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Bridget Foley’s Hugo & Rose was a Disappointment

“I intend to put up with nothing I can put down.”

Edgar Allen Poe

I’m going to be totally honest with you—I couldn’t finish Bridget Foley’s Hugo & Rose. When picking up a book is a chore, that’s a huge signal for me that the book and I aren’t a good fit.

Things started off so promisingly. I came across a used copy of Hugo & Rose at a Goodwill Bookstore and the cover caught my eye. You have to admit that it’s gorgeous. The blurb intrigued me, too. It describes a plot in which Rose, a thirty-something wife and mother, is disappointed with her life, but she has dreamt every night since the age of six of a fantastical island and the same boy—Hugo. When she runs across Hugo in real life, they set out to discover the secret of their connection. That sounds fun and interesting, right?

Wrong, and I’m going to tell you why.

(Heads up: There are going to be some spoilers here for the first half of the book. I didn’t get to the ending so I can’t spoil that for you.)

I have seldom found a book so alarmingly depressing. Rose started having dreams of Hugo after she went into a coma after a bicycle accident when she was six. She grows up, marries a man who absolutely adores her, and has three beautiful children. But her husband works a lot and Rose has gotten heavy, so she feels like her whole life is a terrible disappointment. Don’t get me wrong. I understand that clinical depression is a very real thing and I take it seriously. But Foley writes Rose so unsympathetically. She has a therapist but lies to her. She refuses medication and so she “talks herself better.” Sorry, but when you’re as severely depressed as Rose seemed to be, “talking yourself better” isn’t a thing. Either Rose is chemically depressed and she needs medication, or she’s being a big whiny baby about her (extremely) first-world problems. It’s one or the other.

One day, when Rose is taking her kids to a soccer game (horror of horrors), she comes across a man who looks like the Hugo from her dreams. She becomes obsessed with this guy. She leaves her youngest child, a toddler, with a babysitter so she can drive an hour away each day to stalk the guy. When the babysitter isn’t available, Rose just takes her daughter in the car and lets the (again, VERY young child) live in her car seat, distracted by her tablet and eating fast food. All so Rose can follow this man who doesn’t know she exists.

The whole idea made me feel very uncomfortable—almost physically ill. I’m not usually squeamish, but the thought that Rose was ignoring the actual important things in her life so she can stalk someone just gave me the creeps.

Of course, eventually Rose introduces herself and, sure enough, it’s actually the Hugo from her dreams. He turns out to be way underwhelming, but they’re so thrilled to have found each other. I started to have some hope for this book, but then it got weird. For some reason, Hugo and Rose, who are both way more attractive in their shared dreams, never got together in their dreams. Like, in their thirty-plus years of dreaming together, they never kissed or anything in their dreams. Until, that is, Hugo discovers that Rose is an actual person. Once he knows she has a husband and children, that’s when he decides to kiss her in one of their dreams. And suddenly Rose is lusting after this guy who is now very real and very much not her husband.

I hated every second of it. I could see if they’d been romantic in their dreams beforehand. I think most people have dreams like that. It’s the fact that there was no romance until it was real, until it was forbidden, that makes me mad. I get that book characters are supposed to be flawed, but it made them both so unlikeable. I couldn’t get past it.

And so ends my journey with Hugo and Rose. I have no idea how the book ends, and basically this blog post is just my scream into the void about how much this book bugged me. But I really needed to get it out.

Happy Reading (something other than Hugo & Rose)!

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Time Travel Romances


“People think they own time. They have watches and clocks and digital pulses. But they are wrong. Time owns them.”

Caroline B. Cooney, Both Sides of Time

If you went to elementary school in the ’90s, you probably did SSR (silent sustained reading) at least a few times a week. It was my absolute favorite part of school. For those thirty minutes or so, I didn’t have to try to solve a math problem or remember the states of matter. I just had to read. It was heaven.

I have vivid memories of picking up my first time-travel book, but I can’t for the life of me place the images I see in my mind’s eye in a particular classroom. Was I in fourth grade or fifth? Who was the teacher? I honestly can’t remember. But whoever it was had a copy of Caroline B. Cooney’s Both Sides of Time on her shelf, and I picked it up on a whim. You may know Cooney’s name from her better known work, The Face on the Milk Carton. I read that book the same year, I think, but Cooney’s Time Travelers series has stuck with me longer.

Annie Lockwood is a modern girl (I mean, modern for the ’90s) who is disappointed by what she considers the lack of romance in her life. When she accidentally falls through time and ends up in 1895, she meets the Stratton family and (predictably) falls in love with Strat, the son and heir. Their romance puts a snag in a lot of people’s plans, there’s a murder mystery, and, of course, the fact that Annie could accidentally go back to the present at any time. It’s definitely a YA series, not overly complicated, but my goodness did I love it. This series is perfect brain candy for days when you just want a satisfying story without having to think too hard.

After Annie and Strat’s adventures, I left time travel alone for a while. Middle school and high school were pretty much dominated by Harry Potter, and who can blame me? I’d say my next real foray into time-travel literature was in college when I read Susanna Kearsley’s The Winter Sea. You guys, I was enamored of this book.

An author visits an old Scottish castle to write about a Jacobite attempt to place exiled James Stewart back on the throne of Scotland. She finds herself remembering this she never knew in the first place, which raises definite questions about her connection to Slains and the events that took place there. It not a time-travel story in the traditional sense, but it definitely has that feel to it. I learned a ton of historical information from this book, and it was really enjoyable. Definitely recommended.

Now here’s where I’ll admit that Susanna Kearsley is, in my opinion, a really inconsistent author. Some of her books are spectacular, and others are mediocre at best. Belleweather is one of the former. It’s, again, not a traditional time-travel story, but it involves the French and Indian War, star-crossed lovers, and ghosts. It’s a perfect beach read and also dripping with historical info. The perfect combination, in my opinion.

And now we come to my other favorite time-travel series. I devoured the first four or five books in Sarah Woodbury’s After Cilmeri series in the course of one weekend. (There are actually 16 books in the series, so forgive me for not showing all of them.) This series centers around Meg, modern young woman who goes back in time and ends up in the company of Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, the last prince of Wales. I knew practically nothing about the history of Wales, but these books sent me into a deep dive. It’s fascinating. Basically, this whole series asks the question, “What would happen if Llywelyn ap Gruffydd didn’t die in an ambush in 1282? What if he’d lived to continue to fight the English and keep Wales an independent nation?” Seriously, such an interesting concept, and each book is a really quick, easy read.

If any of you are looking for some light summer reading with a historical twist, or if you just really dig time-travel romances, you should for sure give some of these a try.

Happy Reading!

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The Gilded Ones, Namina Forna

“No matter my origins, there is worth in what I am.”

Namina Forna, The Gilded Ones

Okay. First of all, can we just admire the cover of this book? I don’t really talk about the impact of a beautiful cover, but honestly I pick up a lot of books because of the cover. That was pretty much the case here. I also read the blurb and it looked interesting, but the cover was the first thing that drew me in.

The plot here is really interesting. It’s not anything super new or innovative, but it’s different enough to still feel fresh. In the land of Otera, girls are ritually cut at the age of 15 to determine the color of their blood. If their blood runs red, they are considered “pure” and are able to go on with their lives. If their blood runs gold, they’re considered to be the descendants of demons and are therefore “unclean.” There’s a nationwide death order for all “unclean” girls.

On top of all of this, monsters called deathshrieks stalk the land and kill tons of people. The emperor wants to eliminate the deathshrieks, so he allows the “unclean” girls to live so they can come and fight in his army. As the progeny of demons, the girls have some pretty intense magical skills. They’re faster and stronger than other people, and they’re almost immortal. Some good people to have on your team when you’re fighting monsters.

The protagonist, Deka, is a girl who is a bit of an outcast in her hometown, but who wants desperately to belong. As you can probably predict, her blood runs gold, and she’s given the option to fight for the emperor or die. But even as she avoids the death mandate, she faces the hate of her countrymen, who still consider her to be unnatural. Demonic. Evil. And for a long while, Deka believes it, too.

What I love about this book is the depiction of female friendship and loyalty. When Deka goes to train for combat, she’s put in a training camp with a bunch of other girls. I expected there to be a few who would be her friends and at least one who would be her rival. That’s sort of how things usually go in Young Adult fiction, isn’t it? Whenever you have a group of girls together, there’s got to be at least one who is nasty and competes with the protagonist. And to be honest, I’m sick of it. I was thrilled to discover that that’s not the case in The Gilded Ones. Namina Forna does an amazing job of creating this supportive group dynamic. The girls all watch each other’s backs. They take care of one another. There’s never any question of their loyalty to one another. When I see things like that in literature, I want to sing. Yes! This is how the majority of my female friendships have been, and I love seeing it reflected in fiction.

There’s also a love interest who brings zero drama. None. There’s none of that obnoxious “does he like me or doesn’t he?” that is usually present in YA. Keita is earnest, kind, and competent. I’m totally here for it. Love doesn’t have to be dramatic, and if it is it’s probably not going to last very long. Real love is stable, and I’m so happy that the author chose to portray it that way.

This book does have a few flaws. I felt that there was a lot character-wise that could have been explored, but wasn’t. Maybe Forna is going to get more into that in the next book in the series? I hope so. Otherwise it seems like a wasted opportunity to really get into the meat of these characters.

Also—fair warning—there’s a lot of violence in this book. There’s also discussion of sexual abuse and child abuse, though none of it happens “on screen.” If any of those things are triggering for you, I’d suggest skipping this one.

Overall, I was pleasantly surprised by this debut novel. I’m definitely going to pick up the next one in the series. It’s called The Merciless Ones and it’s supposed to come out later this year.

Happy reading!

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The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek, Kim Michele Richardson

“What I wanted most was to be okay as a Blue. I never understood why other people thought my color, any color, needed fixing.”

Kim Michele Richardson, The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek

It’s been a long time since I posted, and I’m sorry about that. I’m going to be honest and tell you that my grandmother passed away kind of unexpectedly so I had to go home for the funeral and to help my mom. It’s been an exhausting couple of weeks and I didn’t have a ton of time to read while I was gone. But I’m back now and I just finished a really great book called The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek.

Have you ever heard of the Blue Fugates of Kentucky? I’d heard of them in passing a few years ago but I knew almost nothing about them. Basically, Martin Fugate and his wife both had a recessive gene that caused a condition called methemoglobinemia. Their blood doesn’t carry oxygen efficiently to the body’s tissues. One of the effects of this is blue skin. Out of Martin Fugate’s seven children, four of them were blue. If a person develops this condition it can be dangerous, but apparently it’s not a big deal when it’s congenital. The Fugates generally lived long, healthy lives.

In The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek, author Kim Michele Richardson’s Carter family is based off of the Fugates. The protagonist, Cussy Carter, is the last Blue in Troublesome Creek, Kentucky. She’s also a librarian with the Pack Horse Librarian Project, a project that really took place in the WPA under FDR’s New Deal. In an effort to get reading materials into the hands of people in the mountains of Kentucky, the Pack Horse Librarians would carry books and periodicals by horse, donkey, or mule. They would deliver directly to the people in their homes.

For Cussy, books are an escape from a hardscrabble life and the loneliness of being the last Blue. She traverses the mountains on her faithful mule, helping her patrons find joy in learning and comfort in her friendship. The relationships that she develops with the people on her book route were really sweet, and I enjoyed the care the author put into developing each of Cussy’s friendships.

This book was also interesting in that it brought to light the prejudice that the Blue people would have experienced. It’s true that it would be surprising to see someone with blue skin, but it didn’t occur to me that they might have been persecuted in the same way that a Black person would have been in a Jim Crow segregationist society. Cussy isn’t allowed to use a “Whites Only” bathroom and she’s not allowed to attend social functions in town with the white people because they see her as something other than themselves. Her family is even subject to miscegenation laws. The whole thing reinforced for me, again, just how ridiculous it is to classify people based on the color of their skin. In Cussy’s case, her blue skin was caused by a medical condition, but people saw her as sinful and less than them, even though a simple medication was able to make her “white.”

The one thing I didn’t love about this book was that Cussy was a bit of a Mary Sue. She was too kind, too charitable, too forgiving. On the one hand, I love reading about good people who do good things. There were so many uplifting moments in this book. But sometimes it felt a little unreal, because few people are as saintly as Cussy Carter, especially in the circumstances that she endured. I almost wanted her to have a bit more of an edge. A chip on her shoulder. Something that was less Pollyanna and would make her seem like a real girl.

Still, if you want a feel-good book with insight into a fascinating bit of history, this would be a good one to pick up.

Happy Reading!

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First: Sandra Day O’Connor, Evan Thomas

“I’ve never done a job that I didn’t think was a stretch.”

Sandra Day O’Connor

I love reading biographies. Not every biography, certainly. They have a reputation for being dry and overly long, and of course some of them are. Worse is when a biography begs the reader to worship at the feet of the subject, showing only the positive while skimming over the negative. So it’s true that not every biography is worth your time. But I’ve read several biographies that are truly moving, and First: Sandra Day O’Connor by Evan Thomas is one of them. I was touched by Thomas’s portrait of this powerhouse woman.

If you’re like me before I read this book, you know Sandra Day O’Connor was a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, but that’s about it. She certainly doesn’t have the same place in popular culture that’s occupied by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, for example. That said, I wish people knew more about her, because I was inspired by her determination, intelligence, and grit, even if I don’t necessarily agree with her every ruling or viewpoint.

Sandra Day O’Connor—or SOC, as she’s referred to in her husband’s journals—grew up on a ranch in Arizona surrounded by honest-to-goodness cowboys. Her childhood wasn’t what I’d call idyllic, but it was happy. She attended law school at Stanford University where she was one of the few women in the program. She graduated at the top of her class only to find that real law firms cared more about her gender than her legal prowess, so her husband John was offered a well-paying job while firm after firm told her that she’d be more suited to secretarial work.

Undeterred, she won a seat on the Arizona State Senate and managed to find her place in a Boy’s Club, holding her own against snide comments and open mockery. She became a federal judge and was later appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1981 by Ronald Reagan. She was the first woman to sit on the Supreme Court, and she held the deciding vote for a great deal of her time there.

That’s an extremely bare-bones summary of SOC’s incredible life, so I beg you to read this book to get a fuller picture of her. I got it on audiobook and I found myself making excuses to go on longer walks or car rides to get a few more minutes of listening in. I grew to love and admire the woman who helped pave the way for female lawyers and judges in the U.S., and who was a voice of integrity on the Supreme Court for decades. That’s not to say that she didn’t do some incredibly controversial things—her handling of Bush v. Gore in 2000, for example—but Evan Thomas convinced me that her heart was in the right place even as she made decisions that made a lot of people unhappy. I, like her colleagues on the Supreme Court and elsewhere, came to respect her.

Her relationship with her husband also really touched me. I love stories of couples who stick together and stick it out, even when times are hard. Her husband, John O’Connor, spent a lot of time in his wife’s shadow. In a time when other men might have resented her or tried to keep her down, he was so proud of her and did everything he could to lift her up. In fact, he was one of the ones who helped get her name in front of President Reagan for consideration to the Supreme Court. Sandra and John O’Connor are such a good example of love and mutual support.

Honestly, this whole book was just an inspiration. If you’re looking to learn about a fascinating woman while also feeling uplifted, this is the biography for you.

Happy Reading!

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All Souls Trilogy, Deborah Harkness

“Magic is desire made real.”

Deborah Harkness, A Discovery of Witches

Once again, I’m way late to the game. Apparently these books have been around for forever and I’ve got several friends who have already read them. I don’t know where I was when these were coming out, but I’d never even heard of them until a month or two ago when I saw the television adaptation advertised. I got curious and watched one episode, and that was enough to make me go out an pick the first book up immediately.

I was hooked. I think it took me a day and a half to tear my way through A Discovery of Witches. A lot of housework got neglected once I cracked this one open.

Here’s the thing—these books are really smart. Sure, they’re a vampire/witch forbidden love book series, and as such they might elicit an eye roll or two from people who are expecting—horror of horrors—something akin to Twilight. But aside from the fact that there are vampires in both series, the books are very different. Twilight is mind numbing. The All Souls Trilogy brilliantly combines fantasy, science, history, and philosophy. Without giving too much away, let me just say that the vampire in this story is a scientist who has used his immortality to gain numerous degrees and areas of expertise in order to study the origin of vampires. He wants to know how vampires came to be and what, if anything, can be done to save them. His path crosses with Dr. Diana Bishop, a witch who refuses to practice magic, choosing instead to pursue an academic career as an expert in the history of the science of alchemy.

Shadow of Night, the second book in the series, felt a little slower to me. In an effort to find answers and track down a lost manuscript, the pair travel to 16th-century England. From a historical perspective, it was really enjoyable. I loved experiencing London in 1590 and watching Matthew and Diana interact with the likes of Elizabeth I, Walter Raleigh, and Christopher Marlowe.

That said, I felt like Harkness, a historian herself, got so bogged down in describing the past that the plot got lost a little bit. Of the three books, this was the one that dragged the most for me.

Harkness wrapped everything up with The Book of Life, in which Matthew and Diana each must confront their own past to find a way forward. I liked Matthew’s arc, but I was really pleased with how Harkness allowed Diana to develop as a character and really come into her own. Throughout the previous two books she’d relied a lot on Matthew, but in the final book of the series the tables are turned and she’s able to step up and get things done. It was fantastic.

I have a feeling that I’ll be returning to this series again. I’m sure there are things I missed that I’ll catch with a second reading. The plot here is so intricate and there’s so much going on that I know I’ll appreciate it even more on a second read.

These books are marketed as romance books and they’re certainly more in the New Adult category as opposed to Young Adult. There was some sexual content, but I appreciated that it was done pretty tastefully and the scenes were quite short. Some authors (looking at you Sarah J. Maas) have sex scenes that last waaaaay too long. Deborah Harkness was able to get her point across in a few paragraphs—brief enough that it’s easy to skip and doesn’t disrupt the flow of the overall plot.

Anyway, these were the books that got me out of my aforementioned reading slump. If you’re experiencing one, maybe give them a try!

Happy Reading!

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Bad Books and Reading Slumps

“Never force yourself to read a book that you do not enjoy. There are so many good books in the world that it is foolish to waste time on one that does not give you pleasure.”

Atwood H. Townsend, Good Reading

I’ve been MIA lately, and I apologize for that. I’d like to have a really good excuse, but if I’m being honest, I’ve been enduring a pretty intense reading slump. I dread reading slumps. It makes me feel terrible when I know that there’s all of these amazing books on my To Read list and I don’t want to read any of them. Even worse is when I start a book and find no enjoyment in it.

For years, I refused to give up on a book. I was of the opinion that to do so would make me miss out on some amazing literature because I wasn’t able to power through. That’s true to some extent. There are definitely books that I wasn’t in love with at first that I grew to appreciate after I finished. Gabriel García Márquez’s masterpiece A Hundred Years of Solitude was one of those books. It took me a long while to get into it, but as I read the last sentence and closed the book I was profoundly grateful that I’d stuck with it.

But if I’m being honest with myself, those books are few and far between. Most of the books that I didn’t like in the beginning did not improve upon further reading. I can’t tell you how I wish I could get back the hours I spent reading Wuthering Heights. (Actually, I read it twice because I hated it so much that I was convinced there was something about this classic that I’d missed. “It must be a classic for a reason,” I thought. “Maybe I’m just too ignorant to appreciate it. I should give it another read.” If possible, I loathed it more the second time around.)

I was well into adulthood before I gave myself permission to stop reading books that I wasn’t feeling. And even though I’ve told myself I’m allowed to give up on a book, I still struggle with it a bit, especially when the book is a recognized classic. Case in point: I was reading Crime and Punishment for longer than I probably should have before I returned it to the library. I wanted to like it. So many of my friends have given it five stars on Goodreads. It honestly makes me feel a little stupid to not like a book that everyone else raves about. And this isn’t a Wuthering Heights situation where I hated the book and to heck with everyone else. This is a case in which I was just bored out of my mind and was wondering the whole time what everyone else saw in this book. So I pushed on and got increasingly irritated with Dostoyevsky.

I caved eventually. I have a friend who often paraphrases Atwood H. Townsend’s quote. She says, “Life is too short for bad books.” Now, that’s not to say Crime and Punishment is objectively a bad book. I’m sure it has a lot of really great qualities. But it wasn’t what I needed then. It wasn’t what I was looking for, and I wasn’t getting any enjoyment out of it. Reading, even serious reading, is supposed to be joyful. So I walked away from Raskolnikov and his guilty conscience, and I’m at peace with that decision.

Having left Dostoyevsky to other readers, what was I to read instead? Enter: the reading slump. I borrowed books from the library and returned them without even cracking them open. I downloaded audiobooks and listened to ten minutes before sending them back. Nothing I picked up could satisfy me. It was like I was searching for one book in particular but I didn’t know what it was or how to find it.

I wish that I had some words of wisdom about how to get yourself out of a reading slump. I’ve seen other blogs have posts that tout different methods of turning things around. Personally, that doesn’t jive with me. I think reading slumps, infuriating as they can be, are healthy. They give me time to listen to a podcast, to try a new TV show, or to do some research on a topic that interests me. Books are a way to learn, but they aren’t the only way to learn. And every reading slump ends eventually. Soon, out of the blue, you’ll find a book that makes your heart sing as you turn the pages. I’m currently reading the last book of Deborah Harkness’s All Souls Trilogy, and I’m devouring it. My reading slump is officially at an end . . . for now.

So put down that book that you feel obligated to push through. (Unless it’s for school or something. Then do your homework.) Embrace your reading slump. Explore other interests for a while. The books will always be there when you’re reading for them again.

Happy Reading! (Or not!)

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Circe, Madeline Miller

“So many years I had spent as a child sifting his bright features for his thoughts, trying to glimpse among them one that bore my name. But he was a harp with only one string, and the note it played was himself.

“You have always been the worst of my children,” he said. “Be sure to not dishonor me.”

“I have a better idea. I will do as I please, and when you count your children, leave me out.”

Madeline Miller, Circe

My love affair with Greek mythology started in elementary school. My dad used to watch the TV series “Hercules.” You know, the one with Kevin Sorbo in it? No? Was it just my dad that watched it? Anyway, I was intrigued by the stories of the gods, goddesses, and heroes. I checked out this giant book of Greek myths from my school library.

I think I had this book on constant checkout for months. I read it over and over again and tried to explain to all of my classmates why the books they were reading were inferior to D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths. And then when Disney released the movie Hercules, I spent all of my time enumerating the things Disney had changed from the original myth. Yeah, I didn’t have a ton of friends in elementary school.

The point is, I was hooked. I eventually allowed myself to return the book and move on to other things, but Greek myths have always held a place in my heart.

Which is why it’s weird that it’s taken me this long to read Circe by Madeline Miller. It’s been on my radar for a long while. It won a Goodreads award in 2018, so I’m late to the game. But I’m glad I finally got around to reading Circe, because it was exactly the kind of book I needed to read right now.

If you read any of The Odyssey in high school, you may remember that Circe is a witch Odysseus meets on his journey home from Troy. She turns his crew to pigs. That’s pretty much all I remembered about her until I read this book. In Circe, Madeline Miller expands on the lore around the infamous witch to give us a deeply intimate portrait of rejection, loneliness, and self-acceptance. Circe is, at its heart, a book about self-love.

Circe is the daughter of Helios—the sun—and a water nymph. The other gods consider her to be ugly and untalented. They hate the sound of her voice, which they describe as thin. So Circe grows up as an object of scorn. She tries to make herself agreeable to her parents and her siblings, but she’s rebuffed time and again. Eventually—and if you read the book you’ll get all of the juicy details—Circe is banished to an island to live out the rest of her life in solitude.

But her ouster from the halls of the gods doesn’t end up being the punishment her father thinks it is. Alone and away from the malicious gaze of her family, she’s able to develop her talents and find that she’s not the untalented, worthless waste of divinity that her family has always allowed her to believe. Then, as she begins to interact with visitors to her island, she learns the joys of companionship for the first time.

What I loved about Circe is that Madeline Miller gives us the coming-of-age story of a goddess. We watch as Circe grapples with the nature of love and loss. She learns the value of vulnerability. She is stretched almost to the breaking point, and in her extremity she learns to stand up for herself against those to whom she always kowtowed. I think one of the most beautiful parts of the book is where she’s able to look at the ugliness within herself, try to make amends for the wrong she’s done, and allow herself to move forward.

If you’re up for a book that’ll suck you in and make you think, this is it.

Happy Reading!

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We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson

“My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all, I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in our family is dead.”

Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Horror is not my genre. It never has been. I’m not one of those people who finds scary movies cathartic or enjoys the rush that comes from getting spooked. I honestly hate it. That said, every once in a while I’ll watch a movie or pick up a book that’s creepy without being outright scary. Like, I can watch A Quiet Place, but I’ll never watch Friday the 13th. I’m not going to read Carrie or The Shining, but I can handle a book like We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

If Jackson’s name rings a bell, it’s likely because you read The Lottery in high school literature class. It’s a classic. Or maybe you’ve seen The Haunting of Hill House, which was adapted by Netflix a few years ago. Her work has been around for a long time and influenced a lot of more contemporary horror writers.

Okay, let’s get down to business. I really liked We Have Always Lived in the Castle, but I was (foreseeably) very unsettled by it. In case you didn’t gather from the opening lines of the book, quoted above, Mary Katherine Blackwood is a psychopath. The whole story is told from her perspective and she’s a delightfully creepy unreliable narrator. Jackson makes it very plain that Mary Katherine (or Merricat, as she’s called by her sister) is disturbed while also imbuing her with charm and likeability. I found myself sympathizing with and rooting for Merricat, even though she said things like “I’m going to put death in all their food and watch them die,” and “I would have to find something else to bury here and I wished it could be Charles.” Yikes.

Basically, the premise of this story is that the Blackwoods, a wealthy and established family, were all poisoned with arsenic one night at dinner. Only three family members survived: Merricat, who had been sent to her room without dinner; Uncle Julian, who survived but whose health and mind were never the same after the poisoning; and Constance, who had prepared the dinner and who hadn’t eaten the arsenic-tainted sugar. Constance had been acquitted of the murder, but the townspeople still believed her to be guilty and ostracized the already unpopular Blackwoods from village life. Merricat is the only one who dares to go to the village anymore, and while she’s there she’s treated with derision. The local boys taunt her as she walks by:

“Merricat, said Connie, would you like a cup of tea?
Oh no, said Merricat, you’ll poison me.
Merricat, said Connie, would you like to go to sleep?
Down in the boneyard ten feet deep!”

While I read, I kept thinking about how sad that the townspeople treated Merricat this way. If they thought Constance was guilty, then they saw a young girl living with her murderous older sister and mocked her instead of trying to help her. How sick is that? They’d decided long before the murders that they’d hated the haughty Blackwood family, and so they were unable to look upon a tragedy with any sort of compassion or empathy. This occurs again and again throughout the book. Something objectively terrible will happen to the Blackwood girls and the villagers rejoice in their suffering.

It made me reflect on a similar tendency in today’s world. Most of us have a “team” with which we identify, whether political, racial, religious, or other. When we divide ourselves into teams or sides, we pit ourselves against the “other.” It’s us versus them. In the case of Shirley Jackson’s fictional village, it’s the villagers versus the Blackwoods. And when we pit ourselves against the “other,” it’s often easy to forget that the “other” is human. We get swept up in the bad feelings and we neglect to honor the dignity and humanity of people who are on a different team, whatever that may be. It’s the kind of thing that leads us to mercilessly mock a politician who makes a gaffe or write spiteful comments on an internet post of a celebrity discussing her recent miscarriage. We can only delight in the suffering of others when we separate ourselves from them. When we single them out as different or less than.

Shirley Jackson’s work is masterful in We Have Always Lived in the Castle because she shows us that people are the real monsters. In this story, there are very few innocent people. Almost everyone is willing to hurt other people. Almost everyone is out for themselves. It’s chilling, and though the events are fictitious, the people, the monsters, are real. They’re you. They’re me.

If you’re looking for something that’s creepy but won’t keep you up all night, We Have Always Lived in the Castle may be the book for you.

Happy Reading!

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The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World, Melinda Gates

“If you want to lift up humanity, empower women. It is the most comprehensive, pervasive, high-leverage investment you can make in human beings.”

Melinda Gates, The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World

Some of the best books I’ve ever read have been at the recommendation of a friend. If you’re a book lover and you don’t have a book-loving friend to commiserate with, get one. Get a friend that picks up books you normally wouldn’t. I read Melinda Gates’ The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World because a friend (with whom I have what we call “a book club of two”) told me that she’d really enjoyed it. This probably isn’t something that would have caught my eye otherwise. I know who Bill and Melinda Gates are, obviously, but I’ve never felt much interest in them. And while I’m a feminist, sometimes books about feminism can feel ironically condescending.

The Moment of Lift was not, in my opinion, condescending. It’s a close look at the Gates’ charity work and how that work has evolved as their (and specifically Melinda’s) understanding of world issues has deepened.

Melinda Gates never sets herself up as someone who has all the answers. In fact, she quoted her mentor Hans Rosling as saying that rich Americans throwing money at problems just make things worse. In her book, she’s very cognizant of the fact that she and her husband have the responsibility to avoid having a negative impact on the world through their ignorance of the issues. It seems to me like she gets down into the nitty gritty of the data and is willing to learn from people who are more knowledgeable than she is. That is so crucial to good humanitarian work, and I was pleased to see her emphasis on it.

She (mostly) didn’t center herself. As I’ve been learning about activism and anti-racism, one thing that I’ve become the most aware of is something called the “White Savior Complex.” It’s basically the idea that white people, by virtue of their whiteness, assume that they have all of the answers and should be the heroes of every story. (For example, high school and college students who go on voluntourism trips to rural African villages to “help” when they don’t have any real, useful skills. But they take some pictures with some local children, talk about what a difference they made, and go home to the praise of their family and friends, having made little or no positive impact.) An Instagram account called @nowhitesaviors has really opened my eyes to how pervasive this is and has forced me to examine some of my own biases. But I digress. The point is that The Moment of Lift could have featured Melinda Gates as a white savior, but I think that she does a decent job of putting the focus on the people who are on the ground doing the actual work in the cities and villages she writes about. She celebrates their ideas and their successes, noting that in some cases they were doing work she didn’t realize needed to be done, but was so much more effective than the work she and her husband had planned to fund. Gates paints herself as the person who bankrolls their good ideas and watches them work miracles, not the one who personally saves the day.

I was impressed by how Gates shared her feelings about family planning and how she struggled to reconcile her beliefs about birth control with her Catholic faith. It humanized her. Instead of reading about someone who never doubted or wavered, I was reading about someone who was grappling with difficult questions, had to make tough choices, and had to deal with the consequences of her choices.

I also appreciated the fact that Gates took the opportunity to mention the impact of relationships with other women. The way she talked about her friends echoed my own feelings for my gal pals. I, like Gates, have been befriended and blessed by some truly amazing women, and it was wonderful to see someone like Melinda Gates open up about how meaningful those relationships have been for her.

If you’re at all interested in humanitarian work, you should run a bookstore, library, or electronic device and get this book. If you’re interested in learning how to better support and empower women, do likewise. If you’re looking for a biography or memoir of Melinda Gates, that’s not really what this is. It’s more of a reflection on past work and a call to action. If that sounds like something you’d be interested in reading about, give this book a try.

Happy Reading!