bibliophage's reviews
626 reviews

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

adventurous funny hopeful inspiring tense fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

Did a science fiction book just make my Favorites shelf? Yes, yes it did.

A Woman of Intelligence by Karin Tanabe

challenging emotional reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

 “My vision for my life had been that of an international woman of something. Perhaps a translator like my Aunt Hannah. Maybe something that allowed me to keep one foot in New York and one foot in Europe. A diplomat if I really shot straight for the stars and didn’t miss. When I was at the United Nations that goal felt far more possible than it had at City Hall. On my desk, on day one, I found a headset, a typewriter, language dictionaries, a heavy black telephone, and piles of documents. One of them was the United Nations Charter. On that humid day, I sat down in my dark red Treina-Norell dress, took off my pristine white gloves, an ensemble bought at Macy’s with half of my last City Hall paycheck, and read dozens of pages. The section that stuck with me then, and that I re-read almost every week that I worked there, was Article 8: ‘The United Nations shall place no restrictions on the eligibility of men and women to participate in any capacity and under conditions of equality in its principle and subsidiary organs.’” 

 

Set in 1954 New York City, Katharina Edgeworth has a picture-perfect life. She’s married to a successful, altruistic, pediatric surgeon and she has two young sons. But Katharina (nicknamed “Rina”) is unhappy, lamenting the loss of her exciting past as a translator at the United Nations. The story goes back and forth between Katharina’s stale life as a mother in 1954, and her glittering single life of parties and affairs. Katharina’s background, however, makes her the perfect individual to be recruited by the FBI. She’s an Ivy league graduate, fluent in four languages, and had a romantic fling with a person of interest. When approached, Katharina gladly accepts the opportunity to become an informant. But, with all the secrets and time she must dedicate to this new opportunity, Katharina’s home life and marriage is thrown into turmoil. 

 

I think I should have been an ideal audience for this book, and there were elements of the premise that intrigued me: 1950s New York, work at the U.N., an ambitious female protagonist, tensions between marriage and motherhood and professional and personal aspirations, and the 1950s cultural expectations of a highly educated woman. However, I found the characters quite flat and the storyline quite predictable. Not one of the characters seemed to have any complexity or depth. Several times I was infuriated by Rina’s attitude and complaints––I really tried to give her character compassion and empathy for the rigidity of her time and social status, but I pretty much found her completely selfish and her feelings toward her role as mother mostly abhorrent. I think there certainly is a space to explore all the complexities of motherhood and the impact that being a mother has on an individual’s identity, goals, and choices, but I wasn’t convinced that Rina’s feelings for her children were authentic. I don’t want to share additional details as not to spoil the book, but I marked several lines throughout that really frustrated me, and I understand now why other readers struggled to finish reading the book. 

 

Thank you to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for the audiobook version of this title in exchange for an honest review. 

The Self-Driven Child: The Science and Sense of Giving Your Kids More Control Over Their Lives by William Stixrud, Ned Johnson

hopeful informative reflective medium-paced

“We really can’t control our kids—and doing so shouldn’t be our goal. Our role is to teach them to think and act independently, so that they will have the judgment to succeed in school and, most important, in life. Rather than pushing them to do things they resist, we should seek to help them find things they love and develop their inner motivation. Our aim is to move away from a model that depends on parental pressure to one that nurtures a child’s own drive. That is what we mean by the self-driven child.”
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A clear and encouraging guide to helping your child become an effective autonomous being. The main point: Helping your child recognize their agency to make decisions and act is key to long-term success.
There was a lot I really liked about this book, and I hope to use the larger guiding principles and the recommendations in my own parenting. I believe strongly that helping children recognize their agency, make decisions, and act is key to their long-term success. The authors share excellent direction for parents (and perhaps teachers) that I believe is valuable. However, this book is certainly written for a very specific audience (primarily privileged white families) and many of the challenges described here are not inclusive of families of low-income situations, single-parent households, or non-traditional family set-ups. Example: One of the examples in the book discusses a child trying to decide which school to attend, but many families (most families?) don't even have the option to choose between two private schools, or even between a charter school and a public school, or even two public schools (so many factors are at play here and often even prevent many children from having those options). Other examples are similar. So, while the principle being illustrated is key, the examples don't line-up for a significant portion of the population. Families and children who face challenges of socio-economic inequality or racial discrimination have additional barriers not addressed here and I would like to hear the authors take on these other situations to make their larger (important and excellent!) principles more applicable to a broader and more diverse audience.

The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row by Lara Love Hardin, Anthony Ray Hinton

challenging dark emotional hopeful reflective sad medium-paced

“$2,200. What is the price of a life? What is the dollar amount a man will trade his soul for? I don’t know the answers to those questions. I’ve thought about that man—wondered just what it was that led him to such a desperate act. What must he have been thinking as he sat in the dark waiting to rob and to murder? Every desperate act has its price, but I didn’t know then that the person who would pay the price was me. Where was I on the night John Davison was murdered? I have no idea. Was I asleep in my bed? Laughing with Lester? Eating with my mom? Visiting a lady friend? My days and nights were pretty unremarkable. I worked at a store assembling and delivering beds six days a week. I had kept my promise to stay out of trouble. And while I can’t say where I was or what I was doing on that particular night, I do know I was not out beating and robbing and murdering. 

I also know somebody got away with murder.” 

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Anthony Ray Hinton spent 28 years on Death Row for a crime he did not commit due to racial prejudices and systemic injustices. Hinton was arrested in 1985 and he finally won his release in 2015. Here, Hinton details his journey, beginning with the anger he felt in his initial years of silence in solitary confinement. The memoir then moves through his emotional witness of the execution of his fellow inmates, one at a time, and ends with his final release. Reading and books played a significant role in Hinton’s story, and he was allowed to form a book club that proved to be a critical activity for Hinton and his fellow inmates. Hinton’s story was highlighted by Bryan Stevenson in his book <i>Just Mercy</i> which details the efforts of the Equal Justice Initiative to defend Hinton (they handled his defense for 16 years). 

Hinton’s story is emotional and powerful, and his relationship with reading is extraordinary. It is impossible to read Hinton’s words and not feel challenged or changed in some way.

A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison by Reginald Dwayne Betts

challenging emotional hopeful reflective sad slow-paced

“Or that if they were more than faces to me, or I was more than a face to them, they were more backdrop for me. I didn’t see them as confronting the same system I confronted in court. I’d look at them and always assume they’d had to do something heinous to get sent to prison, because it was all over the news and the grapevine that white folks were treated differently in courts. Maybe that’s why I never really thought of any of the white men I met as friends. The world was becoming more diverse for me, but the ground that we all stood on wasn’t becoming any more even.”
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Reginald Dwayne Betts went to prison at 16, after committing six felonies in Springfield, Virginia—including armed carjacking. Betts was tried as an adult and spent his young, formative years in prison. In this memoir Betts tells his story, reflecting on his choices and his identity. Betts writes about the bigger picture of the problematic justice system and also his daily lived-experience moving from cell to cell. The end of the book was a strong reflection on redemption and how Betts now navigates a life that is forever connected to his prison experience. 

I was especially moved when he shared his poetry and talked about his efforts to write. The story does move around in time and space, and may feel disjointed—but Betts says that's what his experience in prison was like, incomprehensible and at times disjointed. 

The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students by Anthony Abraham Jack

challenging informative reflective slow-paced

"Access alone is not enough for fostering inclusion and generating mobility. What you will find in the students' stories that follow is that university policies are failing disadvantaged students in a number of ways. The experience of the Privileged Poor and the Doubly Disadvantaged differ most clearly in their disparate institutional knowledge of and familiarity with elite spaces, and these differences affect both their well-being and their strategies for navigating college. The Doubly Disadvantaged are not adequately integrated into the norms that govern student life at an elite institution—practices like connecting with professors during office hours—that the Privileged Poor learned in high school. As the stories in Chapters 1 and 2 will make clear, the Privileged Poor have the kind of cultural capital that enables them to be at ease when engaging with their peers and professors. Yet when it comes to money, the distinction between these two groups disappears." 

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The description for this book highlights that admission to an Ivy League school, or to higher education overall, is different from *acceptance* and that's the crux of what Anthony Abraham Jack is showing here in The Privileged Poor. The policies and cultures of higher education are significant barriers to many students, primarily students of color and students from low-income backgrounds. Jack specifically discusses the experiences of university students that he calls "the Privileged Poor" versus the Doubly Disadvantaged" which are briefly described in the above quote. Following Jack's discussion and analysis of the interviews he conducted, he shares some recommendations to adjust policies and actions that administration and professors can take in higher education to provide more and better opportunities for the diverse study body of their campuses. 

Jack's main point that "admittance is not inclusion" is strong, but there remains lots more work to be done in higher education—as Jack himself acknowledges. The study here was completed at an elite institution thus limiting the discussion and not fully representing the experiences of students at other institutions, so taking Jack's main argument and recommendations and delving in to this work further in other spaces is necessary. 

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein

challenging informative reflective sad tense slow-paced

“One reason low-income African Americans are less upwardly mobile than low-income whites is that low-income African Americans are more likely to be stuck for multiple generations in poor neighborhoods. Patrick Sharkey, a New York University sociologist, analyzed data on race and neighborhood conditions and reported his findings in a 2013 book, Stuck in Place.  He finds that young African Americans (from thirteen to twenty-eight years old) are now ten times as likely to live in poor neighborhoods as young whites—66 percent of African Americans, compared to 6 percent of whites. He finds that 67 percent of African American families hailing from the poorest quarter of neighborhoods a generation ago continue to live in such neighborhoods today. But only 40 percent of white families who lived in the poorest quarter of neighborhoods a generation ago still do so. Forty-eight percent of African American families, at all income levels, have lived in poor neighborhoods over at least two generations, compared to 7 percent of white families. If a child grows up in a poor neighborhood, moving up and out to a middle-class area is typical for whites but an aberration for African Americans. Neighborhood poverty is thus more multigenerational for African Americans and more episodic for whites.”
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Richard Rothstein shows here that laws and policy decisions at local, state, and federal levels, not de facto segregation, have led to discriminatory patterns  that continue to divide our neighborhoods today. Rothstein clearly illustrates how the fear of diminishing property value and exclusive zoning laws and ordinances have disproportionately affected African Americans. While this information is not necessarily new, the comprehensive delivery here is eloquent and articulate and the research impressive. It is impossible to finish this read without dwelling on the immense chasm of inequality in our country–-that was state and federally sponsored long after the era of Civil Rights and de-segregation. Some of the cases presented in Rothstein's pages are astonishing. When will we change?National Book Award for Nonfiction Nominee 2017

The Kindest Lie by Nancy Johnson

challenging emotional reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

 “The country had just elected Obama president, giving their dreams wings. But that was then. Now, the clarity of a new day trimmed their feathers as it always had, making it damn near impossible to take flight.” 

 

“But Ruth refused to accept that label, knowing now that a lifetime of lies never added up to anything good. A lifetime of doing the wrong things for the right reasons. A lifetime of lies that started small, like a nick in the windshield, then eventually shattered the glass.” 

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The story here follows Ruth, a highly successful Black engineer and a poor white boy, named Midnight, who lives in the town where Ruth grew-up. Xavier, Ruth's husband is anxious to start a family, but Ruth is apprehensive about this decision, due to some events in her adolescent past that she has hidden from Xavier. When Ruth returns to her hometown in Indiana, she encounters Midnight, and all the racism and poverty that has overtaken her town. The novel is mostly slow, following Ruth as she confronts and probes her past, and the odd boy Midnight that she befriends along the way. The ending sped up and felt a bit abrupt. I liked this book, I enjoyed the writing, and I liked the real-ness of the characters––sometimes they showed depth and complexity, and other times (maybe even most of the time?) they were totally flat and selfish. Despite the frustrating nature of some of the characters, the story was interesting and the setting and themes timely. 

The Mothers by Brit Bennett

challenging emotional reflective sad slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

“We were already mothers then, some by heart and some by womb. We rocked grandbabies left in our care and taught the neighborhood kids piano and baked pies for the sick and shut-in. We all mothered somebody.”

“Maybe all women were shapeshifters, changing instantly depending on who was around.”

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

challenging hopeful reflective slow-paced

“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word 'love' here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace––not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.”
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First published in 1963 on the centennial anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, James Baldwin's essays (written as letters) are phenomenal masterpieces examining racial injustice in the US. Baldwin is eloquent and passionate and I have no doubt I will be reading this piece over and over and over again. Even though The Fire Next Time is short there but packed with material to process and act on. Don't delay any longer to learn from Baldwin here.