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foraging_pages's review against another edition
4.0
Read for Lit. Analysis class.
Memoir set in my home state of Idaho.
Memoir set in my home state of Idaho.
arielamandah's review against another edition
3.0
Love her writing. This one lacked a little of the poetry of the other I read--maybe due to it being a memoir? Less creative license? Still, a pretty, interesting book.
violetu's review against another edition
4.0
This book started slowly, and but it was worth sticking with it. Religion found, lost, rediscovered, lost.. and varying perspectives on why.
macford's review against another edition
3.0
My writing professor read the baptism scene aloud to us in college and I never forgot it. A fascinating book with some really beautiful, harsh truths about religion.
auntie_em's review against another edition
3.0
Coming of age gut-wrenching memoir set in the beautiful state of Idaho. I am now inspired to take a road trip to visit Lewiston, Orofino, Pierce, Headquarters, and other environs of the Clearwater River.
What is not beautiful is the accurate depiction of the ways in which strict adherence to fundamentalist religion ruins families. Kim Barnes' story broke my heart. It reminded me of another Idaho woman's story, Educated by Tara Westover. Both books feature horribly flawed authoritarian parents who believe they are right with God at the expense of their own children.
What is not beautiful is the accurate depiction of the ways in which strict adherence to fundamentalist religion ruins families. Kim Barnes' story broke my heart. It reminded me of another Idaho woman's story, Educated by Tara Westover. Both books feature horribly flawed authoritarian parents who believe they are right with God at the expense of their own children.
masonn's review against another edition
4.0
This was a very moving read for me. I felt the struggle between daughter and father that is framed by a fundamentalist Christian perspective, where the father is the priest of the family and to question his power is to question God. I understood the conflict of finding and forming an identity in a space that actively works to subject and suppress your being—where your essence is labeled as sinful and even demonic.
Barnes does an excellent job of tracing the many people that make up who we are, reconciling the various personas we have carried throughout our past, and tracing the subjective nature of memory as we work to make sense of our present.
Barnes does an excellent job of tracing the many people that make up who we are, reconciling the various personas we have carried throughout our past, and tracing the subjective nature of memory as we work to make sense of our present.
shalms's review against another edition
4.0
This is a lovely memoir of family, faith, and place. She captured the nurturing and cruelty of her fundamentalist upbringing, the ways she could know and understand her parents and the ways in which she could not, the beauty of her childhood home and what it gave her. I really loved reading it, especially the parts about growing up in the forest of northern Idaho.
One of my favorite passages: "I think of how long we search to find that place we might call ours, where we might feel we have found a home: the perfect house in the perfect town; the secret hollow; that place in the heart we call love; that state of grace we call salvation."
One of my favorite passages: "I think of how long we search to find that place we might call ours, where we might feel we have found a home: the perfect house in the perfect town; the secret hollow; that place in the heart we call love; that state of grace we call salvation."
brandie185's review
4.0
Very interesting book to read. For as different as our lives are/were, and the experiences she had that I never had, I got it and I can say we had many shared feelings, we just got them in different ways!
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