Spiritomb

Starts really slowly but then halfway through, suddenly everything is happening at once.

I found a lot of the advice in this book helpful in maintaining my own mental well-being in my relationship with my mother, but I'm giving this book three stars because a decent chunk was just not applicable to me as an autistic person, an autistic parent, and an autistic child of undiagnosed neurodivergent parents. In the list of traits of an emotionally immature person, several were autistic traits. Autistic traits may make socializing difficult, but they don't inhibit the ability to have equitable relationships with others. My relationships to other autistic people have had far less emotional immaturity than my relationships to non-autistic people.

The section describing different types of empathy—cognitive empathy being ability to know what others are feeling, and emotional empathy being the ability to resonate with or feel others' feelings—makes the argument that low emotional empathy produces tendencies to be entitled, controlling or cruel. The book fails to say that cognitive empathy is something that is learned—we aren't born with the ability to figure out others' emotions. It has also not been shown that emotional empathy can't be learned. My low emotional empathy has never caused me to see myself as entitled to other people's time, energy or love. I felt like the author was
identifying the wrong causes—entitlement is about your deeply held values, not about your brain's abilities.

The assumption that these types of empathy are innate and unchanging muddles the determination of moral culpability: if someone could not have acted otherwise, they aren't morally responsible. Though it's beyond the scope of the book to rehabilitate them, the fact remains that emotionally immature parents could have acted otherwise, and that is the only way we can say they did things that were wrong.

I found the sections on how to be firm with my boundaries very helpful. Overall, I think this book will potentially help a lot of people! But it does a small contribution to the misunderstanding and harm of autistic people.

If you are white and want to be an effective ally to people of color, you need to read this book. Period. This book has been instrumental in my ability to challenge myself as a white person and to feel empowered to challenge other white people.

This is an amazing book that offers a lot of great advice for how to lay the groundwork for teaching my 3 year old how to be an effective ally toward Black people and other people of color. I am extremely thankful for this book's having helped me become aware of more areas in which I must challenge myself. I highly recommend this book to any white person who will ever interact with a white child.

I loved how the caravan seller described the caravan in the same way that RV dealers describe RVs. I love the little details Mercedes Lackey includes to translate things like RVs, Kool-aid, advanced birth control methods, and accommodating food allergies into a high-fantasy setting.

The part where Jakir ostensibly teaches sex education to Mags was extremely well-written. My only complaint is that the book didn't say that it's not true that first vaginal penetration is guaranteed to hurt the receiver—if the receiving partner doesn't have a sexual pain disorder or vaginal dryness, sufficient arousal levels (and the penetrating partner inserting gently and a little at a time) provide enough lubrication to prevent pain and injury for the receiving partner during first vaginally penetrative sex.

Something that I found extremely compelling in this book was the portrayal of the intellectually disabled adult character Camo. This book was published in the 1970s, so there is some outdated and offensive language describing him (e.g. “half-wit”), but overall, the narrative shows great empathy for Camo. Though he is partially nonverbal, the narrative clearly expresses that he has his own thoughts and feelings. It is refreshing to have disabled characters present in non-issue novels. Disabled people are a part of every community on Earth, so there's no reason why they wouldn't be integrated into the communities of Pern.

Though it was published 20 years ago, this book could have been written today. I read Monster as an adult and I wish I had read it as a teenager when I saw it in my high school library. It would have helped me to learn to engage meaningfully with racism and antiblackness much earlier. I highly recommend this book for middle grades and up, including as part of an antiracism curriculum.

This book was intense. I didn't expect to be so deeply affected by it. I knew from mention of Lavan Firestorm in other books that he would die by suicide at the end after his Companion was killed, but still wasn't fully prepared to lose Lavan. I wanted to hug him and tell him everything would be okay.

This book is so good and precious. The royal family is black, the Maiden is a knight of color, and the background characters include people who look like they could be East Asian and South Asian, all wearing garb that is a blending of Fantasy Medieval Europe and traditional attire of their ethnic groups. The illustrations are expressive and imaginative, and same-gender relationships are completely normalized! I am excited to read this book to my kid.

If you're looking for cute illustrations of a high fantasy world where same-gender relationships are normalized, this is one you'll not want to miss.

I have conflicted feelings about the resolution of the conflict concerning Natalie and eye contact. I do think that it's important for an autistic person to know what non-autistic people will expect from them, and in the context of the horrific eugenics against disabled people in the 1930s it would be absolutely necessary for Natalie's personal safety to mask, but the way the narrative conveys this doesn't do a lot to question the reasons for the goal of Natalie passing as nondisabled.

I do like how Natalie is a highly developed character who's presented as a full person with her own thoughts instead of a collection of behaviors. She expresses that eye contact is “too much.” She's able to force herself to do it in order to visit her father in the hospital, which is important to her, but after that, I find it very hard to believe that she would continue the making-eye-contact game for interactions of less consequence than “I have to make eye contact in order to be allowed to see my dad, who is severely injured.”

This is an incredible allegory for resisting institutionalization, compliance training, and eugenics against disabled people, especially autistic people.

On second reading, now that I've since read The Will of the Empress, the hints that Daja will eventually figure out she's a lesbian are there. She doesn't really like when boys touch her body, and she finds kissing them “interesting.”

I enjoyed this book a lot, especially the depth with which Briar and every other character who'd been in a gang were treated. The only thing I didn't enjoy was the description of a fat character where his weight was considered part of his overall moral failings, because such descriptions in media reinforces a reader's ideas about fat as a moral failing in real life.

I love this series so much and seeing how everyone's magic develops!

I'm flailing over how Lark explicitly told the four not to bring her wife back from the dead if she died, and Briar and company did so anyway. ❤️❤️❤️

I really enjoyed this book's chronicling of Numair's magical training. I was disappointed that Varice was such a flat character, because I was very interested to learn about how her relationship to Numair developed.

I thought that it was precious that Arram was so oblivious to that Varice was into him. It was adorable that he'd assumed that her kisses were sisterly. But I wish that Varice had been a more developed character. I know that their relationship is ultimately doomed because Numair will flee Carthak without her (and later marry Daine), but I'd still love to see these two have the kind of conversations and interactions that friends-turned-partners have in other books in the Tortallverse.

I really enjoyed the worldbuilding in this duology, and I really liked getting to know the characters. I liked the embedded commentary about psychiatric hospitals being detrimental to well-being.

I found this duology's treatment of race to be disappointing. It felt like an afterthought, for Jason to suddenly reveal to the reader in Aerie “By the way, one of my moms is black, and I have seen people be racist to her” and for Aza to make a very quick comment that during the year she spent being perceived as a black woman, she learned that white people are still racist. I feel like there was a missed opportunity for Aza and Eve to have had some conversation pertaining to race, in the year between the books' main action.

I also found it frustrating that Jason doesn't know which of his moms gave birth to him, and that thread was left hanging. Was he adopted? Was he made from an egg from one mom, fertilized by someone else, and gestated in the other mom? I want to know more.

I really appreciated the normalization of same-sex parents in this duology. Jason having two moms is not a source of anything dramatic—no homophobic violence, and no one acting weird about it. It's refreshing to see LGBTQ characters, especially lesbians and queer women, be present in a story, and not have the story be about coming out or interfacing with homophobia.

Overall, I think that Magonia and Aerie were really good! I want more stories about Magonians and Rostrae, especially Jik! I want to read about the Rostrae-led revolution in Magonia! I want to read about Dai's life before meeting Aza! I want to read the Flock's realization that he had to leave Zal! I want more!

I would have liked less stereotyping of black men as aggressive, women from Spain and South America as being “fiery,” and disabled people as being either angels or demons. (A heads up: in one story, a character uses the N word.)

I really enjoyed the narration by Holmes in the stories he tells.

This book starts slowly and very suddenly in the latter third of it, the pace quickens. I have heard others be critical of the slow pacing, but I feel like it was a deliberate choice to give the reader a sense of how a city person like Watson experiences rural life.

Ahhhhhh I loved this book! I thoroughly enjoyed the epistillary style and I grew very attached to the characters. The action sequences were exciting and the art is beautiful.

Wow. This book was way more intense than I remembered. Mary Anne's reaction to the trauma of the fire felt so real: the nightmares, the derealization, the emotional numbing. The action sequence of escaping from the burning house was extremely well done. The research for this book was well done.

I have mixed feelings about this book. I liked the first story by Maureen Johnson, but I couldn't stand Jubilee's “I'm not like other girls” attitude. I'm happy that another character challenges Jubilee about her blanket prejudice against cheerleaders. I didn't like that John Green's story featured another woman with an “I'm not like other girls” attitude, who goes unchallenged. I found the overall story to be fun, but I didn't like any of the characters. John Green's story also includes a character saying the R word and a lot of “Asian guys have small genitals” jokes. I had a hard time getting into Lauren Myracle's story because although I related to Addie's catastrophizing, the plot moved very slowly. I felt like the story moved too slowly up until the final pages, when it suddenly moved too fast.

Before this book, it had never stood out to me that Abby didn't have a love interest. Her turning down Ross's dance invitation reminds me a lot of how I turned down straight guys before I realized that I was trans—I liked boys but something about the idea of me pursuing a relationship with a straight guy seemed wrong to me, and I only wanted to pursue relationships with guys who weren't straight. Abby's reasons for rejecting Ross could be interpreted as Abby being gay but not yet realizing it. The other club members other than Kristy all think she should go to the dance with Ross and that Abby's making a big deal out of nothing. Abby has a conversation with Kristy where Kristy reveals that she dated Bart because it was socially expected of her and she went along with it, and not because she wanted to date him. It's very easy to read Kristy and Abby as gay in this book, and that's why I enjoyed it so much.

This is one of the few BSC books where Jessi and Mallory are written in a way that makes sense to me as 11 year olds. In most books, they are written like they are just starting high school, and the other sitters seem 16.

This was a breath of fresh air for me as a parent frustrated with the abundance of parenting advice that assumes that controlling children is inevitable or even ideal. I had previously understood that punishment was harmful to a parent-child relationship, but I didn't know that reward could also harm children. I now have a deeper understanding of how to demonstrate unconditional love and support for my child, and I would recommend this book to anyone who regularly interacts with children—parents, teachers, child care providers, and others.