Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed - Lori Gottlieb

Do I need therapy? Does everyone need therapy? I'm not sure but I feel like I want to go to therapy after reading Maybe You Should Talk to Someone. I suppose we are all carrying around pain and hurt in our lives. Perhaps childhood trauma or adolescent trauma or adult trauma. Maybe we're carrying around all these things and a therapist is there to help carry that load.

Now really, the author chose her poignant and successful patients here. Maybe therapy doesn't work out for everyone. But there's real heartbreak in this book and it is a heavy read at times. But also hopeful. Whether its the standoffish oaf who tries so hard to push everyone away, the elderly woman dealing with her loneliness, the terminal patient facing impending death, the lonely woman making all the wrong partner choices, or the author herself who faces a devastating breakup- all their stories author insight into the depths of our despair to where hope and growth might lie.

The book is well laid out between the author's own experience and that of her patients. Each patient grows and works along with the author to meet their goals. The cadence is well written and the patients are revealed to the reader as they become known to the author - slowly and through the building of trust.

4/5 Stars. 

On the Come Up - Angie Thomas

Wow! I really liked this book. Here's the thing. A lot of adults try to write a YA novel and end up sounding patronizing or hysterical when they write teenagers. Angie Thomas somehow manages to capture the angst of being a teenager in a realistic, sympathetic, and authentic way.

Reading as Bri struggles with fairness and family obligation actually made me FEEL the way I did when I was a teenager - when I could not conceive of a world that didn't see right and wrong the way I did - when I was so SURE I knew what I was doing and admitting that I had no idea was not an option.

In On the Come Up, Bri struggles to find her own voice as she is under increasing pressure from her family circumstances and societal expectations. See, she has a gift. She's a poet who works with words the way painters work with acrylics. That her father was an up and coming rap artist prior to being shot and killed hangs over her attempts to make her own name in the business.

Her mother J, and her brother Tre are her solid support system. Thomas artfully shows how teens sometimes grow up before their family is ready. And Bri is attempting to shoulder a burden her mother and brother are sure she's not even aware of. As they recognize her personhood - she blossoms and is fully ready to take on the challenges she's facing. And her challenges are many. Her mother is laid off and out of work. Her family is struggling to pay its bills. Bri and her neighbors are bused to a less diverse school but are targeted by security personnel there. A local talent promoter is trying to exploit her and present an image of her she's not comfortable with.

It's a wonderful story of finding yourself, forming bonds, the unsure footing of maturing, and romantic exploration. Thomas has crafted a story with so many people to root for, it was a pleasure to read. 

4/5 Stars. 

Before We Were Yours - Lisa Wingate

This was a tough book to get through. I really dislike reading about cruelty to children. And I really dislike real people who are cruel to children. And so here's this book. It made me feel so many things. 

Before We Were Yours starts off in a Baltimore hospital where a Congressman's daughter has just suffered a stillborn birth but doesn't know it yet. Her desperate family want to fix it. Someone makes a call to Memphis. 

In present day, Avery Stafford is altering her life as a prosecutor to come back to South Carolina and hit the campaign trail with her ailing Senator father whose staff is looking for an heir apparent to his Senate seat. Avery is uncomfortable with the whole thing. Hers is a high stakes family, run mostly by her aggressive mother, Honeybee. In the background is a grandmother who's dementia has led to a nursing home placement. On a visit to a different nursing home, Avery meets May Crandall, who mistakes Avery for someone else. See, there's this blond curly hair thing that seems to be passed down from Grandma Judy.

So we whip back to the past, to a stormy night on the Mississippi river, when Queenie, aboard her shantyboat home, the Arcadia, is having a terrible time birthing twins. When all hope is lost and Briny must take Queenie to the hospital, the other five children, Rill, Camellia, Lark, Fern and Gabion, are left on the boat with a family friend to await their parent's return. 

Unfortunately, this is 1939 in Memphis and there is a real life demon, Georgia Tann, walking around, snatching children from poor families and selling them to rich ones to make herself wealthy. She snatches up the children and places into a boarding home for the Tennessee Children's Home Society. And there, well there is where all the bad things happen and I really just don't like thinking about it so you'll have to take my word for it that it's very very bad. 

What all this has to do with Avery and Grandma Judy you can probably guess but it all unravels over time. As Avery learns the truth about Grandma Judy, she discovers some things about herself as well. And while there are some sweet moments in the book, they are mostly bittersweet because although this is a work of fiction, it's based on real stories of things that happened to real children under the charge of Georgia Tann. That Georgia Tann got to grow old and die of cancer is monumentally unfair. That my Tennessee government had a chance to make life better for these children, but failed is also unfair. 

So go out, help a child, volunteer your time and talent to organizations that make life better for orphans and kids in foster care. And also, if you like crying, you can read this book.

4.5/5 Stars. 

This is How it Always Is - Laurie Frankel

After reading a couple memoirs in a row that included some exceptionally dangerous parenting, it was kind of a relief to step into This is How it Always Is with Rosie and Penn and their brood of five boys. Rosie and Penn are very different, but their marriage together works somehow. Rosie is a trauma doctor and Penn a struggling writer. Their first four boys, Roo, Ben, Orion and Rigel prepare them for their fifth son, Claude, or so they think. At age three, Claude requests to wear a dress and then clearly begins preferring traditionally girl clothes and accessories. 

Penn and Rosie, being progressive parents, indulge their child and then realize that it's possible their child is more than just interested in dressing like a girl. This leads to a probably diagnosis of gender dysphoria. And Claude officially transitions to Poppy in his kindergarten class to some general confusion but otherwise everything is going okay until Rosie treats a transgender woman who has been badly beaten at the University of Wisconsin campus. Rosie decides Wisconsin is just not the place to raise a transgender child.

The whole family moves to Seattle to try to create a better life for Poppy, but they get some things wrong, as parents are apt to do. And the whole family begins to suffer under the strain of keeping Poppy's secret. Even though they know this is a bad way to go, the secret seems to grow until there is no good way out from under it. Then some other stuff happens but I don't want to ruin all that, although Frankel's style of writing often gives you facts from the future when explaining a certain situation.

Each one of the boys in this story could probably support his own book, along with their sister, but since this story is about their sister, they take somewhat of a back seat. There's only so much one author can do within the confines of a novel.

Anyway, I really enjoyed this book and the hope it provides even amidst its thornier parts. I liked that the parents are flawed and doing their best, but inside the context of unconditional love and acceptance. That so many transgender children and adults choose to take their own lives (40%) means we have a long way to go as a society.

4/5 Stars. 

Inside the O'Briens - Lisa Genova

I'm choosing lately to go back to authors I trust and I know Lisa Genova is going to lay it all out for me on these terrible heartbreaking diseases in a way that makes me really understand not just the science but the humanity.

In Inside the O'Briens, Boston police officer Joe O'Brien begins having irrational outbursts of anger in his late 30s. Pop forward to his early forties and Joe is having a few issues with involuntary movements. A toe that is tapping too much and without Joe really wanting it to. Joe is doing his best to ignore it, but his four kids, all in their early twenties, and his wife, Rosie, are having trouble ignoring it. Finally, Joe's best friend and fellow police officer, and his wife intervene to have him checked out. He's then confronted with the diagnosis. Huntington's Disease. A cruel chromosomal extension of a particular gene that causes symptoms that are an unfair mix of Parkinsons, Alzheimers, and ALS. And with four kids, each child has a 50/50 chance of inheriting this gene. 

So now the mom inside me is reeling as I think about Rosie and having to look at her four children, J.J., Megan, Katie, and Patrick and wonder what awaits them. There is no cure for HD. And a diagnosis means debilitating symptoms leading ultimately to death. J.J., whose wife is newly pregnant, is the first to get tested. Then Megan, then Katie. Patrick prefers not to know. And we all wait with them as they find out their fate. But the great and truly wonderful thing about Genova's writing, is that she lets these characters be themselves. She lets them be so flawed. Not everything in a Genova book is tied up at the end. Not everyone gets to be their own hero. Some of the characters are going to let you down. They're going to disappoint you. And that's very very real.

But also, these diseases don't define the characters. The results, ultimately don't matter. Because they are all still people living with the disease, not an embodiment of the disease itself. Genova lets her characters show the human struggle of maintaining our humanity while a disease strips us of our identities. It's a remarkable thing. 

So I was ready for all of the above, and it still really hit hard. But then, then, Genova switched up the narration and some of the chapters come not from J0e, but from Katie. And there it was. The point of view that I hadn't considered and wasn't ready for. Because I have one sister. And if she had something like this, I'm not sure what that would do to me, to us. And when Katie and Megan have to explore this issue... well I wasn't ready. And there was a lot of ugly crying in my car in my work parking lot as I tried to put myself back together. Sister stuff. It gets me every time.

4/5 Stars. 

The Nest - Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

The Plumb family has a problem and it's not the problem that initially appears in the pages. The four siblings, Leo, Beatrice, Jack and Melody are all middle-aged and impatiently awaiting the birthday of Melody, the youngest sibling, as that will usher in payments from a trust their father set up many years ago to provide them with a small estate gift. (The Nest - as they all annoyingly refer to it). However, oldest sibling Leo is a selfish a-hole who nearly kills a waitress in a car accident necessitating the almost liquidation of the nest in order to reach a settlement with the family.

Leo, a charismatic, early success has become a used up former addict with none of the shine left on his apple. So as the siblings squabble with him and amongst themselves for their lack of funds, we are also shown the startlingly flawed characters of the other siblings, who have made serious financial mistakes.

D'Aprix does a fantastic job weaving together the various plot points. While some of the dialogue seems a bit too contrived, overall the story and the characters work well together to produce a readable and entertaining story with just a little bit of heart. In the end, the siblings become actual humans instead of caricatures of themselves and grow more likeable as the story develops.

3.75/5 Stars.

We Are Not Ourselves - Matthew Thomas

I have to hand it to Matthew Thomas. This book was long. Very long. But the writing throughout was really superb. We are Not Ourselves follows the lives of Eileen, Ed and Connell Leary (again sorry for spelling, I listened to the audio version). Eileen's story begins in her childhood and continues through her meeting and marriage to Ed, and the eventual birth of Connell. 

It would seem no detail of Eileen's life is too small to be left out. Which ultimately is the major flaw of this otherwise engaging novel. There's just too much. Connell becomes a narrator of the story in his own write as he reaches adolescence and then further on into his young adulthood. The book ultimately became more interesting after Ed is diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's disease. The story becomes tragic and engrossing. And yet, throughout the entire book, Ed remains the character with the most redeeming qualities. Eileen and Connell are selfish and flawed. Eileen does eventually let go of much of this, but never quite when you want her to. 

Ultimately the characters feel very real. They don't learn life lessons well, or sometimes at all, but never when you want them to, and never in a way that feels like satisfaction. The length of the book was its biggest drawback as the unnecessary details kept me from really falling into the book and getting lost in it. Had it not been for a long vacation car ride, I'd probably still be reading it.

3/5 Stars. 

A Place We Knew Well - Susan Carol McCarthy

I received this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This is the second book in a row from NetGalley in which I was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked it (read my review of the other one here).

Despite a rather bland intro, the story really kicks off after the prologue in Chapter 1. The time is October 1962 and the place is Orlando, Florida. It came as a surprise to me that the story would use the Cuban Missile Crisis as it's backdrop. To me, this was the best part. I knew enough about the Cuban Missile Crisis to know that it happened while President Kennedy was in office, so likely 1961 or 1962 and I knew that it didn't last very long and that eventually the Soviets turned their ships around and took the missiles down (thanks Billy Joel). 

This story focuses on Wes Avery, his wife Sarah and their daughter Charlotte. Wes owns a local gas station in Orlando, just up the road from McCoy Air Force Base (it closed in 1975). A former Air Force man, Wes starts to notice a lot of firepower gathering at the base and believes something may be up. The presence of 5 U-2s at the base later confirms his suspicions. (The U-2 was a spy plane and is awesome - the pilots wear the space flight suit because it goes so high in the atmosphere). 

Wes' best friend Steve, and a Cuban exile, young Emilio also work at the station and have their own backstories to contend with. Emilio's family is stuck in Cuba, his father in prison, his mother hiding out, and his sister, later told in what I considered the most awkwardly written section of the story, raped and murdered for her parentage and privilege. While I thought it was important to show this portion of what was going on in Cuba at the time, the part where Emilio emotionally tells Wes and Steve about his sister's murder was just not as well written as the rest of the story and came out very disjointed from the rest of the prose. 

Meanwhile, Sarah is having trouble squaring the life she lives with the life she had planned for herself, a life she set aside when her older sister became pregnant not once, but twice out of wedlock. Sarah's stern parents then relied on Sarah to live a pedestrian life without taking any chances. Her early talents were squandered and she lived a life devoid of personal accomplishments. This ends up being a major problem for Sarah. 

I really appreciated the obvious research that went into the Cuban Missile Crisis sections of the story, and how well it fit with Wes' overall story arc. I thought Wes was a great character as well he was well developed and he felt very real. Charlotte, the daughter, was a bit wooden in some scenes, but her purpose was more to push the plot ahead. I don't think the epilogue did a good job setting the future tone of the novel, it came out a bit more sinister like it was setting up a mystery, but otherwise this was a solid story with great research.

4/5 Stars.