gizellereads's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional informative sad slow-paced

3.5


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knick_nat's review

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emotional informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

4.0


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ashstrong172's review

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slow-paced

2.5

This book started off strong, but never really made its point. I had hoped for an in-depth analysis of the ways in which wellness culture intersects with race and class, and Róisín did touch on this. However, the majority of the book was about her personal trauma and the search for "wellness" that came after it.

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aubreystrawberry's review

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More of a trauma memoir with occasional critiques of the overall wellness industrial complex- not really what i’m looking for rn. 

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zaraven's review

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emotional informative sad slow-paced

2.5

like others wrote, this book is more of a trauma memoir than a critique or analysis of wellness culture, and in it, Roisin locates their own experiences within existing literature on trauma and post traumatic stress rather than critiquing the ways that trauma is conceptualized in the Global North (eg hyper individualized, often located in the mother or parent, focused on recovery, etc). i resonated with some of it, a lot of it felt repetitive, some things were contradictory without much explanation (eg opening with recognizing that forgiveness is not always helpful or necessary - which I appreciated - and then closing by emphasizing the value of forgiveness without sharing much about how they got there or how they hold both), and mostly generalizing the author’s own personal experiences and offering a partial analysis that left me wanting more. 

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katharina90's review

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challenging dark reflective medium-paced

2.5

This book is first and foremost a memoir and describes the author's abusive childhood and how her lived experience has informed her views on "wellness". 

This book is not an in-depth critique of the wellness industry in the West with all its harmful cultural appropriation, classism, fatphobia, capitalist overconsumption, etc. 

You can catch glimpses of many those critiques but the author only scratches the surface and frequently relies on quotes from others to get her point across which makes her analysis feel unoriginal.

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schomj's review

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challenging dark reflective fast-paced

2.0

So disappointing. I was so excited by the premise and was anticipating it to be engaging in way similar to the Yoga is Dead podcast. Alas, no. 

Instead of a deep dive into targeted critiques of the wellness industry from a coherent and culturally anchored point of view, it alternates between memoir and cherry-picked quotes from (mostly) better thinkers loosely connected by short bits of the author's own prose. She essentially is decontextualizing convenient quotes from their source material in support of her meandering arguments in a way that is ironic and also sometimes misleading. (But her understanding of what science is seems really tenuous so it's possible that it's less misleading than it is just her being confused. IDK)

At times it honestly feels like a first draft that no one edited. I say this because this is how I draft papers. But at a certain point I was telling the book that it needs to paraphrase and not just (block) quote. It is not generally a good sign when I start talking back to books about editing choices.

Also for a book that's supposedly at least nominally coming from a disability perspective, the sanism and dominance of the medical model were both... grim. And at times sounded like something you would hear from a "wellness" MLM grifter.

The book is strongest when it functions as a memoir. It's where the author has the most to say, where her voice is clearest and where her actual expertise is. If her editor had been paying attention, they should have told her to jettison the rest and be true to her strengths.

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jkamler's review against another edition

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emotional reflective sad tense slow-paced

1.0

I honestly struggled to get through this book and thought about giving up on it several times. Near the end of the book I just longed for it to be over already. 
As others have said, the book does not really examine wellness culture through a sociological lens, but is mostly a memoir of the author’s childhood abuse and pretty broad spiritual claims and generalizations. I hate to even admit this but I also found the author to be a little obsessed with suffering and overindulging in a victim mentality. I really wanted to enjoy this book because I believe in centering voices of color and I was invested in the criticism of wellness culture, but I just resented the experience the entire time. I pushed through to the end but honestly should have just called it quits. 

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yaoipaddle's review

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challenging informative reflective slow-paced

3.5

 This book is different than expected, but I am still pleasantly surprised for the most part. I expected this book to be strictly about wellness culture and not include much of the author's life, but this book has a lot of the author's personal life in it. It discusses not only wellness in terms of yoga and meditation like I expected, but also spirituality, environment, family, etc.

I'm white and I think other white people would really gain a lot reading this. I quite like a lot of the connections drawn between capitalism, white supremacy, and wellness culture as it exists in most of the world today. If you think reading something like this would make you uncomfortable as a white person, then I REALLY think you need to read this.

You can tell that writing this book brought a lot of comfort to the author, so good for her!

One of my main dislikes from this book is the overuse of references/quotes. I am not exaggerating when I say almost every single page quotes another work/person. Often times there is multiple ones. I remember one occasion when a third of the page was taken up by a massive quote. This all makes the book more clunky to read and exhausting. I find that for a lot of the quotes the author does not integrate it well to her writing. Very often I felt like I was reading a long research paper's literature review. This does not make it a smooth or fast read.

One final thank you I want to give the author is that for the first time in my life I found someone actual reference the pain the USA & NATO inflicted on my home country. I often felt like we were overseen/invisible in that sense. So thank you thank you thank you! (Not really related to the book but it still meant a lot to me so I am putting it here.) 

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marrocke's review

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challenging dark emotional inspiring reflective medium-paced

2.0


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