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brice_mo's reviews
413 reviews
Ownership: The Evangelical Legacy of Slavery in Edwards, Wesley, and Whitefield by Sean McGever
3.5
Thanks to NetGalley and IVP for the ARC!
Sean McGever’s Ownership is an effective exploration of Christianity’s complicated history with slavery, appropriately more concerned with a reckoning than a reconciliation.
The author provides detailed portraits of John Wesley, John Edwards, and George Whitefield, examining how their lives were largely marked by ambivalent or worse—actively pro-slavery—stances. The result is a book that feels like a necessary contrast to the endless, “Yes, but think of all the good they did” takes that populate evangelical thought. I found the section on Edwards particularly interesting, as he argued for a kind of class-based hierarchy even in heaven.
There are no tired justifications here. McGever refuses to play into the many simplifications people fall back on, such as the argument that “Biblical slavery was different," or that “the Bible condemns slavery.” Instead, his research leads him deeper into the issue, noting that the Bible was an active point of contention for abolitionists, and even early Christians—like Augustine—who thought slaves were mistreated still thought liberation was wrong. The issue, McGever argues, was rarely ignorance—it was willful oversight. Wisely, the author is also quick to point out that early abolitionist movements by Quakers were initiated by enslaved people themselves.
I admire McGever’s take here, which invites readers to reflect on their own complicity. If historical figures were willing to ignore such glaringly problematic beliefs, what are comparable modern issues that people will be ashamed of in the future? How can people proactively take accountability for the present before it becomes the past? This is where the legacy of John Wesley becomes instructive. For the majority of his life, he was passive about slavery before eventually speaking out against it. It was, of course, much later than it should have been, but it was still a conscious pivot from how he had lived his life.
The end of the book is perhaps a bit too tidy, but maybe it needs to be for people to take action. Ultimately, Ownership is a call for readers to view legacy—even ugly legacy—as starting point for action, taking and ascribing accountability as necessary.
Sean McGever’s Ownership is an effective exploration of Christianity’s complicated history with slavery, appropriately more concerned with a reckoning than a reconciliation.
The author provides detailed portraits of John Wesley, John Edwards, and George Whitefield, examining how their lives were largely marked by ambivalent or worse—actively pro-slavery—stances. The result is a book that feels like a necessary contrast to the endless, “Yes, but think of all the good they did” takes that populate evangelical thought. I found the section on Edwards particularly interesting, as he argued for a kind of class-based hierarchy even in heaven.
There are no tired justifications here. McGever refuses to play into the many simplifications people fall back on, such as the argument that “Biblical slavery was different," or that “the Bible condemns slavery.” Instead, his research leads him deeper into the issue, noting that the Bible was an active point of contention for abolitionists, and even early Christians—like Augustine—who thought slaves were mistreated still thought liberation was wrong. The issue, McGever argues, was rarely ignorance—it was willful oversight. Wisely, the author is also quick to point out that early abolitionist movements by Quakers were initiated by enslaved people themselves.
I admire McGever’s take here, which invites readers to reflect on their own complicity. If historical figures were willing to ignore such glaringly problematic beliefs, what are comparable modern issues that people will be ashamed of in the future? How can people proactively take accountability for the present before it becomes the past? This is where the legacy of John Wesley becomes instructive. For the majority of his life, he was passive about slavery before eventually speaking out against it. It was, of course, much later than it should have been, but it was still a conscious pivot from how he had lived his life.
The end of the book is perhaps a bit too tidy, but maybe it needs to be for people to take action. Ultimately, Ownership is a call for readers to view legacy—even ugly legacy—as starting point for action, taking and ascribing accountability as necessary.
Where We Stand by Djamila Ribeiro
5.0
Thanks to NetGalley and Yale University Press for the ARC!
Djamila Ribeiro’s Where We Stand is a call to rethink feminism from the ground-up in order to decenter whiteness and recognize Black women as subjects, specifically through the concept of “speaking place.”
I love this book. It touches on so many complex themes while remaining incredibly accessible, thanks in no small part to the way Padma Viswanathan’s impeccable translation dances with Ribeiro’s original text. The author walks readers through the work of writers like bell hooks and Simone de Beauvoir, synthesizing key concepts so that they are prepared for how writers like Grada Kilomba can speak to the Brazilian context.
The book’s main contribution is the idea of “speaking place,” which, as I understand it, is essentially rooted in the idea that different communicative registers adopt different means of seeking truth—for example, a popular magazine is epistemologically doing the the same thing as academic research, albeit in a different medium. Ribeiro points out that access and stigma are woven together, so that even Black women with a platform may go unrecognized because they are underrepresented as a whole. Individual experience is not the metric; it’s collective and structural positionality that matters. Ribeiro writes, “To speak is not merely to emit words; it is to assert one’s place in the world—to assert one’s write to exist, to be.”
Ultimately, this focus resists superficial ideas of universality and intersectionality. Rather than framing all oppression as qualitatively similar or creating an artificial hierarchy, it opens discourse to the nuance of position, and it complicates notions of access—allowing someone into a structure that isn’t built for them accomplishes nothing. Furthermore, Ribeiro notes, real access warrants structural changes that instigate discomfort when white people must listen and accept knowledges that differ from those that they have have unnaturally elevated. In the end, she calls for what feels like a celebration of subjectivities.
Where We Stand is the kind of scholarship that leaves readers buzzing, and I really hope it means we get more English translations of Djamila Ribeiro’s work in the near future.
Djamila Ribeiro’s Where We Stand is a call to rethink feminism from the ground-up in order to decenter whiteness and recognize Black women as subjects, specifically through the concept of “speaking place.”
I love this book. It touches on so many complex themes while remaining incredibly accessible, thanks in no small part to the way Padma Viswanathan’s impeccable translation dances with Ribeiro’s original text. The author walks readers through the work of writers like bell hooks and Simone de Beauvoir, synthesizing key concepts so that they are prepared for how writers like Grada Kilomba can speak to the Brazilian context.
The book’s main contribution is the idea of “speaking place,” which, as I understand it, is essentially rooted in the idea that different communicative registers adopt different means of seeking truth—for example, a popular magazine is epistemologically doing the the same thing as academic research, albeit in a different medium. Ribeiro points out that access and stigma are woven together, so that even Black women with a platform may go unrecognized because they are underrepresented as a whole. Individual experience is not the metric; it’s collective and structural positionality that matters. Ribeiro writes, “To speak is not merely to emit words; it is to assert one’s place in the world—to assert one’s write to exist, to be.”
Ultimately, this focus resists superficial ideas of universality and intersectionality. Rather than framing all oppression as qualitatively similar or creating an artificial hierarchy, it opens discourse to the nuance of position, and it complicates notions of access—allowing someone into a structure that isn’t built for them accomplishes nothing. Furthermore, Ribeiro notes, real access warrants structural changes that instigate discomfort when white people must listen and accept knowledges that differ from those that they have have unnaturally elevated. In the end, she calls for what feels like a celebration of subjectivities.
Where We Stand is the kind of scholarship that leaves readers buzzing, and I really hope it means we get more English translations of Djamila Ribeiro’s work in the near future.
How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnameable Disaster by Muriel Leung
4.25
Thanks to NetGalley and W.W. Norton for the ARC!
Muriel Leung’s How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnameable Disaster is a delightful, woozily off-kilter kaleidoscope of a story—a world where the world has ended, people are dying, and we’re all still just killing time.
In Unnameable Disaster, Leung depicts the way ongoing crisis quickly becomes mundane once the novelty’s worn off—when California’s collapse is notable because it means “they had to retabulate zip codes. People mutate and change, but even the most absurd circumstance becomes humdrum when it’s the only reality. The book, like its crisis-inducing rain, is a little too acidic to be whimsical, but there’s still an odd charm that pulses throughout it. The novel’s title comes from a call-in radio show that a character starts, which feels impossibly quaint until one recalls the many comparable forms of connection that emerged in the early 2020s.
Each chapter follows a different character, but they are united in becoming more fully themselves once they move past who they were before their afterlives. There are echoes of all the ugly ways grief changed us at the start of the decade, but Leung cleverly depicts these changes physically—one character is headless and called “Sad,” as if that is the one truth about him that survives. Whether they are ghosts—oh yes, there are many ghosts in this book—or simply left behind in the wake of the world, the characters must accept that they are useless and loved, and readers must accept them. We must ask the same question the characters implicitly wrestle with—what is found in loss?
Explicitly, character wrestle with other questions, like “Should I continue to date a ghost?” or “What if my child is born with tentacles?”
It’s probably obvious at this point, but the quirk’s really putting in the work, and I suspect it will be occasionally—maybe frequently—too random for many readers. Certain absurd images are impossible to parse and must be accepted emotionally instead of analyzed rationally. Even so, I found myself giggling at how ambitiously wacky a few moments are. That might sound like a knock on the book, but it’s not—this is just a novel that asks you to accept a detailed love story between two roaches, and its goofiness adds depth to its earnestness. Leung demonstrates an incredible sense of tone to pull off the emotional turns of Unnameable Disaster, and I found myself in awe of her craft.
As much as I would like to say more about some of the book’s specifics, it feels like it would do a disservice to all of the wonderful surprises Muriel Leung has in store for readers, particularly an exceptional, emotional final chapter. Suffice it to say, if you choose to read How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnameable Disaster, you can expect a wonderful celebration of love in all of its joyful clumsiness and multiplicity.
Muriel Leung’s How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnameable Disaster is a delightful, woozily off-kilter kaleidoscope of a story—a world where the world has ended, people are dying, and we’re all still just killing time.
In Unnameable Disaster, Leung depicts the way ongoing crisis quickly becomes mundane once the novelty’s worn off—when California’s collapse is notable because it means “they had to retabulate zip codes. People mutate and change, but even the most absurd circumstance becomes humdrum when it’s the only reality. The book, like its crisis-inducing rain, is a little too acidic to be whimsical, but there’s still an odd charm that pulses throughout it. The novel’s title comes from a call-in radio show that a character starts, which feels impossibly quaint until one recalls the many comparable forms of connection that emerged in the early 2020s.
Each chapter follows a different character, but they are united in becoming more fully themselves once they move past who they were before their afterlives. There are echoes of all the ugly ways grief changed us at the start of the decade, but Leung cleverly depicts these changes physically—one character is headless and called “Sad,” as if that is the one truth about him that survives. Whether they are ghosts—oh yes, there are many ghosts in this book—or simply left behind in the wake of the world, the characters must accept that they are useless and loved, and readers must accept them. We must ask the same question the characters implicitly wrestle with—what is found in loss?
Explicitly, character wrestle with other questions, like “Should I continue to date a ghost?” or “What if my child is born with tentacles?”
It’s probably obvious at this point, but the quirk’s really putting in the work, and I suspect it will be occasionally—maybe frequently—too random for many readers. Certain absurd images are impossible to parse and must be accepted emotionally instead of analyzed rationally. Even so, I found myself giggling at how ambitiously wacky a few moments are. That might sound like a knock on the book, but it’s not—this is just a novel that asks you to accept a detailed love story between two roaches, and its goofiness adds depth to its earnestness. Leung demonstrates an incredible sense of tone to pull off the emotional turns of Unnameable Disaster, and I found myself in awe of her craft.
As much as I would like to say more about some of the book’s specifics, it feels like it would do a disservice to all of the wonderful surprises Muriel Leung has in store for readers, particularly an exceptional, emotional final chapter. Suffice it to say, if you choose to read How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnameable Disaster, you can expect a wonderful celebration of love in all of its joyful clumsiness and multiplicity.
Men Have Called Her Crazy by Anna Marie Tendler
4.25
Thanks to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for the ARC!
Anna Marie Tendler’s Men Have Called Her Crazy is an absolute mic drop of a debut, showcasing a voice that is as pointed as it is compassionate. It’s the rare memoir that seems like a gift to its author as much as its audience.
The book essentially contains two interwoven memoirs—Tendler’s childhood & young adulthood and her time in rehab in the early 2020s. Through both sections, the author articulates the complexities of heavy subjects like self-harm and gendered violence, but she avoids memoirish tropes by always giving generously to readers. For example, Tendler never waxes poetic about her motivations for self-destructive tendencies, but she looks beneath them to pinpoint the allure of self-erasure, which will be helpful for readers who share her struggles. Similarly, she has a remarkable gift—and a cultivated skill—in her ability to parse out misogynistic subtext in “innocuous” conversations and cut to the heart of its motivation. This is a book that recognizes the validity of personal experience, so when Tendler approaches misogyny head-on, she doesn’t fall into the common memoir trap of suddenly trying to cite studies or statistics. Instead, she leans into the authority of her own experience, knowing that it’s enough.
Moments in the book remind me of the kind of self-emptying on display in Jennette McCurdy’s I’m Glad My Mom Died, where readers may wonder if too much is being shared—if it’s at the author’s expense. But like that book, Men Have Called Her Crazy ultimately reveals a steady authorial hand and someone who is healthy enough to safely talk about their worst moments. Tendler writes unapologetically about her failures so that she can write honestly about her triumphs, and it’s been a while since I’ve seen such focused self-awareness in a memoir.
As one might expect, distance offers perspective, and I personally feel that Tendler’s storytelling and wisdom—yes, that feels like the right word—are at their best when she writes about the time prior to rehab. She makes genuine efforts to honor people as people, whether that means celebratory descriptions of momentary female friendship, damning criticism of predatory men, or bitter recognition that some therapist-client relationships can be volatile. Seriously, this is one of the first books I’ve read that doesn’t elevate a therapist to a god-like guru, and I really admire Tendler’s ability to explore that nuance. As an example of how she describes relationships, at one point, she writes, “It is disorienting to feel compassion for a person I have decided not to like.” It’s such a gracious mindset, but it still holds that grace in tension with the reality of experience.
This is a profile of rehab as much as it’s a memoir, with Tendler sharing all the different realities of the institution. These parts of the book feel a little arduous, seemingly covering every detail of Tendler’s stay in the hospital. It begins to read like a list of events, which dampens some of the sharp, reflective insight that sustains the book’s best moments. That said, this critique is likely a matter of taste because the approach does lend a sense of claustrophobia to the whole thing—the author’s anxiety and depression feel almost like they don’t have the space they need to diffuse, which is rhetorically and emotionally effective. I think there’s also a lot of value here for someone who might be considering institutional help but feels afraid of the unknown. Tendler offers a walkthrough of sorts, and I have little doubt it will be the more resonant part of the book for some people. Even so, I feel there are a few too many possible endings, and some chapters might be a bit more effective as standalone essays.
Despite this being Tendler’s story and hers alone, it feels almost necessary to address the elephant in the room—or rather, the elephant that has been locked out of the room. To the author’s credit, she alludes to the pathetic sad-sack(lunch bunch) manchild that exacerbated many of her struggles without ever giving him space. He’s irrelevant—a redundancy. I’m sure part of this is for legal reasons, but, frankly, she’s more gracious than she needs to be, and there’s such a contrast between Tendler’s genuine transparency and *cough* certain men’s *cough*performed authenticity.
I also feel really excited to see what Anna Marie Tendler writes next. Men Have Called Her Crazy is an exceptional debut, and if it’s any indication of what’s to come, there are many great books ahead of us.
Anna Marie Tendler’s Men Have Called Her Crazy is an absolute mic drop of a debut, showcasing a voice that is as pointed as it is compassionate. It’s the rare memoir that seems like a gift to its author as much as its audience.
The book essentially contains two interwoven memoirs—Tendler’s childhood & young adulthood and her time in rehab in the early 2020s. Through both sections, the author articulates the complexities of heavy subjects like self-harm and gendered violence, but she avoids memoirish tropes by always giving generously to readers. For example, Tendler never waxes poetic about her motivations for self-destructive tendencies, but she looks beneath them to pinpoint the allure of self-erasure, which will be helpful for readers who share her struggles. Similarly, she has a remarkable gift—and a cultivated skill—in her ability to parse out misogynistic subtext in “innocuous” conversations and cut to the heart of its motivation. This is a book that recognizes the validity of personal experience, so when Tendler approaches misogyny head-on, she doesn’t fall into the common memoir trap of suddenly trying to cite studies or statistics. Instead, she leans into the authority of her own experience, knowing that it’s enough.
Moments in the book remind me of the kind of self-emptying on display in Jennette McCurdy’s I’m Glad My Mom Died, where readers may wonder if too much is being shared—if it’s at the author’s expense. But like that book, Men Have Called Her Crazy ultimately reveals a steady authorial hand and someone who is healthy enough to safely talk about their worst moments. Tendler writes unapologetically about her failures so that she can write honestly about her triumphs, and it’s been a while since I’ve seen such focused self-awareness in a memoir.
As one might expect, distance offers perspective, and I personally feel that Tendler’s storytelling and wisdom—yes, that feels like the right word—are at their best when she writes about the time prior to rehab. She makes genuine efforts to honor people as people, whether that means celebratory descriptions of momentary female friendship, damning criticism of predatory men, or bitter recognition that some therapist-client relationships can be volatile. Seriously, this is one of the first books I’ve read that doesn’t elevate a therapist to a god-like guru, and I really admire Tendler’s ability to explore that nuance. As an example of how she describes relationships, at one point, she writes, “It is disorienting to feel compassion for a person I have decided not to like.” It’s such a gracious mindset, but it still holds that grace in tension with the reality of experience.
This is a profile of rehab as much as it’s a memoir, with Tendler sharing all the different realities of the institution. These parts of the book feel a little arduous, seemingly covering every detail of Tendler’s stay in the hospital. It begins to read like a list of events, which dampens some of the sharp, reflective insight that sustains the book’s best moments. That said, this critique is likely a matter of taste because the approach does lend a sense of claustrophobia to the whole thing—the author’s anxiety and depression feel almost like they don’t have the space they need to diffuse, which is rhetorically and emotionally effective. I think there’s also a lot of value here for someone who might be considering institutional help but feels afraid of the unknown. Tendler offers a walkthrough of sorts, and I have little doubt it will be the more resonant part of the book for some people. Even so, I feel there are a few too many possible endings, and some chapters might be a bit more effective as standalone essays.
Despite this being Tendler’s story and hers alone, it feels almost necessary to address the elephant in the room—or rather, the elephant that has been locked out of the room. To the author’s credit, she alludes to the pathetic sad-sack(lunch bunch) manchild that exacerbated many of her struggles without ever giving him space. He’s irrelevant—a redundancy. I’m sure part of this is for legal reasons, but, frankly, she’s more gracious than she needs to be, and there’s such a contrast between Tendler’s genuine transparency and *cough* certain men’s *cough*performed authenticity.
I also feel really excited to see what Anna Marie Tendler writes next. Men Have Called Her Crazy is an exceptional debut, and if it’s any indication of what’s to come, there are many great books ahead of us.
You Lied to Me About God: A Memoir by Jamie Marich
1.5
Thanks to NetGalley and North Atlantic Books for the ARC!
Dr. Jamie Marich’s You Lied to Me About God is a deeply frustrating read in that it is a good book buried in a bad memoir.
Decorated with taxonomies at every turn, this begins as something closer to The Body Keeps the Score for spiritual abuse than a memoir. That’s where it excels, as Marich weaves therapeutic language and concepts throughout common religious trauma. The book is so successful in this regard that, for a while, I wondered if it might be eventually be considered a seminal text on the subject.
Unfortunately, though, this approach quickly undermines the structure of the book, as Marich treats her personal history as a problem to be solved—a therapeutic object lesson. As a result, there’s endless signposting like, “the full story will unwind in other chapters of this memoir.” The author completely loses the specificity of her story because she’s preoccupied with its singularity, so her fairly standard spiritual journey is framed as novel and implicitly didactic. Additionally, this attitude makes some of Marich’s other structural decisions appear misjudged, such as each chapter’s concluding “Expressive Arts Invitation,” which is essentially a trauma-informed reflection exercise. Because they are supposed to exist in conversation with “memoir,” they feel self-indulgent more than anything else. As a reader, it feels bad to see a memoirist seemingly convinced that their life is instructive.
Furthermore, like the recent Kissing Girls on Shabbat, a book that might be considered a spiritual sister to this one, the memoir within You Lied to Me About God feels grossly underserved by Marich’s therapeutic impulses. She seems intent on analyzing or justifying every past belief, often to the book’s detriment. I think effective memoir recognizes that its author is just one of many past, present, and future selves, but this book feels desperate to cast the now-Marich as the definitive one, capable of handling every aspect of her life with an authoritative finality. It reads as defensive, a characteristic further compounded by countless performative, white liberal touchstones, such as discussions on race that ultimately feel self-serving.
Lest these critiques seem to be in bad faith, I write this as someone who largely shares the author’s politics and feelings about religion. I also just think Marich’s use of BIPOC scholarship seems patronizing and flippant, rather than rooted in a desire for robust alternative perspectives. Every look outward feels meant to attract the reader’s attention to Marich herself. By the end of the book, this insularity feels like its defining characteristic—a memoir so convinced that it will be “useful” to its readers that it seems completely disinterested in them and detached from its author.
Dr. Jamie Marich’s You Lied to Me About God is a deeply frustrating read in that it is a good book buried in a bad memoir.
Decorated with taxonomies at every turn, this begins as something closer to The Body Keeps the Score for spiritual abuse than a memoir. That’s where it excels, as Marich weaves therapeutic language and concepts throughout common religious trauma. The book is so successful in this regard that, for a while, I wondered if it might be eventually be considered a seminal text on the subject.
Unfortunately, though, this approach quickly undermines the structure of the book, as Marich treats her personal history as a problem to be solved—a therapeutic object lesson. As a result, there’s endless signposting like, “the full story will unwind in other chapters of this memoir.” The author completely loses the specificity of her story because she’s preoccupied with its singularity, so her fairly standard spiritual journey is framed as novel and implicitly didactic. Additionally, this attitude makes some of Marich’s other structural decisions appear misjudged, such as each chapter’s concluding “Expressive Arts Invitation,” which is essentially a trauma-informed reflection exercise. Because they are supposed to exist in conversation with “memoir,” they feel self-indulgent more than anything else. As a reader, it feels bad to see a memoirist seemingly convinced that their life is instructive.
Furthermore, like the recent Kissing Girls on Shabbat, a book that might be considered a spiritual sister to this one, the memoir within You Lied to Me About God feels grossly underserved by Marich’s therapeutic impulses. She seems intent on analyzing or justifying every past belief, often to the book’s detriment. I think effective memoir recognizes that its author is just one of many past, present, and future selves, but this book feels desperate to cast the now-Marich as the definitive one, capable of handling every aspect of her life with an authoritative finality. It reads as defensive, a characteristic further compounded by countless performative, white liberal touchstones, such as discussions on race that ultimately feel self-serving.
Lest these critiques seem to be in bad faith, I write this as someone who largely shares the author’s politics and feelings about religion. I also just think Marich’s use of BIPOC scholarship seems patronizing and flippant, rather than rooted in a desire for robust alternative perspectives. Every look outward feels meant to attract the reader’s attention to Marich herself. By the end of the book, this insularity feels like its defining characteristic—a memoir so convinced that it will be “useful” to its readers that it seems completely disinterested in them and detached from its author.
Fire Exit by Morgan Talty
2.75
Thanks to NetGalley and Tin House for the ARC!
Morgan Talty’s Fire Exit is a good story that doesn’t fit well in a novel.
Thematically, there are some interesting concepts about identity—particularly in the context of blood quantum—because the narrator is a white man who was raised on a reservation. This aspect of the book is largely held in the background, which keeps it subtle and lends complexity to the story without playing into tropes.
Unfortunately, Fire Exit seems like it just doesn’t belong in a book of this length. Everything about it would be more at home in a tightly crafted short story, whereas it feels slack and cumbersome in a full-length novel. It’s written such that readers gradually learn more about its characters’ past, which might feel satisfying if constrained to a few pages, but because the book is so contingent on a constant unfurling of “major revelations,” it begins to consume itself, with each revelation carrying less weight. Furthermore, the characters always feel a little impressionistic, so learning more about them doesn’t add much shade or dimension—the new information just feels needlessly deferred.
When the book finally picks up momentum near its cataclysmic end, it feels like too little, too late, and I wished I could have just read those 50 or so pages independently. To be clear, I don’t think novels are obligated to take any particular shape—it can be enjoyable to feel a writer’s self-conscious decisions about form through the text; in Fire Exit, though, it feels less like intentionality and more like uncertainty.
All in all, I found Fire Exit to be deeply disappointing. It isn’t bad by any means—maybe I would have enjoyed it more if it were—but it feels strangely obligatory, like a book that was required to exist instead of a book that needed to.
Morgan Talty’s Fire Exit is a good story that doesn’t fit well in a novel.
Thematically, there are some interesting concepts about identity—particularly in the context of blood quantum—because the narrator is a white man who was raised on a reservation. This aspect of the book is largely held in the background, which keeps it subtle and lends complexity to the story without playing into tropes.
Unfortunately, Fire Exit seems like it just doesn’t belong in a book of this length. Everything about it would be more at home in a tightly crafted short story, whereas it feels slack and cumbersome in a full-length novel. It’s written such that readers gradually learn more about its characters’ past, which might feel satisfying if constrained to a few pages, but because the book is so contingent on a constant unfurling of “major revelations,” it begins to consume itself, with each revelation carrying less weight. Furthermore, the characters always feel a little impressionistic, so learning more about them doesn’t add much shade or dimension—the new information just feels needlessly deferred.
When the book finally picks up momentum near its cataclysmic end, it feels like too little, too late, and I wished I could have just read those 50 or so pages independently. To be clear, I don’t think novels are obligated to take any particular shape—it can be enjoyable to feel a writer’s self-conscious decisions about form through the text; in Fire Exit, though, it feels less like intentionality and more like uncertainty.
All in all, I found Fire Exit to be deeply disappointing. It isn’t bad by any means—maybe I would have enjoyed it more if it were—but it feels strangely obligatory, like a book that was required to exist instead of a book that needed to.
The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise by Olivia Laing
2.75
Thanks to NetGalley and W.W. Norton for the ARC!
Olivia Laing’s The Garden Against Time is a carefully manicured reflection on the garden as a social symbol and site of class demarcation, but it occasionally gets a little too lost in the weeds.
If you’ve read the marketing copy for this book, you already know that Laing began an 18th-century garden restoration project during the pandemic. It’s a starting point that seems like it should be fruitful; however, like many projects born during COVID, The Garden Against Time struggles with the tension between interiority and insularity, unfortunately skewing toward the latter. Laing’s usual preoccupations just don’t seem to fit within their framing device here, as the isolated origin of the work makes many of the author’s sociological observations feel more voyeuristic than astute.
The Garden Against Time seems to celebrate the garden as a site of escapism while also suggesting it’s an impossibility. Laing offers lush descriptions, treating readers to sensorial delights—I could almost smell the soil and taste the pollen hanging in the air—before interrupting them with discussions of history and politics. Sometimes, they work to shed light on the history of land access and ownership—I also loved all the material about Derek Jarman—but often they read like unexpected digressions. While this approach feels masterful and holistic in a book like Everybody, here it feels less focused—like someone sharing every fact that comes to mind after a wikipedia deep dive. Or, to use some garden imagery, it feels like an invasive species.
Perhaps these complaints are a matter of faulty expectations, but the book feels like it was written as a way to pass the endless, shapeless hours of the early 2020s. It never blooms beyond feeling like a COVID curio—cumbersomely divided, with its political distance in tension with its earthy intimacy. In the end, it’s disappointing because it feels like there are two great versions of The Garden Against Time if Laing picked a focus and an editor trimmed 50-100 pages. Even so, there’s still much to appreciate here, and I recommend the book to readers who understand what they are signing up for.
Olivia Laing’s The Garden Against Time is a carefully manicured reflection on the garden as a social symbol and site of class demarcation, but it occasionally gets a little too lost in the weeds.
If you’ve read the marketing copy for this book, you already know that Laing began an 18th-century garden restoration project during the pandemic. It’s a starting point that seems like it should be fruitful; however, like many projects born during COVID, The Garden Against Time struggles with the tension between interiority and insularity, unfortunately skewing toward the latter. Laing’s usual preoccupations just don’t seem to fit within their framing device here, as the isolated origin of the work makes many of the author’s sociological observations feel more voyeuristic than astute.
The Garden Against Time seems to celebrate the garden as a site of escapism while also suggesting it’s an impossibility. Laing offers lush descriptions, treating readers to sensorial delights—I could almost smell the soil and taste the pollen hanging in the air—before interrupting them with discussions of history and politics. Sometimes, they work to shed light on the history of land access and ownership—I also loved all the material about Derek Jarman—but often they read like unexpected digressions. While this approach feels masterful and holistic in a book like Everybody, here it feels less focused—like someone sharing every fact that comes to mind after a wikipedia deep dive. Or, to use some garden imagery, it feels like an invasive species.
Perhaps these complaints are a matter of faulty expectations, but the book feels like it was written as a way to pass the endless, shapeless hours of the early 2020s. It never blooms beyond feeling like a COVID curio—cumbersomely divided, with its political distance in tension with its earthy intimacy. In the end, it’s disappointing because it feels like there are two great versions of The Garden Against Time if Laing picked a focus and an editor trimmed 50-100 pages. Even so, there’s still much to appreciate here, and I recommend the book to readers who understand what they are signing up for.
Cloud Missives by Kenzie Allen
4.0
Thanks to NetGalley and Tin House for the ARC!
Based on the title, one might expect Kenzie Allen’s Cloud Missives to be a collection of weightless, wispy poems, but that would underestimate how much heft the book actually has—these are storm clouds, capable of powerful and unexpected turns.
Most of these pieces circle the difficulties of Indigenous identity in a world where mainstream culture has reduced it to racist iconography. We see well-known characters like Tiger Lily or Pocahontas (TM) parasitically leeching off the speaker’s sense of self, highlighting the way colonialism is not a historical event—it’s an ongoing reality. The poet pulls off a remarkable balancing act in her ability to engage with these themes and images without indulging them, and it showcases how cohesive and intentioned the whole project is. The marketing copy for this book invokes Allen’s anthropological impulse, and I think it’s a great articulation of how rigorous this collection feels, both in its methodological precision and the way the speaker reconstructs the present from countless artifacts.
Another aspect of the collection I really admire is how each poem feels like the broken shard of a narrative—the reading experience is often like hearing a heated argument through a wall. There’s a groundedness to the language and a unique cadence to what the speaker reveals or withholds, and both qualities make for a book that seems certain to reward attentive re-reads. Periodically, it slips ever so slightly, as the “Letters I Don’t Send” section feels like a familiar poetic fantasia, but it’s only a minor dip in an excellent collection.
Also, “When I Say I Love You, This Is What I Mean” made me weepy. What a poem.
Based on the title, one might expect Kenzie Allen’s Cloud Missives to be a collection of weightless, wispy poems, but that would underestimate how much heft the book actually has—these are storm clouds, capable of powerful and unexpected turns.
Most of these pieces circle the difficulties of Indigenous identity in a world where mainstream culture has reduced it to racist iconography. We see well-known characters like Tiger Lily or Pocahontas (TM) parasitically leeching off the speaker’s sense of self, highlighting the way colonialism is not a historical event—it’s an ongoing reality. The poet pulls off a remarkable balancing act in her ability to engage with these themes and images without indulging them, and it showcases how cohesive and intentioned the whole project is. The marketing copy for this book invokes Allen’s anthropological impulse, and I think it’s a great articulation of how rigorous this collection feels, both in its methodological precision and the way the speaker reconstructs the present from countless artifacts.
Another aspect of the collection I really admire is how each poem feels like the broken shard of a narrative—the reading experience is often like hearing a heated argument through a wall. There’s a groundedness to the language and a unique cadence to what the speaker reveals or withholds, and both qualities make for a book that seems certain to reward attentive re-reads. Periodically, it slips ever so slightly, as the “Letters I Don’t Send” section feels like a familiar poetic fantasia, but it’s only a minor dip in an excellent collection.
Also, “When I Say I Love You, This Is What I Mean” made me weepy. What a poem.
Waiting Isn't a Waste: The Surprising Comfort of Trusting God in the Uncertainties of Life by Mark Vroegop
2.5
Thanks to NetGalley and Crossway for the ARC!
Mark Vroegop’s Waiting Isn’t a Waste is a slight book, better attuned to day-to-day impatience than it is to deus absconditus, which means that its merit is almost entirely contingent on reader expectations.
I know Vroegop’s previous writing on lament was really resonant for many people, and there’s a possibility that the same will be true here, but it felt fairly insubstantial to me. Waiting Isn’t a Waste is not a challenging read, and I mean that both in terms of density and its ability to provoke reflection. Personally, I found it frustrating how rhetorically beholden it is to the format of a 45-minute sermon. Each chapter opens with an anecdote, which then introduces a main point, which is then supported by a few Bible verses and the occasional quote, which is then supplemented with reflection questions. It’s palatable to a fault, and it feels like a missed opportunity to dive deeper.
The following will sound like a harsh critique, but I don’t mean it as such—this is where audience expectations come in. This book feels tailor-made for evangelicals who are so steeped in their subculture that they are at least a little disconnected from the realities of the world. You could only give this to someone who feels comfortably at home in a Baptist/non-denom community because it’s so dependent on that shared lexicon and so disengaged with any concerns outside that demographic. I know a book can’t be all things to all people, but I do wonder if such a strict dichotomy between “sacred” and “secular” audiences promotes an unhealthy insularity. At the very least, the book felt ill-equipped for the existential and spiritual questions that implicitly motivate discomfort with “waiting.”
All that said, I accept that these quibbles are a reflection of me as a reader more than problems with the text. I have relatives who would adore this as a supplement to their morning coffee, and maybe it doesn’t need to inspire thought as much as it needs to be a conversational centerpiece for people who might not otherwise know how to broach its themes. If that’s where you’re at, maybe this is a perfect book for you!
Mark Vroegop’s Waiting Isn’t a Waste is a slight book, better attuned to day-to-day impatience than it is to deus absconditus, which means that its merit is almost entirely contingent on reader expectations.
I know Vroegop’s previous writing on lament was really resonant for many people, and there’s a possibility that the same will be true here, but it felt fairly insubstantial to me. Waiting Isn’t a Waste is not a challenging read, and I mean that both in terms of density and its ability to provoke reflection. Personally, I found it frustrating how rhetorically beholden it is to the format of a 45-minute sermon. Each chapter opens with an anecdote, which then introduces a main point, which is then supported by a few Bible verses and the occasional quote, which is then supplemented with reflection questions. It’s palatable to a fault, and it feels like a missed opportunity to dive deeper.
The following will sound like a harsh critique, but I don’t mean it as such—this is where audience expectations come in. This book feels tailor-made for evangelicals who are so steeped in their subculture that they are at least a little disconnected from the realities of the world. You could only give this to someone who feels comfortably at home in a Baptist/non-denom community because it’s so dependent on that shared lexicon and so disengaged with any concerns outside that demographic. I know a book can’t be all things to all people, but I do wonder if such a strict dichotomy between “sacred” and “secular” audiences promotes an unhealthy insularity. At the very least, the book felt ill-equipped for the existential and spiritual questions that implicitly motivate discomfort with “waiting.”
All that said, I accept that these quibbles are a reflection of me as a reader more than problems with the text. I have relatives who would adore this as a supplement to their morning coffee, and maybe it doesn’t need to inspire thought as much as it needs to be a conversational centerpiece for people who might not otherwise know how to broach its themes. If that’s where you’re at, maybe this is a perfect book for you!
Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology by Timothy Morton
1.0
Thanks to NetGalley and Columbia University Press for the ARC!
Appropriately, Timothy Morton’s Hell is an inflammatory hot mess of a book.
Drawing on Dante, Milton, and Blake, the book (ostensibly) envisions a healthier relationship to the biosphere by dressing it in second-hand Christian and Buddhist iconography. It’s an exciting approach to a critical issue, and I found Morton’s reimagining of the divine both fun and interesting, as well as how they use it to critique “scientism” as its own form of religiosity. Or, as they put it, how they call for “a post-deist, that is to say, post-Enlightenment, indeed Blakean-Romantic, totally un-Hegelian fusion of Christianity and science, the complete opposite of intelligent design: the Stupid Accident theory.”
Based on that sentence alone, you probably have a pretty good idea of what Hell is like, and it's also where my appreciation ends.
This book is absolutely chaotic, proudly embodying a kind of squirrelly energy that will either entice or estrange readers. As an example, there’s a section in which Morton interrogates the etymology of abba as a name for god before suddenly saying our new name for the divine is social media. It’s a pivot that feels laughably unexpected and woefully irrelevant, sounding more like a 2014 evangelical youth pastor than anything else.
The frenetic nature of the text is mystifying; it’s written in the style of those professors who imagine themselves to be rockstars, unaware that they are frumpy, middle-aged, and a bit of a joke. That’s not a dig at Morton as an individual—those were my favorite professors. It is, however, an accurate summary of the kinds of digressions that populate the book, as the author attempts to unify almost every hot-button issue—from COVID vaccines to fascism to AI—until it all slips out of their control.
Like many “grand re-envisionings” of sensitive topics, “Hell feels limited by its preoccupation with cultural artifacts in lieu of their origin. Morton includes every one of their pop culture interests, but they rarely seem to enrich the conversation. To be frank, they often feel more like gestures towards relevance—“I know who Lil Nas X is. That’s cool, right?” Moreover, this book repeatedly circles around Trump, QAnon, and BLM, but their inclusion feels anachronistic and almost purely cosmetic. The alt-right icons simply feel unproductive, but the use of racial issues seems downright irresponsible. When Morton attempts to connect racism to speciesism, it rings disingenuous and reeks of the privilege of analysis without experience, and they are just as flippant in their use of sexual politics. As a whole, the author’s positionality often feels artificial—condemning white patriarchal structures without fully recognizing how much they enable this style of scholarship.
Ultimately, Hell is a letdown because it feels like there’s a premise here that would be fruitful if it were used responsibly in a book with a much tighter edit. In its current form, though, it parodies its own ecological urgency by reducing the climate crisis to a kind of pop cultural debate on par with children arguing about whether Batman could beat Superman in a fight.
That sounds like a joke, but I’ve probably forgotten a few pages in Hell that cover that exact subject.
Appropriately, Timothy Morton’s Hell is an inflammatory hot mess of a book.
Drawing on Dante, Milton, and Blake, the book (ostensibly) envisions a healthier relationship to the biosphere by dressing it in second-hand Christian and Buddhist iconography. It’s an exciting approach to a critical issue, and I found Morton’s reimagining of the divine both fun and interesting, as well as how they use it to critique “scientism” as its own form of religiosity. Or, as they put it, how they call for “a post-deist, that is to say, post-Enlightenment, indeed Blakean-Romantic, totally un-Hegelian fusion of Christianity and science, the complete opposite of intelligent design: the Stupid Accident theory.”
Based on that sentence alone, you probably have a pretty good idea of what Hell is like, and it's also where my appreciation ends.
This book is absolutely chaotic, proudly embodying a kind of squirrelly energy that will either entice or estrange readers. As an example, there’s a section in which Morton interrogates the etymology of abba as a name for god before suddenly saying our new name for the divine is social media. It’s a pivot that feels laughably unexpected and woefully irrelevant, sounding more like a 2014 evangelical youth pastor than anything else.
The frenetic nature of the text is mystifying; it’s written in the style of those professors who imagine themselves to be rockstars, unaware that they are frumpy, middle-aged, and a bit of a joke. That’s not a dig at Morton as an individual—those were my favorite professors. It is, however, an accurate summary of the kinds of digressions that populate the book, as the author attempts to unify almost every hot-button issue—from COVID vaccines to fascism to AI—until it all slips out of their control.
Like many “grand re-envisionings” of sensitive topics, “Hell feels limited by its preoccupation with cultural artifacts in lieu of their origin. Morton includes every one of their pop culture interests, but they rarely seem to enrich the conversation. To be frank, they often feel more like gestures towards relevance—“I know who Lil Nas X is. That’s cool, right?” Moreover, this book repeatedly circles around Trump, QAnon, and BLM, but their inclusion feels anachronistic and almost purely cosmetic. The alt-right icons simply feel unproductive, but the use of racial issues seems downright irresponsible. When Morton attempts to connect racism to speciesism, it rings disingenuous and reeks of the privilege of analysis without experience, and they are just as flippant in their use of sexual politics. As a whole, the author’s positionality often feels artificial—condemning white patriarchal structures without fully recognizing how much they enable this style of scholarship.
Ultimately, Hell is a letdown because it feels like there’s a premise here that would be fruitful if it were used responsibly in a book with a much tighter edit. In its current form, though, it parodies its own ecological urgency by reducing the climate crisis to a kind of pop cultural debate on par with children arguing about whether Batman could beat Superman in a fight.
That sounds like a joke, but I’ve probably forgotten a few pages in Hell that cover that exact subject.