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A review by geve_
The In-Betweens: The Spiritualists, Mediums, and Legends of Camp Etna by Mira Ptacin
1.0
Borrowed this because Camp Etna is nearby and I had only heard a few things about it and thought it might be an interesting local read. It wasn't.
This book is:
1: Boring. Part of this is my fault. I hate memoirs, but I especially hate memoirs snuck into books that are supposed to be about some other non-fiction topic but the author either A: doesn't have enough to write about and needs filler or B: thinks their life/perspective is very interesting and that I really wanna read about it rather than about the actual topic of the book. I probably should have put this book down when, in the first chapter, the author describes leaving her Portland adjacent island home on a ferry to drive up to Etna. So she wants us to know she lives on peaks without saying she lives on peaks. cool.
The book flips between kind of boring, poorly formatted telling of the history of spirituality and the author's personal experiences at etna. Neither of these was interesting and the switching back and forth made it harder to follow. This is a common way of writing this kind of NF, but it was not executed well in this case at all.
2: Poorly written: The author interacts with the current spritualists at etna and has a very colorful and honestly, gross way of describing the people she met. There were a lot of overly floral details about people's appearances that were just so tedious to read, felt very romance novel (which is totally fine in a romance novel) and added absolutely nothing to the story. Also some racist undertones here. Some of that isn't the author's fault, as it seems spiritualism just kinda stole a bunch of stories/religious practices/mythologies/beliefs from other religions, most specifically Native American/First Nations spiritual beliefs. Since the author decided to tell me a bunch of her opinions about the people she met there, I wouldn't have minded if she had had some reaction to the weird racists shit people said, but whenever that might have come up it was back to neutral observer.
3: Just wasn't the story/book I expected. I read the title and the description, and having read many non-fiction books, thought I knew what this was going to be. It just didn't meet my expectations. That's not to say that a book that doesn't follow the formula of its genre is bad, far from it, but a reader has some going into a new book that it is gonna follow through with its proposal, and when it doesn't that's a huge let down. This book was very superficial, both historically and informationally. I did learn some things about spiritualism, but that's mostly because I knew zero things about it to start. I def learned the PRECISE hair color and texture of all the people the author met at etna, though.
4: Is full of cringe. Having a whole spiritualism camp in Maine, that basically hosts a bunch of weird white people to come up and get a white-washed version of Indigenous spiritualism mixed with all the other weird ghost communication shit they've have smashed into this belief system with no criticism of it from the author made me very uncomfy. People can do what they want, but don't tell me how much of a crush you had on one of the spiritualism ladies while then not giving me your opinion about how whack all this shit is.
TLDR: Boring, fake feeling garbage. Extremely hard to get through.
This book is:
1: Boring. Part of this is my fault. I hate memoirs, but I especially hate memoirs snuck into books that are supposed to be about some other non-fiction topic but the author either A: doesn't have enough to write about and needs filler or B: thinks their life/perspective is very interesting and that I really wanna read about it rather than about the actual topic of the book. I probably should have put this book down when, in the first chapter, the author describes leaving her Portland adjacent island home on a ferry to drive up to Etna. So she wants us to know she lives on peaks without saying she lives on peaks. cool.
The book flips between kind of boring, poorly formatted telling of the history of spirituality and the author's personal experiences at etna. Neither of these was interesting and the switching back and forth made it harder to follow. This is a common way of writing this kind of NF, but it was not executed well in this case at all.
2: Poorly written: The author interacts with the current spritualists at etna and has a very colorful and honestly, gross way of describing the people she met. There were a lot of overly floral details about people's appearances that were just so tedious to read, felt very romance novel (which is totally fine in a romance novel) and added absolutely nothing to the story. Also some racist undertones here. Some of that isn't the author's fault, as it seems spiritualism just kinda stole a bunch of stories/religious practices/mythologies/beliefs from other religions, most specifically Native American/First Nations spiritual beliefs. Since the author decided to tell me a bunch of her opinions about the people she met there, I wouldn't have minded if she had had some reaction to the weird racists shit people said, but whenever that might have come up it was back to neutral observer.
3: Just wasn't the story/book I expected. I read the title and the description, and having read many non-fiction books, thought I knew what this was going to be. It just didn't meet my expectations. That's not to say that a book that doesn't follow the formula of its genre is bad, far from it, but a reader has some going into a new book that it is gonna follow through with its proposal, and when it doesn't that's a huge let down. This book was very superficial, both historically and informationally. I did learn some things about spiritualism, but that's mostly because I knew zero things about it to start. I def learned the PRECISE hair color and texture of all the people the author met at etna, though.
4: Is full of cringe. Having a whole spiritualism camp in Maine, that basically hosts a bunch of weird white people to come up and get a white-washed version of Indigenous spiritualism mixed with all the other weird ghost communication shit they've have smashed into this belief system with no criticism of it from the author made me very uncomfy. People can do what they want, but don't tell me how much of a crush you had on one of the spiritualism ladies while then not giving me your opinion about how whack all this shit is.
TLDR: Boring, fake feeling garbage. Extremely hard to get through.