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NonfictionMemoirFamily & Relationships

Blow Your House Down

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

There is pain in every divorce story, but not every divorce story can be related by a narrator as capable as Gina Frangello. Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason, Frangello’s raw, eloquent account of the demise of her marriage, is an exemplar of self-reflection, tinged with optimism about the power to recover one’s life from the depth of suffering.

Long before she reached her 18th wedding anniversary in 2011, Frangello was acutely aware of “the signs you are not living the right life for you, even if your life looks unfathomably pretty and privileged compared to where you come from or in other people’s eyes.” And so she began a long-distance emotional affair with a writer and rock musician whose novel she was publishing, culminating in a full-blown relationship she concealed from her husband for nearly three years.

Like many divorces, Frangello’s mutated from the early hope of relative amicability to the ugly reality of bitter conflict, as a husband who had trouble curbing his public displays of anger even in happier times set out to inflict maximum pain for her transgression. As the warfare escalated, Frangello faced the task of caring for her aging parents and underwent seven months of treatment for breast cancer.

Amid this account of Job-like affliction, Frangello never shirks responsibility for the breakup. Still, casting her ordeal in the form of a trial, she makes a passionate case from an ardently feminist perspective for the rightness of her decision to abandon her husband for “the man who rewired my heart” and pleads that her effort to rebuild her children’s trust be “judged by the courts of distance and hindsight.”

For all her undeniable current happiness, Frangello resists the urge to affix a happy ending to her story. Instead, she offers only a “vow to continue unfolding for as long as I breathe.” Considering all the heartbreak she has endured and the uncertainty of life she knows all too well, that modest hope seems entirely fitting.

There is pain in every divorce story, but not every divorce story can be related by a narrator as capable as Gina Frangello.
NonfictionAudioMemoir

Just as I Am

Review by Deborah Mason

The late Cicely Tyson was more than an actor; she was a titan who inspired, prodded and enthralled her audience. From her breakout role in the 1972 film Sounder to her Emmy-nominated turn in “How to Get Away With Murder,” Tyson played her characters with integrity, endowing each with humanity and dignity. But she was also a daughter, a sister, a mother, a wife, an activist and an artist, and the story of her life is as complex as it is compelling. 

In her memoir, Just as I Am (16 hours), Tyson lays out the whole of her life—including her turbulent relationship with her mother and her fraught marriage to musician Miles Davis—with unflinching honesty and hard-earned wisdom. In the foreword, actor Viola Davis describes her first meeting with Tyson with humor and love, and the relationship between the two groundbreaking artists is a joy to imagine. Award-winning audiobook narrator Robin Miles performs the majority of the book, bringing the same warmth and depth of characterization that she brought to the audiobooks for Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns and Caste. But Tyson herself steals the show with her generous, funny and wise introduction, the many years apparent in her voice but the fire in her spirit still burning brightly. Listening to Just as I Am is a profound delight.

Robin Miles discusses the humbling and thrilling experience of narrating Just as I Am.

Narrator Robin Miles bringing the same warmth and depth of characterization to Cicely Tyson’s memoir as she did to Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste.
NonfictionMemoir

Floating in a Most Peculiar Way

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Searching for one’s identity can be a vertiginous experience, especially for an immigrant shuffling from one culture to another. In Floating in a Most Peculiar Way, Louis Chude-Sokei cannily captures this tumbling free fall through a variety of cultures as he negotiates what it means to be African in Jamaica and the United States.

Chude-Sokei was born in Biafra on July 6, 1967—just past midnight on the day that war was declared between Biafra and the Federal Republic of Nigeria. He learned early that his father, killed in the war, lived on in the country’s memory as a great Biafran hero. His mother—whom he heard referred to as the “Jackie O. of Nigeria,” in part because she always wore dark glasses—moved to the U.S. and sent the fatherless boy away to Jamaica, where he was raised by women and where his quest for a society among men began.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Louis Chude-Sokei shares his experience of transforming memory and truth, joy and pain, into his totally original memoir, Floating in a Most Peculiar Way.

Chude-Sokei’s mother eventually brought him to the U.S., where they lived first in Washington, D.C., and then in Los Angeles. In California, he learned what it takes to survive in an unfamiliar culture. He also discovered his love of stories and the music of David Bowie, both of which helped him navigate the rough waters of adapting to a new neighborhood and trying to find himself. Chude-Sokei felt like he had fallen from space, an alien creature in a Black neighborhood that didn’t accept his accent, his Blackness or his love of science fiction and David Bowie. He began to understand the “prejudices and tensions” within Black America and the “pain and promise” of living within them.

Floating in a Most Peculiar Way is a compelling story of the challenges of living what feels like “life on Mars.”

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Discover more great memoirs this Memoir March.

In his totally original memoir, Louis Chude-Sokei captures the prejudices and tensions, pain and promise of being African in Jamaica and the United States.
NonfictionMemoirEssays

Spilt Milk

Review by Carla Jean Whitley

Courtney Zoffness’ young son was obsessed with police officers. The family lived two doors down from a New York Police Department precinct, and 4-year-old Leo became fixated on the small dramas that unfolded outside the station. Sometimes officers helped his family—jumping a car battery, for example. And sometimes, Leo watched police escort a recently arrested person into the station.

Zoffness wanted to explain big ideas to her son—systemic racism, a disproportionately high number of arrests of people of color, the ambiguity of the term “excessive force.” But how do you explain these concepts to a child? She reminded Leo that being a police officer is about helping people, as her father did as a volunteer with the auxiliary force. But Leo was more enchanted by the idea of handcuffing bad guys.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Courtney Zoffness shares her experience of transforming memory and truth, joy and pain, into her thoughtful memoir, Spilt Milk.

Throughout her debut essay collection, Spilt Milk, Zoffness applies thoughtful analysis to everyday situations like this one. In 10 essays, she explores inherited ideas (such as her father’s respect for police work) and inherited genetics (does her oldest son wrestle with anxiety because of Zoffness’ own childhood experience?).

In “Boy in Blue,” the essay about Leo’s police fascination, Zoffness recounts her family joining a protest in May 2020. They held signs proclaiming that Black Lives Matter and chanted their fury about police brutality. Leo, then 6, remained entranced by law enforcement, proclaiming, “You’re unarrested” in a misunderstanding of what officers actually say. “Dramatic play, experts say, helps children understand the power of language,” Zoffness writes. “We’ve yet to correct him. In Leo’s linguistic reality, freedom rules. Nobody suffers. Everyone is equal. Everyone is blameless.”

Elsewhere, Zoffness recalls how a writing student’s advances brought to mind a parade of assaults and unwelcome commentary from men. She also explores the rituals of her Jewish faith and the juxtaposition of science and astronomy.

Throughout Spilt Milk, Zoffness’ essays plait her life experiences with larger observations about society. In her layered storytelling, she brings empathy to every situation and often finds empathy for herself along the way. Spilt Milk is a generous, warm debut from an already prizewinning writer.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Discover more great memoirs this Memoir March.

Throughout Spilt Milk, Courtney Zoffness uses layered storytelling to plait her life experiences with larger observations about society.
NonfictionMemoir

Speak, Okinawa

Review by Jessica Wakeman

The Japanese word sumimasen means “I’m sorry” as well as “thank you.” This concept perfectly describes Speak, Okinawa, a memoir by Elizabeth Miki Brina.

Brina’s father was a privileged, white American soldier when he met her mother, a nightclub hostess in Okinawa, Japan, who longed to marry up and out of a difficult life. They did marry, then settled in upstate New York to chase the American dream. Although Brina and her mother were provided for by her father, neither woman felt entirely welcome in their largely white suburb. Her mom was isolated, linguistically as well as culturally, and struggled for years with her decision to leave her family in Okinawa for life in the U.S.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Elizabeth Miki Brina shares her experience of transforming memory and truth, joy and pain, into her moving memoir, Speak, Okinawa.

Although technically a memoir, Speak, Okinawa largely centers on the different mental health crises experienced by Brina’s parents. Her father is scarred by PTSD from his service in Vietnam, as well as by a toxically masculine pressure to protect his family. Her mother has developed alcoholism after growing up in poverty and then moving to a country that’s racist against her. The question that Brina strives to answer throughout the book is whether love can heal either of them. In this way, Speak, Okinawa reads like a deeply personal apology from Brina to her mother.

Speak, Okinawa blends Brina’s own narrative of being a confused young person finding her way with her parents’ stories about their lives and the history of Okinawa. For readers who are unfamiliar with Chinese-Japanese-Okinawan-American relations, the history of Okinawa, told in the first-person plural, is jarring in the most eye-opening way. The story is strongest when Brina connects the dots between the U.S. military’s colonization of Okinawa and her family’s, as well as her own, disrespect toward her mom.

Assimilation is often touted as a goal for immigrants in the U.S., but Brina shows how difficult it is for someone to assimilate when they’re already branded as an outcast—especially within their own family.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Discover more great memoirs this Memoir March.

Elizabeth Miki Brina searches for whether love can heal a family traumatized by racism and colonization in her moving memoir, Speak, Okinawa.
NonfictionSocial ScienceMemoir

Raceless

Review by Deborah Mason

Georgina Lawton was born to a white mother and father and had a white brother. She grew up nestled in the love of her white extended family—English on her father’s side, Irish on her mother’s. Growing up in a predominantly white borough of London, she attended majority-white private schools and became close friends with her white classmates. And yet, as we learn in the first pages of Lawton’s eloquent memoir, Raceless: In Search of Family, Identity and the Truth About Where I Belong, Lawton is not white. She is biracial, born nine months after her mother’s one-night stand with a Nigerian man. Clinging to the myth of a “throwback gene” from survivors of the Spanish Armada on the west coast of Ireland, her parents fiercely insisted that their daughter, despite all outward appearances, was white. When Lawton discovered the lie at the heart of her identity, her shock and sense of betrayal were nearly enough to break her.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Georgina Lawton shares her experience of transforming memory and truth, joy and pain, into her compelling memoir, Raceless.

Raceless is the personal narrative of Lawton’s struggle to create a new sense of self. It’s a thoughtful and far-reaching investigation of the importance of racial identity, covering a wide variety of issues including identity theft, the perils and pluses of DNA analysis, how beauty standards are used to repress women of color and the soul-destroying effects of microaggressions. Lawton writes about her journey with passion, erudition and more than a touch of sass. Most of all, she writes with searing honesty—about herself, her family and our society.

Ultimately Lawton’s story is one of reconciliation and redemption, which can only ever be achieved with truthfulness, and of the limitations of love. Her father lavished his love on her from the day she was born until he died from cancer, but his love also allowed her family’s deception to flourish. In this new chapter of her life, Lawton’s fearless quest for the truth enables her to forgive her mother and rebuild their love.

Beautifully and movingly written, Raceless is an important book about the cost of deception and the value of identity.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Discover more great memoirs this Memoir March.

Georgina Lawton was born to a white mother and father. And yet, as we learn in the first pages of her eloquent memoir, Raceless, Lawton is not white.

NonfictionMemoir

Plunder

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Menachem Kaiser never knew the grandfather for whom he’s named, a Polish Holocaust survivor. His curiosity about his ancestor led him on the fascinating but often frustrating journey he describes in Plunder: A Memoir of Family Property and Nazi Treasure.

In 2010, Kaiser embarked on an effort he admits was “sentimental and unpragmatic”—to reclaim an apartment building owned by his family before World War II in the Polish city of Sosnowiec. Represented by a lawyer in her 80s nicknamed “the Killer,” he first needed to accomplish what should have been a simple task: proving that his grandfather and other relatives with ties to the building, all of whom either died in the Holocaust or were born well over 100 years ago, are dead.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Menachem Kaiser shares his experience of transforming memory and truth, joy and pain, into his astonishing memoir, Plunder.

But as Kaiser enters the maze of the Polish legal system, his story takes an unexpected turn. He discovers that his grandfather’s cousin, fellow Holocaust survivor Abraham Kajzer, was the author of a well-known memoir of his experiences in the Gross-Rosen network of concentration camps in Poland’s Silesia region. Those camps provided the forced labor for the Nazis’ Project Riese, a complex of underground sites that purportedly housed the legendary gold train, repository of a trove of looted gold and other treasure.

As Kaiser uses Kajzer’s book to explore the story of his newly found relative, he journeys deep into the shadowy realm of Nazi treasure hunters. Some of these enthusiasts are simple loot seekers, while others resemble Civil War reenactors. In this netherworld, conspiracy theories about German antigravity technology and flying saucers are common fare, a “particularly noxious form of revisionism” that trivializes the slaughter of 6 million Jews to serve a more compelling narrative, “usually one with a technological or occult arc.” 

Kaiser is a sober, responsible narrator, concerned with the moral implications of his quest and the persistent challenges of separating fact from fiction. Though it only illuminates a small portion of the enormity that was the Nazi genocide, Plunder is an account that’s undeniably worthy of its subject.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Discover more great memoirs this Memoir March.

As Menachem Kaiser searches for the story of his Polish Holocaust survivor relatives, he wanders deep into the shadowy realm of Nazi treasure hunters.
NonfictionMemoirAnimals

Flight of the Diamond Smugglers

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

In 1888, the De Beers company began marketing the diamond as a must-have symbol of love, commitment and status, creating unprecedented demand. But their diamonds, although beautiful, were harvested via aggressive mining operations that have left a legacy of pain, crime and destruction.

Perhaps not unlike a sparkling diamond on an outstretched finger, alluring despite its origins, Matthew Gavin Frank’s Flight of the Diamond Smugglers: A Tale of Pigeons, Obsession, and Greed Along Coastal South Africa is a work of strange beauty born of personal tragedy. Frank and his wife Louisa’s sixth miscarriage set him on the path to this book—an often unsettling, thoroughly researched, poetically expressed mélange of memoir, historical analysis and philosophical meditation.

Frank writes that the couple “feared all this love we had inside of us would ever remain stupidly, perfectly unrequited,” so in 2016 they went to Louisa’s birth country of South Africa to hold a memorial at the Big Hole, a former diamond mine and historical site that was a frequent destination for her family. The author became fascinated by the Big Hole’s origins and the history of mining in the area, including the pigeons that have been used as tools of thievery.

The narrative’s path is not linear; instead, Frank follows the flow of his prodigious curiosity. He interviews mine workers and corporate staff, muses on human failings and fragility and develops a friendship with a boy named Msizi and his pigeon, Bartholomew. Msizi smuggles the bird into work sites, covertly affixes diamonds to Bartholomew’s feet and sends him aloft. Frank observes their relationship with a sharp yet sympathetic eye. It’s a relationship of function, fondness and unease under the threat of punishment were they to get caught. Frank also tries to contact Mr. Lester, a shadowy figure known for his cruelty and power who may be behind the disappearance of diamond smugglers like Msizi. Is he even real, and will he allow himself to be found?

Suspense builds as the pages turn. Betwixt and between, there’s much to marvel at, from the far-reaching aftermath of diamond mining to the ways old memories have a hold on us. Readers will empathize with Frank’s efforts to process his grief and with Diamond Coast residents’ search for glints of hope in a grim desert. Through it all, pigeons soar in the sky and alight on the ground, offering companionship, a particular set of skills and thought-provoking fodder for metaphor.

Matthew Gavin Frank's Flight of the Diamond Smugglers is a fascinating exploration of the history of mining in South Africa, born of personal tragedy.
NonfictionFictionChildren's & YAMiddle GradeMemoir

The Hold List: Books served with a twist

Feature by the editors of BookPage

Life is full of surprises, but for avid readers, a genuinely unexpected twist is rare. After a while, the startling becomes predictable, the out-of-left-field ho-hum. We recommend these books for readers who are in desperate need of a shock—and these aren’t spoilers, because there’s no way you’ll see them coming.

Waking Lions

I’m not much for “gotchas.” Often when a book takes a long time to reveal its twist, I feel a little let down—either with myself for not seeing it coming, or with the author for trying to trick me. But when a story starts with a twist—or in the case of Waking Lions, two twists—I’m on the hook, as every page after such a destabilizing opening could shake things up even more. Israeli author Ayelet Gundar-­Goshen’s novel opens with the accidental death of an Eritrean immigrant, run over by an Israeli neurosurgeon’s SUV during an after-hours joyride in the desert. The next day, the dead man’s wife arrives at the doctor’s doorstep, having found his wallet beside the body, and blackmails him into tending the wounds of Eritrean refugees in a hidden desert location. The twists roll on and on in this provocative blend of thriller and social novel, its velocity never dropping, its controlled tension mirroring the ups and downs of a heart monitor.

—Cat, Deputy Editor

Ninth House

Being BookPage’s mystery and suspense editor is a blessing and a curse. I can spot a disappointing ending a mile away, but I’ve also developed an unfortunately strong sense of pattern recognition. Superfluous character who is frequently mentioned or somehow involved in the plot? J’accuse! All this to say, I thought I had Leigh Bardugo figured out. I thought Ninth House, a wintry fantasy-mystery set among Yale’s secret societies, would be one of those books to which I would correctly guess the denouement but would enjoy regardless. As it turned out, Bardugo is smarter than I am. She planned for readers like me, and I fell for it hook, line and sinker. The rapt, breathless joy I felt upon realizing what her real game had been all along was one of my favorite reading experiences of last year.

—Savanna, Associate Editor

I Am, I Am, I Am

Nonfiction books don’t usually have twist endings—at least not in the conventional sense. When I finished Maggie O’Farrell’s memoir I Am, I Am, I Am, however, I reacted as I might have to a particularly startling mystery—gripping the page, mind reeling, trying to grasp the unexpectedness of its conclusion. The book is composed of 17 snapshots from the author’s life of all the times she’s had brushes with death: meeting a murderer on a trail in the woods, a childhood illness, a speeding car that clipped her side, dysentery, three near-­drownings, the perils of childbirth and more. These encounters ebb and flow over the course of the book as mortality approaches and recedes again in the rearview mirror. By the penultimate chapter, O’Farrell’s relationship with death reaches a crescendo, and I thought to myself, How could a close call get any closer? But keep reading. As it turns out, death has been just out of frame the whole time.

—Christy, Associate Editor

Toys Go Out

The subtitle of Emily Jenkins' unbelievably charming collection of stories about a little girl's toys is “Being the Adventures of a Knowledgeable Stingray, a Toughy Little Buffalo, and Someone Called Plastic.” Plastic takes center stage in the story “The Serious Problem of Plastic-ness,” in which she is dismayed by a book left lying open on the girl’s bedroom floor. Plastic is unable to find herself among the animals depicted in the book. Her distress increases when she reads in the dictionary that plastics are “artificial,” which “doesn't sound nice at all.” Only after a long talk with TukTuk the yellow bath towel (who has seen “a lot of strange behavior in her life as a towel”) does Plastic realize her identity. Jenkins has marvelously concealed key details about Plastic before this point, so the revelation of Plastic's true form feels like a delightful surprise for both Plastic and the reader.

—Stephanie, Associate Editor

Sweet Tooth

Any reader of Atonement knows that British writer Ian McEwan is not afraid of a story-shaking ending. For admirers of that book, or any novel that sticks a difficult landing, his 2012 novel, Sweet Tooth, is a treat. In the early 1970s, fresh out of Cambridge, Serena Frome is recruited for the British secret service. An indiscriminate speed-reader who believes “novels without female characters were a lifeless desert,” Serena is assigned to recruit writers for a cultural propaganda campaign by posing as the representative of a literary foundation. This rather low-stakes spy game (which unfolds against an equally mundane, grounded portrayal of 1970s Britain, with its energy and labor crises) rolls out as planned—until Serena falls for one of the novelists. If you think you know where this is going, well, you’re not exactly wrong. But McEwan leverages the fungible line between fact and fiction and the power of stories, steering us toward a surprise ending that casts in a different light all that came before.

—Trisha, Publisher

We recommend these books for readers who are in desperate need of an unexpected twist—and these aren’t spoilers, because there’s no way you’ll see them coming.
NonfictionMemoirEssays

Festival Days

Review by Catherine Hollis

Jo Ann Beard’s prose is never more intensely vibrant than when describing death. Her celebrated essay “The Fourth State of Matter,” published in The New Yorker in 1996, depicts the decline of a beloved dog and the end of a marriage before segueing into the horror of a mass shooting at the University of Iowa. Beard’s new collection of essays, Festival Days, shimmers with a similar emotional intensity, especially when evoking the flashes of memory that come to those pausing on the threshold between life and death.

Beard is known as a nonfiction essayist, but her work often reads like suspenseful fiction. Her essay “Werner,” included in this volume, is about a man who jumps from a burning building in New York City. Beard’s narration so completely enters the subjective experience of Werner, clutching his cat under his arm as he contemplates the jump, it feels to the reader like a virtual reality experience. Similarly, Beard’s prose in the essay “Cheri” conforms intimately to the physical and mental experiences of a dying woman.

Allowing her work to exist beyond the labels of fiction or nonfiction, Beard’s metaphorical patterns evince the imaginative truths that underlie her writing. Festival Days is woven from these repeating symbols: the elderly dog, the husband’s betrayal, the friend dying of cancer. In three different essays in this collection, someone falls through a thin sheet of ice into a winter lake. Twice they are rescued; once they are not. These resonances across the essays suggest a greater unity, a story unfolding over a lifetime.

Beard’s literary powers are most evident in the long eponymous essay that concludes this collection. Here, Beard weaves metaphor and memory into a stunning portrait of lifelong friendship, of those relationships that hold us and ground us across the decades, that persist with love even to the final goodbye.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Festival Days is great on audiobook! Read our starred review.

Jo Ann Beard’s masterful essays shimmer with emotional intensity, especially when evoking the flashes of memory that come on the threshold between life and death.
NonfictionMemoir

Blindfold

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Freelance journalist Theo Padnos only wanted to grab a byline in a prestigious publication for a story about some riveting world event. But as he describes in his harrowing and absorbing Blindfold: A Memoir of Capture, Torture, and Enlightenment, he got much more than he bargained for.

In 2012, equipped with little more than a backpack and a copy of Paul Theroux’s Dark Star Safari, Padnos traveled to Turkey to report on the civil war in Syria. He met up with some young Syrians whom he hoped would help him ease into villages where he could observe the conflict. However, Padnos soon discovered that these men were not journalists as they’d claimed but rather operatives of al-Qaida. They kidnapped Padnos and whisked him away to the first of 13 prisons he would endure over his next two years in captivity.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Theo Padnos shares his experience of transforming memory and truth, joy and pain, into his gripping memoir, Blindfold.

Padnos’ exquisitely painful accounts of his torture, and the tortures and deaths of his fellow inmates, both horrify and provoke a strange hope that it can’t get any worse. He survives, in part, by dreaming of a brook in Vermont, letting his mind drift to the most important parts of his life and, eventually, writing a novel on paper given to him by one of his captors. When he’s freed and returns to America, he lives his “first hours of freedom within a bubble of euphoria” before settling into his new life.

Blindfold unfolds at a slow pace with a tedium that evokes Padnos’ own physical and psychic experiences. By the book’s conclusion, we’re drained and relieved that Padnos has survived. With emotional clarity, Padnos endows his captors with humanity, casting them as people struggling to survive in a world turned upside down, just as he is.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Discover more great memoirs this Memoir March.

Theo Padnos recounts being kidnapped and imprisoned by operatives of al-Qaida in his gripping memoir, Blindfold.

NonfictionSocial ScienceMemoir

The Soul of a Woman

Review by Anna Christensen

“My anger against machismo started in those childhood years of seeing my mother and the housemaids as victims,” writes Isabel Allende in The Soul of a Woman, her reflection on how feminism has shaped her life. “They were subordinate and had no resources or voice. . . . My feelings of frustration were so powerful that they marked me forever.”

Allende, a fixture of Latin American storytelling since the publication of The House of the Spirits in 1982, is well qualified to deliver a feminist manifesto. Those who have followed her career are familiar with the number of times she has struggled defiantly to overcome roadblocks in her path. The House of the Spirits, which addressed the ghosts of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, was rejected by Chile’s macho publishing culture. (Eventually it was published in Argentina instead, to great acclaim.) While many critics have praised her work, comparing her to Gabriel García Márquez, she’s also had many detractors, mostly male writers who seemed determined to dismiss her. In The Soul of a Woman, Allende describes these experiences and others that imbued her with the grit and tenacity that define her today.

Allende discusses her past matter-of-factly and directly, without losing her piquante humor. Her mother was an unconventional and vivacious woman who grew bitter under the heavy hand of patriarchy and misogyny. Allende decided to adopt a different way of life for herself, despite the misgivings of her mother and stepfather, the Chilean ambassador to Argentina. She details her career from its roots in feminist journalism through the literary pursuits that made her a success in spite of adversity and personal tragedy.

Ultimately Allende tells us of a life lived fully, for better or worse. The passionate choices she has made are boldly laid out without apologies in this slim volume. Allende even reflects on the twilight of her life, though it seems unbelievable that such a vibrant spirit could ever dim. But when it does, the blaze her life leaves behind will illuminate this world for decades to come.

 

In The Soul of a Woman, Isabel Allende describes the experiences that imbued her with the feminist grit and tenacity that define her today.
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.

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