American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment

I picked up Shane Bauer's American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment at Book Expo last year, because, while it's not my primary research and advocacy focus, the prison system is a deep and important area of interest for me. It's intricately connected to education, and I can't help but care about the business of prison. 

Bauer is a journalist for Mother Jones magazine, and several years ago he decided to go undercover at a Louisiana prison to repent his experiences as a corrections officer there at a for-profit prison. His year-long experiment was quickly shortened — he lasted only a few months. However, it was enough to shape him and leaving him questioning everything he thought he knew about himself. 

He’s first hired over the phone, sight unseen. The for-profit prison system pays CO’s less than minimum wage, and they are hurting for employees. In fact, before finishing training, Bauer’s cohort is whittled down quite a bit. His whole training experience is enough to turn your stomach; beginning from the moment he walks in the door, not a single inmate at the Winn Correctional Center is seen as human. They are animals, and the COs’ jobs are to treat them as such. 

There is so much packed in this book, including a concise history of the for-profit prison industry, and it’s hard to know where to begin. The overall trajectory Bauer presents of himself — of a man seeking justice through journalism to a man who begins to see the inmates of Winn as the animals he is trained to view them as — was the most startling albeit the most predictable to anyone who has taken Psych 101. It’s the Stanford Prison Experiment writ large. It also feeds into a long-term research plan of mine related to education, but that’s neither here nor for this particular post. I wasn’t surprised at all at Bauer’s transformation, but wow, was it fast. Only a matter of months. It’s shocking how quickly the human brain will transform into full-scale survival mode. 

Winn, as many for-profit prisons, was facing a CO shortage. Who wants to do that job for less than most cities pay in minimum wage? And then, for those who do, who feels as though they are respected enough by their managers that they then respect the men they are tasked with supervising? It’s a recipe for disaster. My favorite parts of this book quickly became the footnotes, which usually invoked the mentioning of Winn’s denial that any events Bauer discusses aren’t true or that they have no record of them. It’s laughable, really. Anyone who has simply read an article online from anyone who has ever walked into a prison knows that Bauer’s experiences are the norm. 

I highly recommend this book for several reasons: Bauer’s persons journey, his interactions with the incarcerated men on his watch, the history of the for-profit prison system, and the final chapters in which Bauer shows the aftermath of his experiences and his reporting. It is well worth the time to ingest this book and sit with it for a time. 

The Dreamers: A Novel

Karen Thompson Walker's The Age of Miracles is a book that hit me like a ton of bricks and has stayed with me for years (since 2012!); when I saw that her newest book, The Dreamers, was available for request on Netgalley I jumped on it. 

A mysterious virus is snaking it’s way through Santa Lora, a sleepy college town deep in California. It’s starts with one student, makes its way to get another, and soon the entire town is blanketed in sleep, dreaming but not waking. Very few will be left awake, and the town is under full quarantine. Who will survive and who will not? What is happening deep down at the cellular level to cause this disease — and what are the dreamers dreaming? 

I wish that my blurb on this book could be a fraction as eloquent as Walker is in her prose. She is one of the most languid and beautiful novelists of our day. She writes with such a deep understanding of her characters yet provides us this knowledge at a remove; it’s as if she’s our higher power telling us the story of our ancient civilization. It’s a folklore that will be come to know by all who dwell here. It’s incredible, her ability to move me as a reader while still feeling like a universal storyteller. 

Walker focuses on Mei, a young woman who feels like an outcast in her college dorm. Her roommate is the first to experience infection and pass away. Walker has written Mei to be the most empathetic of characters, one that is easy to relate to even though in the surface it seems we have nothing in common. Mei, who is asked to endorse more than any 19 year-old does. She is in the eye of the hurricane and when it fans out, she is the moral compass in the storm. She, along with Sarah and Libby, the two young daughters of janitor at the college, anchored this story for me more than any other characters. The couple with the baby felt too close to home for me, as it made my gut ache. Walker has a way of doing that. The story is important, but the characters’ journeys are the lifeblood. 

When Breath Becomes Air

Recently in my apartment building, someone started a book table where they leave books and others can take them. I am not interested in most of the titles, but occasionally one pops out that I have wanted to read. This was the case with Paul Kalanithi's When Breath Becomes Air.

This book is mostly a memoir, but it is a beautiful and arresting treatise on life and love. How do we live to our fullest? Kalanithi tells us, because he did it. Beginning as a child with a deep love of literature instilled in him by his mother, he was encouraged by his parents to delve deep into his curiosity and to learn. In college he continued to immerse himself in his beloved literature as well as indulge his curiosity in how the mind works through biology and the beginning inklings of neuroscience. He then went off to find himself, continuing his studies at Cambridge before moving on to medical school and eventually becoming one of the most sought-after neurosurgeons and neuroscientists in the nation. He married Lucy, the love of his life whom he first met in medical school, and together they had a child when they knew his life was near its end. Other than dying at a young age -- 37 -- he had it all.

But the thing that Paul teaches us in this book that dying is merely the end, but it's not the definition of who we are the lives that we have led. The measure of our worth as humans are the things we have accomplished in between birth and death -- knowledge, love, kindness, and the depth of our souls. In this short memoir, he puts that all to words in the most eloquent, moving, and thoughtful prose I have ever read. His words seared my heart in a reminder of how important it is to reflect on our lives through the lens of thankfulness when we have been given so much. Paul is one of the most gifted motivational writers that has ever existed (and yes, I am not exaggerating), and just a few hours with his gifted mind feels like it was a gift meant for me. It is clear why he would have been incredibly successful as a writer, and his self-education in literature is apparent in his writing.

There are so many beautiful moments in this book to touch on, but I want you to read them for yourself. When Paul is diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer in his 30's, at the height of his career, when he is being pursued by some of the most elite medical institutions, he has to reexamine his life plan. Practicing medicine for the next 20 years and spending the following 20 as a writer isn't possible anymore. He just won't live that long. He has to make a decision to live the last of his days and months to their fullest. He finishes out his residency, he begins this book, and he and Lucy decide to have a baby. This is where I am broken.

Paul's final words in his final chapter broke me as a human. His final paragraph, written to his infant daughter, is the most meaningful work I have ever written. It's simplicity belies the depth of his words and the meaning of life and love for another human. Even if the rest of the book wasn't worth the read -- and it very much is worth every second you will give to it -- those last few words will wreck you.

But you aren't done -- you need to read Lucy's afterword. Reading her bear her raw soul in telling us about her last few moments with her husband was so real that I had to read it in one-paragraph chunks. It was too much to bear in one setting without openly breaking down.

This book as a whole is one of the all time greatest memoirs ever written. 

The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog and Other Stories From a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook

The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog and Other Stories From a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook: What Traumatized Children Can Teach Us About Loss, Love, and Healing by Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D. and Maia Szalavitz came across my radar a while ago, but an old childhood friend recommended it to me recently, so I got it from the library. I was shocked that I had not read it earlier, but it has been indispensable for my work in teacher training. 

Trauma is far more prevalent than we ever could have imagined. Dr. Bruce Perry, a psychiatrist by training, fell into the work of treating trauma in children by accident. From there though, he has built a movement that seeks to give children the space and time they need to process through their pain and experience to learn how to cope in their world. He tells some of his bigger, more memorable stories in this book: his work with the children released from the Branch Davidian compound during the siege; a young girl who witnessed her mother’s murder; children raised in a home of cyclical sexual abuse; and many more. He uses these stories to build a history of what he learned and how it shaped him as a practitioner. He also updates each chapter with the most recent research in order to place each anecdote and subsequent explanation into the most current context possible. 

This book has spurred me to do so much more reading into the recent research on trauma and its effects on children and adults, including health ailments such as autoimmune disorders, mental illness such as Oppositional Defiant Disorder and anxiety, and attachment issues. The roots of this run deep, and the relationship between trauma and human outcomes is staggering. The stories in this book are extreme, and I caution anyone with trauma triggers to proceed with extreme caution. However, it’s important to note that trauma is on a continuum, and it’s not always witnessing a murder or being held in a cage. The common denominator is a lack of need fulfillment from caregivers — and those needs include (per Maslow’s Heirarchy of Needs) food, water, shelter, and safety. Love? Sure, that’s important, but it’s not a buffering factor if you don’t feel safe, physically or emotionally. It’s why a parent who physically abuses you can show you love when they aren’t hurting you, but it doesn’t mitigate the lack of safety you feel in not knowing when they will lash out. 

All of this to say that you shouldn’t fear traumatizing your children if you provide for their needs, including safety. I had a conversation with a friend just last night about this, and her concern that she was traumatizing her young child because he gets upset when saying goodbye to the people he leaves. That’s normal, and not trauma. Having your parent spit at you when you are crying is not normal, as an example. 

Now for the importance of this book. This is an absolute must-read for anyone who wants to do any work with children. You will run across the long-term affects of trauma, although most likely not as extreme as the surviving Branch Davidian children, for example. However, the sexual and/or emotional abuse of children is far more common that we could ever imagine, and its effects last long into adolescence.  Knowing how this affects your students is vital to being a caring educator and seeing past just simply placing the blame on students for behavior that very well may be out of their control. 

I would LOVE to do Dr. Perry’s training in trauma treatment, but it’s a bit out of my financial reach for something that just fascinated me but is y directly part of my practice. However, what a gift this man is to the children being served not just by him, but by the practitioners who have learned from him. I’m so thankful for this book — I even purchased it as a reference piece. I can’t recommend it more highly. 

The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel that Scandalized the World

One of the top five adult buzz books at BookExpo this year was Sarah Weinman's The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel that Scandalized the World. I nabbed myself a copy and was hooked as soon as I started reading. Sally Horner was a young girl -- not even twelve years old, who was coerced into running away with a man four times her age. A simple act of youthful rebellion -- stealing something from the dime store -- set off a series of events that removed her from her family for two years and pushed her into a nightmare that would define her life.

It might seem odd to many of us that a young girl could be "kidnapped" but not picked up and hauled off. She went with Frank La Salle (a name among many he used) willingly because he told her that he was an FBI agent who required her to come with him on a road trip to avoid being arrested and telling her mother for the petty theft. We as a society underestimate the fear and the power that adults have over children, and how likely it is that children feel obligated to those in power will do what they say, even if they get a creepy gut feeling that they shouldn't. (I will put a plug in here to say that teaching children compliance as opposed to autonomy contributes greatly to being picked as a victim by predators -- they know to look out for this type of child who willingly goes along and fears getting in trouble for "telling.") Ten years ago I would have not believed that Sally went along so willingly with a convicted child molester; a decade, some degrees, and a lot of reading later I understand how easy it was for La Salle to take her and convince her poor mother that he was the father of a classmate.

Sally's time with Frank is only known somewhat, although there are details from witnesses who knew them in the neighborhoods in which they lived. The long-term effects of her ordeal, though, were not to be seen, as she died young in a tragic car accident. Her experience didn't just affect her, however. It affected her mother and sister, and her friends that she had both before the experience and after. However, the most wide-ranging impact Sally's kidnapping had was on the public at large, as she served as an inspiration for Vladmir Nabakov's Lolita. While he would deny it until the day he died, Weinman's detailed and painstaking research shows that he was quite familiar with the story, even weaving details too small for the public to recognize into his narratives.

This book was gripping and I couldn't put it down. Weinman is an outstanding narrative non-fiction writer and she tells a tale that is winding and confusing in as close to a linear manner as she can, while still keeping us totally involved in the story. It reads like a novel until  Weinman brings you back out of Sally's story and reminds you that Nabakov was living a parallel life at the time. It is the best way to tell Sally's story; otherwise, it's incredibly difficult. She was sexually assaulted the entire time she was gone, and she was captive to a man who worshiped her in the creepiest way you can imagine. Weinman has crafted a gorgeous retelling of a time in a young girl's life that was horrific, yet iconic. It's well worth sinking your teeth into and getting to know the other side of a book you may know, whether you like it or not.

I need to read Lolita now, as I have never read it. I never had a desire to, but reading Weinman's take on the book and her deep connections to Sally's story makes me intrigued as to what my take of the book would be. Will it be a sordid tale that makes me shiver, or will I despise Humbert Humbert in the way that Nabakov possibly intended his audience to feel toward a man who is clearly a sexual predator? I love a good unreliable narrator, so I will look out for it soon on my next few jaunts to the used bookstore.

Ohio: A Novel

The premise of Stephen Markley's novel Ohio was so compelling that I fought tooth and nail to get an advanced copy. 

One hot, muggy night in The Cane a few years bah, four classmates converge on their hometown (New Canaan, but really, who calls it that?) on a series of missions that are inextricably bound even if they don’t realize it. Bill is running an errand for an old friend, muling something he doesn’t know but would love to find out because the drugs he’s taking are nuts. Stacey has been asked to meet with her nemesis, the mother of her high school lover who has run away and wants it to stay that way. Dan is a veteran of three tours who is back to visit his folks and catch up with the only woman he has ever loved. Tina seeks a reckoning for choices others made for her that have steered her life since high school. Tonight will change the trajectory of so many lives, leaving the wreckage of the baggage of the past out and open for all to see. 

So, I’m dead. I was so utterly, completely destroyed by this novel that I can’t even see strait. This was such an outstanding piece of work that I honestly thought I might never read anything else ever again. This absolutely killed me. I felt myself slowly creeping back to the book after I put it down, wanting to be back in the world of these kids who were just that — kids — as they watched their world change so drastically. These characters are a little younger than me, and I understand their zeitgeist because it is my own. I know what it is like to live without war, without the prison industrial complex, and without the full invasion of addicting, homemade drugs. The landscape of their lives has shifted dramatically in small-town post-industrial America that it’s no wonder those who get out can, and they never return. Those who stay end up barely living if they remain alive. 

I could see some of the twists and turns coming, but I did not see the biggest one, the undercurrent of the reason they all are back. This history, this Eason, draws them all like a magnet back to their center and holds on to them as if their lives depended on it. No matter how far these four have come, they will never be separate from their inner core. Stacey wrestles with her demons and the loss of the first person she truly, whole-heartedly loved. Bill’s demons are all in his head, and he must wrestle with himself in order to breathe. Dan is truly heartbreaking — a man who gave up everything to serve and lost so much, except loyalty. Tina — man, I rooted for Tina once I figured out what she was up to. I wanted her to find a solution so badly. 

This novel was incredibly affecting, so much so that my heart hurt after I closed the final page. It was truly a gift to read in every way, and I’m so grateful it came into my life. 

Dave Eggers' What Can a Citizen Do?

I love Dave Eggers, and when I saw he was releasing a children's book, What Can a Citizen Do?, illustrated by Shawn Harris, at Book Expo, I absolutely stood in line for his autograph. He made it out to my son, so that he will know that he is a citizen and there are so many things that he can do.

He can do so many things -- join causes, write letters, build things, stand up for beliefs, do kind things for others. The key is that a citizen must be engaged and they must be part of their society. Do things to help others regardless of who they are and what they need. After all, we never know the battles that others are fighting. Being a part of something is bigger than me and you -- we are citizens.

Where to start with this lovely piece of work that I love so much that I might not let my son touch it before his 18th birthday? Or, you know what, since his prefrontal cortex doesn't finish developing until he's in his mid-20's, he can't touch it until then which is fine because I wasn't about to let him out of the house anyway. But since I want him to be a good citizen, maybe I should take everything in this paragraph back and send him out into the world.

I love the sentiment of this book, and the poem itself is just wonderful and lovely. That the thrust of the book is to be a good citizen, which means recognizing that there is injustice in the world and that it is your job to fix it, is not just a sweet and ambitious idea, but it's the reality of our current circumstances. I have heard for years from parents of small children then they can do their part by teaching their children to love everyone, and the reality of that idea is that it's privileged, uninspired, and missing what is required to be an active, meaningful citizen. In order to teach our children to be citizens we must make explicit for them how to be good citizens -- caring for others, finding the helpers (thanks, Mr. Rogers!), being the helpers, giving of your time and your talents in any way that you can, and standing up for what is right. It is not enough just to love others -- oh sure, it's sweet -- but we must also teach our children to be active.

That is what is at the heart of this gorgeously illustrated, deeply worded book for young people. May my son always know that he must be a citizen.

Florida: Stories

I loved Lauren Groff's Fates and Furies (which I have et to finish, years later!), which I'm not sure I ever blogged about, so I requested her new book of short stories, Florida, as soon as I could. 

I wasn’t entirely sold by the first story — that of a suburban mom who walks her anger off for hours every night, watching her neighborhood change and shift throughout the seasons. But the second story brought me in a bit — that of Jude and his life’s tale in 14 pages. This story was fascinating, in that Groff takes you from Jude’s childhood to the day he sends his daughter off to college. It’s a wild ride, one that manages to break your heart while also being somewhat bare bones. It speaks to Groff’s astounding storytelling, that she can speed through a life and you feel like you know him intimately.

“Dogs Go Wolf,” the third story, is what completely sold me. The tale of two young girls left to fend for themselves on an island, alone, was gripping and jaw-dropping. Groff has this ability to create fully formed characters within a single page, so that when you realize the tragedy of their existence you can’t turn back and in-know it. I was both intrigued and devastated by these two girls, hoping for them that their mother wouldn’t be the jerk that she was and that she would come back for them. It wasn’t meant to be, and we as the readers are better off for that. We leave with more than we came with. 

Through the story of the woman with a head injury camping with her two sons, we move into another one of Groff’s masterpieces, a story in which a woman opts to ride out a hurricane at home, only to be visited by the great dead loves of her past. This story was surprisingly moving and I found my throat catching in moments. It is a little life-flashing-before-your-eyes but with an honest twist, as there are no holds barred between her and her ghosts. 

The next two stories were equally arresting — one of a pair of friends on holiday in France, where secrets peek around every corner, and the other a woman on annual holiday in Brazil in which her mettle is tested by a storm. As the stories progress, Groff’s writing continues to make its mark as she weaves the tales of these women who are three-dimensional and full of life and love and missteps and small triumphs. You may think you know what is going to happen, but Groff will surprise you with what you least expect, and boy, is that a feat. 

As I rinsed out the last of her stories, I put down this book better than when I came to it, and for me that is a mark of the beauty of this work. I need to turn back to Fates and Furies next, this time with a fresh appreciation for Groff and her storytelling. 

The Whistler: A Novel

I may have mentioned this on the blog before, but my husband is the greatest man alive. Not only do I love him for who he is, but he understands and encourages my book obsession. How does that relate to John Grisham's The Whistler? Well, it was one of two books he gifted me for Christmas a couple of years ago -- in hardback no less. Knowing full well that my TBR pile is actually a TBR bookcase that's overflowing. That's love. 

The investigators on Florida’s Board on Judicial Conduct rarely get fired up about their work. There is no shortage of corrupt judges and a big shortage on funding. They do their job, deal with what they can, and go on with their lives. That is, until the day that Lacy Stoltz, a seasoned investigator, gets a lead on one of the biggest cases of anyone’s career. It involves many moving parts — a corrupt judge in the pocket of a mysterious billionaire who no one has eyes on, an Indian reservation and casino, and an informant who changes his own identity too much to keep of track of. It seems like a complicated case but it soon becomes dangerous — no one guessed when they went to law school that they might also lose their life. 

I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this novel. It was a slight departure from the Grisham formula while still holding true to the legalistic thriller that he does so well. I don’t remember in the past being drawn to Grisham’s female characters; it could possibly be because he doesn’t often have female protagonists that are strong and smart and the actual lead of the story. I could be wrong — I’m not going back to check right now — but it worked in this story. I quite liked Lacy and her firebrand attitude. I liked that she was a badass at her job but when tragedy strikes, she is still a fully-developed human who dead with things the way we all do — caution and putting walls up and wariness about other people’s motives. 

I also appreciated that this story had twists and turns that I didn’t see coming but even if I had, I would still be left guessing so many details. Those moving parts I mentioned. This was a complicated story that could have twisted out of control but Grisham kept the story centered and grounded in the one solid understanding that power corrupts and the love of money is the root of all evil. I passed this book on to a friend of mine to enjoy as much as I did. 

D.C. Trip: A Novel

D.C. Trip by Sara Benincasa is another one of those books that has been on my bookshelf for a couple of years and I decided it was about time that I picked it up this summer. Oh my god, you guys. Oh my god. I died. 

Alicia Deats is a novice teacher in her first year at a high school in New Jersey. She is madly in love with the awkward and square math teacher, Bryan, and she volunteers to co-chaperone the sophomore class trip to Washington, D.C. that spring. Sivan, Gertie, and Rachel have been best friends since nursery school and are excited about the trip -- Gertie especially once she finds out the boy she has been in love with her whole life will also be on his school trip then, too. They will, however, have to deal with their enemies, the "cuntriad," who are definitely out to get them: Peighton, Brooklynn, and Kaylee. In the meantime, they are expected to learn their history in our nation's capital.

I found this book to be laugh out loud funny. Without a doubt one of the most fun books I have read in a while (because murder and mayhem isn't exactly "fun," if you know what I mean), I found myself sitting outside on my front steps the other day finishing the last 10 pages because I wanted to just enjoy them rather than having to put the book down and come back to it. I walked into my apartment building with a smile on my face and a skip in my step. Benincasa has written a book that just has so much joy and lust for life. She takes her characters so seriously, and that's why they are funny. She is a clearly lighthearted person (I follow her on Twitter and I think she's hilarious), and she gives her characters a full body and soul and that's what makes her writing so on point.

Alicia is a wannabe-hippie and we have all known girls like her who found their "inner spirit" and fully believe in making their own deodorant. One of my favorite quick moments in the story is when the girls catch her removing her dreamcatcher earrings after a discussion of cultural appropriation at one of the D.C. museums. [Insert me giggling here.] She is a little bit of all of us -- a girl who doesn't quite know who she is and where the boundaries are, and at 23 years old she is discovering them. Bryan is a grumpy gus who is hiding his insecurities in his intelligence. On one hand I wanted Alicia to win him over and on the other, I couldn't figure out why she wanted him so badly.

The thing I loved most about this book was the story arc and Benincasa's ability to toggle between one main story line (the class trip) and the two sub-story lines (Alicia loves Bryan and the trio's exploits). It was seamless and easy to read while also being just plain brilliant. Benincasa has a quick wit, and it works in writing for high school characters and their cadences, speech patterns, and emotional needs. Never once did I doubt that she had experience as a high school girl because these characters were so on point. Hell, even Brock, the typical popular boy who is dumb as a rock, was completely on point and absolutely hilarious. When he gets around to reading an emotional book, you will sit on edge while he gets advice from the class punching bag and then reviews the book later on the bus. Just go read it for yourself.

This book was an outstanding summer read and I couldn't recommend it more highly. It was funny and sweet, and now I need to go find more of Benincasa's work so that I can fill my heart with happiness again. 

Neverworld Wake: A Novel

I was simply ravished by Marisha Pessl's Nightfilm (in fact, I just recommended it again the other week), so I salivated when I found out that she had a YA novel coming out this summer. 

Beatrice’s friends had a nickname for her: Sister Bee. She was always the kind one, the innocent one of their group of six. Which is why no one blames her for ghosting after the death of their leader and her boyfriend, Jim. One year later, she decides to find out what really happened to him, so she joins the group for her former best friend’s, Whitley’s, birthday. It’s on the way home that things go off track — and the group ends up stuck in the Neverworld, where they must relive the same 11.2 hours over and over again until they, as a group of five, decide who gets to live while the rest must pass on into death. Only when they all have nothing left to lose do they truly get to the bottom of their friendship and what happened to Jim that awful night of senior year. 

I was quite taken by this book. Pessl is a hell of a writer and crafter of stories. I saw many parallels to Night Film and the themes that pull her to the words she puts on paper. Her crafting of this story was robust and fascinating, and she took this idea that has existed forever and a day — purgatory — and built off of it to create a sub-world that exists within a few seconds of wherenyou and I sit in the space-time continuum. It was mind-blowing at times, and I was in it to win it. Pessl has an incredible pull on me and it hurts so good. 

I am still trying to figure if I was surprised by the ending revelations or not, and the more I think about it, the more I realize that this is Pessl’s specialty. On one hand, they were surprising and on the other, they were in front of me the whole time. The hints that were laid down on the narrative path were like Hansel’s breadcrumbs, leading me back to where we started in a story-circle. No one is above blame, but sometimes degrees of blame matter. I often tell my students that it’s not always about what mistake you made, but how you go about fixing it that makes you who you are.

The characters were all interesting, but I was most fascinated by the relationship between Bee and Martha. Cold, distant Martha. You don’t quite figure out what she is up to until the end, and it doesn’t entirely make sense except that it does to her. It begs the question of whether or not the means justify the end, but that’s not for us to decide. It’s Martha who gets to make that choice within the four walls of the story. It made for a compelling read, one that I found myself going back to for even just a few seconds if I could. What a journey it was. I’m still puzzling over some of the details, particularly the ones that come to light in the last chapter, but I also have to be accepting that I will never know the answer. 

God: A Human History

Reza Aslan's Zealot was high on my "enjoyed" list, and I learned quite a bit from it. Looking back on that post, I wish I had written more in-depth about my thoughts on it and how the book effected me. So I decided to pick up God: A Human History when I saw it available for advanced review. 

I have been a fan of Allan since reading Zealot, and I find him to be an accomplished scholar who does outstanding historical research. This should come as no surprise seeing as how this is literally his job. I need to spell that out early on, though, so that we can be clear in explanation that the dude has got a point. You don’t have to be an atheist to find his work to be incredibly deep and explanatory. However, if you don’t like exploring knowledge that may contradict your faith, you should look for another work. That being said, I would encourage you to explore historical facts that you believe might not support what you have faith in — you might find some insight into why you believe what you believe. 

So now that my disclaimer is out there, let’s get to the meat of the book. I have a teensy background in religious history just through reading my beloved non-fiction religious scholars, but I had never explored the origins of the human belief in God. It’s funny now that I think about it, particularly as cognitive psych-oriented I am, that I have never spent time mulling over this. Hence my fascination with Aslan’s latest work. 

Where does God come from? Not in terms of physical origin, but in our own thoughts and minds. Who is he, and what is he like? Since no one on this earth actually knows (not even you), we as hominids with complex cognitive reasoning skills have created a likeness in our image because it’s what we can understand. How can we possibly imagine a being that isn’t something within our cognitive framework already? (This starts to get complicated on my end in terms of psych concepts, so as simply as I can explain it: we can’t know more than we know, so the conception of God is super complicated.) 

So ancient relatives of ours created God in their own image. Religion helped settle hominids and, Aslan argues, pushed us from a hunter-gatherer culture to an agricultural one. We created many gods pan-culturally with similar backstories based on historical events, and those gods had the ability to do specific things that humans could relate to. They were an explanation for a species who are primarily meaning-makers. (Now you are getting a part of my human development class mixed in with Aslan!) 

Then comes in Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. I could go into it all here, but you should read the book yourself because it is an awesome (in the most literal sense of the word) intellectual exploration of humans and deities and how we got to here. 

Aslan discusses some important-to-me topics in here such as theory of mind and ancient Hellenic culture, and I was amazed at my ability to synthesize it all. I was fascinated and humbled by the research presented and the depth of Aslan’s understanding of from whence we come. I only read one chapter at a time so I could ruminate on his words and the string of his narrative in relation to my own history and conception of the divine. 

The most moving piece of his book was the conclusion when Aslan opens up about his own journey to believe in what he does. He leaves the journey up to each of us, but indeed I identify with his short but profound words about his own beliefs, because I share them. He says in the last chapter that to reach this point in your beliefs, you have to come to it willingly and deliberately, and this struck such a strong cord with me. He’s right. I, too, have come here willingly and deliberately. What a beautiful thing it is. 

Our Kind of Cruelty: A Novel

Holy. Mother. Of. Pearl. I heard that Araminta Hall’s Our Kind of Cruelty was a gripping, wonderful thriller, but I wasn’t expecting THAT. 

Mike and Verity were college sweethearts, and for several years after university they supported each other moving up in their careers in London. Mike takes a job in the United States for a short time, and upon his return, his relationship with his beloved V is over — or is it? She won’t answer his emails or calls, and she’s getting married in a few months. But it’s all part of the game they play, this Crave, and Mike believes, no, knows, that if he plays his role the way he’s supposed to, he and V can be stronger than ever before. If only she would speak to him, though. No matter. Soon. 

Heads up — I can’t talk about this book without throwing in a few spoilers, so caveat emptor. 

I honestly didn’t know what to make of this book as I read it with a mouth agape and my head cocked to the side. This is, by far, a huge compliment. It is astounding that Hall could write such an incredible piece of work that treats a mentally ill man with such a deep humanity that sometimes it’s hard to tell exactly what the truth is. Even as Mike is reaching in his interpretations of Verity’s communications, and you know he is reaching, you still aren’t sure which was is up and you ask yourself, “Am I really sure that she’s not playing a Crave?” Because she could be. When we are in Mike’s head as his first-person narrative unfold, we could very well be there. He is both a reliable and an unreliable narrator, and it’s mind-boggling at times the mental gymnastics he goes through to convince himself that he’s seeing what he wants to see. 

Hats off to Hall on the construction of this book as well. I thought for sure this would give me the ending most of these books do, which is that the woman ends up either dead or fighting back and forever scarred. This story, though, ends even worse than that. The first part of the book focuses on Verity’s upcoming wedding and Mike settling back into London, building a home for Verity when she decides to leave her now-husband. The second part is post-wedding when Mike’s determination ends in a spectacular fashion and everyone’s lives are changed. The third part is the most frightening of all, and it’s what I didn’t expect when I picked up the book. What the actual living fuck? 

(Again, a compliment.)

I was so blown away that I was both repulsed by the events and enraptured in what was going to happen. I couldn’t have predicted this ending, and I was spellbound. This story is just simply jaw-dropping, and it’s absolutely worth any praise you’ve heard of it. One of the blurbs said something along the lines of being glued until the very last, chilling line. I didn’t necessarily find that last line most chilling, but rather the first of the author’s acknowledgements. Save it until the end, and it will put the book in an even stronger context. 

Ms. Hall, if I may address you directly — you are incredible and I bow down to you for this raw and intense portrait of violence against women. It feels so real it’s frightening. Thank you. 

Every Breath You Take: A True Story of Obsession, Revenge, and Murder

Could this be the best Ann Rule book out there? Possibly. Every Breath You Take: A True Story of Obsession, Revenge, and Murder was hands-down mind-boggling.

Sheila Blackthorne Bellush lived though literal hell with her husband, Allen Blackthorne. Physical abuse coupled with emotional and verbal abuse, affecting not just Sheila but their two daughters, Stevie and Daryl. When Sheila finally is able to take her daughters and leave, Allen continuously hunts them down and makes their lives as miserable as possible. As he becomes a multimillionaire, he nickels and dimes his third ex-wife to keep her in poverty. When Sheila meets Jamie, they build a family together that involves not just her daughters but quadruplets. After enough threats from Allen, the Bellushes pack up their home and escape to Florida in the dead of night. No one knows where they are -- or do they? What Allen wants, Allen gets, even if is the murder of his ex-wife as a form of power.

This may rank up near the top on my list of Ann Rule full-length narrative non-fictions. Not only is the story absolutely bat-shit crazy, but Rule was able to follow the court case closely and put it all in this book. It's actually one of the pieces that I like least about this book -- the last whole half being the arrest of the killers and the trials of them all -- but the first half which tells the story of Allen, of Sheila, and of the events leading up to Sheila's brutal murder were some of the most riveting I have read out of Ann Rule. That's saying a lot, as you know I am a fan. I tried to search for where the Blackthorne/Bellushes are now, but it's surprisingly hard to find.

Sheila was Allen's third wife (although he told her that she was his second), and Blackthorne wasn't their last name when they married; it was Van Houte. Allen changed it after what is a long, winding road of hustling and cheating and moving and shaking. You see what is coming; Allen's treatment of his first two wives was a huge warning side to us readers, and it's a damned shame that Sheila didn't know about it beforehand. Although, I know well that when a woman is in love, very few will be able to get through to her about this kind of thing. Allen cheated and used Sheila's parents, pushing them into debt, and Sheila still stuck by her man. I wanted to scream at her across the miles and the years to run, but she wouldn't have heard me.

The details of the murder are gory and heartbreaking, especially because it was in front of her four babies. I wish for her that her relationship with her younger daughter from her first marriage, Daryl, had been better when she was killed, but Allen was to thank for that. No matter how much I understand about sociopaths, I am always still so surprised at the damage they can cause. Allen was clearly one; he didn't care who he hurt how badly or how often, as long as he kept his perceived power. It's not a surprise that he was eventually convicted, since we know that's how Rule's stories go, but it was still nutty. 

Ford County: Stories

A little bit of a different John Grisham for you today. I bring you Ford County, Grisham's book of short stories that brings us back to the location of his first book, A Time to Kill, which I loved.

I am going to list out the stories here because that's what I feel like doing today.

"Blood Drive" - A young man is in the hospital after a work accident, and three friends drive up to Memphis to donate blood, only to run into a series of mishaps that waylay them at every turn.

"Fetching Raymond" - A mom and her two older sons head off to Parchman to see her youngest son on death row.

"Fish Files" - What would you do if one phone call could be the key to leave your boring, listless life behind and start over?

"Casino" - Be careful what you wish for, and watch the greed, because before you know it, an enemy you never even knew you had might take it all away.

"Michael's Room" - A man's past work deeds come back to haunt him one night in a grocery store.

"Quiet Haven" - You never quite know what that man is up to, beginning work at him umpteenth nursing home and seeking out odd friendships with the residents. He has some tricks up his sleeve, and they may just break the bank.

"Funny Boy" - A not-quite-prodigal son comes home to die, having left at young age. He was always "funny," which in small town 90's parlance means gay, and he is now dying of that disease. A surprising friendship sustains him until the end.

I was quite pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed these stories. One of the blurbs on the back calls it Grisham's best writing, and while I can't quite get myself to fully agree with that statement, I do think that it ranks up there. Nothing, in my mind, beats vintage Grisham in terms of the legal thriller, but this is quite a lovely tome that pitches the residents of Ford county in a variety of lights. The upright citizens are marked by the different characters that come through their lives, and the stories lie in those characters and not the upright citizens. After all, going about your business is no fun to read. Each of these stories has its merits and was worth reading. While I mentioned in an earlier short story collection (Curtis Sittenfeld's You Think It, I'll Say It) how much I loved that she let her stories dangle at the end, Grisham does the complete opposite and it works so well for these stories. He draws them to a close with a kind of ending that feels complete yet leaves you wanting more. These characters are so interesting and their stories are fascinating.

If I had to pick a favorite, I think "Funny Boy" would be it. There was something so human and raw in the story of Adrian coming home to die, more to avoid his friends watching him suffer than to be with his family. In fact, his family is so afraid of AIDS, which was still misunderstood in the late 1980's and 90's, that they ship him off to their other property "on the other side of the tracks." In the small town South, that means the area where people of color live. While in 2018 it feels offensive, there was a beauty in his friendship with Emporia, the woman renting the family home, and how she cared for him in his final days. That relationship is such a beautiful bloom on an island of gross ignorance, and the love she builds for him made my eyes water a little.

There were also laughs in this book, some because they were "haha" funny and some because there was humor in the dark moments. "Blood Drive," for example, should not have been funny at all, but those moments of mishap occurring with these not-so-smart guys on their way to help someone that they don't even know for reasons that make no sense to the observer were a riot. Reading this book with a distance of 25 years (give or take) provided a humor that might not have been the case in the days without the internet and our exposure to different walks of life. I thoroughly enjoyed this collection and I'm glad I picked it up. 

The Harm in Asking: My Clumsy Encounters with the Human Race

I picked up Sara Barron's The Harm in Asking: My Clumsy Encounters with the Human Race forever and a day ago, and I finally dove into it while nursing this past summer, and it fit the bill better than any other book I read during that time. I was up at all hours of the night and found that I could only read comedic work. Voila!

This collection of essays explores Barron's world all the way from her childhood and high school experience as a mall worker and hopeful lesbian-wannabe to a college student who cannot handle alcohol but still wants to be a druggie to an adult who desperately wants to adult but still ends up being asked to give business advice on being an escort to her dream man on what she thought was a date. Barron's crazy life is our essay-reading pleasure.

Laugh out loud, snortingly funny. That's how I felt about this book approximately halfway through. I found Barron's wry sense of humor to be absolutely amazing, and I was so grateful for these stories when they came into my world. Barron doesn't take herself too seriously (except for when she does, to our comedic reading pleasure), and her willingness to just simply be herself is a gold mine for us. The time that she strutted down a NYC street feeling like she was the shit while farting is amazing. Her desperate desire to be a lesbian for the cache is wonderfully hilarious. Her dating life sounded suspiciously like mine for the majority of my adulthood.

All of this to say, it felt like I had a spirit animal in Sara Barron. My stories are definitely not as good as hers, but I felt a kinship of epic proportions through her writing. As a younger version of herself she wanted to be something, even if she didn't know what that thing specifically was. She is so easy to relate to if you have ever been young, single, and making mistakes as you find yourself. She is also easy to relate to as someone who just wants to find herself and bases those searches on what she thinks she needs to be rather than who she is. I get that, and I got this book. It was hilarious, and I regret nothing. (Except maybe those fake glasses in fifth grade.)

The Self-Driven Child: The Science and Sense of Giving Your Kids More Control Over Their Lives

I saw a segment on The Self-Driven Child: The Science and Sense of Giving Your Kids More Control Over Their Lives by William Stixrud, Ph.D. and Ned Johnson a couple of months ago when it came out. I was thrilled to then get approved for a review copy, and I'm purchasing a paperback to take notes in. I love it when my work and my child-rearing intersect. 

We live in a world that is very different from that in which our parents were raised, and you can see it every day in every way. I sure do. I often explain to people that my parenting style is laissez faire so that no one will be surprised when I don't follow my toddler around like a helicopter. In general I receive praise, then I watch the person who just praised me worry over my child as the helicopter parent that I work hard to avoid being. It's absolutely fascinating to me that the same people who will start their sentences with, "When I was coming up/raising kids, we didn't [insert whichever obnoxious phrase one wants to utter here]," are the very same ones who will start pointing fingers and screaming, "BUT WHERE ARE THE PARENTS" and "IT ALL BEGINS AT HOME."

I should take a moment and describe what I mean by laissez faire parenting before you think I let my kid juggle knives. We are with our son constantly, and if we aren't, we have a babysitter or grandparent with him. He is, after, all, almost a year old and not quite able to turn on the stove yet to make himself dinner. He still needs supervision. But I don't say no very often -- unless it's dangerous, which electrical outlets are, and I made him cry the other day by yelling at him -- because when I say no, it's dangerous, I want him to understand that I'm being serious. I let him explore and yes, I even let him tumble, never in a serious way, but so that he will learn his own limits without me imposing them on him. He gets to make choices about what he does most of the day, and as long as it isn't going to kill him, I let my controlling nature take a backseat. This is because I want my child to be self-driven. (See where this is going now?)

So reading this book wasn't exactly eye-opening for me -- after all, I teach child development and am intimately familiar with the research on developmental psychology -- but it was confirmatory in that I have made the right decisions both in my teaching and in my parenting. One of my best friends said to me as a warning that it's very hard to let your children become who they are without controlling them. I knew then, and I stand by it now, that it's not as hard for me as it is for most people. It may be if you want them to turn out a specific way, instead of who they are meant to be. (On this note, I also highly recommend Alison Gopnik's The Gardner and the Carpenter.)

It is mind-blowing to me that parents have such a difficult time allowing their children to just be, but it is also so easy to understand. The desire for control is a part of us, whether it's hard-wired or socialized. This trickles (or maybe flows like rapids) into parenting, much swifter than even the best parent would like. I have seen it in my friends, my partner, myself. I just happen to be much better at taking a backseat with my son than most people I know, and I'm thankful for my training and my work to teach me how to do this.

I want every single one of my friends with kids to read this. I want every single one of my teacher education students to read this. I want everyone in the world to read this, because these men tell you how to get results. This is backed up with research, and it's backed up by experience. I am so thankful that my parents raised me to be self-driven, as much as my mother would have loved to control so much about me. I was never paid (or otherwise reinforced) for my grades, and at first I was jealous that my friends received cash for A's and I didn't. Then again, I never had much of a desire to make A's. I was a solid B student with an occasional A and a more-than-occasional C. My parents never cared, or at least they never told me they did. My mom would ask, "Are you proud of these grades?" If my response was affirmative, she was fine with it. If my response was negative, she told me to fix it then, because they were my grades and I was the only one responsible for them.

Wow. Radical, huh?

But it worked. I realized very young that the power of learning is so much stronger than the power of numbers. I didn't go to an Ivy League school, and thank goodness for that. I am a product of the public education system, including college and two Master's degree (and one day I will finish my damned PhD), and I'm damned good at my job. I love what I do, and it turns out I'm happy. Happier than someone with an Ivy League diploma and $200k in student loans? Who am I to say?

I see how this manifests itself in my teaching. As the years go on and I find that I am "blamed" for students not doing well, I have emphasized in my classes that I don't give grades, you earn them. It's a radical notion that many young people still have a hard time understanding, but it's true. I have also had to add a syllabus clause stating that "OK does not mean A," and I go on to say that if you request to leave my class early, come late, or miss the whole class, I will always say, "OK," because you are an adult who can make the decision for yourself. You are not a hostage in my classroom. However, choices have consequences and you must abide by those. Have you heard the phrase, "For every syllabus clause there is an awkward story behind it"? Yeah. It's true. Most of these are because we have to remind young people that they are self-driven, and we are not their keepers.

This past semester, I had a student I will call Jenny, who has a four-year-old son. She was telling me about the fights she would have with him over homework, so I asked her what homework was doing for him. She spouted off what we all believe -- that we need to learn to do our assignments so we can succeed in school. I asked her, "What if I told you that the research shows no correlation between homework and academic success?" She was shocked. I asked her what the penalty would be if her son didn't do homework. She looked dumbfounded when she said probably nothing, because it's preschool. No one had ever told her that before. I explained that she needed to tell her son, "I love you too much to fight with you about your homework." It's a phrase I've been using for a while that figures prominently in this book. I explained that even at 4 years old, her son could make choices and then deal with the consequences. The following week she came to class and I asked her how the week went. She lit up and said, "Oh my god, it was AMAZING." She explained that she took my advice on Monday night, and her son went to bed without doing his homework. The next morning he woke up and insisted on doing it to make his teacher happy, and they hadn't fought another day that week.

The point of this book is to help you help your children become self-driven. They are more than a number, and they are more than their accomplishments. They are people who are being driven into stress levels that are unprecedented in teens. Teach them to take care of themselves, and work with them to set limits. Whether it's homework, technology, extracurricular activities, or college prep -- all of which are covered in this book -- CTFO. Chill the &%#$ out. Success isn't a high GPA or a certain seal on a diploma. It's being a person who feels confident, competent, and autonomous. I love how strongly Ryan & Deci's self-determination theory figured into this book. It's my jam, and now definitely my favorite book. 

Bitter Harvest: A Woman's Fury, A Mother's Sacrifice

I thought a good companion review this week to Tuesday's book would be Ann Rule's Bitter Harvest: A Woman's Fury, A Mother's Sacrifice. Bat shit crazy is bat shit crazy, am I right?

Debora Green had it all - a loving, supportive husband, three beautiful children, intelligence to spare, and a medical degree. It was never going to be enough. She lost herself in her novels, ignoring her husband, Michael. She pitted her oldest children against their father, always a push and pull to hold him close while keeping him at arms length. When Michael decides he has had enough and wants to leave, their home catches fire and is uninhabitable. This knocks him to his senses, and he agrees to give Debora another chance. He returns to his family, and they move into their new dream home. When things quickly sour again, Michael realizes that life in his marriage to Debora will never be what he needs it to be, he leaves. What he doesn't know is that this choice -- in conjunction with his affair -- will leave a trail of tragedy in its wake as his unstable estranged wife takes her revenge.

Y'all, this woman was batshit. Like, one hundred percent completely off her rocker. I do not believe that she was insane when she set fire to her home (the big one, not the one I mentioned in the summary above). I can buy that she was drunk, and that her mind tipped on vengeful, but I do not for one second believe that she didn't know what she was doing was wrong. I will let you read the book yourself to determine your own conclusion, but that woman had no regard for human life. Her inability to keep a job and get along with co-workers was just the tip of the iceberg. I am shocked that her husband stayed with her as long as he did.

I read in some of the reviews on social media that they felt that Rule was super harsh on Debora and way too forgiving of Michael, and I do agree with this assessment. I do not, though, feel that Rule had it out for Debora. Very few people, including those in Debora's camp, disagree that she set the fire that night. I will let you read for yourself the forensic evidence, as it's fascinating, but it's also fairly straightforward, even knowing 20 years on that fire investigation in the 1980's and 90's was not perfect. I felt the point of Rule writing this story, as she does many of them, was not to determine whether or not Debora was guilty, but more to explore what happened to try to understand why a woman would be willing to sacrifice her children. Was it revenge? Was it madness? Or, was she hoping to win him back? We will never know.

Where this book fits in the Rule cannon is on the fascinating end of the spectrum. We've seen that some of her anthologies can be reaching in terms of their content, but her full-length novels often hit the mark. Bitter Harvest was for sure one of those, and it was a fascinating look at a story that is not so clear cut. In order to not spoil some parts of the story (even though they are heavily foreshadowed), stop reading now if you want to avoid them.

There is no doubt in my mind that Debora was connected to the suicide of Celeste's husband. Whether she called him to rub in the affair or encourage him to jump off the edge, her goal was to continue to sow discord her Michael's life any way she could. Additionally, I hope that Lissa (real name Kate) has found peace in her adult life as the only surviving child of that inferno. I don't know that it would be something I could ever get over, but I hope there is a sense of peace somewhere in there. 

The Favorite Sister: A Novel

Just last month I posted about Jessica Knoll's Luckiest Girl Alive, and I mentioned that I was looking forward to her new book. Well, here we are! It's The Favorite Sister, out this week.

Goal Diggers is a popular reality television show featuring five women who will fight their way to the top at all costs. People tune in for catfights and sure, also for the feminism. You get what you pay for, you know? Brett is the producer's darling, the lesbian do-gooder whose scrappy beginnings are ratings gold. It also doesn't hurt that her feud with cast mate Stephanie, an author of a series of bestselling books with a new memoir of her surviving an abusive relationship, will be ratings gold. When Brett's sister and business partner Kelly joins the cast, and secrets that the five women hoped to keep secret start coming out in the press, the season goes off the rails and not everyone will get out alive. Literally.

Knoll's books are incredibly entertaining, and I think that she is entering into my world as one of my favorite writers. Her work is a little off in a world that may not be entirely realistic, and I love it. She writes about worlds that I don't live in, and I love that she brings to the page such full-bodied characters in worlds that I would never want to live in. It's really fantastic, and it makes for an engaging and (dare I say?) riveting story. Her build up to climax in this book is amazing, and she did the same thing in Luckiest Girl, but these books are not alike in terms of content. They both tell compelling, full stories that don't have any content overlap. I'm crazy impressed.

We know at the beginning that Brett is dead and her sister, Kelly, is playing the grieving sister. We know the who and the what, but we don't know the when, the where, they why, and the how. As Knoll reveals the details of the plot throughout the book, I found myself gripping my Kindle harder and harder and ignoring people more and more as we got down to business. She has this way of storytelling that peels away layers like an onion and it's amazing. She always reveals just enough to keep you moving on to the next chapter even when you need to go the &^%$ to bed because you have to work in the morning. (Not that I'm speaking from personal experience...) She makes it hurt so good because she knows how to tell you just enough to keep you flipping the page but not enough that you can figure out what's going to happen next until it's too damned late.

Another reason why Knoll is poking her way into my favorites list is her ability to create horrible, nasty female characters that I find myself loving in spite of myself. This is a true compliment, because it's hard to create horrible people that are so unlikable yet you can't stop thinking about. (I am reminded here of Amy in Gone Girl). It takes a sharp writing hand to be able to create characters like this, and that she can do this with women that are strong and principled (in their own, fucked up way) is just incredible. It reminds me of this:

Hats off to this lady who can write.

I don't want to give away too much, so I will end here and encourage you to pick up this book yourself. It's the beach read you are looking for.

Educated: A Memoir

Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover stood out to me as it was an interesting premise: a young woman, raised in a survivalist family in Idaho with no formal education, fights her way to college and graduate school to become a historian. This memoir went way beyond that and became a beautiful story of love, loyalty, and self-discovery. 

Tara was the youngest of seven children, born to a fundamentalist Mormon family who did not believe in formal education. More than that, her father believed that the End of Days was coming, and he had his family preparing to outlast everyone on their mountain, isolated from neighbors, family, and friends. Their income came from the junkyard on their property, and her father spent hours on end rambling about the evils of the Government (capitalization intentional) and the gentiles, whom he defined as everyone but those who lived their faith according to his principles, including his fellow Mormons. When Tara follows in her brother's footsteps to BYU, she suffers from severe culture shock, and she must find her own place and her own way -- not just that of her father. 

This story is incredible, and not just for the sheltered-girl-makes-good story. At its heart, Tara's story is an achievement in self-study that follows her journey from an impressionable child who desperately believes her father's rantings against the evils of the world to an adult who has to find the answers to her questions herself. She has to face her past, which is her family, in the harshest light possible, and she has to make a decision between caring for herself and her own well-being or being a member of her family. It's heartbreaking, and in this story, you watch as her siblings all have to make this decision for themselves. The self-delusion that some family members live in is almost unbelievable, until you realize that we all have people who live in this state even if it is not nearly as extreme as a survivalist mentality. Tara tells of sitting in an undergraduate psychology class and hearing the symptoms for bipolar disorder and realizing that her father is a textbook case. It's not the first time that she begins questioning her upbringing, but it is a defining moment in her relationship with her parents. My heart hurt for her as she laid out her process of coming to grips with the differences between her and those who raised her. 

However, even if this story was just about Tara's work to overcome the odds stacked against her, that would have been amazing. Just her ability to be self-sufficient in terms of reviewing for the ACT on her own, and her seeking help with trigonometry from her brother, was amazing. It was enough to make me wonder if I could have that kind of drive. It's mind boggling that her father would give credit to their "home school," as there was next to no schooling that actually took place. Her family was not set up to succeed, from her father's rantings to her mother's capitulation, from their distrust of modern medicine to a fear of paperwork and schooling, Tara's success was just astounding, and the fact that she, along with two of her brothers, earned Ph.D.'s is amazing, and I applaud them. I know how hard this is. 

The most important part of Tara's story, to me, was her ability to come to grips with the abuse she suffered as a child and a young adult at the hands of her older brother. She calls him Shawn in this book, and he was incredibly violent to Tara, and later we discover many other girls, over a course of decades. I was expecting sexual abuse to come to light at some point, but that was not the case. He spent his time tormenting his sisters, girlfriends, and desired paramours. It's difficult to read, because you want to scream at the girls in the book to run as fast as they can. When one girl turns to Tara and tells her that God has provided Shawn with the ability to "fix" girls through violence, and that he is annointed, it's shocking. I was taken aback that someone could be so enmeshed in their faith that they would accept predicted violence to be God's will. I know it happens, but reading it so starkly was affecting.

Tara's writing is also lovely. In an interview with Vanity Fair, she writes that she studied short stories to figure out how to write for a general audience, and that she structured her chapters like short stories. The effect was beautiful, and the book was affecting and meaningful. I'm grateful that I was able to be a part of her journey as a reader of her story, and I look forward to hearing what the future offers her.