Kelly Blewett

NonfictionReligion & SpiritualityMemoir

Transformative accounts of faith and redemption

Feature by Kelly Blewett

For five writers from varied points on the Christian spectrum, God transforms dramatic circumstances into spiritual gain. From moving across the country to facing death itself, these authors amply illustrate that resurrection stories—far from being a thing of the past—are happening all around us.

LIFE-CHANGING SURGERY

For Steve Sjogren, author of Heaven’s Lessons: Ten Things I Learned About God When I Died, a near-death experience in 2000 led to an unexpected destination in his faith. Sjogren’s story is a humbling one. While pastoring a megachurch in Cincinnati, he went in for a standard hospital surgery that went horribly wrong. On the operating table, God told him that from now on he would “walk with a limp.” Following the surgery, Sjogren lost his position at the church, faced severely diminished health and was forced to re-examine some of the fundamental things he believed about God. He’s divided this book into 10 resulting lessons. “Though my experience with God in my near death experience was life changing, what followed it was depressing to me,” he writes. “If there is an option for a fast route, it seems I still always end up being placed on the l-o-n-g way forward.” This book offers readers the opportunity to benefit from Sjogren’s journey and to see how God turned a tragedy into a transformation. Sjogren, ever the pastor, is quick to provide applications of the book’s lessons to the reader’s life.

A PARENT’S STRUGGLE

In Beautiful Nate, Dennis Mansfield explores how his son’s drug addiction forced him to confront unwelcome truths about evangelicalism. Even though Mansfield tried to raise his son “by the book,” relying on experts like James Dobson, his boy still repeatedly rebelled and ultimately—in his 20s—died after an adverse drug reaction. Mansfield, a former Focus on the Family employee and lobbyist, loves Reagan, rhetoric and his family. His passions come through clearly, as does his pain. As Nate faced prison and life beyond, his father describes a softer side of their relationship: impromptu visits, staying up all night to watch movies and (most movingly) writing a novel the pair jointly penned during Nate’s incarceration. To his father, Nate was a follower of Jesus Christ forever torn by competing desires. While Beautiful Nate is certainly a sad story, Mansfield is consistently grateful for his son and the lessons learned about faith, parenting and life. He writes, “My hope is that you found [this] to be a poignant account of the realization that . . . things often turn out very wrong—and yet can turn out eternally right.” This is a good book for parents of faith who want to heal imperfect circumstances through the mercy of a perfect God.

NEW DIRECTIONS

In Landmarks: Turning Points on Your Journey Toward God, author Bill Delvaux describes a series of unexplainable choices that yielded satisfying results. He left a ministry position for teaching, and left his teaching position to write and speak about faith. A thoughtful writer, Delvaux was asked by a colleague to explain how his spiritual journey developed through these counterintuitive decisions. Delvaux responds that though he never knew he was going in the right direction, his Heavenly Father provided certain “landmarks” along the way. For frequent readers of evangelical nonfiction, the landmarks may seem unsurprising—giving up idols, addressing old wounds, seeking sexual purity. Yet Delvaux’s way of addressing these topics gives this slim book both gravity and purpose. When discussing idols, for instance, Delvaux shares his own former insistence that the details of his life be in order, right down to his junk mail. He realized that grasping toward perfection was ultimately idolatrous. As he reveals his own story, readers are gently guided to consider their own. A movie fan, Delvaux situates many of his lessons within the context of popular films. A small book that leaves a big impression, Landmarks tells how one man was transformed by embracing the principles he’d been teaching his whole life.

HEALING JOURNEY

For spiritual seeker and standout writer Beverly Donofrio (author of the memoir Riding in Cars With Boys) the pursuit of faith led to life in a small Mexican town replete with margaritas at sunset, yoga and plenty of time for writing. Yet Donofrio, a Catholic, felt herself drifting from God. Committed to rededicating herself, she planned an ambitious tour of monasteries around the country. Then a man broke into her apartment and raped her at knifepoint. In her new book, Astonished: A Story of Evil, Blessings, Grace, and Solace, Donofrio ponders the significance of the timing. What does the rape reveal about God? How do trials figure into God’s plan for our lives? What does it mean to heal and grow? Donofrio spends much of the next year completing her monastery tour and offering tentative answers to these questions and more. A nontraditional thinker who accepts parts of the “Jesus myth” and rejects other parts, Donofrio’s journey around the country and into her inner life is compelling material beautifully written. Perpetually humble, searching, honest and wry, Donofrio is a fine companion for a spiritual journey.

THINGS UNSEEN

Jack Perkins, best known as a longtime reporter for NBC News, left a successful journalism career to move to a remote island in Maine. In Finding Moosewood, Finding God, Perkins traces the spiritual lessons he learned, recounts favorite stories from his journalism days and offers a wholly appealing personal glimpse into his family life. In the wilds of Maine—reading the journals of Thoreau and following his spiritual impulses—Perkins’ personal journey with God truly begins. By rejecting the consumerist culture of Los Angeles, Perkins and his wife Mary Jo find what seems to be an incomparable happiness in island living and creative pursuits. Both read voraciously and explore their new home with enthusiasm. By embracing the blessings of God—in a sunset, in the view of the water at night, in spotting a passing lobster boat—the couple begins to appreciate His divine character. This fresh and invigorating story will help the reader appreciate her own life and, better yet, feel that anything is possible.

While these books vary in points of view, trials faced and solutions suggested, they share a common belief that God is in the midst of our circumstances. This divine God who resurrects new life from death is, they agree, more real than the world before our eyes. As Perkins writes in one of his poems: “Henceforth this is my plan: / Believe much more in what I can’t see, / Much less in what I can.”

For five writers from varied points on the Christian spectrum, God transforms dramatic circumstances into spiritual gain. From moving across the country to facing death itself, these authors amply illustrate that resurrection stories—far from being a thing of the past—are happening all around us.

LIFE-CHANGING SURGERY

For…

Religion & Spirituality

Companions for spiritual journeys

Feature by Kelly Blewett

Whether written by an iconic Southern author in 1947 or compiled from emails written by a young pastor to the president in 2010, these gift books explore the enduring themes of spirituality and faith, reminding us that contemplating the divine can confirm our very humanity.

Spiritual thinking has been with us from the beginning, as The Religions Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained reminds readers in its opening sentences. While it may be difficult to come up with a definition for the concept of religion, “cave paintings and elaborate burial customs of our distant ancestors and the continuing quest for a spiritual goal in life” indicate its timelessness. This book offers a remarkable overview of major world religions through recorded time. Though the introduction acknowledges the difficulty of covering such an unwieldy topic, the subsequent pages are easily comprehensible, and even feel nearly comprehensive. Organized chronologically, the book opens with prehistory, moves through the ancient and classical beliefs (devoting the longest sections to Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam), and closes with a selection of modern religions (such as Mormonism and Scientology). The material is both dense and broad, yet the book’s reader-friendly layout and clever graphics invite lingering. An impressive board of contributors (mostly academics) shaped this content. The result is a book at once egalitarian and open-minded, ideal for a visually oriented student of religion or anyone interested in scrambling up the mountainside of human spirituality and taking in the panoramic views.

GRACE AND ART

We move from the lushly panoramic to the intensely personal with Flannery O’Connor’s A Prayer Journal. Penned by the Southern Gothic legend when she was just 22 years old and a student at the University of Iowa, these pages reveal O’Connor at the very beginning of her professional writing career. She prays to get something published, to understand God better and to be free of an ever-present concern that she is simply mediocre. Anyone interested in creative writing or literature will be thoroughly charmed by lines like this: “I am too lazy to despair. Please don’t visit me with it Lord, I would be so miserable.” Though O’Connor is delightfully glib, she worries about some of the big questions of faith and finds few answers. The journal illustrates her complexity of feeling. She criticizes certain sentences because they sound “too literary” and strikes out others altogether. A facsimile of the original diary in O’Connor’s own hand lets readers in on her process and makes the book feel very intimate. The volume is quite short, but that isn’t a drawback. The material that is here is well worth reading. I especially loved the last lines, written in September of 1947: “Today I have proved myself a glutton—for Scotch oatmeal cookies and erotic thought. There is nothing left to say of me.”

AN ECLECTIC REIMAGINING

During a 2011 retreat in Utah, a group of Jewish artists and writers found themselves hotly discussing Abraham’s binding of Isaac. Several admitted, though, that it had been a long time since they had really read a biblical text. Dialogue ensued and, luckily for us, so did Unscrolled: 54 Writers and Artists Wrestle with the Torah, edited by Roger Bennett. After the Torah was divided into 54 sections—which reflects the annual reading pattern of many synagogues—each contributor created his or her own Dvar Torah (“word of the Torah”) for an individual slice. Their creations range from short stories to poems, from personal essays to imaginary recipes for “bloody guilt offerings.” There’s even a drawing detailing how the Tabernacle could fit in modern-day Manhattan. (Spoiler alert: It would have to be tilted on its side.) I especially like when contributors cleverly juxtapose the Torah and their response, as in Aimee Bender’s piece on the Tower of Babel. She celebrates how language defines individuality rather than lamenting the loss of shared consciousness. Brief biblical summaries preceding each Dvar Torah feel contemporary and edgy, and unify the collection. In short, these artists and writers can certainly now say that they’ve read—yes, even wrestled—with a biblical text recently, and readers can be counted among the lucky beneficiaries.

DAILY DOSE OF INSPIRATION

The President’s Devotional began as correspondence between a White House staffer and President Obama, and has since become a public daily devotional. Obama appointed author Joshua DuBois to be the executive director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnership in 2008. Since then, DuBois has emailed Obama a spiritual reflection every morning. The book pulls content from the best of these, providing readers one for every day of the year. DuBois opens each month with a personal essay. Some of these tell heartrending stories about our nation’s leader, as in DuBois’ account of Obama’s interaction with families of the victims of the Sandy Hook shootings. Other essays are more personal, as when the president encouraged DuBois to propose to the nice girl he’d been dating (he did). The devotions themselves are a diverse bunch. Some feature national heroes like Jackie Robinson and Johnny Cash, while others take inspiration from theological texts. The reader cannot help but wonder what was going on in the nation when certain devotions were emailed—like the one that extols the value of having a well-prepared army. Whatever the initial context, faith-filled fans of the president will want to add The President’s Devotional to their nightstands.

Whether written by an iconic Southern author in 1947 or compiled from emails written by a young pastor to the president in 2010, these gift books explore the enduring themes of spirituality and faith, reminding us that contemplating the divine can confirm our very humanity.

Spiritual…

NonfictionFictionMemoir

Paris is a woman’s town

Feature by Kelly Blewett

There is something irresistible about a talented American woman in Paris. She feels sexy and alive while strolling the city’s streets, confident the world will unfurl in her hand like a blossoming flower. 

Such young women are featured in new books by Kate Betts and Christine Sneed, and both tell wonderful stories—one true, one fictional—about taking risks and pursuing dreams abroad.

Betts’ memoir, My Paris Dream, recalls her years in the city of light after graduating from Princeton in the 1980s. Her Paris was a ladder whose climb began with freelance writing assignments for travel magazines and culminated with a position as a fashion editor and associate bureau chief of Women’s Wear Daily. Betts, who later became the editor of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, is an instantly likable storyteller. She takes you to the Parisian boulevards and describes in terrific detail what people were wearing. Perhaps occasionally too much detail. “Only the French could invent seamless stockings that stay up with a rubber sticky band that grips the upper thigh,” she writes. As a young woman looking to make a good impression, she bought several pairs. “Fashion is tribal,” she explains. “It’s not about who you are but where you belong.” This is a story of how one American woman came to belong in the fashion capital of Europe, and how she wrote about that world for an American audience. Along the way, Betts made some terrific friends, fell in love and witnessed the world of style up close during a time of major transition. Full of slangy French, delectable food and swoon-worthy fashion, Betts’ memoir is well worth the read.

If Betts’ Paris is a ladder, then Sneed’s is an escape hatch. Jayne Marks, the protagonist of Sneed’s novel, Paris, He Said, is an aspiring artist in New York who can’t find time to paint. Then she meets gallery owner Laurent Moller. Decades older and maybe a little too suave, Laurent sweeps Jayne away to Paris to be his girlfriend and to live in his luxurious apartment. In her new life, Jayne has hours each day to paint, cook and work in Laurent’s French gallery, which is located on the same street as the Louvre. “I am closer to my twenty-year-old self here,” she thinks, “closer than I am at home.” Yet she finds it hard to settle into such a decadent existence. Can she maneuver the complexities of Laurent’s social world? Will her paintings ultimately be any good? Is Laurent being totally faithful to her? And why can’t she stop thinking about her ex-boyfriend in New York? Sneed, whose previous novel, Little Known Facts, drew considerable acclaim, expertly keeps the pages turning in this delightful novel. Paris, He Said offers readers, too, an entertaining escape from the mundanities of daily life. With clever and graceful prose, Sneed deftly guides a story that explores whether satisfaction follows when all one’s deepest wishes come true.

 

This article was originally published in the May 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

There is something irresistible about a talented American woman in Paris. She feels sexy and alive while strolling the city’s streets, confident the world will unfurl in her hand like a blossoming flower.
Fiction

A first novel that truly sings

Review by Kelly Blewett

Sensual isolation: two words that come to mind when considering The Metropolis Case, the debut novel by Matthew Gallaway. In Gallaway’s world, characters burn with intensity. Their fiery glow makes them somehow terrifically alive but also, it seems, inevitably alone. Structured in a series of “acts,” this ambitious novel weaves together four stories, each occurring in a different time and place. The characters have at least one thing in common: All become nearly obsessed with the opera Tristan and Isolde.

Our cast is comprised of a mature opera singer about to deliver the best performance of her life, a dissatisfied lawyer who watches the Twin Towers crumble from his office window, a teenage soprano who desperately wants to escape Pittsburgh and a dapper 19th-century Parisian who will play the first-ever Tristan. Gallaway writes about the opera with such finesse that one can nearly hear the music—or at least long to purchase the soundtrack.

Even for a reader unacquainted with opera, The Metropolis Case enthralls. Theatrical history, training at Julliard, opening night at the Metropolitan—this is engaging and unusual subject matter. Gallaway draws unlikely but totally plausible connections between music from The Velvet Underground and Tristan and Isolde. Behind the lovely set, dark passions drive most of the characters. The women remain emotionally detached for much of the novel, maintaining distance in order to focus on their operatic careers. Meanwhile, the men pursue love affairs with other men, and seek to come to terms with their homosexuality in the context of two very different societies. The opera seems to offer a point of connection by which the characters might find themselves and each other.

Occasionally The Metropolis Case starts to feel heavy-handed, particularly toward the end, as the reader begins to glimpse how all the storylines may resolve (the characters themselves note this, and call it “fate”). Additionally, certain scenes seem like failed attempts at high drama. Despite these flaws, however, the tale has a masterful quality that satisfies. The Metropolis Caseis an intriguing debut from a fresh, unique voice.

Sensual isolation: two words that come to mind when considering The Metropolis Case, the debut novel by Matthew Gallaway. In Gallaway’s world, characters burn with intensity. Their fiery glow makes them somehow terrifically alive but also, it seems, inevitably alone. Structured in a series of…

NonfictionMemoir

Smile

Review by Kelly Blewett

“In fairy tale logic, you must trade something for something you desire,” writes Sarah Ruhl. “By this logic, I traded my face for my children. And it was a fair trade.” This is just one of the many arresting sentences in Ruhl’s new memoir, Smile: The Story of a Face, which details Ruhl’s pregnancy and subsequent experience of facial paralysis, a condition that set in immediately after delivery. The memoir moves from the intimately personal to the nearly universal: motherhood and medicine, soul and body, and the poetic logic that underlies everyday life. A playwright with an incredible eye for detail and a searing voice, Ruhl excels at putting striking ideas into simple forms that vibrate with power and energy.

Sarah Ruhl recalls passing her time on bed rest by reading the Twilight series. “We can’t predict how our minds will behave in extremis or when we are ill.”

Though Ruhl spent years avoiding her face in daily life, on the page she stares at it without flinching. She recalls refraining from looking at her reflection and how she came to rely on gestures and murmuring to communicate what her mouth and eyes could not—excitement, welcome, affirmation, connection. Behind this performance, or maybe because of it, Ruhl began to disassociate from her face, which no longer expressed her essential self. As a playwright, Ruhl works with actors, whose faces are the tools of their trade and who believe that bodily expression and the inner life are intertwined. Reflecting on these relationships, Ruhl wonders whether appearing more aloof and disengaged has, in fact, made her so. 

Meanwhile, life carried on. Ruhl wrote plays and essays, tried acupuncture and meditation and attempted to raise three children under five while remaining herself. Her memoir is wildly funny about the day-to-day realities of mothering. “My children’s temperaments can be summed up in the way that they vomit,” begins one memorable anecdote. In all, this is a beautiful book that expresses the big feelings of life and the daily practices that allow for incremental progress.

A playwright with a searing voice, Sarah Ruhl excels at putting striking ideas into simple forms that vibrate with power and energy.
NonfictionMemoir

Beautiful Country

Review by Kelly Blewett

From ages 7 to 12, Qian Julie Wang lived as an undocumented immigrant in Brooklyn, New York. Her hunger was regularly so intense that she broke into cold sweats—which, according to her Ma Ma, meant Wang was growing and getting stronger. One classmate referred to Wang’s family not as “low-income” but “no-income.” Her world was simultaneously frightening and normal as she sat listening to scuttling cockroaches with her parents nearby. She describes childhood trenchantly in Beautiful Country, allowing readers to feel her anger, longing, loneliness and fear—and to observe her parents’ desperation.

In Beijing, Wang’s mother was a published professor who spoke Mandarin, the language of intellectuals. But in Brooklyn, her mother lamented, “All these Cantonese assume that if you speak Mandarin you’re a farmer from Fuzhou.” Wang’s mother got a job sewing in a sweatshop, where “there was no day or night; there was only work.”

Wang’s parents regarded her as their best hope for a future, optimistic that she would be suited to this Mei Guo, “beautiful country.” They were right to believe in her. By fourth grade, Wang wrote so well that her teachers suspected plagiarism, and now Wang has written a memoir precise enough to chill her readers. The narrative is full of sharply rendered scenes, such as one in which Wang’s mother suffers in a cold sushi factory before coming home to warm herself in front of a pot of boiling water.

Wang dedicates her memoir to “those who remain in the shadows.” Indeed, Beautiful Country shines light on the childhood that continued to haunt Wang into adulthood, even as her professional accomplishments mounted. She is vulnerable in revealing her uniquely American trauma: a bruised wrist that never quite healed; a hunger that was never quite sated; a feeling that everything, at any moment, could suddenly be taken away. Wang, who is now a civil rights lawyer, is a voice we need. Readers will be grateful for the courage she has displayed in persevering and speaking up.

Qian Julie Wang courageously reveals her uniquely American trauma: a hunger that was never quite sated; a feeling that everything could be taken away.
NonfictionMemoir

The Arbornaut

Review by Kelly Blewett

Meg Lowman, known as “Canopy Meg,” has a big public presence, and her latest memoir demonstrates why: She excels at bringing the natural world to life in language. The Arbornaut: A Life Discovering the Eighth Continent in the Trees Above Us takes readers around the world, from the forests of New England to the hills of Scotland, from the jungles of Australia to the riverbanks of the Amazon. It also tells the story of a passionate young naturalist whose childhood collections of wildflowers and bird eggs were supplanted by mosses during adolescence until, during college, she discovered the enduring love of her life: trees. Specifically, the tops of trees, which have been historically understudied even though they compose a vibrant ecosystem that Lowman refers to as the “eighth continent” of the world.

Lowman’s driving curiosity finds a productive outlet in the scientific process, which she ably describes for lay readers. Her research is full of life, energy, intelligence and determination. It’s impossible to read about it without wanting to examine the natural world more closely! While reading The Arbornaut, I found myself staring out of my second-story windows, trying to discern whether the leaves of the “upper canopy” of my Midwestern trees differed from those visible at ground level. This is exactly the kind of response Lowman hopes for. She is dedicated to getting everyday folks into the canopies, which she argues can advance scientific discovery (more eyes collecting more data) and benefit the planet (more people dedicated to ecological preservation).

Across multiple projects, Lowman’s reputation has grown within and beyond her discipline, and in this memoir, she also attends to the impact of gender on her professional experience. After detailing multiple instances of unwanted attention, ranging from innuendos to attempted assault, Lowman describes herself as a “tall poppy,” a flower that others try to cut down because it stands out. And yet, she persists, leading expeditions to the Amazon, collaborating with scientists and citizens alike and sharing her results in both technical journals and delightful memoirs. She deserves her celebrity.

The Arbornaut is a book to reach for if you, like Lowman, love the natural world and want to live in it fully.

Meg Lowman’s research is full of life, energy and determination. It’s impossible to read about it without wanting to examine the natural world more closely.
NonfictionMemoirLGBTQ+

The Natural Mother of the Child

Review by Kelly Blewett

When Krys Malcolm Belc sees pregnant women, he turns the other way. He doesn’t want to hear pregnancy stories and finds it difficult to share his own. But in The Natural Mother of the Child: A Memoir of Nonbinary Parenthood, the transmasculine author doesn’t turn away from his story. Instead, he lays it out page by page, with pictures and legal documents juxtaposing his poetic prose.

Belc’s process of becoming himself—the growing realization that he identified as male, the move toward a nonbinary and eventually masculine presentation, the decision to start taking hormones—happened alongside the rest of his life, as he married his partner, as she bore children and as Belc decided to carry a child as well, only a few months after his wife gave birth. 

The result is a family that looks one way now—a father, a mother and three boys—but looked another way several years ago. This is the story of how that family came to be, and of the erasures (often painful) that happened along the way, including the legal erasure of the friend who donated sperm for all three pregnancies. There’s also the erasure of the body Belc had, which he generously laid out to birth his son Samson. “He has permanently altered my composition,” Belc writes.

But in the midst of these erasures, something new emerged: an identity and presentation that was always there but in shadow, just beyond view. Bearing Samson clarified the man Belc wanted to be.

The Natural Mother of the Child refuses easy stories or pat answers. Instead, Belc tells a counterstory that resists hegemonic narratives and pushes toward something messier and truer. Belc’s devotion to his son—and especially his bodily devotion—comes through powerfully, a clear signal. By comparison, some of the other signs that supposedly tell us who we are—birth certificates, marriage certificates, adoption certificates—seem desperately incomplete.

Krys Malcolm Belc’s growing realization that he identified as male happened as his wife bore children and as Belc decided to carry a child as well.
NonfictionEssays

Goodbye, Again

Review by Kelly Blewett

What does it mean to find work that you love? To make a home in one city only to move somewhere else for a job? To be friends—real friends—in adulthood? Jonny Sun approaches these questions in his new book, Goodbye, Again. Composed of dozens of short essays and illustrations, Sun’s captivating and immersive book invites readers to listen in as he thinks aloud on the page. 

This book is at once sad and hopeful. It’s sad about the cultural pressure to be constantly working. It’s sad about the inevitability of change. It’s sad about the many ways we say goodbye to each other, whether ending a visit or moving away. But it’s also attentive to life and movement in unlikely places. For example, Sun contemplates house plants—their small leaves, tilting to water and warmth. They need the right kind of care for life to take root, and even when a plant seems to die, it can in fact be growing in a different direction.

Through descriptions like these, the reader feels Sun’s desire for renewal. The book is hopeful as it shows how little moments from the past, something as simple as cooking an egg, can reverberate in the present. In this way, we never really say goodbye. We are still together, still remembering each other in small daily ways.

To spend time with this book is to spend time in the private world of a creative, sensitive person who finds life inviting, beautiful and rich, but also overwhelming, scary and exhausting. Goodbye, Again acknowledges the crushing constancy and anxiety of work, but it also celebrates the joy of creating something where nothing was before—the pleasure of being totally immersed in work and the way that work can make us come alive. By acknowledging both sides of this reality in gentle and specific ways, Sun ultimately gives his readers license to experience their own contradictions and to be fully human.

To spend time with Goodbye, Again is to spend time in the private world of a creative, sensitive person who finds life inviting, beautiful and rich.
NonfictionMemoir

My Broken Language

Review by Kelly Blewett

Joyful, righteous, indignant, self-assured, exuberant: These are all words that could describe Quiara Alegría Hudes’ My Broken Language. The celebrated playwright calls her language broken, but in this extraordinary memoir she actually remakes language so that it speaks to her world—a world that takes as its point of origin a barrio in West Philadelphia where Hudes grew up surrounded by Perez women, whom she refers to as her own Mount Rushmore, her pantheon of goddesses. The women in her family laugh, cry, eat, dance and mourn, and they do it in a glorious blend of English and Spanish, in language made of flesh and motion. Hudes watches them from the stairs, eager to join in but uncertain exactly where she fits.

Like the best translators, Hudes occupies the in-between—in this case, in between the crowded and uproarious barrio, where life feels like an unfolding tragicomedy, and the staid suburbs, where her white father has settled into a routine life that offers plenty of picket fences but little space for complexity. Hudes’ narrative follows her life story, from living with both parents to traveling between them; from her growing bond with her extended Perez family to her trips back to her mother’s native country of Puerto Rico. Her delight in the musicians and artists of the Western canon leads her to Yale, where she realizes the infuriating limitations of that canon, and ultimately to Brown, where she dedicates herself to telling the story of her people, their bodies, their spirituality and their language. This is a book of bringing together dissonant stories, one that Hudes alone could write. 

Hudes’ first name is an invented endearment, a form of the verb querer, which means “to love.” Her mother had seen the name spelled Kiara or Ciara or Chiarras, but for her daughter she wanted that same sound with a deeper meaning, one that indicated that her daughter was beloved (Quiara) as well as a source of happiness (Alegría). There may be no better compliment to the author of this marvelous, one-of-a-kind memoir than to say she truly lives up to her name. With My Broken Language, she has invented a language of love and to-the-bone happiness to tell stories only a Perez woman could share.

Joyful, righteous, indignant, self-assured, exuberant: These are all words that could describe Quiara Alegría Hudes’ My Broken Language.
NonfictionPhotographyHistory

The African Lookbook

Review by Kelly Blewett

“There is no perfect exegesis,” writes Catherine E. McKinley about the photographs in The African Lookbook: A Visual History of 100 Years of African Women, which presents just over 150 pictures of African women between the years 1870 and 1970. Any composed explanation of the photographs would be fictional since so much about them is unknowable. Many subjects are anonymous and many images undated. Rather than an exegesis, then, what McKinley offers in this compelling, quixotic book is something closer to a testament—a bold declaration of the enduring strength, beauty and power of African women, many of whom gaze at the camera with evident self-possession.

The book is a pleasure to absorb, whether you already know about the history of photography on the African continent or are new to the conversation. All the images are from McKinley’s personal collection, gathered over many years, and they seem to announce themselves with joy. From colonial-era photographs to studio portraits to postcolonial expressions of cosmopolitan poise, the collection offers a vibrant, inchoate and compelling snapshot of African women over time.

McKinley accompanies the photographs with prose, occasionally explaining an item in the picture—for example, “She wears the silver chains of the Ga people.” In response to other images, McKinley shares her wonder: “Whose room is this? Who chose the flower for my lady’s hair?” In other moments, McKinley interprets the subjects’ expressions, as when she describes the faces of three young women: “The girls have a look of expectation: an awareness that the world is large and made up of things they have the gumption for.” In all cases, McKinley helps the reader to see more, and thus think more carefully, about the image at hand. She gets close to the pictures without forcing a narrative that oversteps what can be known from the evidence.

Throughout The African Lookbook, McKinley puts African women at the center of their own stories, exploring their pictures with admiration and respect and inviting readers to look alongside her.

From colonial-era photographs to postcolonial expressions of cosmopolitan poise, The African Lookbook offers a vibrant snapshot of African women over time.
NonfictionMemoir

The Other Mothers

Review by Kelly Blewett

From a young age, writer Jennifer Berney knew she wanted a baby. Her longing is palpable and moving in The Other Mothers: Two Women’s Journey to Find the Family That Was Always Theirs as she expresses her desire to care for another little creature, to nurture a life and see it thrive. But her partner, Kellie, is less sure, and Berney shares their story, relating how she and Kellie stayed present with each other as they felt their way through the decision to start a family. It’s a decision that cannot be rushed and requires both women to be patient and steadfast. Once they agree, the book moves on to explore the unique concerns of two women pursuing pregnancy and making a family. 

Questions of where to acquire sperm, how to aid conception and how to know if you are receiving adequate medical care unfold through a series of well-drawn scenes. As a queer woman living in Seattle, Berney expects that medical spaces will be designed with her in mind. The truth proves far more complicated—and infuriating. From impersonal and patriarchal sperm banks to maddening appointments with dense doctors, the journey often feels like a roller coaster. To contextualize her experiences, Berney investigates the history of queer family-making in the Seattle area and finds that informal community networks often facilitated the donation and fertilization processes. Such networks declined during the AIDS epidemic, but in Berney’s present-day story, as the months lengthen, she and her partner begin to pursue similar avenues within their community. Unlike the impersonal and expensive medical experts, these people truly understand the couple—and want to help them. 

In all, this is a beautiful book about love, family, identity and queer community by a gentle and observant writer. Berney is attuned to her body as it goes through the process of fertilization and loss, pregnancy and birth, and as it responds to the people she loves, whether her mother (who can make her heart race) or her partner (who makes her breathe deep) or her friends. As someone who had a child in the last year, I found myself nodding and tearing up as Berney describes what it feels like to want, conceive, carry and bear a child. And as the book reached its closing pages, I found myself wanting to cheer as Berney and her partner become the parents they always wanted to be.

The Other Mothers is a beautiful book about love, family, identity and queer community by a gentle and observant writer.
NonfictionMemoir

Sanctuary

Review by Kelly Blewett

To outsiders, Emily Rapp Black seemed to have overcome the death of her son and dissolution of her first marriage through finding a new partner and getting pregnant. “Congratulations!” they exclaimed. “You’re so strong and brave!” These sentiments, though well-meaning, haunted their recipient. At one point, Black did not want to communicate with anyone who had not recently lost a child. “There are few people who can go to that place with me,” she said while on tour for her second book, The Still Point of the Turning World, which explores the illness of her son, Ronan. Sanctuary, Black’s third book, probes the concept of resilience, extracting it from dewy notions of rebirth and foregrounding the enduring pain of life after trauma.

Taking cues from the history of the word resilience—including the natural processes of butterflies (resin in their wings enables them to fly) and Viking ship construction (resilient ships were the ones that could absorb small wrecks)—Black ultimately aims to shed the shallow and damaging notions of resilience that outsiders continually tried to stick onto her story. To combat the lonely feelings that arose in response to these words, Black did the only thing that felt natural: She wrote about her experiences and researched everything she could find, scouring history, the natural sciences and, inevitably, self-help.

In all, Black offers a memoir of the dear grief she bears for her son, sharing, for example, what she did with the clippings from his only haircut. At the same time, she details her intense feelings of new love and the elated exhaustion of early parenthood. When Black’s daughter, Charlie, was born, she was a joy and a balm. And Charlie, now a toddler, seems to know better than most about the hole that exists in their family, about a brother who is missing and the mother who deeply and steadfastly loves both of her children.

If you are someone feeling a hurt that will never go away, someone who would be affirmed and comforted by real stories of people moving forward while wounded, then Black’s new memoir will be a balm to you, too.

Sanctuary, Emily Rapp Black’s third book, probes the concept of resilience, extracting it from dewy notions of rebirth and foregrounding the enduring pain of life after trauma.

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