Review: Rage Becomes Her (DNF)

Title: Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger

Author: Soraya Chemaly

Genre: Feminism

Trigger Warnings: Misogyny (severe), sexism (severe), suicide (mentions), eating disorders (mentions), sexual assault

Note: Trigger warnings in DNF books only cover the part I read. There may be triggers further in the book that I did not encounter.

Read To: 20%

Back Cover:

Women are angry, and it isn’t hard to figure out why.

We are underpaid and overworked. Too sensitive, or not sensitive enough. Too dowdy or too made-up. Too big or too thin. Sluts or prudes. We are harassed, told we are asking for it, and asked if it would kill us to smile. Yes, yes it would.

Contrary to the rhetoric of popular “self-help” and an entire lifetime of being told otherwise, our rage is one of the most important resources we have, our sharpest tool against both personal and political oppression. We’ve been told for so long to bottle up our anger, letting it corrode our bodies and minds in ways we don’t even realize. Yet our anger is a vital instrument, our radar for injustice and a catalyst for change. On the flip side, the societal and cultural belittlement of our anger is a cunning way of limiting and controlling our power.

We are so often told to resist our rage or punished for justifiably expressing it, yet how many remarkable achievements in this world would never have gotten off the ground without the kernel of anger that fueled them? Rage Becomes Her makes the case that anger is not what gets in our way, it is our way, sparking a new understanding of one of our core emotions that will give women a liberating sense of why their anger matters and connect them to an entire universe of women no longer interested in making nice at all costs.

Following in the footsteps of classic feminist manifestos like The Feminine Mystique and Our Bodies, Ourselves, Rage Becomes Her is an eye-opening book for the twenty-first century woman: an engaging, accessible credo offering us the tools to re-understand our anger and harness its power to create lasting positive change.

Review:

This book has a lot of promise, a lot of research, and a lot of good ideas. But ultimately for me, it inspires too much rage.

I am not a woman. However, I am woman-shaped (my general term for presenting mostly feminine, having most people who look at me put me in the “female” box, and having political issues that affect “women” usually affect me as well) and was socialized female as a child. I am aware of and have personally experienced most of the reasons women and girls are angry that Soraya Chemaly talks about in the first 20% of this book. I myself am full of anger. And having all the reasons I am angry laid out in book form with sources on how much it hurts people made me furious. It made me want to burn down society while knowing that there’s nothing I can do and I’d likely only burn myself down in the attempt.

This is an absolutely intense read. I could only read it in small doses. I’ve said that before about intense books about trauma and such, but those “small doses” were in the 2-hour range. With this book, I risked getting out my phone at work to switch books because I could only handle about half an hour before I wanted to strangle the whole of society with my bare hands.

If I had read this as a physical book instead of an audiobook, I might have skipped around, moving forward to the point where Soraya tells me what I can do with my rage. But audiobooks are hard to skip around in, especially without a table of contents, and this book is already intense. It has really good research and is definitely a worthwhile book, but I am too full of rage to read it without boiling myself to death in frustrated rage. I may come back to it in the future – maybe I’ll find a physical or ebook copy and skip to the solutions section- but for the sake of my own sanity, I’m putting it down for now.

Review: Loot

Title: Loot

Author: Jude Watson

Genre: Suspense/Thriller

Trigger Warnings: Blood, falling, death of parents, police, foster care system, drowning (mention)

Back Cover

On a foggy night in Amsterdam, a man falls from a rooftop to the wet pavement below. It’s Alfie McQuinn, the notorious cat burglar, and he’s dying. As sirens wail in the distance, Alfie manages to get out two last words to his young son, March: “Find jewels.”

But March learns that his father is not talking about a stash of loot. He’s talking about Jules, the twin sister March never knew he had. No sooner than the two find each other, they’re picked up by the police and sent to the world’s worst orphanage. It’s not prison, but it feels like it.

March and Jules have no intention of staying put. They know their father’s business inside and out, and they’re tired of being pushed around. Just one good heist, and they’ll live the life of riches and freedom most kids only dream about.

Watch out! There are wild kids on the loose and a crime spree coming …

Review

I think technically this could be classified as middle grade, since March and Jules are twelve years old, but the subject matter tends towards the more dark and serious (the book literally starts with March watching his father die), so it would also fit just fine in the younger end of YA. And also I enjoyed it a ton despite being too old for most middle grade books.

Our two main characters, March and Jules, were separated as toddlers after their mother died. Their father left Jules with her aunt, a performer running underground Cirque de Soleil-style shows, to be raised as a performer, and he took March and raised him as a thief. They end up in a group home for a little bit, but get fed up really quickly and escape with the help of Izzy and Darius, two other kids from the group home who round out our heist group for the rest of the book.

There are many, many entertaining heists in this book. The “one big heist” from the back cover is actually a series of heists to collect a set of seven moonstones that may or may not be magical but definitely have someone willing to pay seven million dollars for them. And they’re not the only thieves after these stones, so there’s also some spy-vs-spy-style action trying to thwart the other theives’ plans, and occasionally steal from other thieves. I am a fan of shows like “Leverage” and general heist action, so this was so enjoyable to read.

It’s not 100% heist action fun, though. There’s a lot of emotional depth with March dealing with the grief of losing his father, Jules dealing with the anger of feeling like her father never wanted her, both of them trying to learn to trust their newly-met twin, and creating a found family out of a long-lost twin, a claustrophobic hacker, and a strong and surprisingly kind troublemaker. Izzy and Darius also have some emotional depth to their characters, mainly of the reckoning-with-the-effects-of-shitty-parents type, but that doesn’t get explored a lot.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It was a delightful heist adventure, but it also had a solid emotional core, and it was a wonderful read all the way around. And are the moonstones really magic? You’ll have to decide that for yourself.

UPDATE: Turns out there’s a sequel. I’m not sure if I’m going to read it – Loot was a prefectly complete adventure all by itself, but if the sequel is as much fun as this one was, it might be worth it.

The Loot series:

1. Loot
2. Sting

Review: The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning

Title: The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning: How to Free Yourself and Your Family from a Lifetime of Clutter

Author: Margareta Magnusson

Genre: Organization/Memoir

Trigger Warnings: Extended discussions of death and death of loved ones

Back Cover:

In Sweden there is a kind of decluttering called döstädning, dö meaning “death” and städning meaning “cleaning.” This surprising and invigorating process of clearing out unnecessary belongings can be undertaken at any age or life stage but should be done sooner than later, before others have to do it for you. In The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning, artist Margareta Magnusson, with Scandinavian humor and wisdom, instructs readers to embrace minimalism. Her radical and joyous method for putting things in order helps families broach sensitive conversations, and makes the process uplifting rather than overwhelming.

Margareta suggests which possessions you can easily get rid of (unworn clothes, unwanted presents, more plates than you’d ever use) and which you might want to keep (photographs, love letters, a few of your children’s art projects). Digging into her late husband’s tool shed, and her own secret drawer of vices, Margareta introduces an element of fun to a potentially daunting task. Along the way readers get a glimpse into her life in Sweden, and also become more comfortable with the idea of letting go.

Review:

Margareta insists at the beginning of the book that death cleaning (and this book) is not morbid, and somehow she’s right. Despite being about “death cleaning,” or dealing with your stuff now to spare your loved ones the burden of dealing with it after you die, it’s actually a lighthearted and yes, gentle, book.

That said, this isn’t really an instruction manual. Margareta does add a few general “this is how I think you should do it” bits here and there, but it’s mostly about the author’s own thoughts about her own impending death and her experiences death cleaning for others and herself. The bulk of the book is stories about the things she’s accumulated through her life, the memories they contain for her, and how and why she decided to keep or get rid of them.

In some ways, it almost feels like this book itself is part of Margareta’s death cleaning – processing her journey and recording the stories of her things.

The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning is a quick read – I completed it in a single afternoon – and quite pleasant despite being about “death” cleaning and containing frequent (yet remarkably lighthearted) reflections on death. Personally, I think is best approached more as a topical memoir (Margareta’s life told through her process of cleaning out her possessions) than as any sort of advice or instruction manual.

Review: Monstress Volume 1: Awakening

Title: Monstress Volume 1: Awakening

Series: Monstress #1

Author: Marjorie Liu (writer), Sana Takeda (artist)

Genre: Dark Fantasy/Horror

Trigger Warnings: Blood, death, death of children, gore (extreme), torture, torture of children, death of parents, war, body horror (extreme), nudity

Back Cover:

Set in an alternate matriarchal 1900’s Asia, in a richly imagined world of art deco-inflected steam punk, MONSTRESS tells the story of a teenage girl who is struggling to survive the trauma of war, and who shares a mysterious psychic link with a monster of tremendous power, a connection that will transform them both and make them the target of both human and otherworldly powers.

Review:

I normally don’t read graphic novels because I end up focusing on either the words or the pictures and struggle to put them together into one story. But I made an exception for Monstress because it is just so beautiful.

I actually own this book, and I bought it mostly because of the art. It is incredibly intricate and full of detail, and if you end up focusing on just the pictures for a page or two that’s just fine because there’s so many things to look at. And it’s gorgeous. Steampunk meets art deco with a tinge of manga (several of the character designs remineded me of 90s Shonen anime) and I know I’ve spent like two paragraphs now harping on this point but I cannot get over how much Monstress is just a treat for your eyes.

It’s also very, very dark. There is a ton of gore, death, and blood, torture, and quite a bit of body horror, and all of it vividly depicted in the beautiful artwork. It’s not unnecessary, though. This story is about the horrors of war, racial hatred, and how to continue when there is monstrousness inside you.

In an author’s note at the end, Marjorie Liu talks about her grandparents’ experiences with war in their home country of China and how “in their stories surviving was more horrifying than dying.” This story is about how after your survive the horror, you have to pick up the pieces and somehow find a way to live with the trauma. We get to see the trauma of Maika, the protagonist, the most deeply, but nearly everyone in the story is traumatized in some way.

But if you don’t feel like relating to the big themes on trauma and monstrousness, there’s also magic, talking cats, eldrich horrors, winged people, and a really good story, so you could also just enjoy it as a well-told dark fantasy story. (I think that would be missing the point, but you could.)

The only real criticism I have is that I had a hard time figuring out the world at the beginning. Normally that’s not a problem and I pick up on things as I read, but there were so many terms thrown around at the beginning that for a little bit I wasn’t sure what was going on. I got the hang of most of it about halfway through, but I’m still not really sure what a Cumaea is. Overall, though, that is a really minor criticism.

Monstress is actually an ongoing comic series, and the “volumes” collect the comic issues into paperback books. There’s five out currently and I have no idea how many are planned, but I hope to read every single one of them.

The Monstress series:

1. Monstress Volume 1: Awakening
2. Monstress Volume 2: The Blood
3. Monstress Volume 3: Haven
4. Monstress Volume 4: The Chosen
5. Monstress Volume 5: Warchild
6. Monstress Volume 6: The Vow

Review: Folktales of Bhutan

Title: Folktales of Bhutan

Author: Kunzang Choden

Genre: Folktales and Mythology

Trigger Warnings: Death, animal death, blood, mild gore, fire, ableism

Back Cover:

Folktales of Bhutan is a collection of thirty-eight folktales and legends and is a first attempt by a Bhutanese to record in English the oral tradition of this kingdom in the eastern Himalayas. All of the stories recounted here were heard by the author when she was a child living in Bumthang in the central part of Bhutan and are the ones that she passes on to her children today, in the spirit of the oral tradition.

In Bhutan’s centuries of self-imposed isolation brought about by both its geographically remote position and political considerations, the Bhutanese oral tradition evolved and thrived. The rugged and awesome terrain and the people’s closeness to nature, together with their philosophy of karmic life cycles, an unquestioning belief in unseen co-inhabitants of the earth like spirits, ghosts and demons and the creative genius of the storytellers culminated in a remarkable repository of tales and legends which were passed on from one generation to the next.

Review:

I know next to nothing about Bhutan, so this book was enjoyable both because I like folktales and because I feel like I learned a bit about Bhutan.

The book starts with a note by the author about her own experiences with Bhutanese storytelling and the country’s storytelling traditions, as well as a little bit about Bhutan as a country. Then it jumps right into the tales, which are short (most of them about three pages long) and entertaining.

Some of them have morals that are easy to figure out (usually along the lines of “don’t be lazy,” although there are a fair number about not being gullible too), some have morals or meanings that the author explains at the end, and some are stories that are either just tales or I’m lacking the cultural context to understand.

There’s a lot of stories of people who outwit demons and/or their enemies with cleverness, quite a few that show kindness to animals being rewarded, and several that are just about interesting adventures. Some of them felt vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t put my finger on why.

You can also pick up quite a bit about Bhutanese culture from these stories, from Buddhism to anti-demon religious rituals to some of the mythology. Geography also affects the tales a lot – there’s quite a bit involving the mountains, living in and/or crossing them, and traveling to Tibet. I found it all fascinating and I thoroughly enjoyed reading these tales and learning some folklore traditions from Bhutan.

Review: Radical Acceptance (DNF)

Title: Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

Author: Tara Brach, PhD

Genre: Self-Help

Trigger Warnings: Child abuse, sexual assault, miscarriage, moralizing about food

Read to: 50% (beginning of chapter 7)

Back Cover:

“Believing that something is wrong with us is a deep and tenacious suffering,” says Tara Brach at the start of this illuminating book. This suffering emerges in crippling self-judgments and conflicts in our relationships, in addictions and perfectionism, in loneliness and overwork–all the forces that keep our lives constricted and unfulfilled. Radical Acceptance offers a path to freedom, including the day-to-day practical guidance developed over Dr. Brach’s twenty years of work with therapy clients and Buddhist students.

Writing with great warmth and clarity, Tara Brach brings her teachings alive through personal stories and case histories, fresh interpretations of Buddhist tales, and guided meditations. Step by step, she leads us to trust our innate goodness, showing how we can develop the balance of clear-sightedness and compassion that is the essence of Radical Acceptance. Radical Acceptance does not mean self-indulgence or passivity. Instead it empowers genuine change: healing fear and shame and helping to build loving, authentic relationships. When we stop being at war with ourselves, we are free to live fully every precious moment of our lives.

Review:

This isn’t a bad book. Not at all, actually. It’s just very repetitive.

I was really engaged through the first few chapters. Tara talks about her own personal spiritual journey and how she came to Buddhism, and the basic principles of radical acceptance. (The main idea is that emotions or desires you don’t like don’t mean you’re a bad person, and instead of resisting them, sit with them and accept that you are feeling them. It sounds silly when I say it like that but she does a much better job of explaining it.) She also has examples of using radical acceptance herself and helping her therapy clients use it to deal with difficult things.

But it never really goes beyond that. I felt like I got a pretty good understanding of it sometime around chapter four or five, and after that it started to feel repetitive. The issues that her clients were working through were different, but the principle was the same. Pause, breathe, accept that the feeling or desire is there, remember that having it doesn’t make you a bad person, and whatever you decide to do from there do it mindfully. At some point I was like, “Okay, I get it and I’m definitely going to use this myself, but can we get on with it?”

I’m not saying this book is bad. On the contrary, the first few chapters are excellent and I am definitely going to work on using this in my own life. But it started to get boring after a while with example after example that didn’t teach me anything new. A good book, but I think it should be at least 30% shorter.

Review: How Long ’til Black Future Month?

Title: How Long ’til Black Future Month?

Author: N.K. Jemisin

Genre: Short Stories/Science Fiction

Trigger Warnings: Varies between stories; see end for list

Back Cover:

In these stories, Jemisin sharply examines modern society, infusing magic into the mundane, and drawing deft parallels in the fantasy realms of her imagination. Dragons and hateful spirits haunt the flooded city of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In a parallel universe, a utopian society watches our world, trying to learn from our mistakes. A black mother in the Jim Crow south must figure out how to save her daughter from a fey offering impossible promises. And in the Hugo award-nominated short story “The City Born Great,” a young street kid fights to give birth to an old metropolis’s soul.

Review:

I don’t read a lot of short stories, mainly because with so many stories in one volume it’s pretty much guaranteed that I’m not going to love all of them. Except this volume. I don’t think there was a single story in here that I disliked. Some of them were a little hard to follow due to the format (“Henosis” is told out of order, “The Evaluators” is told through mission logs, and “The You Train” is a transcript of one side of a phone conversation), but none of them were bad.

There are 22 stories in this anthology, so in an effort to not make this review ridiculously long, I’m not going to go through them one by one. Besides, I’d say the same thing about pretty much all of them. The concepts are unique and fascinating, the stories are well-written, the characters are complex and well-drawn despite the stories being short, and there’s not a single bad story here. Some are less memorable than others, but there wasn’t a single one that I didn’t enjoy reading.

The concepts are so diverse, too. There’s witchcraft in the Jim Crow south, a chef learning to cook with magical ingredients, an alternate-history steampunk-esque version of New Orleans, AIs in a virtual world, space exploration, utopia, dystopia, apocalypses, hard sci-fi, science fantasy, dragons, goddesses, aliens, lucky charms, the personification of Death itself … And, of course, humanity. Love, death, hope, fear, food, longing, pain, striving, overcoming, living and being and continuing on in weird and wonderful and sometimes frightening worlds.

N.K. Jemisin packs so much into such short stories. I’m honestly blown away. Not only can I not pick a least favorite, I can’t pick a most favorite. These stories are all just so stunningly good, in concept and in execution. I am so glad I read this.

Trigger Warnings:

• The Ones Who Stay and Fight: Death
• The City Born Great: Poverty, homelessness, sex work (mention)
• Red Dirt Witch: Racism, Jim Crow, slavery
• L’Alchimista: None
• The Effluent Engine: Racism, segregation, guns, death, blood
• Cloud Dragon Skies: Loss of home
• The Trojan Girl: Mild body horror, brain death
• Valedictorian: None
• The Storyteller’s Replacement: Death, death of non-human animals, gore
• The Brides of Heaven: Death of children, pregnancy
• The Evaluators: Death (mention), mild body horror
• Walking Awake: Death, death of children, imprisonment of children, blood, murder, body horror, mind control, ableism
• The Elevator Dancer: None
• Cuisine des Memoires: Divorce
• Stone Hunger: Death, injury (broken bones), mild body horror, imprisonment, death of parents/family
• On the Banks of the River Lex: Death, death of non-human animals, human extinction
• The Narcomancer: Death, rape (mentions), sexual desire, heterosexual sex (implied)
• Henosis: Threat of death, murder (mention)
• Too Many Yesterdays, Not Enough Tomorrows: Loneliness, non-existence
• The You Train: None
• Non-Zero Probabilities: Masturbation (mention), heterosexual sex (mention), vehicle crash, death, broken bones (mention)
• Sinners, Saints, Dragons, and Haints, in the City Beneath the Still Waters: Blood, death, gun violence (mention), police brutality (mention), corpses, flooding, death of non-human creatures

Review: Binti: The Night Masquerade

Title: Binti: The Night Masquerade

Series: Binti Trilogy #3

Author: Nnedi Okorafor

Genre: Science Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Death, blood, mild gore, death of family members, death of parents, fire (mention), loss/destruction of home, mild body horror

Spoiler Warning: This book is the conclusion of a trilogy, and reading beyond this point will expose you to MAJOR spoilers for Binti and Binti: Home.

Back Cover:

Binti has returned to her home planet, believing that the violence of the Meduse has been left behind. Unfortunately, although her people are peaceful on the whole, the same cannot be said for the Khoush, who fan the flames of their ancient rivalry with the Meduse.

Far from her village when the conflicts start, Binti hurries home, but anger and resentment has already claimed the lives of many close to her.

Once again it is up to Binti, and her intriguing new friend Mwinyi, to intervene–though the elders of her people do not entirely trust her motives–and try to prevent a war that could wipe out her people, once and for all.

Review:

Before I get into talking about this book specifically, I want to talk about the Binti Trilogy as a whole. Because this series has the best thematic arc I have ever seen in a series. Binti is about Binti’s identity as part of the Himba people. Her connection to her people is the only reason she survived that book. Binti: Home is about Binti returning to her homeland and struggling as she realizes she is now both Himba and Other. And now Binti: The Night Masquerade is about Binti taking the many, many diverse parts of herself and integrating them into one harmonious whole that is Binti – not Himba and Other, but Himba and More.

The first two books were fantastic but this one was just so emotionally resonant. I can’t even put my finger on exactly what it is but while I adored the first two Binti books, I felt this one.

Binti is struggling in this one. People close to her have died, war is about to break out, and on top of it all she knows she is still Himba but the Himba seem to have rejected her and circumstances keep conspiring to make her feel like she has lost her identity. She feels lost and adrift and at the same time responsible for so many bad things that have happened, but through it all she never stopped fighting. I loved her as a character in the other books, but in this one I loved her as a person.

I feel like I should mention Mwinyi, but he wasn’t important. He was there, and part of a barely-there romance that felt a little forced, but he (and the other characters, like Okwu) were important to the plot but not to the heart of the story. The emotional journey in this book belongs to Binti and Binti alone, and her vibrant character made everyone else recede into the background.

Normally I say a lot more about the plot. There was a plot, and honestly a pretty good one – stop the war brewing between the Koush and the Meduse. But somehow the fate of Binti’s homeland (pretty much guaranteed to be destroyed in the crossfire if war breaks out) pales in comparison to Binti’s emotional arc. There is a plot, which is very good and legitimately surprised me with how it ended, but Binti: The Night Masquerade is about character, not plot.

My only criticism of the story was that the ending seemed a little anticlimactic. I didn’t hate it, though – Binti herself pointed it out, making it seem a little bit self-aware – and the ending made me think about how ordinary life keeps going on after the interesting plot of the story ends. It’s not what you expect from a story, especially one as full of drama and science-magic as this one, but it was different and I think I liked it.

And as a fun little side note: I have no idea if Nnedi Okorafor intended this at all, but I discovered while studying Arabic that in Arabic, “binti” translates to “my daughter.” Considering how much of this trilogy is about family and Binti’s place as a “daughter” of the Himba, I thought that was really cool.

The entire Binti trilogy is amazing, and I absolutely loved the first two books, but this one outshone them both. It’s rare that the last book is the best in a series, but I think this one is. I do not have enough good things to say about Binti.

The Binti Trilogy:

1. Binti
2. Binti: Home
3. Binti: The Night Masquerade

Review: Teaching to Transgress

Title: Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

Author: bell hooks

Genre: Society/Social Justice

Trigger Warnings: Mentions of racism/sexism

Back Cover:

In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks–writer, teacher, and insurgent black intellectual–writes about a new kind of education, educations as the practice of freedom. Teaching students to “transgress” against racial, sexual, and class boundaries in order to achieve the gift of freedom is, for hooks, the teacher’s most important goal.

Bell hooks speaks to the heart of education today: how can we rethink teaching practices in the age of multiculturalism? What do we do about teachers who do not want to teach, and students who do not want to learn? How should we deal with racism and sexism in the classroom?

Full of passion and politics, Teaching to Transgress combines practical knowledge of the classroom with a deeply felt connection to the world of emotions and feelings. This is the rare book about teachers and students that dares to raise critical questions about eros and rage, grief and reconciliation, and the future o teaching its self.

“To educate as the practice of freedom,” writes bell hooks, “is a way of teaching that any one can learn.” Teaching to Transgress is the record of one gifted teacher’s struggle to make classrooms work.

Review:

Even though bell hooks is one of the great and famous Black feminist theorists, her works are far from what you’d expect from “feminist theory.” They’re engaging, wise, relatable, and full of truth I was never quite able to put into words.

This book is about education, specifically higher education – the existing system and methods, the experience of being a professor, different and better ways of teaching and facilitating learning, and how the education system fails marginalized students (especially Black women). This topic in itself is not inherently relatable to me. I am not and have never been a professor, have never taught anyone anything in a classroom setting, and for the most part I am the kind of student who excels under the existing college education system. I did, in fact, do excellently during my undergrad.

However, seeing bell hooks put into words not only the shortcomings of the current systems but tangible ways to make it better, I realized how much I missed out on. I’ve always felt like I never truly learned anything in school, I simply memorized what was put in front of me – and I was a wealthy white student, the kind of student the system works best for. I can’t even imagine how much more difficult it must have been for my working-class peers and peers of color.

Far from being about “just” education, though, this book also covers feminism, class, and race. It talks about how students often see plain “theory” as inaccessible and irrelevant to their lives, how to help marginalized students share their perspectives and help privileged students listen, and honoring different ways of knowing. It focuses on the experiences of marginalized students (especially Black students) in education, how the system fails them, and better ways to practice education.

The only parts I found difficult were some of the terms. I’m still not completely sure what “pedagogy” means, and bell hooks uses “theorizing” and “theory” in some contexts that confused me a little. I think this is my fault, though, because I’m pretty sure the terms were defined towards the beginning and I just took so long to read this book that I forgot.

Even though I’m not a teacher and probably won’t ever be one, this book was still intensely relatable and I feel like my eyes have been opened to new things. You don’t have to be a teacher or a student to get a lot out of this book.

I want to end with a few of my favorite quotes from this book – so much of it is very quotable, but these are a few that made me pause reading and save them for later.

… students, most of whom are female, come to Women’s Studies classes and read what they are told is feminist theory only to feel that what they are reading has no meaning, cannot be understood, or when understood in no way connects to “lived” realities beyond the classroom.

Pages 64-65

Black women are treated as though we are a box of chocolates presented to individual white women for their eating pleasure, so they can decide for themselves and others which pieces are most tasty.”

Page 80

[Discussing the value of lived personal experience in the classroom.] I share as much as possible the need for critical thinkers to engage multiple locations, to address diverse standpoints, to allow us to gather knowledge fully and inclusively. Sometimes, I tell students, it is like a recipe. I tell them to imagine we are baking bread that needs flour. And we have all the other ingredients but no flour. Suddenly the flour becomes most important even though it alone will not do.

Pages 91-92

It only took me a short while to understand that class was more than just a question of money, that it shaped values, attitudes, social relations, and the biases that informed the way knowledge would be given and received.

Page 178

Review: To Love While Black Is to Riot

Title: To Love While Black Is to Riot

Author: Regina Williams

Genre: Poetry

Trigger Warnings: Racism, police violence, death, cancer (mention)

Back Cover:

Fire is unstoppable. It is raw, godly in power, and spreads to everything it touches. It is inherently dangerous. Fire lines the pages of this book like the road to perdition. It is lingering on every word, every phrase, every mention of love or love lost. It is inescapable and raging. It is the screaming call of a nation that has been beaten and abused. It is the swaying flame of a people with love flowing through their veins who have remained silent in the face of injustice. The Liberty Bell has gone up in flames and the world is watching. The matches have been lit and the fire is spreading. Are you ready to face the fire?

Review:

These poems cover a lot of different topics under the umbrella of “love and blackness,” and I think that’s the point. There are poems celebrating blackness, poems about loving (and losing), and poems about the threat of being murdered by police purely for being black. At the end is a list of black people who have been murdered by cops. The list is four pages long, and the author’s note clarifies that it’s not comprehensive.

The poems are not divided by topic. Poems about love and blackness are mixed in with poems about police violence. Being white, I’m definitely not a good person to comment on the black experience, but I think that was the point – the threat of systemic racism and being murdered by cops is always there for black people, but they continue living and loving anyway.

All of these poems are well-written, beautiful, and emotional. Though this collection is fairly short and a quick read, it contains some big emotions. Regina Williams is a very talented poet and I’m glad that I had the opportunity to read these poems. (I also bought a copy to support the author – I highly recommend you do the same.)