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Book Review: On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief Through the Five Stages of Loss by Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and David Kessler
Summary:
This book presents the science of grief and grieving, based largely upon the lifetime work of renowned psychologist Dr. Kübler-Ross.
Review:
How to review the first book you picked up after losing your 58-year-old father suddenly and unexpectedly to a heart attack? Normally I take a very academic approach to my book reviews (or at least I try to). I can’t review this one that way. I certainly wasn’t in an academic frame of mind when I was reading it. I wasn’t anywhere near my normal frame of mind. So instead, I’ll tell you about my experience reading it.
I found out my father was dead at 7am on a Thursday. I knew my father had been taken to the hospital the night before. My brother, who lives near where my father did, called me to let me know. But he also called me with an update that my father was stabilized. Neither of us was very worried, because my dad suffered from heart disease for eleven years and had been hospitalized periodically. He had a pacemaker. He was on medication. He had a specialist who did his long-term care. The ER was confident in his stability. They sent my brother home. My brother called me and told me to go to sleep. I did. He called me again about an hour later and left a voicemail telling me to call him back. I knew from the voicemail what he was going to tell me. I just knew it. I think I knew it the night before when I went to bed too. Because in spite of being told repeatedly that my dad was going to be fine, I cried myself to sleep that night. My brother, when I called him back, told me that my father had gone into cardiac arrest when they were moving him from the ER to a more specialized heart hospital. In spite of being in an ambulance surrounded by health care workers, the heart attack won.
In any case, the instant I heard the voicemail, I went numb. I woke my husband and told him. I called my workplace. I sent off certain work emails to pass off tasks to others to cover. I texted my friends. Then I sat on our bed and I felt….nothing. I was in a complete and total state of shock, I know now. Largely thanks to this book.
Late that night, when I found it was utterly impossible for me to sleep and was certain I would never sleep again, I reached out to the same thing I’ve always reached out to my entire life: books. I opened my laptop and logged in to the Boston Public Library’s ebooks search. I did not have the ability to go off looking for a print book at a branch. I needed help now. In the middle of the night.
I searched the catalog for “grief,” and got a list of…I dunno, a few books. This one was the most scientific. The rest were quite religious, and while that’s fine for other people, that’s not what comforts me. So I downloaded this, and I started to read it. And I instantly started to feel less like there was something wrong with me.
I learned that it’s entirely normal to go into shock at first. To not feel much of anything. It’s your body protecting you, letting the emotions in a little at a time, as you can handle them, so you will stay safe. And indeed, that night, after the first 12 hours of knowing, I sobbed in my husband’s arms. Thanks to this book, I knew that the numbness could come and go. In fact, the most helpful thing I learned in this book was that the 5 stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) don’t come in order necessarily, and they’re not neat. You don’t move through them in an orderly fashion. You may be angry one day, depressed the next, in denial another, and feel ok and accepting for a bit, then right back to depression. And that’s normal and ok.
I also learned, which was really important for me to know, that the stage of anger can sometimes express itself as guilt, which is just anger turned inward. Some people are more likely to turn their anger inward, and I am definitely one of them. Knowing this was where my (irrational) guilt was coming from (god knows I couldn’t possibly have saved my father from a heart attack from hundreds of miles away) made it much easier for me to cope with the feelings when they did come up.
There were other particular things that the book predicted might happen that kept me from getting freaked out when they did. For instance, I periodically was certain my phone had buzzed with a text message from my father. So certain, in fact, that I picked it up to check. Twice I thought I saw my dad on the street. Both of these I may have been concerned were abnormal, but the book reassured me these “ghost sightings” are totally normal. It’s your body and brain readjusting to your new reality.
The book also gave me warnings about things to come. Things like how the first holidays without the person or the person’s birthday would be difficult. So I knew to expect that and prepared myself for it. It also talked about being patient with yourself in things like dealing with the loved one’s possessions. Not to rush yourself, that it’s ok to take a little bit of time. There were also warnings about how quickly the person’s scent will fade that meant I took the time to really smell a couple of my dad’s tshirts, because I knew the scent would be one of the first things to go.
There is a “specific circumstances” section that talks about things like multiple losses simultaneously or suicide. I wish this section had a bit more on various other special circumstances. For instance, I had just gotten married 7 weeks before, and then my father died. I would have loved a section talking about the juxtaposition of such happiness with such sadness, and how to handle the emotions of things like your first married Thanksgiving (so happy!) also being your first Thanksgiving without your father.
Overall, this book gave me guidance of what to expect from my grief in the immediate time after the loss, as well as in the first year. It mostly contains universal information that will be helpful to anyone going through a loss. If you are a person who finds comfort in books or science, you will find comfort in this read. If you love someone who has recently lost a loved one, reading this will help you to know what behavior from them is normal and guide you in supporting them and validating them through the experience.
If you found this review helpful, please consider tipping me on ko-fi, checking out my digital items available in my ko-fi shop, buying one of my publications, or using one of my referral/coupon codes. Thank you for your support!
4 out of 5 stars
Length: 270 pages – average but on the shorter side
Source: Library
Book Review: Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things by Randy O. Frost and Gail Steketee
Summary:
It may be difficult to describe a hoard, but you know one when you see one. Maybe you have a neighbor who keeps their shades drawn but when you enter their home you see piles and piles of stuff that either they keep for a project they’ll do one day or because every scrap of it contains important information (according to them). Maybe you’ve only encountered hoarding through reality tv shows focused around the forced clean-up of homes that immediately appear unlivable to you but yet that the person on the show insists is full of treasures. Or maybe you grew up in a home where the hoard slowly encroached on your own room
Between 2 and 5 percent of the population suffers from Hoarding Disorder. Frost and Steketee were the first to begin scientifically studying it. Here, couched in tales of real interactions with and homes of clients (who granted their permission to be featured in an anonymized fashion) Frost and Steketee present both what we know and what we don’t know about hoarding, as well as best practices for helping someone with the disorder.
Review:
As an outside observer of a hoard, it can often be difficult to imagine what leads a person to believe trash is treasure. But of course it’s more complicated than someone just being unable to recognize trash. After all…one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. The authors attack this head-on by first giving a true definition to what counts as hoarding and then talking about various causes and possible presentations of the disorder. So what counts as hoarding?
It hardly matters how much stuff anyone owns as long as it doesn’t interfere with his or her health or happiness or that of others….Hoarding is not defined by the number of possessions, but by how the acquisition and management of those possessions affects their owner. (page 58)
So basically, it counts as hoarding if the collection of items interferes with the person’s health or happiness or the health or happiness of others nearby. The complicated gray area of course is that the sufferer may not realize that the hoard is interfering with their happiness and health. That is the point of conflict for many loved ones of people who hoard.
After establishing and defining what hoarding disorder is and is not, the authors continue on to analyze the behavior and mind of someone suffering from hoarding. Fascinatingly, hoarding shares commonalities with many other mental illnesses, seeming to a certain extent to defy categorization, although the DSM 5 currently lists it among “Obsessive Compulsive and Related Disorders.” Are you shocked? Did you think that OCD always means cleanliness? The fact is that is often not what OCD means. It’s a misunderstanding spurred on by popular culture. OCD is an obsession. It can be with cleaning and germs but it can also be with anything. It also often features repetitive behaviors. If you think about it, you can see what hoarding has in common with this. People who hoard become obsessed with the idea of not losing something important, of collecting everything relevant to a certain idea, of not wasting things. They also can come to establish repetitive behaviors such as maybe always buying a newspaper from a certain store on the way home from work. Another similarity with OCD is that hoarders often are perfectionists. Part of why their homes become cluttered is they are obsessed with only doing a perfect job of cleaning up or of fixing something or using some item for a project, and they become paralyzed with the fear that they can’t do it good enough, so they never start.
The authors also talk about how hoarding has commonalities with Impulse-Control Disorders, such as gambling and compulsive buying. Many people who hoard also struggle with both of these ICDs, and it’s easy to see the relationship here. Similarly, many hoarders show symptoms of ADD. They often do much better cleaning up if there is simply someone there to help them maintain focus, rather than being easily distracted.
Hoarding is also often a result of trauma. People suffer a trauma and essentially attempt to build a protective space around themselves by hoarding.
Compared to people who do not suffer from hoarding problems, clutterers report a greater variety of traumatic events (an average of six versus three), as well as a greater frequency (an average of fourteen versus five) of such events. The type of trauma most often experienced by hoarders include having had something taken by threat or force, being forced into sexual activity, and being physically assaulted. (page 87)
Interestingly, there’s a comparatively low incidence of PTSD among hoarders, in spite of such a high incidence of trauma. (A 2006 study found only 6% of hoarders had PTSD, page 91). It is possible that hoarding prevents the development of PTSD. Many hoarders also report a childhood devoid of warmth and support, so even if they were not traumatized, it is still likely that they had a cold, distant childhood. In contrast to PTSD, the majority of hoarders (nearly 60%) meet the criteria for major depression, and it is posited that this depression could be in response to the hoarding itself.
People draw conclusions about their worth and competence based on their inability to control their living space, and not being able to entertain people in their homes isolates them and limits their social lives. (loc 532)
The authors then talk about what may be going on in the heads of people who hoard. People don’t do things completely irrationally. There are reasons for it. There are multiple possibilities for hoarding of what may be going on. No single aspect has been determined yet. However, in general, hoarders suffer from a different type of threat signal. They fear something being removed, rather than the presence of something. It has also been posited that they have the opposite of claustrophobia. They feel safer in small, tight spaces, so they artificially create them. Hoarders also frequently struggle with identity. Rather than knowing who they are, they often are defined by the question “Who am I?” and collect items to try to show who they are. In addition to the aforementioned perfectionism, hoarders also seem to view items differently from the rest of us. They are generally very optimistic about future usefulness and can be quite creative as to reusing things. It has been posited that hoarding may be creativity run amok. However, many hoarders also gamble compulsively and the relationship between a hoarder’s positive thinking and a gambler’s is interesting.
“Seeing the scratch tickets over the counter at the convenience store leads me to think, One of those tickets is surely a winner, maybe a million-dollar winner. How can I walk away when the opportunity is there?” Our hoarders have said similar things about items they’ve wanted to acquire. (loc 202)
Distress avoidance is also often a common feature. Distress avoidance is when a person seeks to avoid a situation that they think will cause them distress. They then build up that situation in their heads to be more of a stressor than it actually would be. Continual avoidance of these types of situations also weakens a person’s ability to deal with them (due to lack of practice), so it’s a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Animal hoarding is its own special subcategory, and it seems that in addition to all of the other possible hoarding issues, animal hoarders may suffer from a form of an attachment disorder where their bonds with other humans are frayed and easily broken and replaced by bonds with animals.
So, essentially, hoarders are often people who are perfectionists who tend to perform rituals and struggle with impulse control. They may compulsively shop and/or gamble in addition to hoarding. They often had cold, distant childhoods and/or suffered a trauma (or traumas). They tend to come at life from a basis of fear and feel safer in tight, closed spaces, and their fear is heightened by removal of things, rather than appearance of new things. At some point, they started avoiding distress, and this distress avoidance became a self-fulfilling cycle. They also frequently struggle with knowing who they are internally, rather looking outward to possessions for identity signals. In addition to these compulsions and fears, hoarders also often see things differently or in more detail than non-hoarders, and they also struggle to focus or concentrate, making cleaning up even more difficult for them.
The authors conclude by discussing both how to treat hoarding and effects on family members and loved ones (as well as on communities). The authors stress repeatedly that forced clean-ups are the absolute worst possible solution or treatment option. A forced clean-up just fulfills the person’s fear that people are out to get them, and simply makes them cling on to their possessions even more aggressively. It also can make them more depressed. Since their identity is wrapped up in their possessions, getting rid of them by force can cause emotional trauma akin to someone chopping off your hair by force. I was stunned to learn that there have been cases of people who hoard committing suicide after a forced clean-up. The authors strongly advocate for the much slower, but with more long-term positive results, method of going through the hoard with the person slowly and basically teaching them new ways to think about both their possessions and their identity. They also state that it’s easier to treat compulsive buying and gambling than hoarding, so when possible treat that first to prevent the arrival of new items into the hoard. It is a long, difficult treatment plan to go through a hoard slowly, and sometimes it may be necessary to remove the person from the home for safety but then to return with them repeatedly to work on cleaning out the hoard.
The fact that forced clean-ups are the worst possible solution for the sufferer and the fact that hoards get worse over time leads me to believe that early interventions are absolutely critical to render the most help to those suffering from hoarding. But this is a complex thing. Since many cases of hoarding start due to a cold home environment or from trauma, it may be difficult to get parents behind addressing the situation early. Many people who hoard interviewed in the book talk about their hoarding beginning to get out of control by late in their freshman year of college. Perhaps this is something colleges should be keeping an eye out and offering help for. Additionally, shame is often mentioned as a factor in keeping the problem hidden. Perhaps PSAs and other public service campaigns could both lessen the stigma and offer help to people early on in the development of a hoard.
So much of hoarding is stigmatized. To a certain extent this is understandable. It often isn’t seen by the public until it has reached a public health crisis level or in situations where animal hoarders are keeping their hoards in deplorable conditions. Often loved ones of those who hoard feel trapped and frustrated by the hoarding. They feel as if the loved one loves their stuff more than them. These are complex issues and professional help is required to address them. I honestly don’t think this is a situation that is easily handled one family at a time. A family member must be well-informed and patient and empathetic enough to wait through the long treatment process. Often that family member is the child of the hoarder and therefore a minor with no power, which makes the issue even more complex. This is definitely a situation in which public health education campaigns on things like early warning signs of hoarding tendencies and ways to seek help could be extremely helpful long-term. I do believe the authors could have taken things one step further at the end of the book to this connection to public health, rather than mostly focusing on individual therapy. They do mention less consumerism would be helpful, but that simply is not much of an observation. It is a small complaint, but I do feel that this interdisciplinary leap is important.
Overall, this was a fascinating, enlightening book. The authors have conducted extensive scientific research for years, and they do an awesome job of writing this information at the consumer level, as well as humanizing it by bringing in real cases with clients who they render in a three-dimensional fashion. I know I for one will never be able to stomach watching forced clean-ups on the tv show “Hoarders” again. Recommended to really everyone. Anyone could potentially know someone who struggles with hoarding, whether now or in the future, and the book is very readable.
If you found this review helpful, please consider tipping me on ko-fi, checking out my digital items available in my ko-fi shop, buying one of my publications, or using one of my referral/coupon codes. Thank you for your support!
4 out of 5 stars
Length: 309 pages – average but on the longer side
Source: Library
Counts For:
Illness(es) featured: Hoarding Disorder
Book Review: A Spell of Winter by Helen Dunmore
Summary:
Cathy and her brother Rob live with their emotionally distant grandfather on family land in England because her mother left, and her father died in a mental institution. Cathy and Rob seek refuge with each other against the world, but World War I won’t let them keep the world at bay forever.
Review:
I generally enjoy controversial books, and I heard that this historical fiction included the always controversial plot point of incest. The short version of my review is: it’s amazing how boring a book about incest and WWI can actually be. For the longer version, read on.
The book is told non-linearly in what appears to be an attempt to build suspense. The constant jumping with very few reveals for quite some time, though, just led to my own frustration.
I was similarly frustrated by the fact that Cathy’s childish interpretation of her father’s mental illness never progresses. She never moves from a child’s understanding to an adult’s understanding. This lack of progress gave a similar stagnant feeling to the book.
Of course, what the book is best-known for is the incest between Cathy and Rob. I found the scenes of incest neither shocking nor eliciting of any emotion. There are scenes where Cathy and Rob discuss how “unfair” it is that they cannot have children and society will judge them. But then again there are scenes that imply that Rob took advantage of Cathy. Well, which is it? It’s not that I demand no gray areas, but the existence of gray areas in such a topic would best be supported by a main character with insight. Cathy remains childlike throughout the book. Indeed, I think the characterization of Cathy is what holds the whole book back. Because the book is Cathy’s perspective, this lack in her characterization impacts the whole thing. What could be either a horrifying or a thought-provoking book instead ends up being simply meh. A lot of time is spent saying essentially nothing.
That said, I did enjoy how the author elicits the setting. I truly felt as if I was there in that cold and often starving rural England. I felt as if I could feel the cold in my bones. That beauty of setting is something that many writers struggle with.
Overall, this book read as gray and dull to me as the early 20th century English countryside it is set in. Readers with a vested interest in all varieties of WWI historic fiction and those who enjoy a main character with a childlike inability to provide insight are the most likely to enjoy this book. Those looking for a shocking, horrifying, or thought-provoking read should look elsewhere.
If you found this review helpful, please consider tipping me on ko-fi, checking out my digital items available in my ko-fi shop, buying one of my publications, or using one of my referral/coupon codes. Thank you for your support!
3 out of 5 stars
Length: 320 pages – average but on the longer side
Source: PaperBackSwap
Counts For:
Bottom of TBR Pile Challenge
Book Review: Moonlight in Odessa by Janet Skeslien Charles
Summary:
Daria loves the city of Odessa in her home country of the Ukraine. The history of the city, the architecture, and the food. But she’s a highly educated engineer unable to find a job in her field, so she’s stuck working as a secretary for an Israeli import business, dodging the advances of both her own boss and the boss of the local mob. She takes on a second job translating for an online dating agency that matches Ukrainian women with American men. Soon she gets swept up in the idea of escaping to America, where she could actually work as an engineer and get treated like a queen by a man who won’t drink too much or keep mistresses or leave her. But will the reality of America match her dreams? And will living there ever be able to compare to her life in Odessa?
Review:
Confession. I have a thing for mail order bride / arranged marriage stories. I also have a thing for watching reality tv shows about marriages that will inevitably be trainwrecks (I’m looking at you, 90 Day Fiance). I was expecting this book to basically be the equivalent of 90 Day Fiance only on paper. Delightful, yet trashy. What I found was a book that was indeed truly delightful, but that also brought a realistic, humanizing face to modern day marriages that are not for love.
The book lingers in Odessa much longer than I was initially expecting, and I’m so glad it did. This gives a firm basis for who Daria is before she comes to America and really puts the reader in her shoes. The author clearly has a love for and strong knowledge of Odessa, Ukrainian culture, and the Russian language. Within just a few pages, it immediately becomes clear that Daria is whip-smart. Her understanding of the ins and outs of both English and Russian are amazing. She is witty, and it’s easy to see how she would have succeeded in any life circumstance. But it also quickly becomes apparent that although she loves Odessa, it doesn’t let her truly grow into who she wants to be. Every life experience she has had has taught her that Odessan/Ukrainian men will only use her and leave her, and she wants a lifetime partner and commitment. Similarly, she can’t use her engineering degree in Odessa, due to the economy, and she wants to live someplace where she can. The clear and slow unveiling of these conjoining life situations helps the reader to come to understand why she is willing to have a business-style marriage, rather than a love marriage. The American man she meets needs a wife, and she needs a life partner and a ticket to a better life.
Of course, not all is as it seems with the American man. The second half of the book dives into life in America for Daria and depicts the harsh realities of using a business-style marriage to immigrate. Even if her marriage had been perfect (which wow it isn’t), Daria still suffers culture-shock and the realization that America is definitely not perfect. There are pros and cons to living anywhere in the world.
Although her marriage is on the worse side of the arranged marriage bell curve, the author still shows the variety of marriages that can result from this type of arrangement by having Daria naturally seek out other women who came to America in similar ways. She thus meets women in both better and worse marriages than her own, and so the reader sees how, although it can possibly work out, the whole situation is ripe for abuse. For instance, if a marriage that included a K1 visa (bringing a non-US citizen into the US) is dissolved within 3 years then the spouse who was brought over on the K1 visa loses their citizenship. This means that women in these types of marriages are afraid to leave abusive situations because they believe that they will automatically be deported. There are exceptions for cases of abuse, but the women often do not know that, and the men in these situations often threaten the women with deportation. This information is all given within the book with subtlety and within the context of what will Daria do now, which lends a human face to the situation.
Given how interesting and realistic most of the book was, I must admit that I felt the end of the book went a bit soap opera, and the ending in general left me wanting. I can’t put my finger on what exactly about it left me feeling as if the story was incomplete, but it did. I don’t have any regrets about reading the book, though, because I so enjoyed seeing the world through Daria’s eyes.
Overall, anyone who enjoys contemporary fiction and is interested in either the Ukraine or the modern day “mail order bride” as done through online agencies will enjoy this book. The main character is rich and well-rounded and brings a human face to the often underrepresented immigrant side of the K1 visa story.
If you found this review helpful, please consider tipping me on ko-fi, checking out my digital items available in my ko-fi shop, buying one of my publications, or using one of my referral/coupon codes. Thank you for your support!
4 out of 5 stars
Length: 352 pages – average but on the longer side
Source: PaperBackSwap
Counts For:
Bottom of TBR Pile Challenge
3 Speed Reads for Valentine’s Day (f/f, m/m/, and m/f)
Happy Valentine’s Day my lovely readers!
I know, I know, it’s a made-up holiday. But I think there’s something lovely about celebrating romance in the middle of winter. Even if your version of celebrating it is delighting in the quirks of the genre and maybe not necessarily romance in real life.
(Personally I will be celebrating it in real life, but hey, I’m a newlywed. ;-) )
So maybe you’re finding yourself at home with no plans for Valentine’s Day. Sure, you could watch re-runs of The Bachelor, but why not spend the wintry day curled up with a quick romance read? Not sure what to read? Here are three speed read romances, vastly different from each other. What makes them a speed read? They are all less than 200 pages. And don’t worry. All three of them got 4 stars or more here on Opinions of a Wolf.
Braided: A Lesbian Rapunzel
By: Elora Bishop
Mood: You believe in fairy tales and happy endings!
Pairing: f/f
Length: 61 pages
Blurb:
A lesbian retelling of Rapunzel. Gray, a witch’s daughter, visits Zelda every day. The witch switched Gray’s fate into Zelda, so now Zelda is the one entwined with the spirit of the tree that the people worship. She must live on the platform and every day lower her hair for people to tie ribbons and prayers into. Gray feels horrible guilt over their switched fates, but she’s also falling in love with Zelda.
Full Review
Listening to Dust
By: Brandon Shire
Mood: You like a tragic romance that makes you cry. Keep the tissues handy for this one!
Pairing: m/m
Length: 142 pages
Blurb:
A chance meeting between orphaned British writer, Stephen, and American soldier, Dustin, leads to a passionate love affair in England. But when Dustin chooses to go back home to his small Southern town to care for his mentally challenged brother, Stephen is left behind, sending letters that are never answered. He finally decides to follow Dustin home and arrives only to discover that Dustin is no more.
Full Review
Love Among the Chickens
By: P.G. Wodehouse
Mood: You enjoy slapstick and want to laugh. A lot!
Pairing: m/f
Length: 176 pages
Blurb:
Jeremy Garnet, a novelist, is living a relatively quiet bachelor life in London when his old school friend Stanley Ukridge shows up. Ukridge is starting a chicken farm with his wife, Millie, and wants “Garnie old boy” to come stay with them. He’ll get to write in the country in exchange for a few hours of work a day. In spite of the fact that Ukridge is planning to run the chicken farm without any prior knowledge or studying “the better for innovation, my boy,” Garnie takes him up on it. Of course, life with the eccentric Ukridge surrounded by chickens isn’t quite the quiet writing environment Garnie was planning on. Not to mention the Irish professor neighbor’s lovely daughter that Garnie can’t quite get out of his head.
Full Review
Book Review: UnSouled by Neal Shusterman (Series, #3) (Audiobook narrated by Luke Daniels)
Summary:
Connor and Lev are on the run from the Juvenile Authority but for once they’re running to something. Or rather, someone. They’re looking for a woman Proactive Citizenry has tried to erase from history, hoping she’ll have some answers about just how the world got to be the way it is. Meanwhile, Cam, the rewound boy, is plotting to take Proactive Citizenry down in the hopes of winning the heart of Risa.
Review:
This entry in the series really fizzled for me with the far-fetched ideas and shaky execution of a complex plot finally becoming too much for me to really enjoy the story.
On the one hand, this book is more of the same. There’s multiple characters in vastly different situations who will clearly all come together at some point in a convergence that should read like fate but oftentimes just reads as too convenient. On the other hand, the action this time is interspersed with some flashbacks to the scientist who discovered unwinding, and how it went from something to be used to save lives to something to keep adolescents in line. This plot was interesting, but its reveal was awkwardly handled. The flashbacks are from the perspectives of the scientists, just as we switch around among the perspectives of the teens in the story, rather than letting them naturally discover what happened. It’s a change that could have been used to build up more tension and excitement but instead just makes the pace awkward and changes the feel of the story from one told primarily by teens to one routinely interfered with by adult perspective.
The big reveal of how unwinding came to be failed to really strike a chord with me, and I believe this is partially because it’s still a bit unclear to me as to who exactly the big bad is. I do think it’s interesting that basically unwinding came to be because big business was trying to protect their investment in health care. I appreciate the angle of how health care needs to be more than just a business. However, I question the supposed solution for unwinding offered at the end of the book. I feel it is just more big business.
Overall, this book continued the issues with the second book, only more so. Too many plots that conveniently intersect and confusion over what exactly is going on in the world. Additionally, the far-fetched elements that challenged my ability to suspend disbelief in the first two books become at the center of the big overarching plot of the series. Given both of these issues, I will not be continuing reading the series, although I am glad that I read the first book, as it is an interesting and unique dystopian YA world. It’s just one that went off the rails a bit. This entry is recommended to those readers who simply must know how unwinding came to be and how the characters plan to stop it.
If you found this review helpful, please consider tipping me on ko-fi, checking out my digital items available in my ko-fi shop, buying one of my publications, or using one of my referral/coupon codes. Thank you for your support!
3 out of 5 stars
Length: 404 pages – average but on the longer side
Source: Audible
, 
, Book Review: Children of God by Mary Doria Russell (Series, #2)
Summary:
Father Sandoz, the only person from the humanity’s first mission to Rakhat to return to Earth, has barely begun to recover from his ordeal when the Jesuits ask him to assist in preparing the second team. Reticent to assist anyone to go to Rakhat but enjoying the use of the languages again, he agrees.
Meanwhile, one survivor of the mission joins forces with the Runa and a rogue Jana’ata to bring about justice. What world will the second mission find when they return? It certainly won’t be the one previously held in a tenuous working balance between predator and prey.
Review:
The Sparrow really touched me, and I was eager to return to Rakhat, not to mention to see how Sandoz handled his recovery. What I found was a mixed bag. A creative expansion on the world of Rakhat but a message and character development that moved in directions that left me feeling very little.
The presence of humans upset the delicate balance between the Jana’ata and the Runa. The humans demonstrated to the Runa that they didn’t need the Jana’ata, and thus a revolution was born. The thing is though this culture is just so truly alien that it’s hard to root for the Runa or the Jana’ata.
The Jana’ata have a depraved world, yes, but they are also truly predators who evolved from predators. It’s hard to hate on them when they’re basically cats walking around in medieval clothes. Well, of course they’re acting barbaric. They’re cats! And the thing is, they’re not just cruel to the Runa, they’re cruel to each other as well.
The one real disjointed bit of the narrative is that this culture reads as a developing one, as if they are from the 1200s or 1300s on Earth. Yet they somehow have enough technology that they could broadcast music to Earth? It makes no sense that they would be so backwards and yet simultaneously so advanced in science.
Similarly, the Runa are a people with a culture but they also are a prey species. They reproduce like mad when they have enough food, and they act like herd animals. Yakking constantly and with no real art or science developing. It is easy to see how these two cultures came to co-exist, as well as the fact that they need each other. Put another way, everyone thinks deer are cute, and they are. But if they exist in a world with no natural predators, they soon over-run the place until they have too much population for the land to support, and they start to starve. Yes, the co-existence between the Jana’ata and the Runa could be handled better (certainly with more clarity and more maturity) but the Runa and Jana’ata need each other. They co-evolved.My perspective on the Runa and Jana’ata impacts how I feel about the rest of the book.
Russell presents the idea that it’s ok for the Runa to become the dominant culture so long as they “allow” the “good” Jana’ata (the ones who have sworn off eating Runa and struggle along eating the eggs of some other creature that can barely sustain them. Truly barely. One character has multiple problem pregnancies due to malnutrition). Positing the idea that the Jana’ata are bad because they are predators, and the Runa are good because they are herbivores (with some outliers in both groups of course) is just hard to swallow. Bad and good is much more nuanced than that. Is a shark bad because it eats a seal because it’s hungry? No. But if a shark kills a seal because it’s fun to kill a seal and then swims off without eating it? Then one could argue that’s a bad shark with a bad nature. This level of nuance is just something I felt was missing from the book and the world.
I also found Sandoz’s path back to god to be a bit irritating, as well as the repeatedly presented idea that we can all have different interpretations of the one god, but there is definitely one. A whole alien planet with two sentient species, and no one can even entertain the idea that there might be more than one god? People are allowed to think there’s not one at all, although the book does present this as a shortcoming of those people’s natures. Basically, if they were a bit more willing to open they could at least be agnostic about the idea. The ultimate “proof” of the existence of god in the book is something that made me laugh. I won’t reveal what is found but suffice to say that if you’ve heard the argument about a watch proving there’s a watchmaker, it’s very similar to that one. After the insight and the gray areas allowed in the first book with regards to faith, I was disappointed.
If my review seems a bit mixed and all over the place that’s because that’s how this book read to me. There were chapters of beauty and then others that made me sigh and still others that made me scratch my head. It’s a mixed bag of content set in a complicated world with an ending that some readers would definitely find satisfying but I do not. I still enjoyed the read overall simply because I love visiting the world of Rakhat. But would I want to visit it again? Given the direction it was going, probably not. Although I would gladly visit the future Earth that gets to meet a Jana’ata or a Runa on our own turf.
Overall, readers of the first book who enjoyed it for Rakhat will enjoy getting to know more about both the Runa and the Jana’ata culture will enjoy the sequel, whereas those who appreciated it for its nuance and exploration of gray areas and difficult topics will be less satisfied.
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4 out of 5 stars
Length: 451 pages – chunkster
Source: Library
Previous Books in Series:
The Sparrow, review
Counts For:
Illness(es) featured: Autism Spectrum Disorder
Book Review: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick
Summary:
Earth is overcrowded and overheated but people still don’t want to become colonists to other planets. The colonies on the other planets are so boring and depressing that the colonists spend all of their money on Can-D — a drug that lets them imagine themselves living in an idealistic version of Earth. The only trick is they have to set up dioramas of Earth first. The drug is illegal on Earth but the diorama parts are still created by a company there. When the famous Palmer Eldritch returns from the far-flung reaches of space, he brings with him a new drug, Chew-Z, that doesn’t require the dioramas. What the people don’t know, but one of the manager of the Can-D company soon finds out, is that Chew-Z sends those who take it into an alternate illusion controlled by Palmer Eldritch.
Review:
I love Philip K. Dick, and I have since first reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? So whenever I see his books come up on sale in ebook format, I snatch them up. I picked this up a while ago for this reason, and then randomly selected it as my airplane read on my honeymoon. Like many Dick novels the world of this book is insane, difficult to explain, and yet fun to visit and thought-provoking.
The world Dick has imagined is hilarious, although I’m not sure it was intended to be. Presciently, Dick sets up a future suffering from overpopulation and global warming, given that this was published in 1965, I find it particularly interesting that his mind went to a planet that gets too hot. Even though the planet is unbearably warm (people can only go outside at night and dusk/dawn), they still don’t want to colonize other planets. Colonizing the other planets is just that bad. So there’s a selective service by the UN, only instead of soldiers, those randomly selected are sent to be colonists. The wealthy can generally get out of it by faking mental illness, as the mentally ill can’t be sent away. This particular aspect of the book definitely reflects its era, as the 1960s was when the Vietnam War draft was so controversially going on.
I don’t think it’s going out on much a limb to say that drugs had a heavy influence on this book. Much of the plot centers around two warring drugs, and how altered perceptions of reality impact our real lives. One of the main characters starts out on Earth hearing about how the poor colonists have such a depressing environment that they have to turn to drugs to keep from committing suicide. But when he later is sent to Mars himself as a colonists, his impression is that in fact the colony is this downtrodden because no one tries very hard because they’re so much more focused on getting their next hit of Can-D. The Can-D has caused the lack of success on the planet, not the other way around. Whether or not he is accurate in this impression is left up to the reader.
Then of course there’s the much more major plot revolving around the new drug, Chew-Z. Without giving too much away, people think Chew-Z is a much better alternative to Can-D, but it turns out chewing it puts you under the control of Palmer Eldritch for the duration of your high, and if you overdose, you lose the ability to tell the difference between illusion and reality. The main character (and others who help him) thus must try to convince the humans that Chew-Z is bad for them before they ever even chew it. The main character has another side mission of getting people off of Can-D.
It sounds like a very anti-drugs book when summarized this way, but it felt like much more than that. People chewing Chew-Z can come to have an experience that sounds religious – seeing the three stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (a stigmata in Christian tradition is when God shows his favor on someone by giving them the marks of Jesus’ crucifixion. In this book, the three stigmata are three bodily aspects of Palmer that are unique to him). However, the experience of seeing the stigmata is in fact terrifying, not enlightening. The drugs thus represent more than drugs. They represent the idea that we could possibly know exactly what a higher power is thinking, and perhaps that it might be better to just go along as best we can, guessing, rather than asserting certainty.
All of this said, a few weaknesses of the 1960s are seen. I can’t recall a non-white character off the top of my head. Women characters exist, thank goodness, but they’re all secondary to the male ones, and they are divided pretty clearly into the virgin/whore dichotomy. They are either self-centered, back-stabbing career women, or a demure missionary, or a stay-at-home wife who makes pots and does whatever her husband asks. For the 1960s, this isn’t too bad. Women in the future are at least acknowledged and most of them work, but characterizations like this still do interfere with my ability to be able to 100% enjoy the read. Also, let’s not forget the Nazi-like German scientist conducting experiments he probably shouldn’t. For a book so forward-thinking on things like colonizing Mars and the weather, these remnants of its own time period were a bit disappointing.
Overall, though, this is a complex book that deals with human perception and ability. Are we alone in space? Can we ever really be certain that what we are seeing is in fact reality? How do we live a good life? Is escapism ever justified? Is there a higher power and if there is how can we ever really know what they want from us? A lot of big questions are asked but in the context of a mad-cap, drug-fueled dash around a scifi future full of an overheated planet and downtrodden Mars colonies. It’s fun and thought-provoking in the best way possible.
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4 out of 5 stars
Length: 243 pages – average but on the shorter side
Source: Amazon
Book Review: The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You by Dorothy Bryant
Summary:
Running from his demons, a man crashes his car and wakes up being assisted by a deceptively primitive people–the kin of Ata. He discovers that he’s been mysteriously brought to an island inhabited only by these people. As time passes, he comes to learn there is much more to them than first appears.
Review:
I can’t recall exactly how this ended up in my tbr but I am certain it had something to do with it being older feminist scifi/fantasy, which I collect and read as much as possible. What I was expecting, particularly from a book from the 1970s, was a wishful book about an impossible utopia. What I got instead was a spiritual parable that left me breathless, surprised, and craving more–not out of the book but out of life.
The book starts slowly. The entire first chapter has the main character driving angrily down a road just after committing a murder during a fit of rage. He is not a character with which you can particularly empathize at this point, and it is confusing as to just when the titular Kin of Ata will show up. I admit that the first chapter moved so slowly and was so difficult to relate to that I was expecting the book to be a slog, but I persevered on, and in retrospect I appreciate the first chapter quite a bit. I’ll discuss why at the end of my review.
The man wakes up to people getting him out of the car and bringing him to a cave. They then bring him out of the cave to their hut-like homes. He perceives of them as primitive and judges them harshly. Gradually over time he comes to better understand them and their ways and to understand that he is not with primitive people hidden in the woods near his home. He is on an island, and he somehow was spirited there. I won’t discuss much more of the plot, because it could ruin it, but essentially the man is a stand-in for the reader. The Kin of Ata have spiritual lessons and teach them to the man, and in turn to the reader. It comes across much like a parable.
The Kin believe that humans need to remember and respect their dreams (actual dreams we have at night). They view our sleeping lives as just as important, if not more so, than our waking ones. They thus design their waking lives to be lived in the right manner so as to elicit the most powerful dreams. This means things like working but not too hard. Thus making yourself tired enough to sleep but not so tired that you sleep the sleep of the dead. It also means discussing your dreams every morning upon awaking. It means listening to your dreams and choosing daytime activities that suit what they are telling you. Put another way, the Kin choose daytime activities that fit the callings of their deepest souls. They essentially live a very mindful life that helps them achieve happiness and a peaceful community.
The main character starts out as a deep blight on the community. He keeps trying to force his ways upon them. He comes across as an angry cloud. In addition to being a murderer he also rapes one of the female Kin early on in the book. I found the depiction of this rape fascinating. The man sees people having sex with each other in what appears to him to be whenever one person demands it. In actuality, the people are choosing each other and subtlely letting each other know whether they want to have sex or not. The man decides he wants to participate and goes after one of the women. She indicates to him through cultural body language (these people do not speak much) that it is the wrong time. He does it anyway and she does not resist but she also does not participate. The whole community judges him as it being a wrong and a rape in spite of the fact that the woman never said no. The whole community views sex as only consensual if joyous consent is given, not just if the word “no” is not said. The man is startled and yet also immediately understands their point. He felt dirty and wrong after the sex and wasn’t sure why but now he understands and doesn’t know why he never thought of it this way before. He is utterly ashamed of himself.
Longtime readers of this blog know that I struggle with plots that ask us to empathize with a rapist. It honestly surprised me that this scene didn’t turn me off the book entirely. Yet this is also a huge turning point for the main character. He realizes that his way of doing things leads to him feeling bad and wrong and negatively impacts others. The woman spends several days in a cavelike place, which is basically where the Kin go to meditate. When she comes out, she forgives the man, because harboring a grudge against him would hurt her own ability to live the right path. I found the whole event of how the community confronts the man about his wrongdoing, how he responds to this confrontation, and how the woman handles it to be incredibly thought-provoking. It made me think about how much culture impacts people’s ability to even recognize when they’ve done something wrong. Also, much as I had heard many times growing up how harboring hate in your own heart poisons yourself and not the one who harmed you, seeing a character fully embrace this after a traumatic experience made it sink in much more for me than just hearing the saying ever did.
This scene also served another purpose. It reminded me that we’ve all done things we’re ashamed of and showed a path of redemption. The man starts to pursue living the right way. He has set-backs and stumbles. It sometimes takes years for him to see the results of certain actions that he starts doing the right way. It takes perseverance, unlike living the easy way, like he used to. It’s a powerful parable for practices such as meditation, for which you often don’t see results right away.
Similarly, again, I don’t want to spoil it, but the book demonstrates how it takes a community living right for a truly peaceful and happy community to exist. It also demonstrates, though, how one person who is very strong in their commitment to this right path can impact a whole community that is lost.
I promised to touch back on why I came to appreciate the first chapter. I appreciate it because it shows us the main character living his life following the wrong path within his own original community. It shows us where he came from before showing us how he develops into a life so much better through his work with the Kin. It also makes for a powerful bookend with the final chapter, whose surprise I will not reveal.
This is a powerful parable that demonstrates how much impact living mindfully can have, and also how important developing healthy communities is for the happiness and peace of all. It shows how wrong cultural ideals can lead people astray and hurt even the perpetrators of violence. Some may struggle with parts of the book, but that is part of the process of learning the lessons in the parable. I highly recommend this short book to all seeking a thought-provoking read.
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5 out of 5 stars
Length: 228 pages – average but on the shorter side
Source: PaperBackSwap
Buy It (Amazon or Bookshop.org)
Book Review: UnWholly by Neal Shusterman (Series, #2) (Audiobook narrated by Luke Daniels)
Summary:
Picking up where Unwind left off, UnWholly finds Risa and Connor managing the Graveyard full of unwinds themselves with no adults in site, and Lev struggling to find a purpose now that he’s both free of clapper chemicals and under the watchful eye of the government. Into the mix comes Cam, the first ever “rewind.” He’s been assembled completely from the parts of unwinds of every race and religion. And his creator intends to meddle with the runaway unwinds too.
Review:
I picked this up right after finishing the first on audiobook, because finding a fast-paced story with a good narrator can be harder than it sounds. So once I found that with the first book in the series and I saw the rest of it had the same narrator, I figured I may as well continue along with it. While I found the first book engaging and thought-provoking, I found myself periodically bored with the plot in this one, and also found it more difficult to suspend my disbelief than before.
The basic premise is that Connor is all torn up over having the arm of his once-rival (who also just so happened to threaten to rape his girlfriend, Risa). He thus holds Risa at arm’s-length (pun intended) because he’s afraid of what his own arm will do. While I appreciate the fact that it must be truly atrocious for your boyfriend to now have your attempted rapist’s arm, I think the fact that Connor lends the arm so much agency is a symptom of one particular idea in this world-building that just doesn’t work for me. The idea that body parts have their own spark of soul or agency or thought. It’s rife in this entry in the series, and it’s just plain weird to me. I can understand a character not bonding with a transplant that was forced upon him. I can understand it being weird for loved ones. I don’t, however, find myself able to suspend my disbelief enough to believe that someone’s arm has their personality in it so much that the person who it was transplanted onto would be afraid of it. It’s an arm, not a piece of brain or even a heart. The author does provide links to sources about transplant recipients feeling connected to the person whose body part they received or having memories or what have you. I appreciate that. But for me personally this plot point just does not work. Other readers may be able to suspend their disbelief better than I was able to. I for once can’t imagine not going near my own girlfriend because I was afraid of my arm. I also just disliked how much agency Connor removes from himself for his own temper. If he hits the wall when he’s angry it’s not him hitting the wall, it’s the arm hitting the wall. The arm got mad. The arm got out of control. There’s just a ridiculous lack of agency there, and I’m not super comfortable with that level of lack of agency being in a book marketed toward teenagers, who are at the best point in life for learning agency and responsibility.
I similarly have a hard time believing, from a neurological perspective, that the rewind boy, Cam, could exist. His brain is dozens’ of peoples all wound together. I could believe replacing a brain piece here or there with transplant technology, I couldn’t believe mish-mashing many together and having them actually function. Let alone with the only issue being that Cam struggles to learn to speak in words instead of metaphors. While Cam did strike me as grotesque, he mostly just struck me as an impossibility that I was then supposed to have sympathy for because he’s a person with his own feelings…but are they really? The whole thing was just a bit too bizarre for me.
On a related note, I found the scenes where Cam wakes up and learns to talk and slowly realizes what he is to be very tedious to read. They move slowly, and there is an attempt at building of suspense, but it is clear nearly immediately that Cam is a Frankenstein’s creature like experiment, even without Cam himself knowing it right away.
The other big new character is Starkey, a boy who was storked who is brought into the Graveyard. He’s basically exactly the same as Connor (he’s even still a white boy), the only difference being that was a stork and that he has no Risa to ease down his temper. I found his characterization to be uncreative, even if the building up of strife between the storks and the rest of the unwinds was a good plot point. It would have been better if the leader of the storks was more creative. Similarly, Starkey’s two main assistants are a black girl and an Indian-American boy. Just as with the first book, non-white people exist, but only as seconds to the white people. Why couldn’t either of them have been the leader of the storks?
All of these things said, there was still a lot of plot to keep the interest. I’ve barely touched on a couple of them. The world is still engaging, even if it’s hard to suspend the disbelief for it. I doubt I’d keep reading if I was reading this in print, but the audiobook narration makes it feel like listening to a movie, and it’s the perfect match for my commutes and doing dishes and such. Plus, now I’m curious as to where else the plot will go. I’m betting it will end up going in a direction I find it even harder to suspend my disbelief for, but it’ll be a fun ride seeing where that is.
Overall, fans of the first book may be disappointed by the slightly more meandering plot in this one. The addition of two new characters to follow will be distracting to some readers while others will find it adds to the interest and suspense. Some readers may be turned off by the continued lack of diversity in such a large cast of protagonists. The plot is engaging and the world is unique, though, so fans of YA dystopian scifi will probably still enjoy it.
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3 out of 5 stars
Length: 416 pages – average but on the longer side
Source: Audible
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Opinions of a Wolf 