Tag: racism

memoir · nonfiction · YA

Book Review: All Boys Aren’t Blue: A Memoir Manifesto by George M. Johnson

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Okay, so a few weeks ago, I attended a virtual talk on all the garbage book banners out there and the mess they’re making and the stupid things they’re doing. Seriously, what a bunch of whiny toddlers throwing super gross adult-sized tantrums. Mind your own business, skunkbags. At one point in the presentation, one of the people presenting mentioned the book All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2020). I was aware of the book, had seen it around, and knew what it was about, but it wasn’t on my TBR…until the presenter mentioned that whiny Texas governor and human sack of lawn cuttings Greg Abbott had thrown a fit over this book. Knowing what I know about that crapweasel with no taste who is grossly lacking in humanity AND leadership skills, I knew this was likely to be a good read, so onto my list it went. And hey! I was right and Greg Abbott is wrong. Shocker, I know.

George Johnson, who has also gone by Matt (story explained in the book) is a queer Black man who grew up with more feminine traits, who took some time getting comfortable with his queer identity, and was fortunate to grow up in a family who accepted him and loved him for who he was.  All Boys Aren’t Blue is the story of his life: his childhood, spending time with his beloved grandmother, called Nanny, who worked so hard to make him feel loved and accepted; his adolescence, where he began to understand some things about himself and worked to hide other parts; his college years, where it all began to come together. Through it all, George learns and grows, and begins to accept himself for who he is: a delightful, intelligent human being who lives at the intersection of Black and queer.

He has so many good lessons for the reader, lessons about self-acceptance, love, courage, confidence, safety, and more. I deeply appreciated how he related stories from his childhood and adolescence to show how he learned about himself, what he learned, and how he applied this to his life as a whole. I enjoyed particularly the stories he told about how he got into sports and how that surprised everyone around him: an effeminate boy who could play football and run like the wind? Don’t box yourself in. We all contain multitudes. 🙂

George M. Johnson has always lived outside the box, but he’s also always found ways to thrive, and he’s sharing everything he’s learned with the YA set. This is an important book; queer kids, and queer Black kids, deserve to see themselves in books, they deserve to have books that speak to and about them. And people outside the LGBTQ+ crowd need to read these books to get a fuller picture of what life is like for their queer friends and family.

And Greg Abbott and people like him are welcome to fuck off into the sun if they don’t have the humanity to recognize that. : )

Great book. I’d love to hang out with Mr. Johnson sometime, because he seems like a great guy and tells some fascinating stories.

Visit George M. Johnson’s website here.

Follow him on Twitter here.

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fiction · YA

Book Review: Why We Fly by Kimberly Jones and Gilly Segal

StephanieLeave a comment

A book on high school cheerleading wouldn’t normally appeal to me. I’m not in high school, my one brief foray into cheerleading (seventh grade) did not go well, and while cheerleaders are incredible athletes, it’s generally not a subject that interests me. But the premise of Why We Fly by Kimberly Jones and Gilly Segal (Sourcebooks Fire, 2021), along with its first person, dual-narrative structure, lured me in right away. It only took a few tries to finally find it on a somewhat-local-to-me library! (Always glad to see interest in the books that interest me. I’m never too bummed when I have to wait a little bit!)

Why We Fly begins with Eleanor in physical therapy, where she’s been for months following her second concussion after a cheer accident. It’s affected everything about her life – not just her ability to cheer, but her ability to drive, her memory, even her personality. Concussions are serious business, but Eleanor just wants to get back to cheering. At PT, she runs into Three, the star quarterback from her school who’s on his way to college football and a career in the NFL, and things fire up a little between them.

Chanel, Eleanor’s teammate and best friend, is super-focused on success. Leadership runs through her veins, and she’s determined to succeed in everything she does. When Eleanor is named team captain, Chanel can’t believe it; with as hard as she’s worked, how is this possible???

This will affect everything, because the team needs strong leadership right now. Teams across the country are coming to understand the systemic racism inherent in the US, and Chanel and Eleanor’s school is no different. The fallout from their teammates taking a knee during the anthem will have dramatic effects on their school, their friendship, and their futures, and both girls have a lot to learn.

This ended up being a really interesting book. I was kind of expecting it to be more about concussions, but it left that behind early on and segued into the Black Lives Matter movement and how that movement plays out in high school sports teams, how high school administrations respond to it, and how it can divide friendships. Eleanor got caught up in a lot of things in this story; I wondered often if the multiple concussions had made it less likely that she would see she was often making the wrong decisions in regards to the leadership of her team (she should’ve known she wasn’t the right leader from the start) and her friendship with Chanel.

Chanel is a dynamic character. She’s complex, driven (maybe sometimes a little too much?), and hard-working. She gets the short end of the stick far too often, but that usually just makes her work harder. She doesn’t let disappointment get in her way; when it tries, she’s able to refocus and continue on. I liked her character a lot; contrasted against Eleanor, who is a little flakier and nowhere near as driven, she felt like a strong role model.

I do wish we had seen more of what made the two girls friends in the first place. I never got a great sense of what drew them together and kept their friendship going. I did really like the information on concussions in the beginning, though. My son had two (mild) concussions during his teenage years; some kids are just more prone to them than others, but they can be really devastating, and I’m glad more attention is being paid to the seriousness of these brain injuries.

Fascinating look at racial injustice and how today’s social movements play out in high schools and among high school students. I enjoyed this one.

Visit Kimberly Jones’s website here.

Follow her on Twitter here.

Visit Gilly Segal’s website here.

Follow her on Twitter here.

nonfiction

Book Review: White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color by Ruby Hamad

Stephanie3 Comments

It’s been another busy week around here, so I haven’t gotten a ton of reading time, but I’m immensely glad I made some time to finish reading White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color by Ruby Hamad (Catapult, 2020). If you are lucky enough to have Black and brown friends who use their time, energy, and voice to share with you their experiences and their knowledge, listen and take to heart what they say. I have several of those women in my life and I’m deeply grateful for their presence and the way they teach in the hopes that things will get better. It was one of those friends who recommended this book (thanks, Jo!); I put it on my list immediately, because no matter how much work I’ve done to free myself from the racist messages I’ve absorbed simply by growing up and living in a culture as racist as ours, the work is never done. We can always do better. And white friends, we have to do better.

Ruby Hamad has written an incredible book about how white feminism leaves women of color behind, how white women continue to marginalize women of color. It’s not just our words and actions; it’s the way we cry, as though we’re the victims, when called out on our behavior. Instead of listening, considering, and realizing that what we said or did was wrong, we break down in tears (and not tears of regret, tears of anger) and lob “How can you SAY that? How can you be so mean?” at the woman or women who had pointed out our harmful behavior. And that’s the problem- unfortunately, we don’t always know our behavior is hurtful (again, living in a racist culture, we absorb messages and behaviors we don’t necessarily think of as racist, but they still are, and they’re still hurtful. It doesn’t matter that our intent wasn’t hurtful if it still harmed someone), and we react with anger, vitriol, and accusations, turning the person who was trying to prevent further harm into the aggressor.

Example by example, using history to back up her narrative, Ruby Hamad illustrates exactly how poorly white women handle matters of race, and the harm it inflicts on women of color. There can be no true sisterhood of women until white women understand the gravity of their harmful attitudes, and it’s up to white women to unlearn these attitudes, to listen and change their ways.

This is an incredibly necessary book. Women of color may benefit from it as well, having their experiences validated and feeling not so alone when they read that other women have gone through these things as well. But if your heritage is primarily from a European background and you check the box marked as ‘Caucasian’ on forms, you need to read this book. Because we HAVE to do better. We HAVE to be better friends, better allies. We need to stop the white woman tears, call out racism and bad behavior when we see it (even if that upsets other people- sorry, but it’s the right thing to do. The right thing isn’t always the easy thing, and really, if someone is hurting people and refuses to recognize that, you need to reexamine how much you want someone like that in your life). Tell your racist uncle to shove it at Thanksgiving dinner; cut off your best friend mid-sentence; and more than anything, when a Black or brown friend tells you something you said hurt her, SHUT UP AND LISTEN, AND THEN DO BETTER.

The future of our world depends on this.

While I don’t *think* I’ve white woman tear’ed (as the book refers to it) anyone, I am aware of several times in my life I didn’t speak up when family and friends, both in person and on social media, were saying racist things. Three specific incidents came to mind as I was reading this book, incidents that I didn’t think of at the time but that I now recognize I should have stepped in and said something. I’m saying this here because I’m guilty as well; so often as women, we’re taught that we need to keep the peace, we need to not rock the boat. But there are already people rocking the boat so hard that Black and brown women are being thrown overboard with reckless abandon. Perhaps by speaking up when we see other white women engaging in racist behavior and white woman tears, we’ll not be so much as rocking the boat but steadying it, making it a safer place for everyone.

This is one book I’m begging everyone to read. Read it, learn it, live it. Recognize your own shortcomings and racist attitudes. Be honest with yourself about when and how you’ve been wrong. Listen to your Black and brown friends, take their words to heart, and be the kind of friend and feminist they need you to be. Because we may all be in this together, but the stakes are a lot higher if your skin isn’t white, and for too long, white women have been okay with grasping for even miniscule scraps of power while throwing darker-skinned women under the bus in order to do so. No more.

Follow Ruby Hamad on Instagram.

nonfiction

Book Review: The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Equal America by Carol Anderson

Stephanie1 Comment

This review will look a little different than my usual reviews.

A few years ago, I read White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide by Carol Anderson. It’s American history with a spotlight on how deeply and violently racist this country has always been to Black people, and while I knew of many of the stories Ms. Anderson recounted, the details she included and the stories I hadn’t known about were shocking. I was appalled, and this has since become one of the books I recommend the most, because it’s history that everyone needs to know about and understand. Because of that well-written, beautifully researched, and eye-opening book, everything Carol Anderson has ever written is on my TBR- though I’m spacing them out; they’re a lot to handle, but they’re such important books- and next up was The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021).

The Second Amendment, which gives Americans the right to bear arms, has never been applied equally. We’ve seen that play out time and time again, when Black people (usually men, though not always) who are legally in possession of a weapon and are acting in a responsible manner with it are shot and killed (whereas white men who have murdered people as part of an active shooter situation are taken into custody alive and unharmed). Think of Philando Castile or Tamir Rice, both now dead- one had a legally registered gun, which he had informed the police about; the other had a toy gun. Both are now dead. Compare that with all the perpetrators of mass shootings we’ve seen in the US that have been taken into custody alive, even after murdering people. There is a history to all of this, unfair rules that were harshly applied to the Black community, who were never allowed to defend themselves against anything or anyone, and Ms. Anderson meticulously documents it all in the pages of this book.

The Second isn’t a long book (there are a lot of footnotes; her research is meticulous, and I ended up flipping to the back quite often out of curiosity as to what sources she was using, and also because I wrote down a few quotes and wanted the original sources), but there’s a lot to digest here, a lot to wrap your brain around, and I had to keep stopping and rereading passages to make sure I understood them. American history as we’re taught in school is usually about brave patriots who stood up to tyrants; they leave out how often we were the tyrants ourselves. We leave out how racist our founding fathers were; we leave out most of the laws and court rulings that told Black people in no uncertain terms that they weren’t human beings, that their lives were worthless, that they weren’t entitled to self-defense or the rights of citizenship. Carol Anderson doesn’t leave these things out; she’s the education you should have gotten before, but likely didn’t. I was actually lucky and had a few grade school teachers that didn’t hold back when it came to speaking truth about American history; even so, there have still been many things I missed, and I’m grateful to Ms. Anderson and other writers like her to help fill in the gaps and help me understand exactly how deep the injustice in this country runs.

This review is more to make readers aware that this book exists- I’m not a historian and can’t review it as such, but the history she relates is heartbreaking and infuriating- and that Ms. Anderson’s writings are important and deserve your attention and consideration. The US has a lot of work to do to clean up the messes it’s made. To be honest, I’m not sure we have the willpower to do it; there are a frightening number of people out there who seem to revel in being as cruel as possible to as many groups as possible. But the decent people among us know that it’s a fight worth fighting, no matter what the odds, and the first step is being aware of exactly how much work there is to be done. Books like The Second and White Rage are excellent places to start.

Visit Carol Anderson’s website here.

Follow her on Twitter here.

nonfiction

Book Review: Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War by Tony Horwitz

Stephanie3 Comments

Sometimes books end up on my TBR because people I love have read and raved about them, and that’s how I came across Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War by Tony Horwitz (Vintage, 1999). My friend Sandy had read it years ago and mentioned it in my parenting forum- she may have even recommended it directly to me as something she thought I’d like. Onto my TBR it went! To be honest, if I’d seen the publication date, I may not have read it; I was a little iffy about starting it when I did see it. Not because I have anything against older books, but sometimes older nonfiction can be out of date and irrelevant. Not so with this book; if anything, this book reveals how long today’s problems have been simmering. It should have served as a massive, massive red flag when it was first published.

The American Civil War, fought from 1861 to 1865, is still a source of deep fascination for many Americans (and some non-Americans, as Mr. Horwitz shows!). From amateur history buffs to hardcore reenactors, from condescending politicians to red-faced parents screaming in stuffy high school gyms about Confederate flags and racist high school mascots, so many people think they know exactly what the Civil War was fought for and what happened at every step of the way. Some of these people get it. Others have rewritten their own version of history and have dedicated their lives to living in a way that honors that revised history. For so many people, for a multitude of reasons, the Civil War didn’t end and it’s still being played out in various forms today.

Tony Horwitz travels all over the South, visiting battlefields, gravesites, reenactments, museums, and the people who are still living out the consequences of Americans fighting Americans. He covers the tense racial climate that persists in this country, that we never really dealt with and that will continue to persist until we do. He follows a few hardcore reenactors who wear grimy, period-appropriate costumes (that they don’t wash, for authenticity, right along with their bodies…ew) as they tramp across various battlefields in the heat of a southern summer. He profiles a murder that happened because of a Confederate flag, a woman makes a career of performing as Scarlett O’Hara (and is beloved by the Japanese, who apparently adore Southern culture), and visits dusty museums with sometimes bizarre period relics.

There are so many times where this book fairly screams out, “You should have seen this coming, 2021 reader!” The hatred, the racial tension, the division, the utter selfishness and concern for no one but oneself, all of this is right there in the text and makes it fairly obvious that the rise of Donald Trump and the cult that follows him was inevitable and shouldn’t have surprised anyone. It wasn’t a surprise to me, based on other things I’ve followed for most of my adult life, but this book lays it all out there and makes it utterly, utterly obvious in a way that’s honestly pretty depressing.

You don’t have to be a history buff or love the Civil War in order to read this, but it helps. Tony Horwitz has an almost jovial writing style that makes the reader feel as though they’re riding in the car next to him, tramping along beside him on a Virginia battlefield, and listening to him interview his various subjects. He goes places that I wouldn’t feel safe or comfortable in, even after his interviewees make hideous antisemitic comments (Mr. Horwitz was Jewish), and his bravery here is to be admired. This book is a fascinating look at what some people take away from history, what they choose to cling to, and what we as a country can’t move on from. Perhaps we don’t really want to.

There are other Tony Horwitz books that I’d like to read, but as he died, far too young, in 2019, my brain is already screaming at me to space them out, to make what he left for us last, so I don’t know when I’ll pick up another of his books, but this definitely won’t be my last. His style and clarity really spoke to me, and I’m looking forward to reading more of his insights.

Tony Horwitz, who was married to author Geraldine Brooks, died in 2019. Visit his website here.

nonfiction

Book Review: The Organ Thieves: The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant in the Segregated South by Chip Jones

Stephanie1 Comment

The US has a terrible past (and present) in regards to racism. Scratch the surface of just about any topic and you’ll reveal its racist roots- it’s an unfortunately truth, because things didn’t have to be things way, but we let it, and the only way to change things going forward is to confront what we’ve been and resolve not to be that again. The history of medical research leading up to the miracle of modern organ transplantation is no different, and after discovering The Organ Thieves: The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant in the Segregated South by Chip Jones (Gallery/Jeter Publishing, 2020) in a Book Riot email, I knew I had to read it. Onto my TBR it went.

In 1968, William Tucker, a Black man from Virginia got a received a strange phone call about his brother Bruce- something about his being in the hospital, and a bizarre comment about them taking his heart. After scrambling for information that no one seemed to want to provide, William learned that Bruce had died following a head injury. The hospital had never contacted anyone from the family, despite William’s business card with his phone number being in Bruce’s wallet upon his arrival at the hospital, and stranger still, they had removed his heart and kidneys without permission in order to use them for transplants, a new and still very much experimental procedure at this time. William was horrified at this desecration of his brother’s body and contacted a lawyer.

But medical experiments (often ones that lead to groundbreaking research and treatments) have a deeply racist history in the US; the progress medical science has made has often been built on brown and Black backs and bodies, quite often without their consent. Chip Jones delves into the history of Black grave robbing by medical schools for research purposes and how that led to William Tucker’s missing organs. His case went to court, and the outcome ultimately led to a change in legislation when it comes to organ donation and consent, but the history is there and cannot be erased, nor should it be hidden. The Organ Thieves shines a light on a subject a lot of people most likely know very little about.

Organ transplants have featured heavily in the books I’ve read throughout my life. In the 80s and 90s when I was growing up, I read Why Me? by Deborah Kent (about an adopted teenager who receives a donated kidney from her biological mother) over and over again, and plowed through a ton of Lurlene McDaniel’s medical dramas for young adults, which often featured teenagers who were awaiting donated organs. And of course there was Jodi Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper, and recently, Rachel Solomon’s Our Year of Maybe. But I never really knew the history of transplantation, the many failures and deaths it took to get to the place where receiving a donated organ meant a new lease on life, the difficulties doctors first had in recognizing the symptoms of rejection, and what this all meant for Black patients. They were aware of the grave robbing and knew this would have bigger implications, and unfortunately, this proved to be true. And all of this and more (such as history of the Tuskegee study) has led to the hesitancy of Black people in taking the Covid-19 vaccine. History never dies; its consequences ring throughout time like the loudest of bells.

There’s even more racist medical history that Mr. Jones doesn’t touch (the history of gynecology is utterly horrifying), but what he does cover is bad enough. The trial that covered the removal of Bruce Tucker’s organs without family consent is a complex read; the trial itself raised many questions and led to necessary changes in legislation, but at a heavy emotional cost for the Tucker family and the many others who came before them. So much of our progress as a society- maybe all of it- has been made at the expense of others.

At times, the story gets just the tiniest bit dry, but The Organ Thieves is so important that pushing on through is necessary and rewarding- you’ll be better informed, a better ally, better at knowing what shouldn’t be. If you’ve ever read or watched a medical thriller or drama and enjoyed it, or benefited from organ transplants or medical research that came from corpses dug up in the dead of night (and this is probably everyone), this is a book you should be aware of. We owe those unnamed people and Bruce Tucker that much.

Visit Chip Jones’s website here.

nonfiction

Book Review: An American Summer: Love and Death in Chicago by Alex Kotlowitz

Stephanie2 Comments

What do you know about Chicago? The Sears Tower (it’ll never be the Willis Tower, dammit!), the Magnificent Mile, Lake Shore Drive, our sports teams, corrupt politicians…and violence. Maybe Chicago’s violence was the first thing to come to your mind. But whatever you think you know, the story most likely goes deeper, and one of the very best people out there telling the story of the devastation suffered by Chicago’s Black and brown communities is journalist and author Alex Kotlowitz. He’s probably best know for There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America (if you haven’t read that, I highly recommend it). I’ve admired him for years, and I was excited to read his latest, An American Summer: Love and Death in Chicago (Nan A. Talese, 2019). There aren’t a whole lot of people out there writing books about Chicago, but Alex Kotlowitz’s masterful writing and storytelling is the equivalent of a thousand lesser authors.

An American Summer begins with Pharoah (not a misspelling), one of the boys profiled in There Are No Children Here, giving an update on his tumultuous life. Mr. Kotlowitz then delves deeply into Chicago’s most violent communities, expanding upon the stories that make headlines, the ones people blow off because they read ‘gang member’ and immediately dismiss the victim/s as unworthy of sympathy. The story, as always, goes far deeper than that. These are real people, loved by their family, friends, and community; they’re parents, friends, employees, students. They’re people who have spent the vast majority of their lives being traumatized over and over again by the violent deaths of their loved ones and community members, and being dismissed by the world around them as not worth caring about. The phrase ‘hurt people hurt people’ comes to mind often when reading their stories, and while it’s difficult to grasp this level of violence, this book illuminates what daily life looks like for the people who live it.

Alex Kotlowitz paints pictures of bleak, isolated neighborhoods full of run-down homes, often abandoned, full of bullet holes and grieving families. These communities aren’t without hope, though it’s occasionally difficult to find. There are high schoolers who have witnessed multiple deaths by gunshot- of friends, of family members, of strangers, often right in front of them. These are entire neighborhoods of people with the worst forms of PTSD and no hope for treatment, because unemployment- and thus lack of health insurance and an income high enough to pay for regular therapy and medicine- is so high that comprehensive treatment is often out of reach.

An American Summer is nonfiction that reads like a heartbreaking novel, but this is all tragically real. I could get into my car and be in some of these neighborhoods in less than half an hour. The massive difference between their lives, their neighborhoods, and mine is unfathomable, and it should never, ever have become like this. These people deserve so much better than what racist America has afforded them. They need jobs, fully funded education, healthcare (including comprehensive medical care)- the same thing the rest of America needs, but the situation is desperate here, and no one makes this clearer than Alex Kotlowitz.

If you think you know Chicago, read Alex Kotlowitz’s work. He’ll show you another side, the people behind the headlines, the trauma lived there every day. It’ll break your heart in a thousand different ways.

Visit Alex Kotlowitz’s website here.

nonfiction

Book Review: Stamped from the Beginning: A Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi

Stephanie1 Comment

Slightly different kind of book review today. Not as much of a review as a recommendation, and a plea.

I’ve had Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi (Bold Type Books, 2016) on my kindle for a while, but I hadn’t gotten around to it yet. Which made it a perfect choice for my parenting group’s reading challenge pick for a book that’s been sitting around on our shelves (or digital shelves) for a while. I’m glad my copy was digital; had I been able to flip through a paper copy, I would have been intimated both by the size (592 pages!) and the academic writing style. Instead, I clicked on the icon on my kindle and dove in.

This is a history of racism and racist ideas in the United States from the beginning of the country up until the present (or at least until the book was published in 2016). Whatever you think you know about racism in this country, it’s worse, and this book pulls no punches. That historical figure you always admired? Racist, and disgustingly so. That president you considered a decent guy? Yeah, he said some horrible things and signed off on policies that mirrored those things. History looks a little different than the stars-and-stripes-waving rhetoric that American grade school textbooks push, and if you haven’t really looked into history beyond that, you need to. This book is a good place to start.

This book is extremely comparable in tone and depth to Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, so don’t go in expecting an easy, relaxing read; this is a book you work for. There were sentences and paragraphs I needed to reread to make sure I was understanding them fully. There were times when I paused and looked things up online to get some extra information. And on nearly every page, there’s a story that made me want to hurl the book across the room in a total rage. How are people like this? Why? How are they still like this? This book doesn’t answer those questions, but it does provide a fuller picture of the suffering that people who look like me have caused to Black people, and it provides impetus for doing better NOW.

I know over the summer this was free as an audiobook on Spotify; I don’t know about now, but most libraries should have it available. I don’t normally make the suggestion of audiobooks, since I myself don’t listen to them (not enough quiet time here, plus at least for fiction, my brain tends to wander), but if those are your jam, I highly, highly recommend this on audiobook as an easier way of making it through the book, because this is an information-packed, intense read, and I so want everyone to read this book. It’s 2020, people. We should have been beyond racism a loooooooooooonnnnnnnnnnnnng time ago, and instead, we’re still…here. We have to do better. And we can.

Start here. Start with this book. And then go out and do better and be better.

Visit Ibram X. Kendi’s website here.

Follow him on Twitter here.

fiction · YA

Book Review: In the Neighborhood of True by Susan Kaplan Carlton

Stephanie3 Comments

Another book list gem! I picked up a copy of In the Neighborhood of True by Susan Caplan Carlton (Algonquin Young Readers, 2019) on my last trip from the library (during which I looked at my stack of like six books and went, “Well, that’s gonna take a while to get through…” and I’m already going to have to go back today and pick out a few more. BUT…I have an idea for a new project. I’ll write up a post about that later!). I’m super fortunate that my library has *so* many of the books from my TBR!

It’s 1958, and Ruth Robb has moved to Atlanta with her mother and younger sister after her father suddenly passed away. The move is already tough, but it’s complicated even more by the fact that Ruth is Jewish (her father was born Jewish; her mother, an Atlanta native, converted, a fact that is important to this story), and the South isn’t exactly friendly to Jews. Neither is her grandmother, who doesn’t fully accept that her daughter converted and is raising the girls Jewish. Ruth immediately falls in with the debutante group of girls from her grandmother’s club, but she knows she has to hide who she really is- admitting she’s Jewish is a recipe for immediate ostracization.

But it’s so much fun to be popular, and Davis Jefferson, the gorgeous popular guy, is falling for her. When Ruth’s mother starts requiring her to attend synagogue, she meets college student Max, who’s as dedicated to fighting for integration and social justice as the rabbi. He’s deeply intelligent, proud of who he is, and never hides anything about himself. When the politics of the day blow up in a way Ruth can no longer ignore, she has to make serious choices about who she is, who she wants to be, and how she wants to live her life.

I lived in the South for five years and oof, so many parts of this book rang true and made me feel claustrophobic again. Ruth’s grandmother is antisemitic- not in a Nazi-style manner, but in a dismissive way, in a way that it’s obvious she finds Jewish people kind of icky and different, and she’s constantly trying to encourage her daughter to abandon the religion and her granddaughters to hide who they are. I imagined that Ruth’s mother needed to do a LOT of tongue-biting in order to not tell her mother exactly where to get off; as they were living in the grandparents’ guest house, she needed to maintain at least some level of civility. She handled it far better than I would have.

As a reader, it’s sometimes frustrating watching Ruth make the decisions she does, but they’re understandable. After being wrenched away from her home, from everything familiar, in a place where there are plenty of other people like her and now dealing with the grief from her father’s death, she just wants to fit in and find a bit of normalcy, but in a place that demands conformity and spits out anything or anyone different, that’s not so easy to find unless you’re willing to compromise major parts of yourself. Ruth makes some difficult choices; to her credit, she never seems fully comfortable with the ones that require her to hide being Jewish. Her romance with Davis made me deeply uneasy; I may be an adult reading YA, but it wouldn’t have felt good to me as a teen, either. There are certain things I’ve never been willing to compromise, not even for the cute popular boy, but I think this was a realistic choice Ms. Carlton made as an author. The teen years are hard and full of challenging decisions. Figuring out who we are, especially when who we are goes against cultural norms, isn’t easy, and strength of character takes time to develop. Oftentimes, it only comes through adversity, as it did for Ruth, and she’s a great example for younger readers on doing the right thing even when it’s difficult, even when it comes at a cost.

I do wish there would have been a bit more of a build-up to the climax; the end felt a tiny bit rushed, but man, does Ms. Carlton do a fabulous job of setting the scene. 1958 Atlanta is steamy and full of tension; you’ll practically be able to taste the sweet tea and the Coca-Cola and feel the sweat trailing down your back and the girdle squeezing your midsection. I have zero desire to move back to the south (a former colleague who moved to North Carolina just informed my husband of a job opening at his new workplace; I LOVE that area, but nope nope nope, not for me and not for us as a family, sadly), but wow, did Susan Kaplan Carlton absolutely made me feel like I was there again.

I deeply enjoyed this. History, religion, politics, YA, it’s a perfect storm of so many of the things I love about reading. I’m looking forward to seeing what else Ms. Carlton comes up with!

Visit Susan Kaplan Carlton’s website here.

Follow her on Twitter here.

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Book Review: No One Ever Asked by Katie Ganshert

Stephanie1 Comment

Holy timely read, blogger friends!

I have no idea how this book ended up on my TBR list or where it came from; usually I have some sort of idea, whether I found it through someone else’s blog, a book list, a reading group suggestion, etc., but I have zero clue where No One Ever Asked by Katie Ganshert (WaterBrook, 2018) came from. But that’s okay. It’s an emotionally complex book that gets right to the heart of so many of the struggles we’re seeing play out before our eyes right now.

Jen is a newly adoptive mother and she’s struggling. Her (adopted) seven year-old daughter, who has only recently come home from Liberia, is, unsurprisingly, having trouble adjusting to life in a new country with a white family, and Jen, who has wanted nothing more than to be a mother her entire life, is shocked to find that the bonding process isn’t instantaneous. Camille’s picture-perfect life is unraveling at the seams: her oldest daughter barely speaks to her, something’s up with her husband, and the uproar over a primarily Black school sending its students to her children’s mostly white school isn’t painting her in the greatest of lights thanks to her own bad behavior. Anaya has just gotten a job as the new second grade teacher at said white school, but her teenage brother’s transfer to the high school and the stress of being Black in a sea of white faces who don’t necessarily understand her and who don’t want to try is testing her faith and strength.

Tensions are sky-high throughout the year as the town grapples with issues that shouldn’t even be issues and old attitudes are brought to light and found- by most people, but not all- deeply unflattering. The novel comes to a head at the annual 5K, where everyone will be forced to come together in a tragedy that could have easily been avoided.

WHEW. This book is an emotional powerhouse. Katie Ganshert perfectly nails so many of the complex emotions that go into making flawed characters. Camille’s racism isn’t necessarily outwardly malicious, but by refusing to listen and avoiding deep self-examination, she becomes a perfect Karen, concerned only with what affects her and her family. Anaya is determined but wounded and exhausted, states that become more and more clear as to why- not just for outward reasons- as her story unfolds. And Jen. Ohhhhhh, I understood Jen so well, and Ms. Ganshert has illustrated in her something that isn’t talked about enough.

Jen pictured motherhood as lots of snuggles and cuddles and an instant bond with her daughter, despite understanding that it would be work raising a child who had spent her earliest years surrounded by loss and trauma. Her reality was struggling to bond with a child who didn’t quite feel like hers, even though she wanted her to, so badly. I get that. Though my daughter is mine biologically, it took much, much longer for me to feel that deep soul-bond with her, much longer than I was expecting, and it made parenting her difficult in the early days of her life (and we weren’t even dealing with trauma and loss and all the many things adoptive parents know to expect! Although my massive sleep deprivation, to the point where I was hallucinating, didn’t help…). The parenting manuals don’t discuss this enough; they talk of bonding as immediate or as happening soon after birth; they don’t discuss what happens or what parents are supposed to do when it takes longer than that, which leaves parents like Jen and me (during the time that was happening to me), feeling lost and scared and resentful. I applaud Katie Ganshert for bringing this delicate issue to light and giving parents like me a chance to see ourselves and see that we’re not terrible people, that this is just part of what parenting can look like.

Camille’s growth throughout the novel is commendable; her growth stems from the tragedies and challenges her family faces throughout the year (and other near-misses), and her eventual learning to look outward and apply what she learns inward. Will readers see themselves in her? I hope so, because there are far too many people out there who need to.

Anaya is strength and conviction and determination; her family- her mother in particular- is so well-crafted. There’s a speech her mother gives her near the end of the book on forgiveness that had me rereading the paragraph several times; do not miss this. It’s perfection.

Content warnings exist for racism, both blatant and the kind that’s more inconspicuous but just as harmful, death of a parent, and allusions to what likely constitutes rape (where a drunken character is taken advantage of by one that didn’t seem drunk or as drunk). All the characters in the book seem to be practicing Christians (to some degree), and while their faith is discussed and put into practice (and some have labelled this novel as Christian fiction), it never comes across as the author having an agenda, only as something by which those characters live and base their morals on. Ms. Ganshert isn’t proselytizing or advertising here, only describing her characters’ commitment to or failure to live up to certain ideals, something which I appreciated.

This is a wonderful, timely book, one that I’m glad I read, and I’m looking forward to reading more from this author who not only has her finger on the pulse of America, but who is able to translate her observations into a deeply-felt novel that will tug at your heart and hopefully have you examining your attitudes towards a number of important issues.

Visit Katie Ganshert’s website here.

Follow her on Twitter here.