espouservioletdawn

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Books Batch

Fear not, my friends. Though I haven't posted a book summary review, I have been reading. So here goes a book summary dump of sorts.

I hate to say it, but I've kind of hit a wall with my reading. I'm working on a book where the first couple of chapters haven't pulled me in, so I just haven't read it. It's called Libertie by Kaitlyn Greenidge. I'm sure I'll get into it a bit more later, but it's on hold for right now, and I need to pick up something else.

The Lost Apothecary - Sarah Penner - This was a an interesting read because of the historical time line and present day back and forth, but mostly this book about how an unfulfilled woman finds herself and her calling while exploring an apothecary bottle she found in the Thames while in London. I found the book lacked depth and the true nature of the elusive historical hunt.

Outlawed - Anna North - It was almost like The Handmaid's Tale meets the Old West. I really liked this book. Even with so brief a book, the characters had purpose and personality. The underlying looks at gender, race, and feminism were well done and I was satisfied.

The Sun Down Motel - Simone St. James - Not as compelling as her book The Broken Girls, but still a good read. After her mother's death, Carly heads to Fell, NY to search for clues in the 35 year old disappearance of her aunt that has never been resolved. She walks in the footsteps of her aunt and solves the mystery.

Gods of Jade and Shadow - Silvia Moreno-Garcia - This book is a slow start. Caseopia teams up with a God of Death in order to escape her stifling life in 1920s rural Mexico. By the end, I was surprised how much I liked it.

Daisy Jones & The Six - Taylor Jenkins Reid - This fictional Rocumentary was so sad and sweet at the same time. I almost wished they were polygamists so they could all be together.

The Final Revival of Opal & Nev - Dawnie Wilton - It's funny how most fictional rocumentaries are explored by a child of one of the main characters trying to get to know their parent. The genre is so rich with discovery about that life you never saw them lead. I love it. Opal did not disappoint. Nev was bah. I want to have long discussions with this fictional dynamo.

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Calypso - David Sedaris

Look at the Sedaris family in the light of day and and it's really quite sad. The family is pretty fucked up, but they've tried to make the best of it. Despite or because of it, David Sedaris is a genius at self deprecation and off-color humor.

His writing reads like poetry on a misty dark night. The facts under it are the sad prose.

Still, I can relate.

Calypso is a set of loosely woven vignettes after the suicide of his sister Tiffany as the diminished family ages and takes family trips to the vacation home he and his boyfriend Hugh have purchased in Emerald Isle, North Carolina.

Calypso reads like a "Hey look ma, I made it and I still talk to these crazy kooks."

If you like irreverent, you'll laugh your ass off.

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The Vanishing Half - Brit Bennett

It's no surprise to me why this won a book of the year award! Amazing book.

Desiree and Stella are twin girls who live in the area of Louisiana called Mallard, known for it's exceptionally light skinned African Americans. Their happy life is brought to an end when their father is lynched in front of the girls by a group of racist white men. When he didn't die the first time, the racists came back and shot him in the head as he's laying in his hospital bed. Things are hard for their mother who takes in washing to make ends meet, but as the girls get older, even that isn't enough. After being pulled out of school to work as maids for a rich white family, the twins, finally run off to New Orleans, after years of Desiree asking Stella to do so.

But life is no picnic in New Orleans either. One day, Desiree comes home from work to find Stella gone, with a note that says she's leaving and no forwarding address. Desiree wanders from place to place and ends up in DC processing fingerprints for the FBI. She gets married to a man who is very dark and has a baby who resembles her father. When she can no longer take the physical abuse and mental anguish, she flees in the night and heads back to Mallard and her mother, with her daughter in tow. Her husband, desperate to find her, hires a man to seek her out. When Early Jones sees the picture of who he's tracking, he knows where to find her. They'd met as children and had a courtship of a kind until Desiree's mother ran him off.

While Desiree knows that life is horrible for her dark skinned daughter, Jude, she can't seem to take them away from Mallard, wondering if perhaps her sister will come walking through the door one day and worried about the health of her mother.

Bennett weaves a compelling story of what it means to be black in a white centric world. She writes about sisterhood, family, hardship, and finding a place in the world where you feel like you don't belong.

Meanwhile, Stella has been living life her own way and has her own daughter. But life for Stella is on an entirely different path, passing herself as white. Terrified that someone will find out she's black, she lies and conceals her past. But the days of Stella's secret are numbered when the girls meet and Jude tries to find out more about her friend's mom, who looks like her own mother. Will Stella ever go home to face her family or tell her husband her long held secret?

I found this book so compelling partially because, while my grandmother is pale white, my mother had the darker complexion of her father. I was discussing this with my sister the other day and she said that our mom didn't identify as white even though her parents checked white when asked. We were always told that there was a fair amount of Native American in our family, but my mom could have passed for an African American or Mexican as well, if she'd been outside tanning.

As a history major, I know about the switch in mentality from the concept that your race could be changed to that it was fixed at birth. I know about the one-drop rule which negated the 1/8th rule here in the United States. Mentality remains when laws do not, unfortunately.

But what does that mean for race and identity in our world today? Some people will claim that if you have "one-drop", you're African American, and they are not all white. Some people feel that it's the majority of your heritage, more like the 1/8th rule that said as long as you're less than 1/8th you're considered the other. And we have more people all the time that are giving up on the idea that they have to pick a side and consider they're a mix of the various backgrounds that they have inherited from their families. But this dualistic system we live in then classifies them as non-white.

And that's the problem. You take a race and even if it's in the minority, push it up as the one that is "right", all the while trodding upon those that aren't that race, you have a system where the majority don't fit in, and are not treated well. But in the meanwhile, people are brainwashed into thinking that it'd be better to be the race with privilege, or at least not to be themselves. And that mentality peppers how they treat those around them and how their children think. It perpetuates that broken system.

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The Witches of Eastwick - John Updike

One of the things that has really been intriguing me lately is how, why, and wherefore, books become movies or tv series. I’m in love with media about witches, even writing my senior thesis in college about witchcraft in England in the 1600s.  

Now, I Remember watching the movie The Witches of Eastwick, when I was a teen. The movie came out in 1987, smack dab in the middle of my checking every book about witchcraft I could find out of the library and reading the hell out of them. Obviously, John Updike didn’t make it into the school library, and as I was on the younger side, our card catalog searches weren’t cross referenced the way they are now. Needless to say, I missed the book until the other day. 

Updike’s novel, and the subsequent movie are set in the fictional town of East Wick, Rhode Island. They both have the characters of Alex, Jane, Sukie, Darryl, Clyde and Felicia, Neff, and Fidel. The similarities almost end there. 

Not only are surnames of some of the characters different but also their general appearances, the general description of the estate, and homes of the witches. 

The book introduces the women as a coven of three that get together to do magic on Thursday’s and all of them have children, whom they neglect, to sleep with various married men in the town until the mysterious and theoretically wealthy Darryl Van Horne moves into the Lenox estate and the 3 women are drawn to him. 

Now, this is maybe where I differ from probably most people who read this book. In the Movie, Darryl Van Horne represents the Devil, but in the book,  I didn’t feel he was devilish at all. In fact, in the book he never asks for the women to do anything sexual for him, though Jane does and he does not tell her no. His encouragement with them is to come hang out with him, and do what they do on a grander scale. But overall Daryl is a crass, bumbling, irresponsible with money,  but intelligent about chemistry, bi or gay man in the book. 

On the surface, the late 1960s backdrop has the 3 witches as liberated. They practice witchcraft, don’t abide by social conventions of motherhood, sanctity of marriage, or the preconceived notions of how a matronly woman should act. Some critics have said that it is misogynistic in it’s telling, perpetuating the myth that non-conventional women are indeed witches. Others believe it is satire. 

To me, in many ways, Updike did a terrible job at telling an important story. That story was, how do we open up to the people we care about. In this tale, it took a Darryl and pot and a large warm pool for the women to open up and express their admiration for each others bodies and acceptance of their own bodies. Only when they are harmonious with Darryl does that remain. Once Darryl and Jenny marry that was done they were back to their self loathing and commentary on the looks of themselves and the others. They turn against Jenny, a now married woman, and bewitch her with cancer and she dies. Jane and Sukie bewitch Felicia until Clyde kills her and hangs himself. Ultimately they feel terrible about themselves and their circumstances until they finally find guys that are single, marry them, and take them to live in other places.  It was extremely superficial. 

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The Broken Girls - Simone St. James

Simone St. James' novel about a reporter, Fiona, who is stuck in her small town Vermont hometown still, 20 years after the murder of her sister who was dumped in a field at a haunted, old, shut down boarding school. Even at age 37, the circumstances never add up to her, and though the killer has been behind bars for 20 years, she is obsessed with figuring out how and why. When the Idlewild Boarding School for wayward girls is purchased by a wealthy heiress, in order to renovate and open it back up , it gives Fiona the opportunity to look at the school, her sister's murder, and the town she's called home, in a new light.

I really can't say more about this book than, I picked it up at 7pm, tried to put it down at 1am, but couldn't manage to wait, picked it back up at 1:10am and read until I was finished at 3 am. I wanted to know, I had to know. St. James's heroine's obsession became my own.

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Girl A - Abigail Dean

It’s in the wee smas and I just finished the book and tried to go to sleep. No go. The thing that I both love and hate about consuming media is that I absorb the emotions from books and visual media and sometimes have a really hard time shaking it off.  This book did a number on my brain though. Girl A, AKA Lex Gracie, is a survivor of extreme childhood trauma and abuse. Seven children of extremely religious parents, they are first taken from their homes, withdrawn from school, then society, and eventually chained up in bedrooms by their father and  mother. It is the story of getting nearer to closure when years after her escape and rescue of the rest of the children, Lex finds herself back at the home she escaped following the death of her mother in jail.  Maybe it is because my arm is sore where I had the Covid-19 vaccine today that is making it hard, or maybe it is because of the wild thoughts going through my brain about the book. The thought that, what is it I’m not remembering from my childhood keeps popping into my brain. I don’t remember a lot of things from it, so something is amiss. I wonder what my sisters would say when I ask them to divulge anything kept from me?