My October Book Haul includes both my hardcopy and ebook purchases I’ve made since my September book haul (click here to see). The haul totals to 14 books (including ebooks), and every book, except for two, is a book I’ve wanted to read for months! Despite October being a month dedicated to spooky reads, I’ve never been much of a mystery/thriller fan. However, I’m broadening my typical reading genres by including a mystery in this haul!
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Series: Standalone
Release Date: September 15, 2020
After more than forty years in the United States, Lan Cao still feels tentative about her place in her adoptive country, one which she came to as a thirteen-year old refugee. And after sixteen years of being a mother, she still ventures through motherhood as if it is a foreign landscape. In this lyrical memoir, Lan explores these two defining experiences of her life with the help of her fierce, independently-minded daughter, Harlan Margaret Van Cao.
In chapters that both reflect and refract her mother’s narrative, Harlan describes the rites of passage of childhood and adolescence, as they are filtered through the aftereffects of her family’s history of war, tragedy, and migration. Lan responds in turn, trying to understand her American daughter through the lens of her own battles with culture clash and bullying. In this unique format of alternating storytelling, their complicated mother-daughter relationship begins to crystallize. Lan’s struggles with the traumatic aftermath of war–punctuated by emotional, detailed flashbacks to her childhood–become operatic and fantastical interludes as told by her daughter. Harlan’s struggle to make friends in high school challenges her mother to step back and let her daughter find her own way.
Family in Six Tones is at once special and universal, speaking to the unique struggles of refugees as well as the universal tug-of-war between mothers and daughters. The journey of a refugee–away from war and loss towards peace and a new life–and the journey of a mother raising a child–to be secure and happy–are both steep paths filled with detours and stumbling blocks. Through explosive fights and painful setbacks, mother and daughter search for a way to accept the past and face the future together.
Format: eARC
Rating: 4.75/5 stars
Note: I received Family in Six Tones through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. My thanks to FSB Association for the opportunity.
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Series: Standalone
Release Date: August 25, 2020
Many predicted that pageants would disappear by the 21st century. Yet they are thriving. America’s most enduring contest, Miss America, celebrates its 100th anniversary in 2020. Why do they persist? In Here She Is, Hilary Levey Friedman reveals the surprising ways pageants have been an empowering feminist tradition. She traces the role of pageants in many of the feminist movement’s signature achievements, including bringing women into the public sphere, helping them become leaders in business and politics, providing increased educational opportunities, and giving them a voice in the age of #MeToo.
Using her unique perspective as a NOW state president, daughter to Miss America 1970, sometimes pageant judge, and scholar, Friedman explores how pageants became so deeply embedded in American life from their origins as a P.T. Barnum spectacle at the birth of the suffrage movement, through Miss Universe’s bathing beauties to the talent- and achievement-based competitions of today. She looks at how pageantry has morphed into culture everywhere from The Bachelor and RuPaul’s Drag Race to cheer and specialized contests like those for children, Indigenous women, and contestants with disabilities. Friedman also acknowledges the damaging and unrealistic expectations pageants place on women in society and discusses the controversies, including Miss America’s ableist and racist history, Trump’s ownership of the Miss Universe Organization, and the death of the child pageant-winner JonBenét Ramsey.
Presenting a more complex narrative than what’s been previously portrayed, Here She Is shows that as American women continue to evolve, so too will beauty pageants.
Rating: 3.5/5 stars
Note: I received Here She Is through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. My thanks to FSB Association for the opportunity.
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My first ever book haul is covering three months of book purchases! To ensure the post doesn’t go on forever I’m going to split my hard copy and kindle purchases between this post and my August monthly wrap. In this haul, I am featuring all of the books I’ve purchased in hard copy!
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Series: Standalone
Release Date: October 25, 2019
Sohaila Abdulali was the first Indian rape survivor to speak out about her experience. Gang-raped as a teenager in Mumbai and indignant at the deafening silence on the issue in India, she wrote an article for a women’s magazine questioning how we perceive rape and rape victims. Thirty years later she saw the story go viral in the wake of the fatal 2012 Delhi rape and the global outcry that followed.
Drawing on three decades of grappling with the issue personally and professionally, and on her work with hundreds of other survivors, she explores what we think about rape and what we say. She also explores what we don’t say, and asks pertinent questions about who gets raped and who rapes, about consent and desire, about redemption and revenge, and about how we raise our sons. Most importantly, she asks: does rape always have to be a life-defining event, or is it possible to recover joy?
Format: Paperback
Rating: 5/5 stars
Trigger Warning: This review discusses topics that can be triggering for some. Please read the ‘Possible Triggers’ tab above for details.
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A detailed look at last week’s reading habits: four new books read, all with a rating above 4-stars, three new books I want to read that all centre resilient Black women; I also introduce my Up Next shelf and details the books I’m going to read this week as well as the highly anticipated release of Midnight Sun.
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A detailed look at March’s reading habits: 24 books read, two DNFs, seven books read from my Up Next Shelf. I also read books continuing four favourite series of mine, and I finally finished the Throne of Glass series!
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Also by Bonnie Balliff-Spanvill, Mary Caprioli and Chad F. Emmett
Series: Standalone
Release Date: April 7, 2012
The authors compare micro-level gender violence and macro-level state peacefulness in global settings, supporting their findings with detailed analyses and color maps. Harnessing an immense amount of data, they call attention to discrepancies between national laws protecting women and the enforcement of those laws, and they note the adverse effects on state security of abnormal sex ratios favoring males, the practice of polygamy, and inequitable realities in family law, among other gendered aggressions.
The authors find that the treatment of women informs human interaction at all levels of society. Their research challenges conventional definitions of security and democracy and shows that the treatment of gender, played out on the world stage, informs the true clash of civilizations. In terms of resolving these injustices, the authors examine top-down and bottom-up approaches to healing wounds of violence against women, as well as ways to rectify inequalities in family law and the lack of parity in decision-making councils. Emphasizing the importance of an R2PW, or state responsibility to protect women, they mount a solid campaign against women’s systemic insecurity, which effectively unravels the security of all.
Format: Paperback
Rating: 5/5 stars
Trigger Warning: This review discusses topics that can be triggering for some. Please read the ‘Possible Triggers’ tab above for details.
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Series: Standalone
Release Date: June 11, 2020
Women Don’t Owe You Pretty is the ultimate book for anyone who wants to challenge the out-dated narratives supplied to us by the patriarchy.
Through Florence’s story you will learn how to protect your energy, discover that you are the love of your own life, and realise that today is a wonderful day to dump them.
Florence Given is here to remind you that you owe men nothing, least of all pretty.
WARNING: CONTAINS EXPLICIT CONTENT (AND A LOAD OF UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTHS).
THE FEMINIST MEMOIR EVERYONE IS TALKING ABOUT.
Format: Hardcover
Rating: 4/5 stars
Trigger Warning: This review discusses topics that can be triggering for some. Please read the ‘Possible Triggers’ tab above for details.
Note: This novel is very similar to What a Time to Be Alone: The Slumflower’s Guide to Why You Are Already Enough by The Slumflower (Chidera Eggerue) which was published in 2018. Women Don’t Owe You Pretty was published in 2020. If Given’s book looks like something you want to read, I highly recommend reading What a Time to Be Alone first.
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