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sarahaf712's review
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Addiction, Alcoholism, Sexism, Toxic relationship, Drug abuse, Domestic abuse, Physical abuse, Racism, Rape, Sexual violence, Sexual harassment, Emotional abuse, Vomit, Mental illness, Misogyny, and Sexual assault
Moderate: Cultural appropriation, Gaslighting, Panic attacks/disorders, Colonisation, Abandonment, Stalking, and Grief
Minor: Genocide and Hate crime
viaviaggi's review
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
4.25
Content Warnings
Graphic: Alcoholism, Body horror, Genocide, Mental illness, Sexual violence, Colonisation, Medical content, Cursing, Gaslighting, Rape, Sexual assault, Violence, Addiction, Domestic abuse, Emotional abuse, Injury/Injury detail, Alcohol, Gore, Misogyny, Murder, Physical abuse, Racism, and Toxic relationship
Minor: Stalking, Car accident, and Fire/Fire injury
betsygrace's review
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
5.0
Very interesting chapter on Oregon Trail from an Indigenous perspective. I appreciate her thoughts on the term “white passing” and the cognitive dissonance this brings for many indigenous folks.
I also had some small revelations about why silence in relationships can be triggering for me (because the author is an abusive relationship and her experience sounds somewhat similar to my previous relationship).
The author also writes beautiful prose about her trauma, mental illness, colonization, and more. Her transparency is something beautiful.
I also think this was more of a 4ish for me because I didn’t love the darkness the book brought for me personally— BUT. I can still appreciate a good piece of literature when I see one!
I also think this was more of a 4ish for me because I didn’t love the darkness the book brought for me personally— BUT. I can still appreciate a good piece of literature when I see one!
Content Warnings
Graphic: Abandonment, Addiction, Alcohol, Colonisation, Cultural appropriation, Domestic abuse, Emotional abuse, Genocide, Mental illness, Physical abuse, Rape, Sexual assault, Suicidal thoughts, Toxic relationship, and Trafficking
caseythereader's review
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
4.25
Content Warnings
Graphic: Addiction, Alcohol, Alcoholism, Colonisation, Cultural appropriation, Cursing, Death, Domestic abuse, Drug abuse, Emotional abuse, Genocide, Grief, Infidelity, Mental illness, Misogyny, Panic attacks/disorders, Physical abuse, Racism, Rape, Sexism, Sexual content, Sexual assault, Violence, Toxic relationship, Stalking, and Sexual violence
corvicore's review
I have had nightmares three days in a row after reading this book so for my own sake I'm not finishing it. It's very well written and I'd like to finish it someday, but due to the heavy subjects I don't think I can continue reading this book right now.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Addiction, Alcohol, Alcoholism, Rape, and Mental illness
Minor: Child abuse, Colonisation, Cultural appropriation, Emotional abuse, Genocide, and Sexual assault
ceallaighsbooks's review
challenging
emotional
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
4.75
“A canal wants to be a river. It wants to carry what a river carries, but without flair: tidy banks, no tricky bends. A river doesn’t want to be a canal, but now that the settlers are here, a river doesn’t have a choice.”
TITLE—White Magic
AUTHOR—Elissa Washuta
PUBLISHED—2021
GENRE—memoir; essays
SETTING—modernday America
MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—witchcraft, cultural appropriation, Indigenous identity, PTSD, mental health, love, astrology, tarot, absurdism
WRITING STYLE—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
BONUS ELEMENT/S—“You destroyed my heart,” I say. “And then I became a powerful witch.”
PHILOSOPHY—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
“I walk back thinking about dead sharks in the water, caught by somebody who wanted something else.”
Alright. I honestly didn’t mean to rush through this. I wanted to stop after every few chapters and really digest what I’d read but I literally could not stop reading it. I think what was primarily driving me through this book was my curiosity for a story that was so unique and totally unlike anything I’d ever encountered before. It was a total intellectual and emotional experience. I had to consciously digest every sentence and consider every possible meaning and implication behind the author’s choices from structure, to metaphor, to the details she picks as relevant, the questions she asks both herself and her reader—she covers so many different topics and emotions and yet still manages to keep everything contained and purposeful.
“The doctor prescribes a pill and asks me if I’m getting any exercise. I tell her I’ve been cutting my lawn out of the ground with a knife.”
On indigenous identity & generational trauma: “The site of my wounding can’t be reached because it disappeared under the dammed river’s water clot long before I was born into the nightmare.”
I think what also particularly blew me away about this book was how unreservedly raw and personal it was. I was constantly being floored by the fact that someone could write something so revealing about their inner personal journey and write it so honestly and make themselves so so vulnerable in print! Idk. Maybe that’s a total projection of my own fear of revealing too much of myself to anyone let alone any total stranger that might read a book revealing some of my most private and personal thoughts and experiences but damn. Washuta does not hold back and going through all of her “research” (LOVED that wordchoice btw) with her was such an incredible, rewarding, emotional, and eyeopening (both as to the perspective of someone else and to my perception of my own life) experience. I’ll definitely be rereading this one!
“Maybe it’s not that I’m so strange; it’s just that I catalog pieces of strangeness and, through them, bring my body into focus in a way I can’t when I look into the mirror.”
“…sometimes, it’s not the real but the imagined that unlocks answers that save us.”
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.75
TW // rape, sexual assault, sexual trauma, PTSD, sexualization of Indigenous women, mental health, colonialism, genocide, alcoholism, toxic relationships, emotional abuse
Further Reading—
- I, Tituba, by Maryse Condé
- Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer
- Women Who Run with the Wolves, by Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés
- Walking the Witch, by Pam Grossman
- Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, by Olga Tokarczuk
Favorite Quotes…
“But I don’t like calling myself a witch. I don’t want to be seen as following a fad, and I don’t want the white witches I resemble to take my presence in their spaces as permission for theft. Really, I just want a version of the occult that isn’t built on plunder.”
“The truth is I’m not a witch, exactly: I’m a person with prayers, a person who believes in spirits and plays with fire.”
“The PTSD diagnosis scared me. My triggers and traumas had been allowed to multiply unchecked, making for a hefty pile of kindling that would catch fire from the smallest sparks… My challenge would be to learn through therapy to function in a world full of reminders that I would probably be harmed again.”
“I speak every fear into the bucket: That I am not safe. That I am too wounded to be anything but a burden. That the best of me has been taken, the rest of me left to grope for a calm that might never be anything but potential space for danger.”
“It sounds like the little lies that come to me and ask to be called epiphanies.”
“The answer was that I needed to ask for help. I am loath to, ever, because it’s only when I’ve needed something from somebody that I’ve been let down.”
“I’m not comfortable with the notion that I have all the information I need, because I’ve never known that to be true.”
“…I was instructed in assumption before gravity, resurrection before biological death, and immaculate conception before reproduction. The problem with mystery is that I have always understood completely. I never fully cultivated a sense of reason in which what’s called supernatural would be anything but natural.”
“It takes safety to dream: to play house in my mind, to build us a little life in the future, to believe we are living in magic and can use it to make us happy.”
“In the woods, I turned over rocks, looking for the underworld, always fearing I’d find a nest of snakes instead.”
“I wanted a love that would rouse the dead. Maybe the devil, then, was the beloved I’d been looking for.”
“A spell is a set of words meant to make magic by calling upon a deity, spirit, demon, or other supernatural power. The spell is the request; the magic is the miracle. A spell, then, must be the same as a prayer.”
“When you don’t understand the meaning of something you read, whose fault is it? Yours or the writer’s? It has to be someone’s fault. Everything does. Anyway, I just ask because this is my book. Do you think I understand everything in this book? If I don’t, can you?”
“How am I supposed to live, not knowing where the ghosts are, where my murder will happen, where my corpse will be left? I could be murdered anywhere, really, because that’s where the men live, but that truth was easy to ignore when I was blithe and rosy in that made-up land where I might have been dreaming, might have been playing pretend, might have been nothing more than a man’s imagining.”
“This book is a narrative. It has an arc. But the tension is not in what happened when I lived it; it’s in what happened when I wrote it. Like I already told you, this is not just a recounted story; I am trying to make something happen and record the process and results.”
“…the way the trauma can turn thoughts into sinister nonsense that moves violence from unthinkable response to natural answer.”
“The choice is not to be a witch or to be a witch, not to believe in magic or to believe in reality, but to be an open door or a closed one.”
“You’ve traveled so many miles but you still haven’t seen the sun or the moon.”
“Do you think this is a good book? How do you know? Is it because you compared it to other books? I do want to make you uncomfortable if you’re accustomed to being the ideal audience, your wants prioritized. This is how I treat so many of the people I get close to: I try to give them exactly what they want in some ways, withhold in others. Can you love a person even if you don’t understand them? Or: How much do you have to understand someone in order to love them? Does one have anything to do with the other at all?”
“Nature wasn’t good enough for settlers; it demanded transformation.”
“But Duwamish villages lined the Black River. A long-haired man-shaped monster, skaitaw, once lived in a deep river hole. A person could draw power and wealth from skaitaw. I don’t know what happened to the being. I imagine a dry hole filled with the memory of a monster, a cold spot of warped energy, the residue of power sucked from the world.”
“I became so busy insisting on the fact of my existence that it was only through strain that I could summon up the words for anything else.”
“At first, the change in diagnosis brought on a mild identity crisis—bipolar disorder had been a major part of my routine and my self-conception for most of my adult life… PTSD was the external turned internal, a constant string of triggerings, a body and mind set against the world.”
“I have lost my land, my language, a thousand choices that should have been mine to make.”
“I have a highlighter, a composition book, and a pen. I have time. I do not have any better ideas.”
“…our reality is a fabrication of our own making, formed from our thoughts and actions.”
“The site of my wounding can’t be reached because it disappeared under the dammed river’s water clot long before I was born into the nightmare.”
“Men of my history, hear me: When you talk down to me, fuck around on me, disappear from me, lie to me, that’s an interesting perspective but actually me, you disrespect a woman made of women knotted in a long string stretching back before massacre.”
“Because I am a fool, I have faith he’ll use what I’ve told him to love me better.”
“Borders are the flesh wounds of empire. On the map they look like stitches on a belly.”
“They’d make you think that evil and need have the same means and ends.”
Content Warnings
Graphic: Alcoholism, Emotional abuse, Mental illness, Rape, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, and Toxic relationship
Minor: Genocide
PTSDbi_n_large's review
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Rape, Domestic abuse, Emotional abuse, Alcoholism, and Genocide
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