be incredible.

And I was not disappointed.

But I was shaken. Deeply. It’s that kind of book.

Several times, I had to put my kindle down and take a few deep breaths. Several more times, I had to pull out the tissues, and during one moment, I needed to stop and hug my daughter (still crying, of course). 

Before I get into the meat of this review, please know that while this is an utterly amazing memoir that deserves to be read far and wide, it’s intense. It’s a LOT. It’s probably the heaviest escape memoir I’ve ever read, and I don’t say this lightly, because survivor stories are always heavy with the pain and trauma they’ve suffered at the hands of their cult. That said, Tia Levings’ writing is raw; she doesn’t hold back on walking her readers through her trauma and letting them know that this isn’t just her story. This is the story of a lot of women who have gotten pulled into fundamentalism.

This memoir revolves around themes of abuse (spiritual and religious, physical, emotional, and sexual), Christian fundamentalism, domestic violence, misogyny, Christian patriarchy, fear, shame, fear of hell and loss of salvation, female submission, control, isolation, Christian Dominionism, Christian nationalism, Christian domestic discipline, quiverfull theology, ATI and Bill Gothard, Reform and Calvinist theology, repeat pregnancies, rape, painful sexual encounters, severe medical events, death of an infant, grief, diminishment and loss of self, dissociation, and mental illness. Take care of yourself when you read this book. It’s incredible the entire way through, but even if you’re not a survivor of religious abuse and trauma like Ms. Levings, there are potentially triggering topics on every page. Survivors will see a reflection of the nightmares they lived through; non-survivors will be shocked and appalled at the devastation wreaked upon women and children in the name of God. 

It was a family move to Florida, followed by her family’s eventual involvement with a Baptist megachurch, that set Tia Levings down a twisted path of Christian fundamentalism, patriarchy, and female submission. Due to a combination of heavy church influence and lack of family finances, Tia walked away from the idea of college (too worldly for Christian girls like her, anyway) and instead waited for God to send her a husband. And a husband was indeed sent – though by whom, I’m not sure – in the form of Allan, a Christian Air Force veteran who began abusing Tia even before they became engaged. But with the ideas of female submission and forgiveness firmly planted in Tia’s mind, she went along with what she’d been taught and married Allan anyway. It’s what a good Christian girl does.

Her long-anticipated wedding night was terrible, sounding like something straight out of Debi Pearl’s account of her own honeymoon (if you’re not familiar with the story, you can Google it, but I’m warning you, it’s horrific, and beware, because she and her awful husband are still some of the louder voices in this harmful patriarchal movement), and life only spiraled downward from there. “It’s my job to teach you what we believe,” Tia’s husband informed her. Another friend shamed her by telling her, “If you’re feeling personal ambition, Tia, you need to repent and ask Jesus to help you die to yourself.” It’s no wonder that she slowly began to feel like she was vanishing from her own life, using dissociation as a coping mechanism and losing large chunks of time as baby after baby joined their family.

Fundamentalist Christianity uses severe control tactics in order to keep women cowering and keep the men in charge, and this is evident in every sentence of this book. I scrawled down horrifying quote after horrifying quote in my notebook as I paged furiously through my kindle copy: “You disgust me with your opinions and individualism.” “The elders feel that women getting together is dangerous, because of our propensity to stray from spiritual topics into gossip when unattended by a head of household.” And, most chilling and stomach-turning of all, this quote, uttered by the husband of the woman in question: “Well, it’s time we should be getting home. Mommy’s getting a spanking.” And for context, the mother being referred to here was both pregnant and nursing at the time. And this wasn’t said in jest. This adult woman was going to be forcefully spanked like a child, as punishment, by her husband, upon returning to their house. This is an aspect of fundamentalism that Ms. Levings experienced as well. I nearly lost my lunch while reading the scenes that dealt with Christian domestic discipline.

Tia and her children eventually do make it out, but only barely, and the long-term effects ripple on today. Her story is told in such a way that you can feel her isolation, the mind-numbing boringness of it all, her desperation to give her kids the best life possible in the midst of all of this, her desire for more. And yet, her survival tactics of denial and downplaying make complete sense in the context of her religious indoctrination; this memoir is the best I’ve ever read at explaining the hows and whys of indoctrination and its effect on decision-making and survival. 

This book is going to make some waves. Not just among survivor communities, but also among the general public. Because at the heart of it, this book, along with Tia Levings’ vibrant social media presence, serves as a warning: THIS is how Christian fundamentalists and nationalists want us all to live. All the abuse, the pain, the isolation that she suffered, this is the reality that people on the far right are trying to craft for everyone in the country. Learn it, recognize it, and join the fight against it. 

If I could give this book more than five stars, I would. This is one of those books that I think no amount of words could ever do justice to in a review. It’s powerful, it’s masterful, it will shake you to your very core. Read this, but take care of yourself while you do. It’s not an easy read. Read it, then tell everyone you know about it so that they read it too, and are aware of how devastating patriarchal fundamentalist Christianity can be.

If you’re a survivor of religious trauma and/or spiritual abuse and are in need of support, please visit The Vashti Initiative. We’re here for you.

Huge thanks to NetGalley, Tia Levings, and St Martin’s Press for providing me with an early copy for review.

A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy will be available on August 6th, 2024. Support your local bookstores!

Visit Tia Levings’ website here.

Follow her on Instagram here.

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. 

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!

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

Stephanie1 Comment

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

Stephanie1 Comment

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.