You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
cocoonofbooks 's review for:
I've been anxious to read this book for a while, after seeing Rachel Held Evans write about it and then hearing Sarah speak at the Faith and Culture Writers Conference a couple years ago. So part of my disappointment with it is no doubt due to my own high expectations. The other part, I think, is that I've already read just about everything Rachel Held Evans has written, and so there was a lot of ground I'd been over before, but more thoroughly and convincingly then Bessey has room for here. And so, though I couldn't have articulated it at the outset, I was looking for a step beyond that, something that digs into the daily details more — like, how do you turn the other cheek without being just another woman who doesn't stand up for herself?
The parts of this book that were most powerful — the parts that had me, literally, in tears — were Bessey's personal stories: giving birth to her son in a parking garage, working with girls coming out of abusive situations, working through the seasons of her marriage in partnership with her husband. I wish she had dug more into these real-life moments, because many of her more vague reflections lost me.
While Bessey may have been stirring the pot (or committing heresy) from some perspectives, for my own part I felt that she played it too safe much of the time. She says that she doesn't want to get into the debate between egalitarians and complementarians, but she follows this up with a chapter about her own egalitarian marriage and how great it is. And yet, as if to cover her bases, she also talks about the women should be held up as equal to men because they can offer something to complement men, making two equal halves of a whole partnership.
And this points to another issue. In Bessey's world, despite her claims to be speaking to and about all women (she shares Rachel Held Evans' reliance on lists to illustrate the diversity of the people her words apply to), heterosexual marriage with children is the default. She talks about church not being a welcome place for singles without trying to pair them up, yet she seems to struggle to picture a reader who's not a straight married mother like her. (Oh, and a biological mother. Motherhood and giving birth are inextricably linked in this book.) At least once she explicitly addresses the reader as a fellow "Mama."
At the end of the book, there's a general commissioning of the reader to go live out the Kingdom, but it's not really clear what Bessey thinks that means. She mentions (in one of her many lists) that some women will "rabble rouse" as their way of living this out, yet she seems critical of anyone who wants to debate any of the topics she herself makes arguments about in this book. She also emphasizes that for many women, they will live this out in the mundane tasks of daily life (specifically, caring for children is mentioned as an example multiple times). And yet, in her story about Haiti, she criticizes herself for ever arguing that each person can only do so much and not everyone can personally care for the poor. And this comes back to the feeling of playing it safe; she wants to challenge the reader while also not making anyone feel bad for what they're not doing.
I don't want to come down too hard on this book, because there is quite a lot about it that I liked, even if the insights weren't that new. (She's essentially paraphrasing A Year of Biblical Womanhood and Half the Church for several chapters.) As I said at the beginning, much of my disappointment with this book comes simply from wanting it to be something it's not. It's clearly spoken to a lot of people, which is great, and I'm glad I read it for what I did get from it. It's just not nearly as much as I expected.
The parts of this book that were most powerful — the parts that had me, literally, in tears — were Bessey's personal stories: giving birth to her son in a parking garage, working with girls coming out of abusive situations, working through the seasons of her marriage in partnership with her husband. I wish she had dug more into these real-life moments, because many of her more vague reflections lost me.
While Bessey may have been stirring the pot (or committing heresy) from some perspectives, for my own part I felt that she played it too safe much of the time. She says that she doesn't want to get into the debate between egalitarians and complementarians, but she follows this up with a chapter about her own egalitarian marriage and how great it is. And yet, as if to cover her bases, she also talks about the women should be held up as equal to men because they can offer something to complement men, making two equal halves of a whole partnership.
And this points to another issue. In Bessey's world, despite her claims to be speaking to and about all women (she shares Rachel Held Evans' reliance on lists to illustrate the diversity of the people her words apply to), heterosexual marriage with children is the default. She talks about church not being a welcome place for singles without trying to pair them up, yet she seems to struggle to picture a reader who's not a straight married mother like her. (Oh, and a biological mother. Motherhood and giving birth are inextricably linked in this book.) At least once she explicitly addresses the reader as a fellow "Mama."
At the end of the book, there's a general commissioning of the reader to go live out the Kingdom, but it's not really clear what Bessey thinks that means. She mentions (in one of her many lists) that some women will "rabble rouse" as their way of living this out, yet she seems critical of anyone who wants to debate any of the topics she herself makes arguments about in this book. She also emphasizes that for many women, they will live this out in the mundane tasks of daily life (specifically, caring for children is mentioned as an example multiple times). And yet, in her story about Haiti, she criticizes herself for ever arguing that each person can only do so much and not everyone can personally care for the poor. And this comes back to the feeling of playing it safe; she wants to challenge the reader while also not making anyone feel bad for what they're not doing.
I don't want to come down too hard on this book, because there is quite a lot about it that I liked, even if the insights weren't that new. (She's essentially paraphrasing A Year of Biblical Womanhood and Half the Church for several chapters.) As I said at the beginning, much of my disappointment with this book comes simply from wanting it to be something it's not. It's clearly spoken to a lot of people, which is great, and I'm glad I read it for what I did get from it. It's just not nearly as much as I expected.