Girl Detective

Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes is an intriguing premise for a graphic memoir. The author, Mary Talbot, was the daughter of a Joycean scholar. She alternates between her coming-of-age story and that of Lucia, James Joyce’s daughter. It’s illustrated by Mary’s husband Bryan, an award winning English comic book creator. Both stories were involving and sad, but I felt the connection between them was strained, and that neither achieved a depth because both were being told.

Last Friends is the third book in Jane Gardam’s Old Filth trilogy, after that book and The Man in the Wooden Hat, both of which I loved. There’s also a related book of stories, The People on Privilege Hill. I have so loved those previous books and the characters in them that I had high expectations for this book. A small English country town has histories and people who are far more complicated than any of them suspect of one another.

I was happy to spend time with the characters again, but the plot seemed meandering instead of layered and complex as in the previous books. I got stuck several times on awkward sentences or plot inconsistencies. And yet, these were minor annoyances, because the world and the people in it that Gardam has created are so rich and real that I still counted myself as privileged to have spent time with them, and was sad to see them go for what is probably their final bow.

Oh, there are some drool-worthy photos of book stacks in Japan, for example:

Image: Twitter. Via.

But my favorite part is the brief last sentence:

While still an emerging art, the ultimate book stacking style would combine style and strength but also allow customers to actually pick a copy up so they can buy it.

I have been mulling for a while that I want to create stacks with my TBR books, not buy more shelves, but have the books be removable, at least one at a time, without it all tumbling down. My summer project? Or another brick on the road to hell? Only time will tell. I wouldn’t put money on it.

I started to write this, then got sucked into Facebook, and well, I’m not sure how much time has passed.

A friend lend me Come Closer by Sara Gran, and said that both she and her husband liked it. Since I know they often disagree significantly, I was intrigued, and then the book itself proved them out. It’s about a young woman who starts having personality problems and wonders if she’s becoming possessed by a demon. It’s a scary, fast but complex read, reminding me of Rosemary’s Baby and other classic horror stories without being overly gory as much modern horror is. Highly recommended.

Then, in a weird burst of synchronicity, I found two related articles online yesterday.

1. How a brain affliction can mimic possessions symptoms

and

2. How a doctor got in trouble for diagnosing possession

Apparently Boston is the crazytown bananapants of possessed/not possessed.

Wow, the descriptive clause in Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking does go on, doesn’t it?

For one of my book groups, Quiet was one I almost abandoned. I didn’t care for the author’s take on Rosa Parks’ story as she focuses more on Rosa as lone superhero than on Rosa as the superhero who inspired everyone else to be heroic. But I pressed on, and as the book goes beyond the sometimes trite stories and gets into some of the science, I found it very interesting. No surprise to learn that brainstorming in groups doesn’t work, or that persuasive talkers are more listened to even if they’re not right. By the end, this book had won me over so completely I kept bringing it up in conversations with friends and family. It’s overly reductive, and she protests for the amazingness of introverts (among which she counts herself) too much, and yet, it’s still a fascinating window into behavior and interaction. Highly recommended, with a grain of salt, if that makes sense.

I meant to read Jess Walter’s Financial Lives of the Poets for one of my book groups last year (or the year before, or the year before that; hard to say), but I couldn’t manage it, and didn’t get around to it by the time this year’s Tournament of Books happened, where Walter’s Beautiful Ruins was a candidate, so I ended up reading (and loving) that before this earlier one that had been sitting on my shelf. I attended a recent reading he did here in town, and that spurred me to have another go.

This is a WMFU novel, an acronym from the comments of this year’s Tournament of Books: White Male F-Up. Kind of like a bildungsroman, just taking place in a man’s thirties or so rather than in his teens. it reminded me a lot of another WMFU novel that I enjoyed, Jonathan Tropper’s This is Where I Leave You.

Here, Matt Prior the protagonist is married but having trouble financially and with his wife. This novel is firmly situated in the wake of the housing crash of last decade, and it explores what happens when balloon payments on shifty mortgages suddenly come due. But it’s a comedy, and so there are many different elements that get tossed in: infidelity, pot smoking, drug dealing, parenting, and more. I will never be able to think of the phrase “make good choices” in quite the same way. It was a fast fun read, with some laugh out loud moments. Recommended, though not as highly as Beautiful Ruins.

Welcome to The Brothers Karamazov Summer Readalong! Should I call it The Summer of K? BK? will always be associated with the Newark, Ohio Burger King, and KB are my initials, so perhaps we are best left to the name. We’ll be reading one of the novel’s 13 book sections a week.

What’s in a name, though? One of the many people I talked to about the book asked, “is it about a circus,” perhaps because of the title. I find it intriguing that only the Oxford World’s Classics version is called The Karamazov Brothers, which scans more regularly, though is certainly less familiar and distinct.

Then, what’s in a name? According to Pevear/Volokhonsky, the translators of my edition, the zee/zed of Karamazov is like zoo, not Mozart.

And, why did I pick this translation? I’m reading it with a book group, so I find it best to go with the most readily available in stores, which is this one. The P/V version is even available in more than one edition/publisher. After some poking around, though, I think I might have preferred that Oxford edition. There are a couple times already in just 33 pages that the translation has “hiccuped” for me:

“he is a strange man, even an odd one.” (3) What’s the difference between strange and odd?

Then, among the translations, there’s disagreement on an adjective to describe the brothers’ father, Fyodor Pavlovich. Some choose muddleheaded (P/V, MacAndrew), McDuff, Avsey), others senseless (Garnett, and another, perhaps Oddo’s Norton?) I find scatterbrained perhaps more apt.

Hey, did you know there’s a 1958 film adaptation, and guess who’s the main character, Alexi?

SHATNER.

On to the book. Part I, Book One contains five chapters. We’re introduced to the depraved and scatterbrained father Fyodor Petrovich, his first and second wives, and most importantly, his three sons, of the title.

Dmitri, from the first marriage. A wild uneducated soldier who resents his lack of inheritance. Fights with FP.

Ivan, the elder son of the second marriage. Gloomy and a scholar, also resentful about living on handouts but gets along with FP.

Alexei, the youngest son, who is proclaimed the hero of the novel by Dostoevsky on page 3. Introverted, intelligent, religious, a peacemaker. Loved by his father, liked by Dmitri, but distant from Ivan.

The narrator tells us that FP dies a dark and tragic death, which he’ll discuss later. Several other times we’re told that we’ll be told things later. This book ends as the brothers, their father, and a relative of Dmitri’s mother plan a metting with a respected monastery elder, Alexei’s mentor Zosima. Alexei does not have a good feeling about the upcoming meeting.

Meet us back here in a week to discuss book two. What did everyone else think?

Nothing like flying by the seat of my pants, skin of my teeth, riding the ragged edge of disaster, la, la, la.

I’m reading Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov for one of my three book groups this summer, and I’d love it if you’d join me! I will even blog regularly so we can “talk” about it every week. I’m using the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation, but I bet any one would do as long as it’s divided into 13 books. Here’s the schedule. START NOW!

This Sunday, June 2, 2013: complete book 1. I’ll post to blog on Monday 6/3, and we can discuss in comments.

Sunday June 9, 2013, complete book 2. Discuss on Monday 6/10.

Sunday June 16, 2013 complete book 3. Discuss on Monday 6/17

Sunday June 23, complete book 4. Discuss on Monday 6/24

Sunday June 30 complete book 5. Discuss on Monday 7/1

Sunday July 7 complete book 6. Discuss Monday 7/8

Sunday July 14 complete book 7. Discuss Monday 7/15

Sunday July 21 complete book 8. Discuss Monday 7/22

Sunday July 28 complete book 9 Discuss Monday 7/29

Sunday August 4 complete book 10 Discuss Monday 8/5

Sunday August 11 complete book 11 Discuss Monday 8/12

Sunday August 18 complete book 12 Discuss Monday 8/19

Sunday August 25 complete book 13 and Introduction. Discuss Monday 8/26.

Books range from 20 pages long to 101, averaging 60. For this Sunday, it’s a mere 33 pages in my edition.

See? Totally do-able.

I found Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali a wildly uneven book, so my reaction falls between didn’t like (or, often hated) and it was OK. For me, effective memoirs are written by people with self insight and empathy, possibly leavened with humor. She’s writing about a difficult childhood and harsh reality for women abused in the name of Islam, so I’ll give her a pass that this book is humorless. But I find her lack of self-insight, her protestations of innocence in situations of obvious culpability, and her readiness to trot out other people’s horror stories in lieu of aforesaid self insight all pretty damning. The book is often poorly written with stunningly awkward transitions. Few if any other people stand out in the book because she is The Star. I found her disingenuous when claiming non-inflammatory intent when she over and over said incredibly outrageous things. This and other instances in the book led me not to believe her as a reliable narrator. Get thee to a therapist, I hope, to work out your childhood issues, especially with your father, and your inability to own your responsibility for your words and actions.

BUT, and it’s a huge BUT, she’s absolutely right that outrages against women and in general take place in the name of Allah, that this is sometimes (often?) ignored in the name of political correctness. She focuses more on this point at the end, so the book has a stronger finish that it does a beginning or middle.I found it unfortunate that she throws pretty much all of Islam under the bus in order to make this point. She makes an important argument, but one that is easier to dismiss because of the often offensive nonsense she surrounds it with.

This is a complicated book about complicated issues. It spurs me to find out more about Islam, but not by reading more of her writing.

Post-apoca-fic (PAF) is most recognized as a sub-genre of science fiction, but end-time narratives are at least as old as the Epic of Gilgamesh and the story of Noah’s ark. Modern PAF is marked as beginning with Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, written by a woman by featuring a male protagonist.

I recently re-read the PAF classic A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller, Jr. Published in book form in 1959, it collected 3 sections that had previously appeared in a sci-fi magazine. It centers on a monastery in post-nuclear Utah. There the monks seek canonization of the sacred Leibowitz of the title. A man of science instrumental in the nuclear holocaust of the mid 20th century, Leibowitz converted to Catholicism and advocated peace and learning. The book’s first section is set in the mid 21st century:

Brother Francis Gerard of Utah might never have discovered the blessed documents, had it not been for the pilgrim with girded loins who appeared during that young novice’s Lenten fast in the desert.

The subsequent sections jump ahead hundreds of years, though there are through lines for characters and artifacts that are fun and satisfying to recognize. I found the first section with Brother Francis, the most engaging. It’s the most funny, and Francis was my favorite of the many characters in the book. As the novel progresses, though, it shifts from being speculative to more preachy and explicative. The only females are in the third section, and this book fails The Bechdel Test, which identifies gender bias in fiction, in that no female has a conversation with another female.

Since the book is set in a monastery, it could be argued that it wasn’t within the scope. Yet after I read this book, I longed for a female perspective, something like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Since I hadn’t read her most recent post-apocalypse novels, I decided to check out Oryx and Crake, the first of the MaddAddam trilogy, which was followed by The Year of the Flood and completed with MaddAddam, to be published this September.

The events in Oryx and Crake are typical of PAF: a genetically engineered plague has wiped out probably all humans except one man, our narrator:

Snowman wakes before dawn. He lies unmoving, listening to the tide coming in, wave after wve sloshing over the various barricades, wish-wash, wish-wash, the rhythm of heartbeat. He would so like to believe he is still asleep. ..

Out of habit he looks at his watch–stainless steel case, burnished aluminum band, still shiny although it no longer works. He wears it now as his only talisman. A blank face is what it shows him: zero hour. It causes a jolt of terror to run through him, this absence of official time. Nobody nowhere knows what time it is.

Snowman is not alone; he is surrounded by a variety of genetically spliced creatures. The series proceeds ahead then flashes back. Typical Atwood, she breaks every rule of how to write fiction, yet the story unspools seamlessly into a compulsively readable narrative. Although devourable, the book left a bitter aftertaste. The central characters are a love triangle: two men and one woman, who embodies several cliches, and meets a clicheed end. She never converses with another woman, so this book too fails the Bechdel test. And, for anyone expecting closure, remember: you’re reading Atwood.

I continue to puzzle over this book. What does it add to the PAF genre other than a ripping yarn typically devoid of females? Is there a deeper layer of irony that I’m missing? Is Atwood saying a fully realized female is impossible in PAF? Is this an extension of the female-suppressing world of Handmaid? Does the apocalypse somehow preclude women? Certainly, it’s provoking, though what it has provoked is perplexity and anger and disappointment at Atwood, not my usual admiration.

I found a possibly parallel question in Vanessa Veselka’s essay in The American Reader, “Green Screen: The Lack of Female Road Narratives and Why It Matters“:

Siddhartha wants liberation, Dante wants Beatrice, Frodo wants to get to Mount Doom–we all want something. Quest is elemental to the human experience. All road narratives are to some extent built on quest. If you’re a woman, though, this fundamental possibility of quest is denied. You can’t go anywhere if you can’t step out onto a road.

Left to my own devices, I’d go down a rabbit hole and explore PAF with female protagonists. Maureen McHugh has done some excellent stories and her novel Mission Child is one of the few I can think of. Octavia Butler? Sheri Tepper’s Gate to Women’s Country? Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time? YA PAF often has female protagonists, e.g., Katniss Everdeen, only to shackle and domesticate them in the end.

Alas, being part of 3 book groups, one of which I lead (hence Canticle, which sent me down this “road”) means my dance card is limited, so I’m unlikely to read up on these questions soon. If any of you kind readers have any insight, please, please, start a thread in the comments section.

I love most of Hope Larson’s graphic novels, Gray Horses, Chiggers, Salamander Dream, Mercury, with the exception of her adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time. I was interested to see how I’d like the oddly titled Who is AC? which is written by Larson, whose art I really like, but illustrated by manga artist Tintin Pantoja.

Lin is moving to a new town with her family. She’s a writer who puts out her own ‘zine. On the plane she gets a mysterious phone call that somehow results in superpowers, and further shenanigans ensue in creating a villain. There are a handful of strong female characters.

There’s lots going on with a big cast of characters. Good and bad lurk in the cyber-background and while this is clearly the beginning of a series, it is a standalone story. While it worked better for me than Foiled and Curses Foiled Again, this feels more disposable than Larson’s earlier works.

Oops. I’ve accidentally now watched more movies this year than I’ve read books, and have been reading a bunch of graphic novels, so it isn’t even like there are chunksters slowing me down. For a while I stopped requesting DVDs from the library because the queues were so long. Now I’m back in the habit. And a habit it is, in the negative sense of the word, when my husband has to warn me to stop using his account to reserve things or he’s going to change his password.

I can’t even blame recent binges or Blu rays from Half Price Books, since none of the recent viewings are from recent used purchases. Sigh. I suppose there are worse habits to have.

Django Unchained (2012) Hyper violent, of course, it didn’t impress me as Inglourious Basterds did. Good, but overlong and unfocused. I do like the revisionist history/wishful thinking aspect that it shares with IB.

Pitch Perfect.(2012) Flawed, but charming, like a real person. Don’t have high expectations, and it’ll be fun. Geek note: I bought the soundtrack, plus Kelly Clarkson’s Greatest Hits after watching it.

Dredd (2012). This I borrowed from the library because I thought my husband would like it and I watched it too. Hyper violent, again, but with dark humor, and an intriguing villain.Like V for Vendetta, this comic-book adaptation made more sense when it was grounded in Thatcher’s England.

Clueless (1995). I was reminded of it when I saw this article on game theory. Charming and fun, but a little low on the acting quotient. Paul Rudd has come a long way.

Iron Man 3.(2013) Date night. Glad I saw it before anything got spoiled, ’cause there’s loads of stuff to spoil. But overloud, overlong, and over ’splodey. Towards the end stuff was going down and I just kept thinking, “I’m bored. This is silly. Please move the plot along.” It does set things up interestingly for the future. But I’d say see it at a matinee, though sooner is better because of spoil-i-tude.

P.S. We saw a trailer for The Lone Ranger, that has Johnny Depp playing Tonto, and in Iron Man 3, Ben Kingsley plays a character called the Mandarin. Why are white people playing non-white roles, still? Shouldn’t we have moved past this? Can’t we PLEASE move past this, and have more non-white roles in movies played by non-white actors?

I listen to the Current radio station, and my favorite of their DJs is Mary Lucia. Yesterday, she played Squeeze’s first hit single, Take Me I’m Yours, which I knew from their collection Squeeze Singles 45’s and Under. It jolted me back:

18 years old, I’m new to a stickshift, grinding the gears and riding the clutch of a cheap, noisy car. 7:45 in the morning, running late on the way to school, my best friend is in the passenger seat. Between my knees a cold Diet Coke. (This was in the days before cupholders.) In my left hand, a Marlboro Light. Squeeze Singles blaring from the tape player. We laughed. We stalled out. We cursed. And somehow we got to school.

Foiled by Jane Yolen and illustrated by Mike Cavallaro is a middle-grade graphic novel about Aliera, an introverted girl who fences who is ostensibly in high school, though she feels much younger to me. There’s a cute new guy at school who seems a little odd and when she tried to meet him at the train station, things become really odd. Aliera’s only friend is her wheelchair-bound cousin with rheumatoid arthritis. She just got a new practice weapon (NB: not a sword) that her mother picked up cheap from a Chinese woman at a tag sale. (I don’t like the Mystical Asian cliche).

My description of the book won’t flow, because my experience didn’t either. It also ends just as it’s getting good. While I know this is part of what a series does, I do feel that each volume should have a complete story, and I didn’t think this one did. So I had hopes for the sequel, Curses Foiled Again. Alas, this worked even less for me, as a big villain was revealed, whose identity, past actions, and motivations I didn’t buy at all.

The illustrations are strong. Aliera is smart and funny, but as a whole, this didn’t work for me. There’s little subtext, so it’s all on the page, and the story isn’t complex enough to fully engage me. Perhaps because I’m not the target market? My children, 7 and 9, both boys, loved them.

Was it possible to die of loneliness, Nicole wondered. She lay alone in the giant king bed, listening to the neighbors having raucous sex, and didn’t doubt it for a moment.

[this is another fragment of a bigger piece I recently unearthed, one that I thought worked as flash fiction on its own.]

Right after Julian left town, people missed him. Time passed, and they began to miss other things. One of his roommates, Adam, couldn’t find his portable CD player. Their other roommate, Jason, couldn’t find his concert T-shirts. The bookstore discovered it no longer had a copy of the Hardcover Oxford Abridged English Dictionary. A co-worker couldn’t find his favorite bong. One of his exes couldn’t find her favorite sweatshirt or U2 CD. As people talked, they began to put it together. The conclusion was unmistakable. And in the NW corner of the country, Julian was safe from reprisals.

About a month after Julian left, everyone still missed their things. But they’d pretty much stopped missing Julian.

[Found this when I was putting together a writing sample. It was part of a larger manuscript, but I wondered if it worked as flash fiction.]

Apparently there were some people out there who thought Hilary Mantel shouldn’t be on the shortlist for the Women’s Prize for fiction, fka The Orange Prize. She’s won enough, seemed to be the feeling. Let someone else have a chance.

This is funny for a few reasons. It is EXACTLY what I was thinking when Mantel was included in this year’s Tournament of Books. She won it last year, give some other books a chance. Then I was thrilled when Orphan Master’s Son won, but it proceeded to win the Pulitzer, so it’s not like it was some tiny little book that needed recognition. But I agree entirely that she should be on this shortlist, which recognizes literary excellence. And her writing is excellent, even if I don’t care for it.

This was the point made by chair of judges Miranda Richardson.

“I was very keen to keep a balanced approach about Hilary Mantel,” she said, “because we have in the UK this tall-poppy syndrome: ‘You’ve already had too much; you can’t have any more. Go away and die now.’ It’s disgusting, frankly, because this competition is about excellence for writing.”

And I read this and was like, what? Is that THE Miranda Richardson, of Blackadder and oh so much more? Or was there some other, literary Miranda Richardson.

It IS the actor.

Every year there’s a kerfuffle over the prize, since many people (including AS Byatt) think it’s sexist to have an award just for women, except that last year’s VIDA stats show us that we’re still living in a world that slights women authors. But even AS Byatt agrees that Mantel should be on the list.

via Bookslut

Through some sort of synergy, we received three small indie movies in a row from the library. Two were good, and one was great.

Bernie (2011) Jack Black manages to control and channel his usual over-the-top-ness playing an assistant funeral director/choir director in a small Texas town who befriends a cranky old woman, played hoot-inducingly by Shirley MacLaine. Matthew McConaghey is great as the smarmy but well meaning local politician, and the performances are all elevated by the surrounding chorus of small town gossips, some of whom are from the town where the movie’s story is based.

Celeste and Jesse Forever (2012) Rashida Jones and Andy Samberg are charming as a couple who married young but can’t quite make it in the long run. Lots of nice supporting roles for good character actors, and a story that mostly lightly treads a tough balancing act that could easily have veered into the saccharine. Quiet, a little slow, but worthwhile.

Safety Not Guaranteed Up front, I loved the movie. This definitely belongs on that Entertainment Weekly list of movies you should see that you may not have heard of. (The previous two probably do, also, but this one, most definitely.)

Aubrey Plaza plays a withdrawn character not unlike that of April Ludgate on Parks and Rec, just minus the goofiness. She’s a magazine intern who gets assigned to check out a weird classified ad that seeks a partner for time travel. She and two others from the paper meet up with the guy who may or may not be nuts, and things play out in weird, surprising, sad, and sweet ways. Again, the tone on this could have gone so wrong, and that it didn’t veer into offensively weird or saccharine sweet delighted me. SEE THIS FILM.

Yay! I thought when I got the weekly pile at the comic shop and it included the 7th graphic novel collection of Peter Gross and Mike Carey’s comic-book series The Unwritten: The Wound, about a Harry Potter-like guy who finds that truth and fiction have a very complicated relationship. The problem with these six-issue collections, though, is that this bunch of 6 issues didn’t tell a complete story. It doesn’t stand alone, and merely leaves me hoping that closure comes in volume 8. So, you should absolutely be reading The Unwritten, as it’s one of the best current series out there. But v7 didn’t satisfy on its own.

Also recommended? Brian K Vaughan’s Saga. I buy that one monthly; can’t wait for the collections.

A few months ago, my husband was reading something on his nook and kept laughing aloud. It was Caitlin (pronounced CAT lin) Moran’s How to Be a Woman, which he’d seen recommended by gonzo author Warren Ellis. Since his copy was an e-book, he got a hard copy for me (I’m a traditionalist, and yes, I’ve tried e-readers. Not my cuppa.)

Starting off, it reminded me a lot of Jenny Lawson’s Let’s Pretend This Never Happened because it’s about growing up poor and weird far from a major city. While Lawson’s is a pretty straightforward memoir, Moran’s is personal stories pinned up around a theme of what she refers to as strident feminism, a term she knows will put some people off. And yet, she has two diagnostics that I thought were useful and to the point.

One, to tell if you’re a feminist:

a. do you have a vagina? and
b. do you want to be in charge of it?

If you said yes to both, then congratulations! You’re a feminist. (p. 75)

Another,

how can you tell when some sexism is happening to you?

Well, in this matter, what ultimately aids us is to simply apply this question to the issue: Is this polite?

The anecdotes come fast and funny, and it’s entertaining and a good reminder of other things that I, at least, sometimes forget. On underwear:

I’m pro big undies. Strident feminisms NEEDS big undies…there is scarcely a woman in Britain wearing a pair of underpants that actually fit her. Instead of having something that sensibly and reassuringly contains both the buttocks–what I would call a good pair of undies–they’re wearing little more than gluteal accessories, or arse-trinkets. (91-2)

On high heels:

“But, bafflingly, we totally accept the uselessness of heels. We accept it limply, shrugging. We are indifferent to the thousands of pounds we spend over a lifetime on shoes we only wear once, and in great pain. (196)

On bras:

“a good bra can be one of the greatest aids a woman will ever know.” (95)

(The only kind of bras she burns are the ones that don’t fit properly.)

There is also a very thoughtful and thought-provoking chapter near the end on a topic so touchy that most wouldn’t touch it, but Moran does, politely, I thought.

BUT. Here come the but’s. Somewhere around the middle of the book, when the childhood anecdotes stopped and the book became more straightforwardly a treatise on feminism, I became less engaged. Moran made huge sweepting statements and didn’t qualify them, e.g., How to Be a Woman, right up front there in the title. Nowhere does she qualify her position as a non-poor white woman. See also:

“Even the most ardent feminist historian, male or female–citing Amazons and tribal matriarchies and Cleopatra–can’t conceal that women have basically done fuck-all for the last 100,000 years. Come on–let’s admit it.” (131)

Um, no. No. I will not admit that.

Also, she draws a polar distinction between burlesque, saying that it lets “the power balance rest with the person taking her clothes off”, as opposed to strip clubs, which she finds indefensible. I don’t quite buy either extreme of her argument.

She offers two chapters: Why You Should Have Children and Why You Shouldn’t Have Children. But while it seems balanced that she included the latter, her romantic waxing on motherhood tip the scales toward the former. Additionally, this was one of many instances in which she used “you” rather than “me” and I found the slippage into second person grating, as when she keeps using “you” in the chapter about naming her vagina and breasts, which is not something I ever did or worried much about. And I was bothered by her use of “you” in the chapter on abortion. She probably did it as a way to draw in the reader and encourage empathy, but it came off to me as distancing herself from her own story.

In the end, the amusing anecdotes and helpful reminders were not enough to win me over. I spent some time reading reviews at Goodreads, and there are almost no three star reviews–they tend to 1/2 hate or 4/5 love. I would give this book 3 stars. Some good stuff, some not good stuff. Context and qualificaiton would have made a huge difference to me. Enough good stuff for a qualified recommendation, but that’s it.