Spiritomb
I found this book really disappointing. Colin was written in an extremely behaviorizing way and can be described as a self-narrating zoo exhibit. I felt like the glimpses into Colin's thoughts still came across as behaviorizing—and when he had meltdowns, they were never described from inside Colin's thoughts, but as how they would look to an observer.
As an ancom, I obviously have major disagreements with the author about many things, but I actually enjoyed this book. While McCabe is motivated by a degree of jingoism (like any person in a law-enforcement career), there was minimal jingoism in the book: McCabe wasn't trying to persuade me as much as matter-of-factly describe how the FBI works and the cases he's worked on, while also expressing a lot of frustration with how the Trump administration has tried to control the FBI. Everything McCabe relates regarding interactions with Trump and his cabinet reveals the Trump administration's calculated efforts to garner preferential treatment from the FBI.
This book got me thinking about ancom solutions to problems like organized crime, because at one point McCabe claims that the FBI's top-down methods are the only way to dismantle it. I definitely want to research how ancoms and other leftists approach that issue.
McCabe does discuss past investigations of civil rights leaders by the FBI as things that shouldn't have been done and assures the reader that the FBI now has rules to prevent such infiltration of nonviolent activist organizations, though it felt like an afterthought more than seriously engaging with criticism of the FBI. I don't find it convincing to be told that something doesn't happen because it's against the rules. That said, I got the impression that people who join the FBI have less power-hunger and more integrity than people who become cops. I don't think of the FBI as being run by terrifying boogeymen now that I've read what protocols FBI agents follow and how they work.
Overall, McCabe advances a very strong argument that Trump's actions toward the FBI are indicative of Trump's gross disregard for facts and reasoning that don't align with his preconceived notions. I recommend this book to anyone curious about how the FBI works.
So much exotification of Romani people here. The one Romani character we interact with is a mystical stereotype. This book could have been so much better wrt challenging stereotypes of Romani people in Victorian England—Enola could have learned over the course of the book that Romani people are not what she previously thought they were. When you write about fictional Romani people for a historical fiction book, you have a responsibility to do actual research about them, beyond knowing what white English people at the time thought of them.
I didn't finish this book. The main premise of the main character being uniquely able to avoid rockfalls due to being hearing is evidence that the author did not talk to any d/Deaf people at all. Deaf people can feel the vibrations that would warn them of rockfalls, and they can feel vibrations of sounds (especially loud sounds) in their bodies. The scene where a gong is struck makes it really obvious that the author didn't ask any actual deaf person what their sensory experiences are around percussion. Deaf schools have percussion bands! I also thought it was bizarre that in a village where everyone has been deaf for hundreds of years, the villagers would think of themselves as lacking?
In addition, the concept of balance was not well-developed, and the main character's criticism of the supplier's interpretation didn't feel like it was coming from within the same culture. I also didn't feel like the supplier's argument for why it's fair for the village to be given fewer resources because balance really made sense in a context of how balance is understood in Taoism. It felt like a caricature of Taoism.
I feel bad giving this only two stars because the premise of a remote village where everyone has been deaf for hundreds of years is so cool! But this book was so disappointing.
I really liked that the author made it clear that assigning a diagnosis to Donald Trump is both unhelpful and impossible. Unhelpful because it diverts attention from actual criticism, and impossible because Donald has never had to function independently. I found her argument that Donald is essentially institutionalized particularly compelling: though he is not in a situation where he does have the freedom to microwave a burrito at 3 a.m., for his entire life he has been surrounded by people that make all his important decisions for him, and it has resulted in a need to be surrounded by yes-men at all times. I wouldn't use the word institutionalized because of the immense violence psychiatric institutions do, but it is very clear that Donald has never made an independent decision in his life.
Before I read Too Much And Never Enough, I knew very little about the Trump family. The family dynamic that made Donald who he is today is presented in great detail, and it does not exonerate him of any wrongdoing. Mary Trump expertly psychoanalyzes her uncle Donald in a way that both explains how he came to be callously self-centered and holds him accountable for it.
I wanted to like this book. I wanted to say that it was helpful in my life as a late-diagnosed autistic person. But it wasn't.
This book is geared towards late-diagnosed autistic women who are able to have a “normal” job, given sufficient sensory and social accommodations. (I'm not a woman, but since I spent my first 18 years of my life perceived in all my offline social spheres as a girl, my experiences from then are more like late-diagnosed autistic women's than late-diagnosed autistic men's.) I am unable to work, and so I found the suggestions largely irrelevant to my life.
I kept reading in hopes that the author might criticize the idea of productivity as one that harms disabled people whether they're like me or not, but such criticism never came. I found the author's treatment of the problems that undiagnosed autistic women experience at the hands of psychiatry lacking, especially with respect to race. Unmasking is something that has many more risks for autistic Black women and autistic women of color than for autistic white women.
The author's passing endorsement of training cops about ways autistic traits can look like disobedience feels especially ignorant, given the amount of young autistic Black men and women who have been arrested or assaulted by police who knew they were autistic. If this book were published prior to the Black Lives Matter movement's founding rather than in 2020, I might have let that slide. But it has become common knowledge in autistic advocacy that training cops about autism hasn't resulted in cops treating Black autistic people any better.
I'm frustrated by this book. It contains a lot of suggestions that are probably very helpful for autistic people who do work “normal” jobs, for making their workspace more comfortable. This book wasn't the book I thought it would be.
I'm not going to give Felicity's books to my own children because of the profoundly troubling way the stories deal with slavery.
Felicity's parents and grandfather are slaveowners, and at no point does Felicity have any internal conflict or unease about this. These books depict Virginia as if abolitionists did not exist (they did) and as if slavery was not something talked about (it was).
There are ways to write a setting where slavery is normalized, and the narrative makes it clear that it's not morally neutral. This book wasn't that. It felt really icky to read.
I first read this book more than 20 years ago, when I was eight years old. It's just as moving as I remember it being. Never let anyone tell you that it's impossible to write about the horrors of slavery to eight year olds in ways that they will understand.
In the first chapter, Addy is whipped and describes a memory of seeing her older brother whipped to the point of being covered in blood. An overseer forces Addy to eat live worms as punishment for not removing all the worms from a row of plants.
The emotions that 9-year-old Addy experiences throughout the book are incredibly real, and it's absolutely powerful.
Rating: 4.5 stars.
The dialogue is ham-fisted at times, there's a little jingoism toward the end, and the internment camp director is almost cartoonishly villainous (I feel really bad saying that because he's supposed to be cruel), but this is ultimately a very powerful novel of resistance.
I've read a lot of dystopian YA, and I find it very compelling to read cruel characters in power who use trickery and false kindness in order to hurt others much more deeply by making victims and witnesses question whether it's really that bad. The camp director wasn't like that. He made no such pretense, and he couldn't control his temper. I would have found him more believable if he'd nonchalantly ordered his subordinates to strike or taze Layla rather than punching and hitting her himself. People do exist who are cruel in the way he was, but I'm under the impression that giving such people positions of power leads to them becoming more sophisticated in their cruelty—they don't typically want to get their hands dirty.
Overall, this is a powerful story of rebellion and I am glad to have read it. The clear echoes of today's political climate combined with that the fictional president is unnamed leave it ambiguous whether the referenced president is Trump or someone like him, and it adds to the novel's urgency.
This book deeply affected me as a teenager in the aughts. I loved and wanted to befriend Stargirl. The image of Archie burying Barney and a scrap of paper, and Archie saying “a word” when Leo asks what's written on the paper—that has stayed in my memory for at least 17 years. Stargirl is one of those books that takes the reader on a journey and irrevocably changes them.
I was definitely not expecting a fast-paced story involving underage drinking, attempted acquaintance rape, drunk driving, and an evil twin willing to tell horrific lies to get her way...but that's what this book is. This was a wild ride.
I liked the third-person-omniscient narration, and the storytelling was clear and well-done. It's easy to see why books in this series made the NYT bestseller list.
This book is just as relevant today as when it was published in 1998. Some language has changed since then—like the word transgender becoming the inclusive term for anyone who isn't the gender assigned at birth, which was one of the things Feinberg advocated in hir work—but the overall message of how coalitions are necessary because oppressions are all interconnected remains.
I find Feinberg's arguments especially applicable to challenging transmedicalist ideological frameworks, which wrongly assert that allowing people who don't fit a True Transsexual narrative to call themselves “trans” lessens True Transsexuals' movement strength. Coalitions between people fitting a True Transsexual narrative and other trans people (and their allies) are in fact required for a trans movement to have any chance at success.
I was surprised when I noticed the publication date, because other than small references to the technology level (record players, looking things up in your home encyclopedia instead of online) and the characters' names being ones that were popular at the time, I wouldn't have known that it was published in 1973. Judy Blume is known for being frank about sexual topics in her YA books, and I was really surprised that at publication, it wasn't considered unrealistic that a teacher in the 1970s who was asked about it would be frank about masturbation as something that is common and nothing to be ashamed about.
I really liked how Deenie's dad advocated for her when her mom persisted in the fantasy of Deenie having a modeling career. While I was reading, I looked up pictures of the Milwaukee brace and learned that they are still used today for severe scoliosis, with the same instructions as Deenie received: wear it all the time, including in bed, except when swimming or bathing.
I love the twist where the sleeper is in fact the witch, and the old woman was the princess she cursed. I also love how the queen is revealed to be Snow White living with the trauma of a previous sleep curse, and having learned how to resist magical emotional manipulation (magical gaslighting?) from suffering magic-tinged abuse from her stepmother. I also enjoyed the ambiguous ending wrt what the queen does—it's clear that she chooses not to marry her prince fiancé in her home kingdom, but not whether she chooses to form a relationship with the old woman.
It's unclear if the old woman's youth reverts upon destruction of the spindle, or even if the old woman survives it, since the blood on the wool was initially her own. Does she live? Does she get any of her youth back as she sleeps for the first time in decades? Will a kiss from the queen wake her?
All in all, this story is some excellent twists on Sleeping Beauty...and I'm here for Snow White with a sword, being heroic and kissing women ⚢❤️
This book starts out as “What if Tudor England but with Animorphs” and then goes on to have a progressively sassier, more fourth-wall-breaking, more Lemony Snicket narrator with more and more Monty Python and the Holy Grail (and Princess Bride, I think?) quotes and references. I enjoyed the first half of this book, but then the writing style changes to having the aforementioned narrator progressively dropping all pretense of seriousness and it's extremely jarring. I would have enjoyed the latter half of the book much more if the narration style hadn't gradually turned into one joke after another.
I did catch the reference to All About That Bass, and I liked that there was a well-developed peasant character whose purpose was not comic relief.
Wow. The relationship between Kiko and her mom is very like the relationship I had with mine when I was a teen, with the exception that I came to the revelation that I didn't need my mom's approval a few years earlier than Kiko—and my mom doesn't intentionally upset people for fun. I saw my mom's mind games plainly illustrated in the words of this book.
