Book Report

The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh – A dark novel in which three sisters are raised on a remote island. Their parents treat the family like a cult, forcing the girls into rituals to ostensibly protect them from the outside world and its toxins and its men. Their world is shattered when their dad disappears, and then later three men appear on their island. I guess I can kind of step back and admire that for some folks this book might have been awesome, but it really just wasn’t for me. I didn’t see the point of it, and I left it feeling kinda empty. Grade: 3

 

Heart of Fire by Mazie K Hirono  - Fascinating memoir by the US Senator from Hawaii. Loved it. She tells her whole story. She immigrated as a very young child from Japan, as her mom fled a terrible marriage. They were really, really poor for a while. Hirono lived for many years with her mother and brother in a 1 room tenement, with a shared bathroom and kitchen down the hall - all three family members slept on 1 bed. Her mom eventually gets some better jobs, and Hirono does well in school, and eventually gets involved in political campaigns. She then runs for Hawaii’s House of Reps and later for Lieutenant Governor. Interestingly that when she ran for Governor, her opponent was also a woman, and it was only the second time in US history that both major parties had a female candidate for governor. (Looks like Nebraska was the first in the 1980s). There are so many great tidbits in here. Hirono says that she read feminist literature in the 1960s and it convinced her that she was not meant to devote her life to marriage and motherhood. She shares that for decades, she had an on-again-off-again with this guy but he was kind of a jerk, and she turned down his marriage proposal. (She does eventually marry a great guy. He’s got a daughter from his previous marriage). Hirono’s mom and grandma were really her anchors and inspirations. Anyway, it’s a solid read all the way through and it ends with the Trump years and the hopefulness of the 2020 election. Grade: 8

 

Transforming Stress: The HeartMath Solution for Relieving Worry, Fatigue, and Tension by Doc Childre and Deborah Rozman – I read this book many years ago, and wanted to re-read it now. The long and the short of it is that it does exactly what the title suggests. I find the method the authors teach is way easier and fits me way better than meditation. It helps a lot. Grade: 8

 

All This Could Be Yours by Jami Attenberg –  Attenberg is one of the rare novelists who I enjoy not for her plots – her plots are never anything exceptional – but more for the way she writes and especially how she writes human behavior. She’s just so good at capturing characters and moments and getting to the core of what makes us human. Each person and each scenario felt real. As for this novel, the plot is basically that an old man dies, and he was a white-collar criminal and a jerk, and we see the reactions of his adult children and other family members. Grade: 8

 

This is How We Come Back Stronger edited by Feminist Book Society – I was looking forward to delving into this one, since it was published during the pandemic and the tagline is “feminist writers on turning crisis into change”. I’ve read lots of essay collections. Some have mostly awesome essays, some have mostly crummy essays, some have a mixed bag. I think this one is a mixed bag? Nothing in here grabbed me that much, but there were a few that I nodded along to or thought were reasonably insightful. Grade: 5