Book Review: Hold Still by Sally Mann

Title: Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs
Author: Sally Mann
Enjoyment Rating: ****
Source: Digital Copy
Content Alert: suicide, murder, sexual predation

I didn't know anything about Sally Mann when I picked up Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs, all I knew was that the book had been nominated for the National Book Award. I soon learned that Mann is a photographer who originally rose to fame in the 90s, when she published Immediate Family, a book of photographs of her children engaged in all of the intimate moments of growing up with children (sick, naked, vomiting-- she didn't shrink from capturing any of these moments. And the result is not Instagram but art. In Hold Still, Mann's story is all over the place-- she delves back into the distant past of her Southern relatives and the less distant past of the murder-suicide of her in-laws. She writes about racism and the long trip she took around the south with a photo lab in the back of her station wagon.

Just like you'd expect from the subtitle, Hold Still is full of Mann's photographs. And when I looked at them, my initial response was not often positive. These are pictures that demand your attention. They're shadowed and often sort of spectral, and after looking at them for a while, I often grew to appreciate them. I felt the same way about the memoir. The narrative thread of the story isn't immediately apparent, but after reading the book for a while, you realize you're enjoying yourself so much you really don't care. It's a little weird, but it works.

Book Review: When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

Title: When Breath Becomes Air
Author: Paul Kalanithi
Enjoyment Rating: *****
Source: Hard Copy
Content Alert: a pretty clean read. There are a handful of swear words, but don't let that hold you back from reading this beautiful book.

When Paul Kalanthi was thirty-six, just a year from completing his training as a neurosurgeon, and just on the verge of finally achieving adulthood, he was diagnosed with stage-four lung cancer. In When Breath Becomes Air, Kalanthi looks back on his life, especially on his training in medicine and literature, and how those two fields informed his approach to his disease, and, ultimately to his death.

A few years ago, I read a short piece by Kalanthi published in The New York Times. If you've read this blog for a long time, you probably know that I love literature about medicine, and this piece, and this story, really hit home for me, because, like Ed and I a few years earlier, Kalanthi was poised at the beginning of a life he'd spent half a lifetime preparing for. It felt so unfair, and I really admired the poetry of his language and the pathos I felt while reading. When Breath Becomes Air manages to retain the beauty in the language of that shorter piece, while providing a more extended meditation of life. This is a fabulous book for any reader, whether confronting your mortality or not.

Book Review: Furiously Happy by Jenny Lawson

Title: Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things
Author: Jenny Lawson
Enjoyment Rating: **
Source: Digital Copy
Content Alert: frank conversations about mental health

In Furiously Happy, Jenny Lawson, aka The Bloggess, writes frankly about her mental health challenges, which include anxiety, depression, and a host of related issues.

Okay, okay, I know I'm going to draw some ire here, so I'm taking a deep breath and forging ahead. I'm not a regular reader of Lawson's blog. I never read her first memoir, Let's Pretend This Never Happened. I have never had some of the mental health problems that Lawson has had. So I'm not her target audience. But this book kept coming up in every "Recommended for You" feed, and I bought it. I was reading Brene Brown's Daring Greatly at the same time, and in that book, Brown talks about vulnerability and about how sharing too much too soon with people whose trust you haven't earned can backfire. And that's exactly what this book was for me. I think that for some people, those with whom Lawson has established a rapport over years, this book would be fabulous, but for me, it felt like too much, too soon. The details of all of her fights with her husband, Victor, the incredibly detailed conversations she had with herself, which are things her regular readers would probably love, just annoyed me. So this book would be fabulous in the right hands, but her willingness to put everything out on the table was too much too soon for this reader.

Book Review: Home is Burning by Dan Marshall

Title: Home is Burning: A Memoir
Author: Dan Marshall
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Digital Copy
Content Alert: So. Much. Swearing. Some sex. Some illegal drug use. And a sad, slow decline ending in the death of the author's father.

Dan Marshall was a twenty-five-year-old Berkeley grad, living in LA, with a sweet job and a hot girlfriend when his father, Bob, a marathon runner who had never been sick a day in his life, was diagnosed with ALS. To complicate matters, Dan's mom, Debi, had been living with stage-four lung cancer for more than a dozen years, and she'd had a relapse and needed more chemo. So Dan and his brother Greg moved back home to take care of their parents. Home is Burning is the account of Dan's year living at home in Salt Lake City, taking care of his parents.

I would imagine that if I lived in New York or Los Angeles, seeing my city through the eyes of authors and filmmakers would become commonplace. But Salt Lake City is not a popular setting for books and movies. And when it does appear in film (like in High School Musical, it's often masquerading as someplace else). For me, the fact that Home is Burning takes place in Salt Lake made it so much more enjoyable. I could not, in good conscience, give this book a higher rating, because it seemed to operate only on the emotional levels of shock and sadness, but I really enjoyed reading it. The high school Marshall attended is Olympus, my kids' rival high school. They walk in the same canyon where I run trails, and they even stop and get drinks at Shivers, where I'm a frequent visitor at the drive-thru. At one point, Marshall named his street, and you'd better believe I opened Google Maps on my phone and, like a true creeper, found out where the street was. Turns out I run within half a block of his house at least three times a week. So the fact that the book takes place in my backyard was novel and thoroughly enjoyable. Not quite as enjoyable was the fact that Marshall is constantly referring to the damn Mormons or the f&^%ing Mormons. I know that part of his bravado was intended to show his fallibility as a character, but the fact that Marshall and his family seemed to hate the Mormons so much for I'm not sure what other than being squeaky clean Mormons got at the heart of one of the biggest tensions here in our city. I think that also made this book more important and significant as a local reader, even if it was less easy to brush off the comments because I recognize how it plays out in our city from day to day.

Book Review: Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Title: Between the World and Me
Author: Ta-Nehisi Coates
Enjoyment Rating: ****
Source: Audible
Content Alert: swearing

I pay for an Audible account that gives me two book credits per month. In that month, I'll probably run about 250 miles, much of it by myself, and I use the books to keep myself entertained. So I tend to shop for long books. Alexander Hamilton, at more than thirty hours, was a good buy. I was loath to spend the money on Ta-Nehisi Coatses's book, Between the World and Me, since it's only 3 1/2 hours long. But within a couple of days of each other, I heard that the book won a National Book Award, and I heard an extended interview with Coates about his newfound success on This American Life, and I knew I had to part with the credit and listen to the book.

Between the World and Me, which is written as a letter from the author to his (then) fourteen-year-old son, Samori, was eye-opening. It's a book written by a black man about my own age, to his son, who is the same age as my oldest son, and while we grew up within a few hundred miles of each other, studied the same things in college and have worked at writing as a career, our worldviews could not be more different. And Coates would say that this is because he's a black man and I am a white woman. He writes poetically, emotionally, sparely about the experiences of his life. Of his loving father hitting him with a belt. Of being a teenager in Baltimore. Of having college friends shot and killed by the police for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He writes of fear and hatred. And the book left me feeling unsettled and fearful myself, finding my privilege uncomfortable and conspicuous. It's a book I'm glad I read and perspective I'm glad I understand a bit more, but not an easy read. If you read it, don't forget to listen to the This American Life piece. They stand as interesting counterpoints to each other-- showing the complexity that lies within each of us.

Book Review: Dear Mr. You by Mary-Louise Parker

Title: Dear Mr. You
Author: Mary-Louise Parker
Enjoyment Rating: ****
Source: Audible
Content Alert: mild language, abuse, sex

In Dear Mr. You, actress and writer Mary-Louise Parker writes letters to the men in her life, from her grandfather to her ex-fiance to her son (and many fellows in between). In this memoir, we see Parker obliquely, not as part of a narrative but as a narrator, filtering her one-sided vision of interactions with these men. The idea for the book is ambitious, and the execution is pretty genius. There were times when the lack of a clear narrative made this book easy to set aside for a while, but I was always happy when I picked it up again. I feel that eventually, a picture of the author emerges that might have been more obscured through a more conventional format.

Book Review: Year of Yes by Shonda Rhimes

Title: Year of Yes:  How to Dance it Out, Stand in the Sun, and Be Your Own Person
Author: Shonda Rhimes
Enjoyment Rating: ****
Source: Audible
Content Alert: Acknowledgement of sex, swearing

Shonda Rhimes is one of my guilty pleasures. I watched Grey's Anatomy with an almost religious fervor when my kids were little, and I still tune in to TGIT for Scandal and How to Get Away with Murder. Heck, I even watched every episode of Off the Map. And as much as I may mock the Shonda Rhimes dramatic monologue, you know I'm a secret fan.

And it's a good thing, because Year of Yes is basically one extended Shonda Rhimes dramatic monologue. The story starts when Rhimes's sister says to her, one Thanksgiving, "You never say yes to anything," and Rhimes decides that for a year, she's going to get out of her comfort zone and say yes to opportunities for growth in her path. These range from giving commencement addresses and losing half her body weight to playing with her children and having the courage to end relationships. There's a lot to be learned here about the ruts we tend to let ourselves fall into, and how to get out of them. I have talked with lots of friends about how much I love her chapter on "doing it all." Rhimes contends that there's no way we can do it all, and her nanny is the only way she's even able to pretend, but even then, when she's succeeding in one aspect of her life, she's letting other areas slide. That was so refreshing for me to hear (trying to write, right now, with a child actually sitting on my lap watching YouTube). I also really loved her insights into her characters, and how ambitious, arrogant intern Christina Yang (from Grey's Anatomy) represented who she was early in her career and powerful, isolated, morally ambiguous Olivia Pope (from Scandal) represents some of how she has felt as she's achieved more success. This is a really fun read, whether or not you're a fan of Shondaland like I am.

Book Review: Between You and Me by Mary Norris

Title: Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen
Author: Mary Norris
Enjoyment Rating: **
Source: Audible
Content Alert: some mild swearing

There are some kinds of books that simply don't lend themselves to being made into audiobooks. Comic books and math textbooks, for example, have such important visual components that the transition to an audio format would require extra descriptions, and a lot would still be lost in the translation. You might not expect that a memoir would suffer from the same fate, but Mary Norris's Between You and Me is definitely a book where the audiobook feels like a pale imitation of the original. Yes, it's true, there are lots of places where Norris tells engaging stories about her life as a copyeditor for The New Yorker. The book is completely irreverent, and she tells hilarious stories (the story about her obsession with #1 pencils was my favorite). However, there are lots of places where she's talking about how the printed word appears on a page. When she talks about the placement of commas, for example, this listener was totally lost. Although I'm an editor, I'm much more a big-picture (or is it "big picture"?) kind of person, and I tend not to care much about the minutae of grammar. In that sense Norris's book felt both pedantic and like I finally started to understand why some people care so dang much about when to use "who" and when to use "whom." If you pick this book up, you'll probably enjoy it, but listening to it often left me frustrated and confused, which is not the feeling you want a reader to have when attempting to demystify grammar.

Book Review: Why Not Me by Mindy Kaling

Title: Why Not Me?
Author: Mindy Kaling
Enjoyment Rating: ****
Source: Audible
Content Alert: language

You know how you sometimes fall in love with a character on a tv show, and then you're disappointed that they don't exist in real life? Well, I have sort of the opposite feeling for Mindy Kaling. Kelly Kapoor, her breakout role on The Office, was someone I never really connected with (and I haven't watched The Mindy Project yet, but it's on my list), but somehow I ended up reading Kaling's first book Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? and I fell in love with it, and with her (and isn't it nice when the real person behind the character is so much cooler than the character?). So I had high expectations for Why Not Me? and Kaling surpassed all of them. This book is funny (of course), but it's also really honest and open, and not just about interesting but superficial things like how to get your clothes tailored so they fit your body perfectly, but also about deeper things like how she decided sorority life wasn't for her, what it's like to work in Hollywood when no one else looks like she does, and how she credits her success to lots and lots of hard work, and not simply to being in the right place at the right time (and her resume attests to her work ethic). She reads the book herself, and has perfect delivery, and she finally answers the question about what is going on with her and BJ Novak. Even though Kaling's a little loose with the language, I heartily recommended that my teenager daughter give the book a listen, because let's be real, a girl who works hard but also loves great shoes is a pretty good and realistic role model.

Book Review: The Light of the World by Elizabeth Alexander

Title: The Light of the World
Author: Elizabeth Alexander
Enjoyment Rating: *****
Source: Audible
Content Alert: This book digs deeply into grief and loss

Poet and Yale professor Elizabeth Alexander expected April 4, 2012 to be a regular evening, juggling work and child care of her two boys, Solomon and Simon, with her husband, Ficre. Then, the bottom dropped out of their lives when Ficre, so healthy and full of life, suddenly died of a heart attack while exercising on the treadmill. The Light of the World is an elegy in prose, in which Alexander shows how Ficre, an Ethiopian painter and chef, brought color and spice to her life, and how she and her boys mourned and lived in the time just after his death.

I listened to The Light of the World in less than a day, and I would have listened to Alexander talk about Ficre and her love for him for ten times as long if she had written more. This isn't a whitewashed love story-- she's open and honest and raw about the imperfections of their life together, but that doesn't diminish the story-- it endeared me to them. I loved the inside view Alexander gave us into her life-- it takes a brave author to be willing to expose the private aspects of life, especially and love and grief and raising teenagers, and Alexander shows herself both wise and brave in The Light of the World.

Book Review: Do No Harm by Henry Marsh

Title: Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery
Author: Henry Marsh
Enjoyment Rating; ****
Source: Hardback Copy
Content Alert: Possibly some swearing

Henry Marsh is an eminent London brain surgeon who writes about his experiences in Do No Harm. Marsh delves into individual cases, devoting a chapter to each, and talks about what he's learned, both in the operating theater and in life, from each one.

If Derek Shepherd is your idea of a brain surgeon, get ready for those assumptions to be tested by Henry Marsh. While I do think someone has to have a certain amount of self-confidence in order to cut into someone's head and take out pieces of their brain (especially when that person is alive), and Marsh does occasionally come off as self-important, he tends to focus a lot more on his failures here-- the cases that went wrong, the people that he tried to fix but couldn't, the cases he shouldn't have taken. Do No Harm feels a lot like a catalogue of regrets, and I think it takes a certain amount of self-awareness and humility to be able to write about your failures. This book was illuminating in illustrating some of the downfalls of the NHS in Great Britain, and the behind-the-scenes look at surgical protocols. It was also very humanizing to see Marsh talk about his relationships with patients and their families, especially when things did not go as planned.

Book Review: Real Moms by Lisa Valentine Clark

Title: Real Moms: Making It Up As We Go
Author: Lisa Valentine Clark
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Digital Copy
Content Alert: A clean read

Back when I was an English major at BYU, there was a girl in a lot of my classes who was all the things I wished I was-- she was beautiful, confident, smart, and hilarious. I know this because she commented frequently in class and because I also knew she was in the "The Garrens," a comedy troupe on campus. So when I saw that she'd written a book, I thought, "why not?"

Twenty years later, Lisa is still adorable, smart, and funny. The things she has to say in Real Moms about parenting five kids are not putting herself in the position of a parenting expert, but as someone trying to draw lessons from real life. It was a fine, fun read, as long as the reader isn't expecting to be more than entertained. The book is pretty short and I enjoyed it while I was reading it, but several weeks later, I barely remember anything other than that there are plenty of ways to be a good mom, that motherhood requires improvisation, that moms shouldn't lose themselves to their kids, and that hard work is more important than natural smarts.

Book Review: The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry by Kathleen Flinn

Title: The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry: Love, Laughter and Tears at the World's Most Famous Cooking School
Author: Kathleen Flinn
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Paperback Copy
Content Alert: Perhaps some mild swearing

American Kathleen Flinn was in her thirties and living the dream of working as an executive in London when she was laid off from her job. In the ultimate case of turning lemons into lemonade, Flinn decided to take the opportunity to change her life and finally move in with the guy she was dating long-distance, while indulging in her lifelong dream of attending Le Cordon Bleu, the world-famous cooking school in Paris. Then she wrote all about it in The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry.

While chef training is notoriously challenging and hazing is seen as part of the experience, Flinn's experience at Le Cordon Bleu is mostly positive, focusing on Paris, friends, and her blossoming romance. Sure, some of the recipes are weird or disgusting, the chefs can be unforgiving and uncompromising, but that's to be expected. This book is more of a love story than a war story. It's definitely one that made me want to get in the kitchen, go to Paris, and nurture love and friendships.

Book Review: Everything I Know About Love I Learned From Romance Novels by Sarah Wendell

Title: Everything I Know About Love I Learned From Romance Novels
Author: Sarah Wendell
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Paper copy
Content Alert: Some swearing, discussion of some racy bits from romance novels

For the last few years, I've been trying to overcome my prejudice against romance novels. This isn't really that hard, because I enjoy reading them. What is hard is admitting that I enjoy reading them. I've decided to embrace that fact, and decided to educate myself a little more about the genre. I turned to Sarah Wendell, who, along with Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast host Linda Holmes, have been instrumental in helping me nudge myself out of the closet and proclaim myself a lover of the HEA (Happily Ever After, in romance-speak). In Everything I Know About Love I Learned from Romance Novels, Wendell draws on her own vast experience as the co-creator of Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, a website dedicated to romance reviews, as well as an online community of romance readers. Wendell uses her online community and her relationship with romance authors as primary source material for the books, asking these readers and authors what they've learned from reading romance. The book is fun and enlightening, especially the parts about how romance novels teach women to navigate conflicts, to be more assertive in relationships, and to be smarter about sex. I also added a dozen or so books to my reading list. It's also a quick read-- I read the entire thing one night when I was putting Rose to bed.

Book Review: Yes Please by Amy Poehler

Title: Yes Please
Author: Amy Poehler
Enjoyment Rating: ****
Source: personal copy
Content Alert: Some swearing

Amy Poehler is the shiz. She's a fantastic writer. She's hilariously funny. She is the voice of Joy. She started Smart Girls, a website I love. Apparently she's a pretty great waitress too. And she's basically my own age. Which means that I'd better get cracking. Although she'd never say that. In fact, she would tell me not to apologize for my life. Because one thing you learn from reading smart girls is that Amy does not like reflexive apologies (as in when someone steps on your toe and you say "sorry"). But she does like making real apologies (she talks about a beautiful experience that came from a long-overdue apology she made a few years ago). And she won't read your screenplay either, and she's not surprised at her success, because she put in years and years of hard work to get where she is.

Yes Please is part memoir, part essay, part self-help book, with pieces thrown in from people Poehler has worked with over the years. It's a strange little beast of a book, and I loved it. I really wish I had bought it as an audiobook, because I've heard that hearing her read the book makes it even better, but my sweet husband got me this for Valentine's Day (that's how big my backlog is!). My daughter Annie is 13 and she has been begging to read it, and even though it's a little racy in parts (it's pretty frank about drug use and acknowledges the existence of sex, and she's pretty liberal with the cussing), I really do want her to read it, because I want her to know what she should and shouldn't apologize for when she's 13, and not try to figure it out when she's 40. If you haven't read this one yet, you should. You'll laugh, you'll cry, and if you're like me, you'll start binge watching Parks and Rec so you can hang out with Poehler just a little longer.

Book Review: Some Girls by Jillian Lauren

Title: Some Girls: My Life in a Harem
Author: Jillian Lauren
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Kindle
Content Alert: This is a book about life in a harem, prepare yourself accordingly

At the age of eighteen, I worked at a photography studio and made $5.25 an hour. When Jillian Lauren was eighteen (a year or two before me) she joined the harem of Prince Jefri of Brunei and was paid in Cartier watches and Dolce and Gabbana dresses. Some Girls is a memoir that recounts the events that led up to Lauren's decision to join the harem (difficult family life, dropping out of NYU, working as an exotic dancer), her time living in Brunei (which is a lot of what you would expect-- complicated female friendships/rivalries, isolation, conspicuous consumption, loneliness, and disordered behaviors resulting from all of the above), and her reintegration into life back in America.

I was interested in reading Some Girls because Lauren writes a lot about the process of writing the memoir in her second memoir, Everything You Ever Wanted (which is such a beautiful book that I think I may be judging this one a little harshly in contrast). She writes at length about the fallout with her family from how they're portrayed in the memoir, and I wanted to see if what she said about them was really bad enough to provoke years of silence (and I can see how they would be sensitive, and how she would want to tell her story in the way she does). This story didn't move me as much as her other story, probably because this one didn't parallel my own life in the same way. The book is currently being made into a movie, and I think it will be a good one, and it's an interesting book worth reading.

Book Review: Everything You Ever Wanted by Jillian Lauren

Title: Everything You Ever Wanted: A Memoir
Author: Jillian Lauren
Enjoyment Rating: *****
Source: Digital Copy
Content Alert: Some swearing

When Jillian Lauren gets to the point in her life where she wants a child, she has lived a very full life-- she's been an actress, a member of a harem, a drug addict, a cosmetologist, a rock star's wife, and an MFA student, just to name a few things. One thing that it seems like she might never be is a mother, and after several years of infertility, she and her husband Scott Shriner (bassist for Weezer) adopt a son, Tariku, from Ethiopia. And then, they set out on the task of learning to become a family.

I can't tell you how many times Everything You Ever Wanted made me cry. I was crying even before Tariku entered the picture, just from the way Lauren was able to get her life back together (she talks about her best friend, who also struggled with addiction, throughout the memoir, and it provides a haunting counterpoint). I adore her for the honesty about which she talks about raising Tariku. Raising kids who know trauma and loss, who have been abandoned and neglected, is no small stuff. Many of us put smiles on our faces, but Lauren goes the places that so many of us feel-- sometimes at our wit's end, but loving these kids with a desperate ferocity. So thanks, Jillian Lauren, for this book. For your gift with words, and for making me feel not quite so alone. And for the beautiful way in which you're raising your son. It gives me hope.

Book Review: Home Game by Michael Lewis

Title: Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood
Author: Michael Lewis
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Audible
Content Alert: a few swears

In the introduction to Home Game, Michael Lewis (of Moneyball and The Big Short fame), says that his level of involvement as a father should be viewed on something of a sliding scale-- compared with his own father, he's all hands on deck, compared with other fathers who take a more hands' on approach, he might be seen as distant. The book, drawn from a series of columns Lewis wrote for Slate from approximately 2003-2009, shows him in the trenches of fatherhood with his three kids, juggling writing and parenting and his relationship with his wife (Tabitha Soren, that MTV hottie from my teen years).

If you're not into judging Lewis's involvement (and it seems that most people on Goodreads are) or his upscale lifestyle (ditto), and take the book for what it is-- a collection of humorous stories about parenthood from which Lewis occasionally tries to draw a deeper message, then Home Game is an enjoyable read. If you're trying to do cultural commentary or delve into a deep discussion of gender parity in America, then maybe not so much.

Book Review: A Fine Romance by Candice Bergen

Title: A Fine Romance
Author: Candice Bergen
Enjoyment Rating: ****
Source: Audible
Content Alert: a little bit of swearing, but a cleaner read than I expected it would be

When I was a teenager, I remember sitting on the couch with my mom on Monday nights to watch Murphy Brown. Murphy was beautiful, smart, and tough, and I admired Candice Bergen, the actress who played her. A Fine Romance is the second of Bergen's memoirs (her first, Knock Wood, was written in the early 80s, when she was launching her career as a writer, photographer, and actress, after growing up the daughter of Hollywood royalty), and takes place where the first left off, when she falls in love with French director Louis Malle. The story spans marriage, motherhood, widowhood, falling in love again, and lots and lots about her career.

Around the same time I was watching Murphy Brown, I had a friend whose dad was a surgeon. I was always a little starstruck around him. I thought he was so different from the other dads I knew, and got tongue tied, like I imagine I might if he had been a famous movie star. Celebrity memoirs show me that actors are, when you strip them of the Armani and the famous friends, just like the rest of us. The book was at its strongest when she wrote about her pregnancy and early mothering years, the time of Malle's illness and subsequent death, and the risks she took when she gave herself over to falling in love again.

While I love the guilty pleasure of a celebrity memoir, this one suffered from some of what you would expect from the genre-- there was too much name dropping when it wasn't relevant, constant claims that she lives an ordinary, frugal life (ordinary and frugal seem to be quite relative here), and a freaking ton of praise for Chloe, her daugher. Reading the memoirs of parents of only children always makes me glad I have a bunch of kids so none of them gets all the praise or has to suffer all my neuroses. I gobbled A Fine Romance in less than two days, and enjoyed nearly every moment of it.

Book Review: To The Mountain: One Mormon Woman's Search for Spirit by Phyllis Barber

Title: To the Mountain: One Mormon Woman's Search for Spirit
Author: Phyllis Barber
Enjoyment Rating: *****
Source: Digital Copy

After Phyllis Barber and her husband raised their sons as traditional Mormon parents living in Salt Lake City, the pair divorced, and Barber divorced herself from the LDS Church too. To the Mountain is a series of beautiful essays, delving into the child-rearing years, the years away from the church, and the experiences that led her back to the Mormon faith.

This collection of essays is all the good things-- honest, literary, real. It may be uncomfortable for some rank-and-file Mormons in some places, but I loved seeing the variety of experiences that enriched Barber's spirit, and appreciated that those things could be seen in a holistic way that enlightened her life as a Mormon, too. I see this book not just as a collection of essays, but as a journeying piece, in which Barber seems to come to a sense of peace.