10-Minute Declutter

I really wish I'd realized why this author's name was familiar to me before I took on this review copy. If I had, I surely would have passed it by. Skye Alexander already has another “10-Minute” decluttering-meets-feng-shui book, and it was also pretty unlikable for me, and it also has an extremely low Goodreads average, so... I think that says something about the situation at hand.

Anyways, this is not a book about decluttering. This is a mixture of a book about feng shui and a to-do list. The decluttering “tips” aren't ideas on things you might not have thought to do before, they're literally lists of things like “return phone calls” and “sweep off your ceiling fans”. The entire section on feng shui is really poorly-crafted; Alexander tries hard to gloss over the minutiae and give you a quick guide, but feng shui is a practice that is ancient, in-depth, and if you're going to do it, I think it deserves the respect granted by actually learning what matters and why, rather than being only given these weird, bare-bones explanations.

Along a similar vein is my complaint about Alexander's incessant recommendations to “smudge” your home, yet no explanation for smudging is ever given beyond “buy a bundle of white sage and set it on fire”. This is... disrespectful, to start. There's a big difference between smudging and a basic smoke cleanse — one of these is a cultural and spiritual ritual performed primarily by Native tribes, while the other is self-explanatory: using smoke to spiritually “cleanse” a place, thing, etc. I'm not even going to dive into the entire discussion regarding whether or not non-Native peoples should be smoke cleansing with white sage to begin with (and if you're looking for an argument about that, go elsewhere, because I'm not going to sit here and fuss with you over whether or not you believe in appropriation within paganism and craft). I just... there's a lot I want to say, but I frankly don't have the energy to lay it all out here right now, so I'll just leave it at this: a lot of what Alexander discusses is careless and not thoughtful in the slightest, and between this and the last book I tried to read from this author, I'm hoping I can now remember in the future to stop supporting their endeavors because their work clearly is incredibly Not For Me.

Thank you so much to the publisher for providing me with this ARC in exchange for an honest review!