Spiritomb

This book, nearly a century after its first publication, is still very relevant today. It is written in plain language and is extremely accessible.

I have complicated feelings about this book.I take no issue with having a character in 1867 who has a Confederate backstory. Nor with that character being slow to trust Northerners and especially the Army. Jett's Louisiana plantation home was destroyed by the Union Army before the story begins, and that's her trauma history she has to grapple with in order to work together with a Northerner and an Army scout. That's part of Jett's character development I really liked, actually—by the end, she still refers to Gibbons as a fool yankee but she's learned how to make peace. And that's great!But. And this is a very serious “but.” This book includes the myth of Black Confederate soldiers. I have just begun reading [b:Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War's Most Persistent Myth 44577407 Searching for Black Confederates The Civil War's Most Persistent Myth (Civil War America) Kevin M. Levin https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1561937934l/44577407.SY75.jpg 69188809], and it has attuned me to instances of the myth that I wouldn't otherwise have remarked upon It's a testament to how pervasive the myth is. I don't think it's a case where the authors deliberately set out to rehabilitate the image of Confederates as not-racist, but that's what effectively happens in novels when you repeat a historical myth of a racially integrated Confederate Army. Suffice to say, the Confederate Army utilized the labor of free and enslaved Black people in camps, but those Black people were neither soldiers, nor trusted with weapons, nor regarded as equals by the whites around them. White Southerners during the war certainly believed that the enslaved Black people in the Confederate encampments were “loyal” to their cause, but when a soldier tells you that the enslaved bodyservant he took to the Confederate Army encampment is loyal and perfectly happy about the enslaved status, you shouldn't accept that at face value.Jett as a white Southerner in 1867 who grew up on a small Louisiana plantation would most likely have known that the Black people in Confederate Army camps were there as servants, and that most were enslaved. Jett's backstory includes positive feelings about a Creole woman enslaved by her family, but that's the extent to which this book remarks on slavery. It would be consistent with history for Jett to have unexamined ideas about slavery like this, but it is not consistent for Jett to simultaneously have grown up around slavery as something normal AND to believe that enslaved people could be trusted not to revolt when given access to weapons, without having abolitionist sympathies.White Fox's backstory is of being born in a white family and having been orphaned young and raised by a specific named Native American group that found him. He doesn't feel like he fits in with white people, and the group that raised him no longer exists by the start of the story. His character has some stereotypical mysterious-Indian elements and is quite flat, but I don't feel comfortable saying any more than that as a white person.I enjoyed the constant banter between Gibbons and Jett. I especially liked Gibbons' character as an eccentric daughter of a rich eccentric father who was the kind of eccentric that forgot to enforce gender roles.

Preface to my review: I am hearing. I have a few Deaf/HoH friends and know a little ASL (a few signs beyond fingerspelling, plus some spatial grammar). Most of what I know about Deaf culture and d/Deaf history is through the aforementioned friends.

I really enjoyed this book a lot, and learned new things about how to better advocate for d/Deaf folks. I didn't know, for instance, about virtual remote interpretation in hospitals. There is a big overlap between audism and discrimination against autism. I related very strongly to Maya's initial apprehension and suspicion of Beau for using ASL with her—it is not unlike when a neurotypical person immediately starts telling me about their autistic relative, upon learning I'm autistic.

The scenes where Beau screws up a sign are amusing. There were no instances of him messing up spatial grammar or facial expressions, but that also could have been a source of humor.

The part where Maya yells “Did you not know that the disabled chick can lipread?” kind of handled the deaf/disabled distinction in a way that a disabled reader might see as offensive or confusing. Perhaps in future editions, the author's note can include some discussion of why many deaf people do not consider being deaf to be a disability, and why that in itself is not something that devalues disability.

I appreciated the author's note, especially regarding cochlear implants. I already knew a lot from my friends (one of whom got a CI as a teen, as his own choice), and it's deepened my understanding of the topic. The topic of cochlear implants among d/Deaf people is not unlike the topic of ABA among autistic people: very controversial, can be used as a means to separate someone from a Deaf/autistic community, and involves serious issues of informed consent.

This book did a good job keeping me engaged to the end, despite its flaws. I was really invested in Maddie for the whole story, as well as in the mystery of the explosion that killed her mom.

The second story told around the campfire was one of those “Mentally Ill Person is Actually a Dangerous Killer” stories that I really dislike. Stories in that category are popular but reinforce negative stereotypes of people with psychosis and contribute to violence against them. People with psychosis are far more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators, in part because of these inaccurate, harmful portrayals. The emphasis on the patient's flat affect as something scary also put a bad taste in my mouth, as someone who has flattened affect due to being autistic. I was also disappointed that this campfire story didn't have a twist, like the head doctor being the actual killer who was framing the Scary Mentally Ill patient. (That's a story I'd like to read: Mentally Ill person being framed as the killer but ends up a hero, subverting these tropes.)

Aspects of that framed story were also problematic: what hospital gives patients full responsibility for administration of their own medications, especially antipsychotics? A person in a hospital who has psychosis is more likely to forget whether they've taken their meds, panic, and accidentally overdose. And it would have been completely believable for the hospital to have sedative autoinjectors on hand, so the employees could have subdued the killer.

Moving on to the outer narrative. Where did the ATV go? And why didn't Caleb have an emergency satellite phone on his person at all times, and why wasn't the shed with the supplies locked? There has to have been a protocol for what to do in the event of a camper dying other than just leaving the bodies and relying on a single radio. At no point was bear safety addressed realistically: I've camped in places where bears are, and a very big safety thing is that you should never have food in your tent. I can accept that Mark was ignorant, but Caleb should have said something about not keeping food or garbage in tents, and keeping garbage away from the campsite. Caleb should have had bear spray on him as well (if Mark had done actual research in his paranoia he would have had bear spray too, but I'll allow that Mark is not good at finding good information sources). I am not content with Caleb's explanation of no bears on the mountain.

I can accept that from Maddie's point of view, Charlie suddenly changed from being a sweet protective loving older brother, but it would have been more believable if she'd in hindsight seen signs of things being not-right, like how Tommy's anger issues were evident with his smashing his coach's car. (Side note: Chelsea dismissing that as Boys Being Boys with All That Testosterone was kind of bizarre though. Maddie should have had Lots of Doubts in response. What experiences has Chelsea had that make it normal and okay for men to commit extreme premeditated property destruction in response to being benched??)

Charlie being secretive without Maddie realizing it was hard to believe, unless Maddie is established as completely oblivious in general (which she wasn't). Charlie would have had an observable pattern of entitlement over women long beforehand if he decided to kill Dylan for mentioning the possibility that circumstances might make them need to break up in the future.

I understand that this was supposed to be a slasher thriller and that the genre is supposed to be about killers having motives that don't make sense, but I firmly believe that the genre can still involve authorial commentary about how real mass killings are overwhelmingly part of a pattern of the killers' entitled thoughts and actions. I feel like authors have a responsibility to include details like entitlement, in a time when mass shootings are so frequent in the U.S., and mass shooters' histories of entitled behavior are glossed over in favor of stories like “he did it because he was Crazy/autistic/bullied.” Mass killers almost always have a domestic violence history.

I can imagine a story where Charlie uncovers this conspiracy about the circumstances of his mother's death, and makes choices other than “Murder everyone involved and any witnesses who won't keep quiet.” I can also imagine a slasher story where Maddie has been worried about Charlie's becoming weirdly distant since their mom's death (maybe getting into fights at school and struggling with academics?) and hopes the camping trip will bring them back to how close they were before, but the story otherwise progresses as written.

I gave this three stars because I believe that the slasher genre can do better, even with the constraints that details about the killers' justifications for murder should be minimal. The book kept me engaged despite its issues, and I enjoyed it overall. The scene that reveals that Maddie likes to imagine being chased by monsters during her runs was really well executed; I was convinced she was really in danger in that moment.

I LOVE the worldbuilding of dragons that use mechanical technology and hoard knowledge. Dragon culture's hyper-rationality reminded me a lot of Vulcan culture from Star Trek, especially the meditation. I also liked the portrayal of Seraphina's skin care routine: her scales get unbearably itchy unless she bathes every day and oils them. Being half-dragon seemed very much like an analogy for being autistic: Seraphina knows that she doesn't visibly emote like others, she has a lot of sensory defensiveness, and she masks.

The complex political situations are engaging and nuanced. The conflict between humans and dragons is not one where there's a clear-cut resolution. The nativist gang that targets dragons is believable. The religion of the Goreddi involves not gods but a collective of saints, and the rituals reminded me a lot of Catholicism.

I am very excited to read more of this series.

DNF.

Note: I feel bad giving this one star, but I just had a really bad experience all around with this book's opening chapters. Please understand my rating in light of that reviews are supposed to be subjective, and one star is supposed to just mean “didn't like it.” Not “this book is objectively bad and no one should ever read it.” Please don't let my bad experience dampen your enjoyment if you actually enjoyed this book!

CW for menstration, menstrual horror (?), graphic period sex, graphic animal death, eye trauma

I found the narration in second-person extremely off-putting, especially because the novel opens with the POV character having her first period start during a sexual experience with her boyfriend. I am completely fine with body horror, blood, menstration and sex scenes, but the details of her period were way too graphic even for me, and the amount of blood (described as gushing) seemed unrealistic for hour 1 of a first period.

I wasn't sure how I was supposed to experience the second-person narration of the main character receiving oral sex. It felt too graphic for YA because of how detailed it was, even though it used euphemisms like “your core” to mean the POV character's genitals. The sex scene felt really long. It could have been much shorter, given that the point was apparently to convey the POV character to run away into the woods with embarrassment about getting period blood all over her boyfriend's face. She could have been made to run away embarrassed without a sex scene, like if she noticed a wet feeling + blood on her legs right as she was leaving the gym? I don't know how necessary the oral sex unexpectedly becoming period oral sex was for the plot.

I think she exchanged zero words with the boyfriend during the entire time the boyfriend was present? If this was a first sexual experience with the boyfriend as implied, I would have expected some dialogue, even as simple as Boyfriend asking “do you like this” or her saying “don't stop.” This could even be conveyed wordlessly with facial expressions, pauses and nodding (think then-nonverbal Ariel's emphatic smiling and nodding during Kiss the Girl in Disney's Little Mermaid). At minimum there should be some awkwardness from figuring out body positioning?

I think YA authors have a responsibility to portray sex in ways where the reader comes away with better understanding of what makes good consent practices, which can be done via authorial commentary whether portraying an assault or a fully consenting experience (especially during a fully consenting experience).

Moving on to the running into the woods, it was implied that the lone wolf that attacks her was attracted to the menstrual blood, that was of such volume that it was just trailing behind her on the ground? I didn't read far enough to learn if this wolf was actually her transformed boyfriend who is actually a werewolf or something, so I'm allowing for this wolf to have been supernatural in origin, since real wolves hunt in packs and are generally afraid of humans.

Putting aside the myth of predator animals being particularly attracted to the smell of human menstrual blood (compared to their usual nonhuman prey), this whole action sequence had so little internal monologue that I found it difficult and confusing to figure out the main character's thought process. And the eye trauma horror and the strangulation involved in her fighting the wolf was too much for me. Our POV character seemingly had gained supernatural strength, in being able to pick up this wolf by the throat and throw it against a wall hard enough to kill it.

Maybe there was indeed a supernatural explanation for her abilities and the presence of this lone wolf, but I was still wondering the whole time why she didn't try to climb a tree, and why she wasn't injuring her bare feet on roots, sticks and rocks. The dearth of internal monologue to show her decision-making process made it very hard to understand.

Overall, this book just wasn't for me. If intense action horror is your thing and character introspection is not (no judgment here, you like what you like), you will probably have a better experience than I did.

Merged review:

DNF.

Note: I feel bad giving this one star, but I just had a really bad experience all around with this book's opening chapters. Please understand my rating in light of that reviews are supposed to be subjective, and one star is supposed to just mean “didn't like it.” Not “this book is objectively bad and no one should ever read it.” Please don't let my bad experience dampen your enjoyment if you actually enjoyed this book!

CW for menstration, menstrual horror (?), graphic period sex, graphic animal death, eye trauma

I found the narration in second-person extremely off-putting, especially because the novel opens with the POV character having her first period start during a sexual experience with her boyfriend. I am completely fine with body horror, blood, menstration and sex scenes, but the details of her period were way too graphic even for me, and the amount of blood (described as gushing) seemed unrealistic for hour 1 of a first period.

I wasn't sure how I was supposed to experience the second-person narration of the main character receiving oral sex. It felt too graphic for YA because of how detailed it was, even though it used euphemisms like “your core” to mean the POV character's genitals. The sex scene felt really long. It could have been much shorter, given that the point was apparently to convey the POV character to run away into the woods with embarrassment about getting period blood all over her boyfriend's face. She could have been made to run away embarrassed without a sex scene, like if she noticed a wet feeling + blood on her legs right as she was leaving the gym? I don't know how necessary the oral sex unexpectedly becoming period oral sex was for the plot.

I think she exchanged zero words with the boyfriend during the entire time the boyfriend was present? If this was a first sexual experience with the boyfriend as implied, I would have expected some dialogue, even as simple as Boyfriend asking “do you like this” or her saying “don't stop.” This could even be conveyed wordlessly with facial expressions, pauses and nodding (think then-nonverbal Ariel's emphatic smiling and nodding during Kiss the Girl in Disney's Little Mermaid). At minimum there should be some awkwardness from figuring out body positioning?

I think YA authors have a responsibility to portray sex in ways where the reader comes away with better understanding of what makes good consent practices, which can be done via authorial commentary whether portraying an assault or a fully consenting experience (especially during a fully consenting experience).

Moving on to the running into the woods, it was implied that the lone wolf that attacks her was attracted to the menstrual blood, that was of such volume that it was just trailing behind her on the ground? I didn't read far enough to learn if this wolf was actually her transformed boyfriend who is actually a werewolf or something, so I'm allowing for this wolf to have been supernatural in origin, since real wolves hunt in packs and are generally afraid of humans.

Putting aside the myth of predator animals being particularly attracted to the smell of human menstrual blood (compared to their usual nonhuman prey), this whole action sequence had so little internal monologue that I found it difficult and confusing to figure out the main character's thought process. And the eye trauma horror and the strangulation involved in her fighting the wolf was too much for me. Our POV character seemingly had gained supernatural strength, in being able to pick up this wolf by the throat and throw it against a wall hard enough to kill it.

Maybe there was indeed a supernatural explanation for her abilities and the presence of this lone wolf, but I was still wondering the whole time why she didn't try to climb a tree, and why she wasn't injuring her bare feet on roots, sticks and rocks. The dearth of internal monologue to show her decision-making process made it very hard to understand.

Overall, this book just wasn't for me. If intense action horror is your thing and character introspection is not (no judgment here, you like what you like), you will probably have a better experience than I did.

This book was extremely well-researched, and I learned a lot about the physiology and technical aspects of mountain climbing, and the specific geography of the north face of Everest.

The characters were very relatable—the one exception was the one Chinese commander because he seemed almost cartoonish. By contrast, much more care was done with the Nepalese, Tibetan and Sherpa characters, portraying cultural practices without exotifying them, and showing them doing general everyday activities.

The Chinese commander (the only Chinese character with any dialogue) felt like a caricature. I understand that his function was to add tension to the plot, and he is not supposed to be a sympathetic character (he is singularly focused on exposing the plot to put Peak on the summit, and he uses his power in ways that endanger everyone), but I think more could have been done to avoid reinforcing stereotypes of Chinese people.

This book sparked a new interest for me in learning about mountain climbing and mountain climbing disasters. The author does not shy away from the fact that the death zone is full of corpses, and treats this fact with appropriate amounts of reverence and horror.

I'm excited to read more of this series!

Overall, I found this book fascinating. The neuroscience of smell compared to other senses is a topic that interests me, moreso since last winter I lost most of my sense of smell for a few months as a lingering effect of COVID-19. I didn't lose it completely like the author did (and I've never had scent hallucinations), but she was absolutely spot on with describing how losing the sense of smell dulls the whole world, far beyond experiences of food.

Like the author, I am also very emotionally connected to my sense of smell, though for different reasons than hers. I went into this book expecting a combination of science and memoir, and for the most part it did not disappoint. But when it did disappoint, it was extremely concerning.

There were some parts that were more conjecture than reporting on research, which I found off-putting. If the author were a biologist or social scientist (or even someone who wasn't cis and straight, when talking about gender and sexuality), her conjectures wouldn't have been so off-putting, but even with her caveats about being out of her expertise, it was inappropriate much of the time.

She occasionally remarks on the phenomenon of smell loss (or smell reappearing) correlating with weight changes, and how olfaction affects one's levels of hunger and satiety hormones, and she wonders if food manufacturers manipulate the smell profile of high-fat foods on purpose. She mentions how (newly) sorry she feels for fat people in light of learning about how disrupted hunger and satiety hormones can affect weight. (The research she reports on doesn't make an assumption of “eureka! this is what causes all fatness!”) She point-blank states that she previously assumed we fat people were just gluttons who don't have the moral character required not to overeat. It would have been fine for her to speculate that her anosmia altered her hunger and satiety cues, and for her to relate this to her own weight changes, and even for her to relate how she felt compelled to lose weight. But she didn't stick to her own experiences, and just assumed that her reason for weight gain (inadvertently overeating) was the reason for all weight that's judged by society as “too much.”

I recommend skipping the entire gender and sexuality chapter. The arguments involve the idea of prehistoric humans following the recently-debunked “man the hunter, woman the gatherer” division of labor, the specter of pheremones as an explanation for human behavior as complex as infidelity, the labeling of lab rats that engage in same-sex sexual behavior after having their pheremone senses altered as “gender confused,” and brain scans being interpreted in ways that equate straight man sexuality with lesbian sexuality (and straight woman sexuality with gay man sexuality), and using the words “masculine” and “feminine” to describe (heterosexual) reproductive behaviors in animals. (In my queer transgender opinion, calling rat mounting “masculine behavior” makes as much sense as calling bathing a “feminine” activity.)

There's inconsistency in the book about what a pheremone is, when discussing the possibility of humans having them. In rats and fruit flies, pheremones directly cause reproductive behaviors, like mounting or going into the lordosis position, and there is no choice involved; they will do it no matter what. Humans are neurologically able to choose to stop doing a reproductive behavior at any time, and at no point in the book does the author mention this problem when describing how various researchers have responded to the question of whether human pheremones exist. A major criticism of the idea that humans have pheremones is indeed that humans choose how and whether to respond to feeling arousal and attraction. (Humans don't go into heat, and even the most attraction-driven straight cis dude doesn't act on every attraction he has.)

In passing, there's also reference to the tongue map and menstrual synchrony myths as if they're true facts. The section with the menstrual synchrony has evopsych conjectures that fail to consider that if half of the prehistoric human group gives birth at the same time, that is extremely disadvantageous for the group's survival. There's also a weird conjecture that abstract thought requires language? I don't even know how it related to olfaction. The idea of language as a prerequisite for experiencing abstract thought is not innocent and has been used to harm babies, deaf people and people with language disabilities; it's still used to harm those groups. My thoughts are not all in words, and many autistic people's thoughts are not in words.

Overall, I liked the parts of the book that stuck to memoir and to reporting on science without inappropriate conjectures about gender, fat people, linguistics and sexuality.

I read this book to my 7-year-old to explain how OCD affects me, and it helped her understand what my brain does.

This book uses a framework where OCD is external to the person, which is a common way to go about treatment. Kevin imagines his OCD as an annoying little man named Mr. Worry, who won't stop calling to ask about the things for which Kevin experiences obsessions.

My only criticism is that while I understand the need to reassure a person who asks “So I'm not crazy?”, I skipped over some instances of Kevin asking that, because I have many friends who experience psychosis and I want to teach my kids to be empathetic toward people labeled “crazy.”

DNF. It had some parts that were interesting, but the continuous insistence of the necessity of repairing my relationships to my parents (who are completely self-centered and unrepentant about ways they severely mistreated me, and who continue to gaslight me today) was extremely off-putting. It felt like the author didn't anticipate that a reader might genuinely have had an unempathetic, selfish parent who valued their children's well-being drastically less than their own self-identification as a “good parent.”

The evopsych chapter was where the book went a bit weird for me. I shudder to think about certain evopsych dudes' worldview: if the ability to produce music in cis men came about because it is beneficial for attracting a mate, what do these evopsych dudes think about musicality in everyone else? (This is only one evopsych argument re: music, and it is not the only one; it's just the most annoying one IMO.)

Overall, I feel like I have a good understanding of what the state of neuroscience of music was like when this book was published.

This was deliciously spooky and atmospheric. The house is itself a character just as in Poe's story. The narrative jumping around in a nonlinear way felt natural and like I was piecing together a puzzle. The chapter headings all being “Madeline is [age]” made it feel like I was reading flashbacks that Madeline was having. And I really like the level of agency Madeline has compared to in the original. She is still very constrained by both the evil of the house and the predatory doctors, but figures out ways to exhibit her own will anyway.

The incestuous implications in Poe's story are made more explicit in this book, and always with the characters feeling horror and revulsion. There is a clearer allegory where the physical state of the house represents the Usher family's implied consanguinity. When twin siblings Madeline and Roderick are the only remaining Ushers alive, and Roderick is implied to have no interest in women (he and Noah are strongly implied to have been lovers while at school), the house itself tries to compel them to have an incestuous relationship—it felt very much like an allegory for noble families' marriages being based around keeping their wealth and property in the family.

[hypothesis]
By coincidence I had been reading about the health problems and traits in the Habsburg dynasty that are believed to have come about from their high level of consanguinity, and that likely primed me to think of the Usher family illness as akin to those health problems. The house's evil magic rather than pure genetics is the cause of the Usher illness, but it is attracted to Usher family blood, and seems to correlate with consanguinity. Women from outside the Usher family can get the illness from marrying into the family, so this isn't an interpretation without problems. But I still like to imagine the mechanics of fantasy processes.
[/hypothesis]

There are some editing and typography issues, and the book seems a bit disorganized, but it's a good primer on ARFID nonetheless. Fernanda do Valle describes the process by which she found a treatment protocol that worked for her son, and she emphasizes repeatedly that she takes issue with the idea that one must be underweight to qualify for a restrictive eating disorder diagnosis. This book helped me see deeper connections between ARFID and atypical sensory processing than I'd previously known, and the recommendation of a sensory processing evaluation is helpful.

One of the recommendations in the beginning of the book is to disallow snacks in bed and outside of designated meal and snack times, but do Valle repeatedly emphasizes that parents shouldn't feel like they have to go with a treatment protocol that goes against their values, so I don't feel like this is a problem in the text.

There is description of a consultation with a BCBA where the therapist's plan was to systematically desensitize the child to food with the goal of having him eat the food given to him regardless of whether he liked it, out of a sense of duty and with no emotional connection to the meal. Do Valle rejects this treatment first because rewards and punishments are ineffective for her son, and second because she views it as “mechanistic” and she wants her son to be able to enjoy food and experience it positively as a form of social connection. She is critical of American culture's valorization of thinness and of its demonization of food as a source of positive emotion.

Overall, this book was a good primer for me in understanding my own experiences with ARFID both in myself and in my kid.

DNF. I stopped reading after chapter 13. I got very frustrated with this book for multiple reasons, but the most important are that the author doesn't approach the topic from a neurodiversity framework or a fat liberation framework, and the valorization in anecdotes of people who were once extremely ill but today take no medication gave me a bad vibe.

The attachment parenting advocacy felt like a repackaging of refrigerator mother theory, with the twist of “society creates situations that coerce or strongly encourage refrigerator parenting.” It's not a framework that I find helpful as a parent or as a neurodivergent person.

In summary, I don't know if the author is one of those people who thinks that I as a chronically ill person should have “be on no medications” as a goal, but I don't want to continue reading to find out. Of course I'd love to not be in pain. But I can't read about mental illness and chronic illness from a perspective that seemingly depicts being 100% nondisabled & neurotypical and on no medications as something that I have a responsibility to want.

I did appreciate that the author has zero tolerance for Jordan Peterson.

This book has so much in it that either aged poorly or was cringeworthy to start with. Lipstick Day gives me the creeps, even if it's hinted to be just something that Sarah-Charlotte created that isn't school-sponsored.

Where was the oversight for the radio station? A radio station would have had a faculty advisor. And why couldn't Reeve call campus security when Vinnie literally threatened him with a chair?? At the conclusion of the book it's still not resolved whether or not Reeve is in physical danger from Vinnie at the radio station.

Brendan's “shopping is for girls, colors are for girls” having been typical for middle-school-boy misogyny in the early 90s doesn't mean that other characters can't tell him to STFU. People like Vinnie certainly exist, but I feel like Vinnie only exists as a foil to Reeve, as if the author is trying to make Reeve out to be the good guy just because he isn't bluntly saying and doing obviously misogynist things. The choice to portray Reeve's betrayal as like how AA portrays alcohol abuse, making Reeve out to be a victim, is nauseating.

It's ambiguous whether Janie forgives him at the end. And that makes me angry, because it makes the message of the book “men are gonna do stupid shit that hurts you but that doesn't mean they don't deserve your love and forgiveness!” The speech by Janie's birth mom about forgiveness is so vague on what forgiveness even means that it even could be “pretending that no harm happened.” And that's a horrible message to give to teen girls about how to respond to partners who mistreat them.

There are some aspects of this book that made me very uncomfortable. There are several instances of uncritically presenting dialogue that includes the word “Injun.” Calpurnia's grandfather was a captain in the Confederate army, so while there's no real overt pro-Confederate content, the Confederate romanticism that would have been in full swing in 1899 is just never talked about directly. The kids play Civil War and obviously valorize the Confederates, because no one wants to be the “Federals,” who are the bad guys. Stonewall Jackson is regarded as a war hero by Calpurnia and her brothers, at one point. The lack of clear authorial commentary on the Confederate romanticism of the era is the elephant in the room.

While this is most likely an accurate depiction of Confederate romanticism in Texas in 1899, it is irresponsible to present white kids in 1899 valorizing the Confederacy as if it's something neutral in 2016. Occasionally the narration sounds like an adult Calpurnia recounting her childhood–which is an excellent way to inject authorial commentary even mildly critical of the Confederate romanticism that obviously surrounded Calpurnia. I'm not asking for Calpurnia to have a modern understanding of racial justice–just like, some statement about how she and her siblings had no idea what the war was really about when they were young? (Also, I can't remember if it's said whether the grandfather obtained the plantation house before or after the war so idk if he was a slaveholder himself. But he absolutely would have known what the war was about and not denied it, if the author were committed to portraying former Confederate officers accurately.)

Anyway. Those are my thoughts. I wouldn't give this book to a kid unless I deliberately intended to be discussing it one chapter at a time, deliberately drawing attention to the Confederate romanticism that a white kid in Texas in 1899 would have been surrounded by, as part of a larger conversation about people today who are grappling with having Confederate soldiers among their ancestors.

I hope I never lose the sense of wonder for the natural world that propelled the author to spontaneously go on the ten-hour road trip she describes in the conclusion, to go see and touch a rock. People who haven't lost that sense of wonder will know exactly what I mean by that.

I found the text very accessible and it was easy to immerse myself in the narrative format.

The language is cisnormative throughout the book, which I expected, because it's only just becoming common for scientists to explicu clarify whether research includes any trans people. But it went to a degree I found very unusual. There were many parts where mentioning trans people would have made a lot of sense in potential for research distinguishing hormonal from genetic sex differences, but at no point does Saini do this. It seems deliberate?

By contrast, Bitch: On the Female of the Species has an introductory note that addresses trans people and explains that the language of the book will be cisnormative at times because the research being described is itself cisnormative. Maybe Saini chose not to mention trans people because of not wanting to accidentally say the wrong thing about us? I'll have to see if her newer book about patriarchy makes some mention of trans people, because transness, especially trans women, absolutely threaten patriarchy by existing.

Cisnormativity aside, I found it very heartening to read about research that's disproving the grounds used to bolster sexism. It was shocking but not entirely surprising to read the lengths to which scientists alive today will go in order to dismiss research critical of their “women are naturally less X” i without argument. The “it's only popular now because (minority groups) like it” argument those pro-essentialist scientists use is so transparent; I wish that feminists had that kind of influence to transform evolutionary psychology and biology such that it became the norm for researchers not to assume their data means subjugation of women is ~natural~. The one scientist who abruptly said he couldn't continue the conversation “for personal reasons” after initially telling Saini he hadn't read the paper his whole field was discussing was especially transparent.

It was especially shocking to read about how even men who publish research critical of sexist dogmas receive violent threats from MRAs. And it's profoundly unsettling that this kind of violence has gotten worse since Inferior's publication, thanks to Trump's having emboldened MRAs and other extremist groups that have regressive ideas about women's place in society.

I highly recommend this book with the caveats that the language is cisnormative, and that at times, Saini uses words that seem inappropriate to the context—as when she remarks “all our brains are intersex” after discussing research critical of the brain sex hypothesis, and when she uses the word “affair” several times to describe what sounds like a cultural norm in some societies where a woman having an extramarital sexual relationship is not considered to be comitting deception or a major transgression against her spouse (if I'm reading it correctly).

I really don't like how Applegate wrote Tobias' mom's experience of restored sight. After more than a decade of very little sight, it would be completely overwhelming to suddenly have the visual acuity of a hawk–and to be a sighted person upon morphing back to human. I also really didn't like how it's written in this tone of, “of course a blind person wants to be able to see!”

Also the distractibility of her service dog seemed like poor research. A service dog can't be so easily led away from their handler when they're working. The morphed dog would have been intact, and harder to control, like the time the kids morphed into intact bulls after aquiring steer.

Things Applegate wrote well: the neatness of Loren's house, and how Loren was able to find her groceries in the store.

I saw my younger pre-realizing-I'm-trans self so clearly in Bug and it makes me so happy that the author's note at the end is about how to refer to Bug when talking about the story. In a time when there's rampant moral panic about drag queens and trans kids, it gives me hope to read a story about a kid coming to understand himself as trans with a little supernatural help from his ghost drag-queen uncle, and then being fully affirmed by his mom, his friends and the administration of his new school. This book is necessary and important.

Sometimes the narration is hard to follow. It's not always sequential and the POV shifts: some chapters are first-person from Snow White's perspective, and some are third-person-specific (to another character). The third-person chapters are showing events that happen while she's not present or not awake, as well as events happening to her from the other character's perspective.

There is depiction of sexual harassment, sexual assault and child abuse. The sexual assault is not graphic; it's a fade-to-black and in a detached third-person POV.

DNF. This book is mainly a collective biography of several cult leaders. I read the chapter about Charles Manson and it doesn't really go into detail about his cult's tactics other than Manson's charisma. I had hoped to read about cults' tactics and hierarchies, not a biography.

DNF. I realized halfway through that I just didn't have any motivation to find out what happened next, and that I was just forcing myself to continue reading out of misguided completionism.

This book is just as thrilling as when I read it as a teenager. The pacing is excellent.

This book was fascinating until the chapter toward the end where the author starts urgently recommending “the” “Mediterranean” diet, scaremongering about sugar, and using the O word to describe being fat. I loved learning about how statins work and how atherosclerosis has been present in human history for literal millennia, as well as how it's treated. I skimmed from the dietary advice to the end. Up until the food and health moralism and medical anti-fat bias, this book is amazing.