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natalierobinld's review
emotional
funny
hopeful
reflective
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
lookatjimmy's review against another edition
2.0
[2.5]
IDK man it’s just not the type of book I’m generally into. Once again, read it for a book club and would’ve otherwise never given it the time of day. It wasn’t terrible or anything, I just didn’t really relate to/sympathize with any of the characters or the situations for the most part. One thing that REALLY pissed me off was the whole second half with Missy realizing she was wrong and all the doctors who denied her sterilization were actually right all along, culminating in her desperately wanting a baby and finally, by the end, the whole bullshit “yes it’s hard but it’s also the most rewarding thing in my life” blah blah blah like bro sometimes people really don’t want babies and that’s FINE.
IDK man it’s just not the type of book I’m generally into. Once again, read it for a book club and would’ve otherwise never given it the time of day. It wasn’t terrible or anything, I just didn’t really relate to/sympathize with any of the characters or the situations for the most part. One thing that REALLY pissed me off was the whole second half with Missy realizing she was wrong and all the doctors who denied her sterilization were actually right all along, culminating in her desperately wanting a baby and finally, by the end, the whole bullshit “yes it’s hard but it’s also the most rewarding thing in my life” blah blah blah like bro sometimes people really don’t want babies and that’s FINE.
ella_francess's review
challenging
emotional
funny
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
sad
fast-paced
5.0
This may be one of my favorite books of all time. It has everything, from mommy issues to fem experiences with trans mascs to punk rock to family trauma. Extremely complex look at feminism and being a woman. Cried straight for the last 30-40% and laughed at the same time. So, so beautiful. Feel grateful that this exists.
lsparrow's review
2.0
I always want to enjoy this author's work more. I love the gritty queer characters and locations but the stories and plots just cannot keep me hooked.
kleonard's review
3.0
This is a novel about motherhood in all of its forms, and how important it is for women to control whether and when they become mothers. Each character rejects and chooses motherhood in different ways, with different support systems, and with very different approaches. Whittall does a great job of revealing each woman's reasons for abortion, and how they got their abortions, emphasizing the need for safe and legal abortion on demand. This would be a great selection for book clubs and for parent-child reading.
nicovreeland's review
1.0
I had some small problems with the first half of this book, but they pale in comparison to the problems that jump up during and after the midpoint.
The book starts strikingly. The opening chapter finds Missy, a 21-year-old rock star and self-described slut, having problems getting a doctor to agree to tie her tubes. She knows that she doesn’t want kids, and she wants to be able to sleep around on her tour.
The chapters alternate between Missy and her mother, Carola, who abandoned Missy when she was a child to “find herself” and go join an ashram—in Missy’s words, “she left us to go do yoga.”
Carola sees Missy on the cover of a music magazine, and decides she wants to find her. We also discover some interesting backstory about Missy’s cult leader father and the polygamous commune he ran, a big factor in Carola abandoning Missy. Meanwhile, Missy’s destructive behavior derails her band’s tour and she decides she wants to find her mom.
So, if this novel plays out predictably, Missy discovers that she’s pregnant, realizes that she wants to run away like her mother did, instead she and her mother reconnect, and everybody learns a lesson about, say, grace.
NOPE.
Spoilers from here…
SPOILERS
Instead, when Missy discovers she’s pregnant, she quickly gets an abortion. Then, just when Missy and Carola are about to reconnect, we jump to a 40-page interlude with Missy’s grandmother, Ruth. (Bafflingly, Ruth is NOT Carola’s mother, but her mother-in-law, the cult leader’s mother.) Ruth’s story starts in 1922 Turkey, and also ends there when she dies, and the whole section seems to mostly be an homage to All the Light We Cannot See. Then, frustratingly, we get the confrontation between Missy and Carola from Ruth’s POV. It’s about a page and a half long and supremely unsatisfying.
Then the real bullshit goes down. Instead of following the storylines from the first half, we skip forward 16 years.
Missy, now 37, DESPERATELY WANTS A BABY.
Fuck this whole storyline. Doctors really do gatekeep their patients’ own bodies and reproductive choices because they think they know better than their patients, and because everybody is “supposed” to have babies. When I got a vasectomy, a nurse tried to talk me out of it DURING THE PROCEDURE.
But here comes this dumbass book, telling us that the doctors who wouldn’t tie Missy’s tubes were right not to do that because she DID change her mind later. That’s infuriating. Even more infuriating is that Missy doesn’t even really seem to want a baby. She wants to save her shitty marriage (to a character who wasn’t even in the first half) and she’s bored. Even Missy herself acknowledges that she probably wants a baby for the wrong reasons.
Meanwhile, second-half Carola is INSUFFERABLE. Where first-half Carola seeming to be maturing and coming to accept the mistakes she’d made with Missy, second-half Carola runs from the slightest confrontation. When Missy brings up her abandonment (which is obviously still a raw issue for her even 16 years after their reconciliation), Carola exploits therapy-speak to deflect any responsibility for her actions: “I wasn’t prepared to have this conversation right now. Please, I just need quiet.”
Missy, who’s been sober for years, gets drunk and sleeps with the Uber driver who takes her home from the bar. The book treats this whole episode as a good decision because she might get pregnant, which is now the thing she wants most in the world. Carola is super excited by this development, because she’ll get a do-over baby that she double-pinky-promises not to abandon.
One of the threads throughout the book is the death of Taylor, Missy’s friend at the commune who died as a young woman. Finally, her cause of death is revealed: BIRTH CONTROL KILLED HER. She was on birth control, smoked a cigarette, and died of an aneurysm in her sleep. She was something like 19 years old. I guess—I hope—that this plot point is supposed to convey something like “women shoulder most of the burden of birth control, and it’s dangerous for them.” Instead, it comes off like a fundamentalist scare tactic: don’t take birth control, it’s dangerous.
The book introduces a couple of weird late-onset plot threads at page 30: Carola gets cancer and Missy reconnects with a one-night-stand from that tour when she was 21. Both of these feel like first-act plot points, not third-act plot points, and, indeed, they are both rushed and unsatisfying. (Carola’s cancer is stage 1, it’s cured before she works up the courage to tell Missy, and then she never has to.)
The most frustrating part of this novel is that it squanders every single bit of its potential. There are such good setups here to explore questions like: how does motherhood affect people? What’s the value of community? What’s the value of conformity? How do we balance what we want with what we’ve committed to when those wants change? Or even just, what’s it like to grow up in a cult? Or, what challenges do lesbians who want kids face?
The book delves deeply into exactly ZERO of these questions. Instead it just rams home these weird conservative family-planning talking points like “birth control is dangerous,” and “you’re gonna want kids someday” and “sometimes you need to fall off the wagon to find the courage to have unprotected sex to have a baby, because have baby is most important thing in life”
Missy and Carola both seem to demature as the story goes on. At the end, their lives and their identities are messier and they are dumber and less responsible than they were at the beginning of the book. Carola refuses to apologize for abandoning Missy, saying that her choice was the best one for everybody involved, instead of acknowledging any role that selfishness might have played in it. She also never acknowledges that there might have been a middle ground between staying and complete abandonment, like leaving but staying in touch.
The longer I spent with these characters, the more I disliked them. By the end, I really hated them both. The book ends with a chaotic series of quickfire plot points, and then a last page on how Motherhood Is the Best Part of Womanhood. As a whole, the experience of reading this book was deeply, deeply unpleasant.
The book starts strikingly. The opening chapter finds Missy, a 21-year-old rock star and self-described slut, having problems getting a doctor to agree to tie her tubes. She knows that she doesn’t want kids, and she wants to be able to sleep around on her tour.
The chapters alternate between Missy and her mother, Carola, who abandoned Missy when she was a child to “find herself” and go join an ashram—in Missy’s words, “she left us to go do yoga.”
Carola sees Missy on the cover of a music magazine, and decides she wants to find her. We also discover some interesting backstory about Missy’s cult leader father and the polygamous commune he ran, a big factor in Carola abandoning Missy. Meanwhile, Missy’s destructive behavior derails her band’s tour and she decides she wants to find her mom.
So, if this novel plays out predictably, Missy discovers that she’s pregnant, realizes that she wants to run away like her mother did, instead she and her mother reconnect, and everybody learns a lesson about, say, grace.
NOPE.
Spoilers from here…
SPOILERS
Instead, when Missy discovers she’s pregnant, she quickly gets an abortion. Then, just when Missy and Carola are about to reconnect, we jump to a 40-page interlude with Missy’s grandmother, Ruth. (Bafflingly, Ruth is NOT Carola’s mother, but her mother-in-law, the cult leader’s mother.) Ruth’s story starts in 1922 Turkey, and also ends there when she dies, and the whole section seems to mostly be an homage to All the Light We Cannot See. Then, frustratingly, we get the confrontation between Missy and Carola from Ruth’s POV. It’s about a page and a half long and supremely unsatisfying.
Then the real bullshit goes down. Instead of following the storylines from the first half, we skip forward 16 years.
Missy, now 37, DESPERATELY WANTS A BABY.
Fuck this whole storyline. Doctors really do gatekeep their patients’ own bodies and reproductive choices because they think they know better than their patients, and because everybody is “supposed” to have babies. When I got a vasectomy, a nurse tried to talk me out of it DURING THE PROCEDURE.
But here comes this dumbass book, telling us that the doctors who wouldn’t tie Missy’s tubes were right not to do that because she DID change her mind later. That’s infuriating. Even more infuriating is that Missy doesn’t even really seem to want a baby. She wants to save her shitty marriage (to a character who wasn’t even in the first half) and she’s bored. Even Missy herself acknowledges that she probably wants a baby for the wrong reasons.
Meanwhile, second-half Carola is INSUFFERABLE. Where first-half Carola seeming to be maturing and coming to accept the mistakes she’d made with Missy, second-half Carola runs from the slightest confrontation. When Missy brings up her abandonment (which is obviously still a raw issue for her even 16 years after their reconciliation), Carola exploits therapy-speak to deflect any responsibility for her actions: “I wasn’t prepared to have this conversation right now. Please, I just need quiet.”
Missy, who’s been sober for years, gets drunk and sleeps with the Uber driver who takes her home from the bar. The book treats this whole episode as a good decision because she might get pregnant, which is now the thing she wants most in the world. Carola is super excited by this development, because she’ll get a do-over baby that she double-pinky-promises not to abandon.
One of the threads throughout the book is the death of Taylor, Missy’s friend at the commune who died as a young woman. Finally, her cause of death is revealed: BIRTH CONTROL KILLED HER. She was on birth control, smoked a cigarette, and died of an aneurysm in her sleep. She was something like 19 years old. I guess—I hope—that this plot point is supposed to convey something like “women shoulder most of the burden of birth control, and it’s dangerous for them.” Instead, it comes off like a fundamentalist scare tactic: don’t take birth control, it’s dangerous.
The book introduces a couple of weird late-onset plot threads at page 30: Carola gets cancer and Missy reconnects with a one-night-stand from that tour when she was 21. Both of these feel like first-act plot points, not third-act plot points, and, indeed, they are both rushed and unsatisfying. (Carola’s cancer is stage 1, it’s cured before she works up the courage to tell Missy, and then she never has to.)
The most frustrating part of this novel is that it squanders every single bit of its potential. There are such good setups here to explore questions like: how does motherhood affect people? What’s the value of community? What’s the value of conformity? How do we balance what we want with what we’ve committed to when those wants change? Or even just, what’s it like to grow up in a cult? Or, what challenges do lesbians who want kids face?
The book delves deeply into exactly ZERO of these questions. Instead it just rams home these weird conservative family-planning talking points like “birth control is dangerous,” and “you’re gonna want kids someday” and “sometimes you need to fall off the wagon to find the courage to have unprotected sex to have a baby, because have baby is most important thing in life”
Missy and Carola both seem to demature as the story goes on. At the end, their lives and their identities are messier and they are dumber and less responsible than they were at the beginning of the book. Carola refuses to apologize for abandoning Missy, saying that her choice was the best one for everybody involved, instead of acknowledging any role that selfishness might have played in it. She also never acknowledges that there might have been a middle ground between staying and complete abandonment, like leaving but staying in touch.
The longer I spent with these characters, the more I disliked them. By the end, I really hated them both. The book ends with a chaotic series of quickfire plot points, and then a last page on how Motherhood Is the Best Part of Womanhood. As a whole, the experience of reading this book was deeply, deeply unpleasant.
leamarieee's review against another edition
emotional
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
chloe_s27's review
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
dl307's review
3.0
Disappointed in Missys obsession in book 3. It's a complete 180 of the character in book 1 in a way that doesn't feel right.
I did enjoy the stories of each character overall. Felt messy, complicated, real.
I did enjoy the stories of each character overall. Felt messy, complicated, real.