The Graveyard Book - Neil Gaiman

First things first, you should know I love Neil Gaiman. I like the way his mind works and the worlds he creates. Although my eight year old received this for Christmas, I read it before him. Devoured it in a few days. This is what Gaiman does. He creates a world you want to inhabit. Even though it is usually creepy and discomforting, it is undeniably addictive.

In the Graveyard book, a man has come to kill a family, but he underestimated the curious nature of the toddler living in the house, who escapes without knowledge of the carnage and wanders into a nearby graveyard. The ghosts in the graveyard (a game I used to play as a child) come to find the child and are visited by the ghosts of the child's parents, who beg the graveyard inhabitants to protect their child. They agree and give him the run of the graveyard. He is taken under the protection of a mysterious figure named Silas, who, although his parents are two kindly old ghosts, it is Silas who provides most of the boys education.

Together, Silas and the ghosts keep the boy fed, entertained, and most importantly safe from the person or persons invested in killing him, who continue to look for him even after his escape to the graveyard. Along the way, the boy - whose name is Nobody Owens - meets fascinating people from the graveyard and learns to fade into the background and remain unseen.

As children do, he begins to question his mentors and venture out to discover what happened to him and why. This leads to a Gaiman style show down and Nobody shows why what he's learned in the graveyard is the best education he could have received.

Things that don't appear to be connected at first all matter and become connected with time. Bittersweet goodbyes and all that are wrapped up into this beautifully crafted book. What a gift for children to get to encounter Gaiman's creativity in such an accessible novel.

5/5 Stars. 

Down Among the Sticks and Bones - Seanan McGuire

 

I just love these little Wayward Children stories. Down Among the Sticks and Bones follows the backstory of twins Jacqueline and Jillian as they find a doorway to the Moors. Children of cold distant parents, Jacq and Jill each find their way in the Moors. Jacq becomes the apprentice to Dr. Bleak. Jill becomes the child in training to The Master, a vampire who both protects and feeds off the local village.

The Moors is a hard place but both Jacq and Jill seem to find their place. Except that Jill is under the tutelage of a jealous narcissistic vampire and she's already terribly insecure. Their parents had assigned roles for them to play as children and they were not allowed to deviate. So when the Master assigns Jill her role she plays it to a T, all while basking in his supposed love. We all know from Every Heart A Doorway where this entire thing ends up, but it was still very shocking to see the twins before they ended up at the Home for Wayward Children. Little surprise their parents placed them there after their return from the Moors.

For such short books, these stories are bursting with detail and imagery. I'm already teeing up the next one to listen to.

5/5 Stars

The Vanishing Half - Brit Bennett

Stella and Desiree are twins who grow up in Mallard, Louisiana where the lightness of your skin is prized above all else. When the girls leave as teens, they shock the town who see nothing wrong with the place they live.

The book begins with Desiree returning to town with her dark child in tow. What has become of Stella we don't know but it is eventually teased out over the course of the book. Desiree rebelled against Mallard by going to DC eventually and working for the FBI as a fingerprint examiner. She married a dark man and had a dark child. But when the man ended up being violent and abusive she went back to Mallard. Preferring to live a smaller life of safety even if it meant returning to Mallard. Desiree puts no value on the lightness of her skin. And she guides her daughter through the difficulty of living in that environment.

We then find out that Stella left New Orleans without telling her sister. Passing as white and living under a cloud of shame. She can never fully relax, can never be herself truly as she knows the cost to her life if anyone were to find out her secret. She makes a life for herself and then eventually, through her daughter, finds some way to pursue the studies and qualities of herself that she has suppressed for so long. There is so much narrative tension created through all the Stella chapters. Brit Bennett does a remarkable job stretching that out for the reader.

The book then moves on to Stella and Desiree's daughters. The two could not be more different but as they learn about each other it makes them explore the ways they are similar and what their lives have meant. This book is beautifully written. Even the minor male characters are so well drawn by the pages I can see them in my mind.

The Vanishing Half is a joy to read, even as it tackles some very deep family rifts and personal traumas.

5/5 Stars. 

The Dutch House - Ann Patchett

I loved this book. I love Ann Patchett. I love siblings. This was a definite five star read for me. Danny and his sister Maeve grow up in an architectural gem of a house in suburban Philadelphia - The Dutch House. The house was purchased by their father Cyril, a real estate prospector who built a thriving business. Their mother hated the house. Hated the opulence that was associated with the house. She felt out of place and not useful to the world shut up in the house. So she leaves. And the children are bereft. Maeve is diagnosed with diabetes - a dangerous disease in the late 60s.

Everything develops a new rhythm after their mother leaves until their father begins dating a woman named Andrea. When their father eventually married Andrea, Maeve has gone off to college and two little girls move into her room. Danny is aghast at the way Andrea is obsessed with the house. He wants nothing to do with her, and she with him. But when their father dies unexpectedly, Danny finds himself at Andrea's mercy. And she has none. She kicks this 16 year old boy out on his own to fend for himself.

Luckily the love between Danny and Maeve is the strongest in the whole book and she is there for Danny. She's always been his mother figure and she remains so. Their love is also tied up in their shared childhood trauma and the vengeance they feed between themselves. The hate they have for Andrea is almost a tertiary character in the book.

I love the nuance Patchett drives into Danny and Maeve's relationship. I love the way she teases out the characters and their motivations, the ripples their childhood creates through their life. It's so well done.

5/5 Stars

Song for a Whale - Lynne Kelly

I really loved this book. I occasionally snag my middle reader's books and it makes me so nostalgic for all the books I read in my room in my own middle reader days. I would have loved this book as a kid too.

In high school, I was lifeguarding at a local water park and started to take sign language classes with my mom and St. Rita School for the Deaf in Cincinnati. I really loved watching the students communicate and loved learning about how ASL changes and adapts with slang and regional "accents" just like spoken English. We not only learned ASL there, but we learned about the history of ASL and why schools like St. Rita's were so important to the deaf community.

I loved seeing these sentiments reflected in Song for a Whale. The main character, Iris is a sixth grader in a main stream school where she can't communicate with anyone. Her mother and brother have a strong grasp of ASL but her father struggles. Her mother was born to two deaf parents and grew up knowing how to sign. When I was learning ASL, I learned that kids of deaf parents knew ASL, but that parents of deaf kids rarely learned. This is a sad reality and leads to a lot of miscommunication between kids and their parents, further isolating deaf kids if they don't have access to other ASL signers.

Iris feels lonely and isolated until she learns about a whale, Blue 55, who sings at a different frequency from other whales. He travels alone through the ocean with no one to talk to since no other whales can understand his song. Iris feels and instant connection and sets out to help Blue 55.

The best part of Song for a Whale is that Lynne Kelly has made sure that Iris is proud of her deaf heritage. She doesn't spend the book longing to be like other kids, she really is just longing to find her place in the world and yearns to be around people she can talk to. She stands up for herself and her identity. It's a great message for kids (and me, I really loved this one). 

5/5 Stars. 

Ploughshares Summer 2020 - Guest-edited by Celeste Ng

I loved reading the introduction to the Summer 2020 edition of Ploughshares and finding out it had been curated during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic when we were in the early stages of lock downs and uncertainty was swirling in the air. Celeste Ng did a fantastic job reaching into those moments and finding stories that echoed the feeling of the time. I always appreciate the diverse voices I hear in Ploughshares and I often feel I've lived so many lives by the time I finish.

In the very first story, Wandering Gliders, we are introduced to Manu and Eve as they sit in the hospital awaiting the arrival of their twins. The story is told from Manu's point of view as he tries and fails to fully capture Eve as a person, as his wife. The story has the feeling of always being on the cusp of connection, until it's gone.

Jamel Brinkley's painful story Comfort is about a woman who has lost her job and is a bit adrift following the death of her brother at the hands of a police officer. Terribly timely, the story is full of grief and the simple comfort another human can bring when our hearts are not quite ready to let new people in.

Go Forth, Miss Trout! tells the story of a group of writing students awaiting the arrival of their teacher only to find out she has died. Having a grandmother that lives in Toronto and having been a visitor to the city for more times than my brain remembers, I loved all the Toronto specific details in this story.

Doers of the Word was an great story of a woman healer who helped escaped slaves on their way to freedom. Told from the point of view of Liberty, the healer's daughter, a man shows up in a coffin and is thought to be dead only to be brought back to life by her mother. Liberty, having grown up free, struggles to understand the anger boiling inside the man.

Code W by Sonya Larson was a great story of a new ranger at Glacier National Park learning the ropes of which Park visitors need rescuing, and which need toughening up. The Code W is a visitor who insists on help but is not actually in danger, but because of their own incompetence has become scared and insists they are likely to die without rescue from a ranger. It is the ranger's job to determine if an attempted rescue would put more people at risk. Chuntao, the new ranger struggles with this idea and thinks at first her fellow rangers are being callous.

Susan Shepherd's Goats about a wildfire and a man living off the land and the generosity of a woman with a hoarding problem was wonderfully complex and I really felt the tension of the fire as it moved closer to the house. This was just a really well drawn story that had a lot of feel to it.

Those were just my favorites that pushed this edition into a five star read. The other stories I don't mention specifically were just as good.

5/5 Stars. 

The Last Wish - Andrzej Sapkowski

 

I love Geralt of Rivia. In my world of fictional boyfriends, he's basically roommates with Uhtred. He's a bit snarky, a bit cool, and yes I read this after watching the first season of the show and I can't quite get Henry Cavill's portrayal out of my brain. So there were some minor changes from the TV show that my brain had trouble overriding. Essentially, in The Last Wish, a completely new world is created in which some children are taken and manipulated to have special learning and powers to deal with evil creatures that populate the world. But as the world turns away from fantasy and into an agrarian fiefdom somewhat like our own Earth's middle ages, the need for Witchers and sorcerers and magic at all is fading. It's an interesting look at a world on a precipice of losing those things that would make it a fantasy realm at all. There's a big deal in the book about destiny and can we avoid it and how are we wrapped into it. In the TV show, Geralt seems to decry the idea, but in the book he's all in, which was a hard thing to reconcile. But in any case, the motivations of people, and how their choices affect the future, is a big theme in the story. Geralt tries to thread the needle by keeping his head down and doing his work, but his actions seem to entangle him further in the politics of the realm. I'm looking forward to getting into the next installment of the series and ahead of the world I've already seen on TV. I'm going to be sticking with this one for a while. 5/5 Stars

The Adventure Zone: Petals to the Metal - Clint McElroy, Griffin McElroy, Travis McElroy, Justin McElroy, Carey Pietsch

I finished this in one day. My page per day average soared. I finished and wanted to start all over again.

It's been a couple years since The Adventure Zone, Balance Arc finished its podcast and moved on. I'm still not over it. But as the feeling of the podcast grows more distant, these comics that cover the different arcs within the Balance show, become better. Because the show got better over time as the narrative deepened and the McElroy brothers (and dad) got more deeply into the characters they were creating.

Petals to the Metal is really where this all started to happen within the show. When Griffin McElroy took more control over where the story was going, and side characters who could have been throw- aways became fan favorites. This was the arc where Justin McElroy conjured Spirit Steed and instead of a horse, we got a fabulous, deep voiced binicorn Garyl. I mean, no one but the McElroy's could have pulled this off.

Petals to the Metal deepens the mystery of the red robes and the Bureau of Balance. It illuminates the characters but casts huge doubts over their mission and the narrative. It's an excellent turning point in the series. The only thing to regret is the next installments are not immediately available. And, naturally that since my 8 year old is now into graphic novels he mistook this for his own and we had to have a serious chat about the "F" word.

5/5 Duh. 

Other Words for Home - Jasmine Warga

The kids are alright. Mostly because they have great books to read to open up new worlds to them, like Other Words for Home. I live in a town lacking in diversity. My children go to school with classmates that are overwhelmingly white.

A couple of years ago we volunteered through Catholic Charities to be a host family to a refugee family in Nashville. This warm generous family welcomed us to their home and although there was a language barrier for the adults that made conversation difficult, the children took off to play and came back smiling and exhausted two hours later. Then federal funding for the program was cut and the kind interpreter who had facilitated and made everything possible was laid off and the program ended. And although we've emailed a couple of times, we haven't seen them again. They have family in the area and I know they are well taken care of by their family.

All this to say is that children have a wonderful capacity to understand and empathize with other children. They understand that fundamentally other children are the same as they are and they can find common play when given time and space, and maybe just a little direction. And this book highlights that capacity.

Jude, a seventh grader, leaves Syria with her pregnant mother and goes to live with an uncle in Cincinnati. At first things are overwhelming and even her cousin Sarah, who should be a ready friend for Jude, is distant and judgmental of Jude's differences. It's hard to remember that being in middle school is all about not wanting to stand out in any way that isn't socially acceptable. You can be a star athlete or the lead in a school play, but you better not wear different clothes from anyone or speak another language. It's a harsh time.

But Jude, though initially shy and overwhelmed by her new surroundings and new "home" finds her own path and her own voice. She sticks up for the people who matter to her, even when carrying a heavy emotional burden of her father and brother remaining behind in Syria.

Although written for middle aged readers, the book was moving and well written. Definitely a five star read I would encourage for middle readers.

5/5 Stars. 

Me - Elton John

I can't stress enough that I'm already a big Elton John fan. I love singer songwriters in general. Have always been a lyrics geek. I saw Elton John in concert with Billy Joel either in the late 90s or early 2000s. I can't recall but I loved every second of it. They put on a hell of a show.

But as much as I've loved Elton John's music, I didn't know much about him personally. I knew he was British and I knew he was gay, but his childhood and upbringing were a total mystery to me.

So I just loved Me. It's so open and honest and direct and funny. Elton doesn't take himself too seriously and is very open with his trials and failures. His childhood is sad and informed a lot of his personality and choices later in life, but he's open about how he's made the best of things and moved on. I loved hearing about his musical connections. His various meetings with Bob Dylan, his friendship with Ringo Starr and John Lennon. His visits with the Queen Mum.

And I love how he embraces being able to change. There's something refreshing about people who are recovered addicts being able to embrace change and betterment. When he got sober, he realized he wasn't using his fame, money and influence enough and started an AIDS foundation that has raised $450M.

He's entirely delightful. I would thoroughly enjoy spending a day with him and his Canadian husband. I just loved reading about his journey. I finished the book and then stayed up until midnight watching Rocketman, which he mentions in the book and is just a delightful movie. I loved Taron Egerton's rendition of I'm Still Standing in the Sing movie. It was great to see him sing it again as himself and not a gorilla.

5/5 Stars.

This Will Only Hurt a Little - Busy Phillips

Right about the time I was wrapping up high school, I fell pretty hard for a brown haired boy and was so frustrated by the girl who wouldn't notice him for fear of ruining a friendship. Of course I'm talking about Pacey Witter and Dawson's Creek (Team Pacey, don't @ me). But then I went to college and so did Joey Potter and that's when I first saw Busy Phillips. I wasn't a huge fan of the character of Audrey. The writers and show runners so obviously wanted to place someone in juxtaposition to Katie Holmes' character and they went a lot overboard with Audrey in the process.

So I lost the thread on Busy Phillips for a while until she was gearing up to have a late night show on E! called Busy Tonight. Finally, said the feminist inside me. A late night show hosted by a woman. This is so great. Hmm 10 p.m. said practical sleepy me. And while I followed both the show and Busy Phillips on social media (instagram), I didn't stay up to watch any episodes. And inevitably the show was cancelled and I'm mega-bummed but also can only really blame myself.

Busy's book has been on my to-read pile for a while but it took some time to get around to it as the urgency of connecting the book with the show became lost. So, having no other knowledge of her career, I dug into this (audio) and really enjoyed it. Busy is honest AF about her life and irreverent of the system within which she works for her profession. Hollywood is about as rough and misogynist as I imagined. I really connected with her journey through balancing motherhood and work, and her loneliness following the birth of her first daughter. Being a new mother can be terribly isolating and society does not prepare men to become dads and shoulder ANY of the load. Men who have managed to figure out how to do this are going above the norm and this should change.

Busy on her show. At the end of the night she drank a margarita in her nightgown. 

I'm glad women like Busy exist to demand to take up space and give voice to some of the pitfalls women when we're trying to be polite. I'm only sad Busy's show was cancelled before she got a chance to have Glennon Doyle on. But, at least I can rewatch the Kristen Bell episode whenever I want to really live my best TV life. 

4/5 Stars. 

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End - Atul Gawande

My grandmother just turned 90 and lives on her own in the house where my mother was raised. She's lived there alone since her mother died at the age of 97, a year after my grandfather died of a massive heart attack leaving my grandmother a widow caring for her aging mother. At each step, my family has tried talk to my grandmother about her needs and moving into a facility with more activities and more people. She's very social. Up until this stupid pandemic struck, she was making crafts for the church bizarre and making tea sandwiches for the church coffee hour.

She's done amazingly well on her own, for a woman who had a heart attack ten years ago while visiting our family in Ohio. Since then she's watched her diet and makes her medical appointments through a car service for seniors. She takes trips to the grocery store or the mall. Sometimes calling a cab and sometimes taking the service. She hasn't driven since my grandfather's Chrysler needed a major repair decades ago. At each turn she's clung fiercely to her independence in a way that made little sense to us.

But now. Well now I've read this book and I feel terrible about the wasted energy of trying to convince a woman who raised two children and cared for her ailing mother and has made her limited income work for decades on her own, on the street she knows that I somehow known better what will make her life fulfilling. It would be one thing if she was complaining - or somehow making it known that her life was not satisfying to her. But she's not. She's shown, again and again, what it is she wants these years to look like for her, and the trade offs she's willing to make to have that independence in her life. So should we instead be looking at what ways in which we can make these goals of hers more achievable? Should we be aiming to help her live her best life now? Yes of course. Those are easy answers.

Being Mortal asks hard questions. The first half of the books looks at the way we treat infirmity and old age. And urges us to discuss what life looks like for our loved ones as they enter those sunset years. And really, what does life look like for ourselves? What things are essential to our being and self-actualization? It's so important to have these conversations and realize in the moment that we may be making choices based on our own preferences for our loved ones rather than what they would choose for themselves.

The second half of the book focuses on terminal illness and the limits of medicine. To what end do we continue to push our bodies past the point of diminishing returns? In the treatment of unconquerable illness, medicine will push us to choose the next thing and the next, often convincing us, against evidence, that there is always going to be a next thing. So when the final moments come, we are unprepared and the emotional toll on loved ones is enormous. Hospice services can enter the gap and make those last moments more bearable and better prepare us for their arrival. But of course no one is good at talking about these last moments. Doctors do not possess a natural ability to guide people in their end of life choices, unless they are trained and work at it.

I sometimes think awareness of an issue helps us take a step back from it and realize when we are in a situation that can sometimes be emotionally overwhelming. "Oh," we can think, "this is just like that book I read about making choices at the end of life." And maybe, hopefully, we can be better prepared to meet the next thing, even if it is the last thing. 

5/5 Stars.

Untamed - Glennon Doyle

Sometimes you read something that is like a shot of adrenaline into your veins and you can feel the light and the knowledge pressing up against your skin from the inside. That is what reading Untamed does. There were so many moments while reading this book that I placed my finger into the page, took a deep breath and just felt the truth of Glennon's words wash over me.

I'm not quite as sensitive as Glennon, but over time I've learned the same lessons about what the world expected of me as a woman. To be quiet. To take up as little space as possible. I've stayed quiet about things even when I knew the right answer. I'm a Enneagram 9 so I felt all of this book.

A lot of my remaining quiet or reserved was undone by a pretty marvelous high school experience surrounded by intelligent and independent women. And I'm lucky to have seen what living authentically can look like. Can I ask for more? Demand what I think I deserve? Not now.. not worth ruffling the feathers I used to think. And then I read: "Maybe in a different life. Isn't that interesting? As if I had more than one?"

As if I had more than one.

I don't. This is it. This one beautiful life that is mine for doing within whatever I think most fulfills it. Isn't that just selfishness my old self asks? Aren't you cloaking selfishness in some kind of higher philosophy? No. Because I've made other people's feelings my touch trees for too long. And when I do that I do everyone a disservice. So me and myself, we are till death do us part. And that's the tea.

5/5 Stars. 

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption - Bryan Stevenson

There's a wonderful momentum in setting a wrong right. There's an incredible grace in redemption and acceptance. Bryan Stevenson is a vessel of grace. Through the Equal Justice Initiative, Stevenson brings hope, comfort, acceptance, and redemption to those to whom the "justice" system in our country has terribly failed.

In Just Mercy, Stevenson says again and again that people are more than the worst thing they have ever done. It's one thing to say this kind of thing, but it's another to actually believe it, and through your life and actions, show others that this is true.

The history of the death penalty in the United States is a shameful story of unequal application disproportionately affecting the poor and people of color. How then is it justice? (spoiler alert, it's not). The fact that this country has absolutely put to death innocent people should give anyone pause as they talk about the reasonableness of the ultimate punishment. Couple this inexact science with the long history of racial discrimination in this country and you have a disgraceful recipe for injustice in the name of justice.

When Stevenson graduated from Harvard Law School, he set about with a mission to help others. And over the past couple of decades, he's done just that. He's championed cases such as that of Walter McMillan, sentenced to death in Alabama for a crime he did not commit, and of hundreds of children serving life sentences in our nation's penitentiaries. There is a better way, and it's because of people like Bryan Stevenson and his tireless fight for justice reform that we may someday earn the description "justice system."

5/5 Stars. 

The Hate U Give - Angie Thomas

I'm going to say this one more time in case anyone missed my multiple IG posts, but I'm going to be an Angie Thomas fan for life. The Hate U Give (THUG) is the second Angie Thomas book I've read this year and I stand by my earlier review of On the Come Up that her writing feels real and her characters are authentic. Too many times YA novels get teens wrong, or work too hard to teach lessons that the authors forget to include real people with real issues. Kids are a lot like adults in that they're complex and full of conflicting motivations - they just haven't figured out how to fake it yet.

THUG wastes no time setting up the central conflict - namely that the protagonist Star Carter is present when a police traffic stop ends with the murder of her friend Khalil. Star tries to process her heartbreak over the death of her friend, her own trauma of witnessing it first hand, and the complex social set she's created for herself by attending an exclusive private school. All of these things inform who she is and how she reacts to the situation.

Star's mother and father present as strong parental figures in the story, with both of them providing stability and strength to Star in her time of need. That her father is an ex-gang member who is constantly battling with figures from his past, complicates their family life, but the love they share between them is real and deep.

I basically loved every character in this book (except King and Haley obviously) but each character is used for a specific purpose and creates such a vivid picture. The overarching theme of police shootings is timely and presented in a way that even real dummies should be able to understand the human cost of police violence.

I'm planting my flag in the Angie Thomas fan club soil. I'm going to read whatever she comes out with next. 

5/5 Stars. 

Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster - Alex Higginbotham

I was five years old when the Chernobyl nuclear disaster occurred so let's just say that I didn't really follow the story at all. But throughout my childhood I was aware of the accident. Perhaps through follow up stories of the remaining radiation or the ghost town of Pripyat. In any case, I thought I knew what happened there. Nuclear reactor meltdown, radiation fall out. Some kind of heroics of fireman. End story.

I actually love finding out I'm insufficiently informed - woefully ignorant. It's such a joy to learn new things. But Midnight in Chernobyl tore my understanding down and showed that the reality of the disaster was so much worse than I could have imagined.

Do I now understand nuclear physics? Not even a little but. But this book does an excellent job of walking the reader through some painfully complex science so that when the explosion finally occurs around chapter 7, you are well and painfully aware of just how easily this accident happened and you're just as surprised it didn't happen earlier and all over the Soviet Union.

That this accident could only have happened how it happened, when it happened, and how it was responded to in the Soviet Union cannot be understated. From the attempts to protect reputation, to oversell quotas and timelines, to the blind adherence to authority over safety, this disaster snowballed out of control and then only through the essential sacrifice of bodies was it contained.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/moving_to_Chernobyl

The true extent of the loss and fall out will never be known (mostly because the government didn't want to have to tell anyone), but the human toll is overwhelming and obvious from the pages of this book. Every chapter brought some knew horror of response and loss. At times I just needed to take a break and walk away from the staggering details. I definitely want to read this again as I think there is just more to be gleaned from a second reading.

5/5 Stars.

Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators - Ronan Farrow

If I didn't know Ronan Farrow was a real person I would swear this was a work of brilliant fiction. That Catch and Kill involves real people and the lengths to which slime balls go to protect their reputation and their brotherhood of slime balls is shocking, disheartening, maddening, and disgusting.

Apparently the fact that Harvey Weinstein was a misogynistic, predatory a-hole was a well known "secret" in Hollywood (that's code for if someone makes enough money they can really get away with anything). Typically he would walk over women, assault women, be pushy with women, and anyone who got sideways of his endeavors found themselves without movie scripts, production offers, etc. But because he held the purse strings, employed people, promoted people, created stars, people looked the other way. People who couldn't were shown the exit door and asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement. This isn't right. It's certainly not justice.

So when Ronan started following a lead that became a story that became an avalanche, an entire system was put into motion to try to stop the reporting. Men whose conscience balked under the weight of similar allegations, organizations worried about their own internal practices around predators. This led to international security firms following Ronan to out his sources (sorry Jonathan that you were too boring to follow, it's adorable).

I deeply appreciated the vulnerability and empathy Ronan showed throughout and that he didn't shy away how the reporting affected him as a person. He focused on sources and facts to remain objective but also let himself feel the way he felt when the facts and evidence laid bare the truth. Our country is better for this kind of reporting, and for Harvey Weinstein and the men (and women) who believed their power, prestige, and money would allow them to get away with this heinous behavior to be held accountable.

Also, I would read any book that has a cameo by Pundit. 

5/5 Stars. 

The Adventure Zone: Murder on the Rockport Limited - Clint McElroy, Griffin McElroy, Justin McElroy, Travis McElroy, Carey Pietsch

What can I say? There's a gorgeous synchronicity between The Adventure Zone podcast and the graphic novel. The graphic novel manages to take the whimsy and sweetness of the McElroy brothers and carry it into a visual medium. 

Murder on the Rockport Limited follows Magnus, Merle and Taako as they try to recover a second grand relic. A Bureau of Balance reclaimer, Leeman Kessler, has gone missing after checking his luggage onto the Rockport Limited. In the luggage is the relic, and our three adventurers must get it back. But nothing is that easy and the Ruff Bois have to work hard to get it back. And solve a puzzle at the same time - with a strong assist from kid detective Angus McDonald. 

It's a lovely way to relive the more than 70 hours of audio the McElroy's created. I know that's not much for a review but it's hard to really grasp all the things of a graphic novel. 

5/5 Stars. 

The Explosive Child: A New Approach for Understanding and Parenting Easily Frustrated, Chronically Inflexible Children - Ross W. Greene

When our first child was a baby, he was impossible to soothe to sleep. We'd walk and rock and shush him and peering over at his face, his eyes would be wide open and alert. So on and on we'd walk, changing hands every 30 minutes when the frustration built and we were sure the lack of sleep was going to ruin our days. 

But as a toddler, he slept better and things were off to a good start. But when we signed him up for his first soccer season, it was evident that his emotional maturity was not quite those of his peers. He would refuse to be on the field, weep at the thought of being late, and lash out in frustration when told he would have to do something he didn't want to do. It didn't start at soccer, but it was the first aha moment that maybe the immovable object we encountered at home (literally he would become stiff and not move) was a sign of a greater issue that just stubborness or shyness. 

We started taking him to an excellent therapist prior to the start of his kindergarten year. And some of the coping techniques she taught him, and us, were extremely helpful. And yet, there remained moments, mostly centered on doing Kumon math worksheets, where his level of rage or frustration was beyond what we would or had expected. It was during a waiting room visit at a therapy session that I saw The Explosive Child sitting in a "lending library" of the therapist's office. "Easily Frustrated, Chronically Inflexible"? Was there a camera in this waiting room to see if I picked this up?

Within the first few pages of reading, I felt something I didn't know I'd tightened in myself start to loosen up. "The reason reward and punishment strategies haven't helped is because they won't teach your child the skills he's lacking or solve the problems that are contributing to challenging episodes." 

There are so many times that we feel like we are failing as parents. If we can't get them to just behave and comply isn't that a reflection on our lack of skills? This entire book gives parents grace in abundance so they can in turn show their children grace. This should be obvious, but yet it's not. And I realized, ashamed, that I had been developing bad habits regarding conflict with my child, and was probably doing more damage to our relationship than missing a few worksheets was worth.

Okay so reset. Move to what Greene calls, Plan B, because clearly our Plan A wasn't working. And you know what, it requires you to have open and considerate communication with your child, to really show them you care about their concerns and their opinions. Are you still the boss? Yes, but your child is trying to learn skills that make them able to handle frustrations and disappointments. And yelling at them and imposing parental will isn't going to assist in that. 

It's harder than it sounds, but that's okay. Because "We can do hard things." And that lovely child of mine is worth it.

5/5 Stars.

Washington Black - Esi Edugyan

I'm just going to say it now. This is the best book I will read in 2019. The moment I woke up after reading all night, I sent a note to my mom and sister - "Just finished this last night. It's exquisite."

Exquisite. I'm not sure I can think of a better word than that to describe Esi Edugyan's Washington Black. First, the writing is exquisite. This is about as tight as a novel can be written but still say so much. Words aren't wasted. Ordinary words line up in a sentence and become transformative. Here's some examples:

"You were children," his father said. "You knew nothing of beauty."
"Children know everything about beauty," Titch countered softly. "It is adults who have forgotten."

"In any case, it was then I recognized that my own values - the tenets I hold dear as an Englishman - they are not the only, nor the best, values in existence. I understood there were many ways of being in the world, that to privilege one rigid set of beliefs over another was to lose something." 

Goff gave a flustered grunt, shoving some boiled potatoes into his mouth, but I could see he was interested. "Such a thing is not possible." 
I peered quietly at him. "Nothing is possible, sir, until it is made so."

Point number two: The nuance is exquisite. These characters, they're complex without being unnecessarily so. There are strong positions on slavery and race, but it's not surface stuff. There is so much nuance - so much examination of the subtle violence of slavery and racism that accompany the obvious violence. 

Point number three: The timelessness of the story is exquisite. Yes, clearly this novel is set in the 1830s. It boldly displays that at the start of each section. And yet. And yet. I would sometimes completely forget that this was happening in a setting close on 200 years ago. All of a sudden a carriage would make its way through a city and I would be shocked to remember that this was all happening a long time ago. This shouldn't be possible when one of the characters is a former slave, and slavery is still a very much real part of the plot, but it just somehow was. George Washington Black, "Wash", was timeless in his character. Somehow. And that is just a very real mark of the artistry put in by Edugyan. 

So I could say many things about the plot. How 11 year old Wash is selected by Christopher Wilde to become his assistant while he toils around his brother's plantation. How Christopher, "Titch", is repulsed but also complacent in his brother's mistreatment of slaves on the land. How the brutality of slavery seeps into every page of the first part of the novel and beyond. How Wash has an opportunity to escape that life without truly understanding what this meant to be forever one part out and one part in. How a daring escape led to a discovery of what it fully means to be your own person. 

But this is really not a novel that can be described but has to be experienced. Because my heart still feels full of it and that's a rare gift.

5/5 Stars.