reneedecoskey's reviews
318 reviews

Oh hey. My head hurt a lot last night and I couldn’t deal with screens so I finished Sex Cult Nun by Faith Jones instead.

The title is a little more salacious than the book actually is, first of all. But it’s still really messed up because… religious cults.

In this memoir, Faith Jones tells the story of her upbringing as a member of the Children of God and how nothing seemed weird to her because she was born into it and sheltered from the outside world. Also, her paternal grandfather was the founder and prophet (because there’s always a prophet).

She ends up visiting her “Systemite” grandparents (her mother’s birth family who aren’t in the CoG) and finds herself out The Family (the cult) for a while. She gets to go to normal school and read books and she loves it.

The little taste of education eventually leads her to question what she thought she knew and recognize the abuse she’d been receiving. She eventually breaks away, but it’s not easy. And that education separates her from her whole community.

This book has a ton of trigger/content warnings given the nature of it. SA, r-pe, death of a pet, child abu-e (trying to avoid words that will catch me in filters here). But it’s also really interesting to see that cult mentality and how they keep people. It also makes you so angry at religious hypocrisy. I mean, if you weren’t already.

If you liked Educated by Tara Westover, you will probably like this too.

4.5/5

Finished the audiobook of We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie over the weekend. It’s more like an audio-essay, maybe. I listened in one sitting.

I loved it. It’s a few years old now so a lot of its lessons are, at least I think, a bit less revolutionary than they maybe once were. But they’re important ones and ones that people still need to hear. Everyone should read this, especially the people who think they don’t need to.

One thing I would like to see is an update with a little more intersectionality, especially as it pertains to the LGBTQIA+ community, because the author’s definition of women is pretty narrow. But for a lot of people who consider themselves feminists (and we all should!), that definition has expanded quite a bit in recent years.

4/5

Finished Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe last night. I started it a month ago and then went into a reading slump, but it was a good book.

It’s the story of Okonkwo, his wives, children, and clan before the British colonized Nigeria. Most of the book establishes how Nigerians lived in their villages and what their customs were.

The back third of the book sees the white men from England bringing Christianity to Nigeria on behalf of their queen, and the fallout that ensues.

It’s the first book in a trilogy, published in the 1950s, but the best known.

This isn’t the first book I’ve read about the white men coming into Africa, but it offers a strong back story and another perspective about the damage that was done.

4/5

Finally finished a book for the first time in almost a month. Very unlike me, but whatever. In December, I got really into this podcast called Normal Gossip, which is quite funny. That led me to deuxmoi, where I feel very old because I don’t know who current celebrities are anymore. There were lots of pictures of her book (this book), though. There was one copy left at B&N and I had FOMO (do people still say that?).

It’s a fiction book based loosely on the true story of how deuxmoi took Instagram by storm. It’s great if you’re a 20-something and know a lot about celebrity gossip. I am 40 and clueless, but the book didn’t ask me to think too much, so that was fine for right now. Sort of like the Devil Wears Prada meets season 1 of SATC. 3/5.

The language and writing are beautiful and artistic. Although I enjoyed listening to the narrator read the audiobook, I almost wish that I had a physical copy because sometimes I would start savoring the prose -- the descriptions and the atmosphere -- and I'd lose track of the story itself (especially because it's non-linear, jumping from present day, back to the 70s when August is a girl, over to her childhood in Tennessee, and back again). I think I would have appreciated it more being able to linger a bit more over those passages if I could stop and think about them while re-reading or flipping back to other passages, as well. 

The story itself is primarily a flashback, told after August sees her old childhood friend on the train. And then it's part coming-of-age tale, part exploration of family (both in the truest sense of the word as well as "found" family), and part cautionary tale. August and her girls grow up in Brooklyn where they walk up and down the streets, arms linked, bumping their way through life together. They are always together and rely on each other for everything. When their families of origin don't quite measure up, the girls are their own family unit. But there is an incident that changes all of that, and it has to do with the other Brooklyn. The other Brooklyn is a dark place full of drugs, boys and men with groping hands, expectations of their maturing bodies, missing mothers, disappointing fathers, clashing cultures, etc. They navigate all of it together before it ultimately breaks them apart, sending them on different paths. 

There were parts of this book that I adored and parts of this book that made me really angry. It seems fitting that I'm having a hard time saying whether I have more positive or negative feelings about a book that examines life's nuances and demonstrates that so few things are truly binary. Life isn't black and white, but a whole spectrum of grays. 

The parts that I liked the most were the parts that explored identity. Identity really seemed to fuel this book. Evelyn needed to shake her born identity as Evelyn Herrara, Spanish-speaking Cuban American and resident of Hell's Kitchen. She embraced opportunism and never apologized for it in order to assume a new identity: Evelyn Hugo, English-speaking Hollywood starlet. Before the term bisexual is even used, she identifies as someone who loves men AND loves a woman. 

Likewise, Monique, the obscure writer Evelyn chooses to write her biography, is half black and half white but never feels enough of either. Identity gets lost in being not enough of anything -- or feeling that way. 

Something that really bothered me, though, was that Evelyn says she's going to tell her story now because everyone is gone. They're all dead. But the story that she tells Monique to include in her book ultimately ends up revealing very private and sensitive information about other people -- people she loved, people she hated, people she once loved, etc. They may have been part of her story, but THEIR stories weren't hers to tell. Perhaps that's the nature of Evelyn's character. She's unapologetic, but it still felt like some of those details -- particularly what she ultimately has to reveal to Monique about why she was chosen to hear Evelyn's story -- were part of someone else's story, and that maybe they never wanted the public to know. Some of the characters spent their whole lives hiding who they were. That they're dead now and it "doesn't matter" doesn't seem to excuse it. Especially because she outs people who were very close to her. 

The character I liked the most was Harry Cameron. I loved his friendship with Evelyn and how, no matter what, they looked out for each other. They were each other's family and constants. I loved how they made their family official, and I loved them with Connor. Once again, because this book explores complicated feelings and complex people, I loved everything about Harry except for when we found out about his death and how it happened. It was the most unlikeable thing about him but it was a huge thing, and that action from the past had major implications for someone in the present who never even knew Harry. 

There were many things to admire about Evelyn, and there were many things that I didn't like at all. But I think that's exactly the point the book wants to make. No one is completely this or wholly that. Everyone is a mixture of things. Some good and some bad. 

That said, I will say that I didn't love the character of Celia St. James. Or rather, the character didn't bother me so much as her relationship with Evelyn. I didn't find anything about it romantic. It felt toxic to me. Evelyn would work hard for them to be together and protect their privacy (and protect them in general with the world was even less accepting of LGBTQIA+ communities), but Celia just seemed like she was never going to be happy. Short of Evelyn giving up her dreams to do everything the way Celia wanted it to be done, Evelyn was never going to win. Not really. Celia was insecure and selfish. Evelyn was selfish too, but I didn't feel like it was to the same extent as Celia. 

I did enjoy the book and read it in giant chunks at a time. But it also gave me a lot to think about in terms of identity, binaries, women's rights, and how our own personal moral and ethical codes are formed. This is my third TJR book and it's probably the one that made me think most about the book's illuminating aspects rather than just the story itself. 

You can tell this book is inspired by Harry Potter and certain elements of Tolkien. The main character, El, is a junior at the Scholomance - a wizarding school. But this isn’t your fun happy place where The Boy Who Lived always saves the day. At this school, bad things exist at every turn, feeding on energy from the students — and sometimes feeding on the students themselves. It’s basically Darwinism for Wizards, except with a more current societal twist: it’s not just the strongest who survive; the ones who have the most privilege and are the best connected are typically the only ones who make it out of the graduation hall every year. The rest die trying. But that’s how the school is fed and that’s what keeps the bad things at bay. So it’s a bit of a problem when Orion Lake starts saving everyone.

I can’t explain the book very well because fantasy is not usually my genre, but I enjoyed this book and look forward to the other books in the series. Especially after the cliffhanger of an ending!

The Last Chance Library by Freya Sampson is a cozy love letter to libraries and the resources they provide in order to better the communities around them. 

You can probably guess from the title that the book is about saving a library in danger of closing down due to budget cuts. If you love books about books (including libraries, bookstores, etc.), this is for you. I loved it. 4.5/5. 

It's a love story (I guess?), which isn't really my genre at all, but I'm easily influenced by Instagram and 9/11 stories (the book begins on 9/11 when Lucy and Gabe meet at Columbia University). A few years later they meet again and enter into an intense relationship. For reasons I won't divulge here, it eventually ends. Lucy goes on to marry someone else, but she never forgets Gabe and Gabe never forgets her. If it sounds like every Hallmark or Lifetime movie, there's probably a reason for that. 

The narrative voice is Lucy recounting her and Gabe's entire story TO Gabe, and at the end you find out why. The book is mostly character-driven and not plot-driven, so if you like a lot of action moving the story forward, just know that this isn't that book. That said, it's quick-paced and highly readable. It's engaging and engrossing. 

There's a lot in this book that questions fate versus free will. I'm not a huge fan of the "one who got away" trope. I'm also not a fan of the "they're just with the wrong people and this is really a beautiful love story because it's destiny!" trope. The thing is that all of these "love" stories just seem so toxic to me. Someone is manipulative. Someone makes some kind of martyr-like sacrifice in the name of love. Someone else ends up as collateral damage. It makes me want to puke a little, but also... it's toxic and unhealthy and I have a hard time reading this type of book as anything but. Change the perspective of the story and it's another story entirely that can paint the sympathetic character in a very unsympathetic light. I feel like books like this set unrealistic expectations and even when their complications are realistic, everything gets tied up with a neat little bow, even when it really doesn't. A huge part of this book was left unresolved, at least for me. I suspect it's by design and we get to imagine what Lucy's husband does next. I wanted more of HIS story. 

Gabe as a character made me angry and frustrated with this book in the same way that the Stephen character in Carola Lovering's Tell Me Lies made me angry and frustrated with the book. And I'm the only person I know who's read that book and hated it, so take that for what you will when it comes to my criticisms here. 

I also found it a little bit too on-the-nose that Gabe makes a show of noting that Lucy --> Luce --> Luz, which is the Spanish word for Light. Then he keeps making a point to let it be known, even in really inappropriate circumstances, that Lucy is his light. Like... to the point where a volunteer at his gallery sees her and says something like "it's you! You're his light!" despite not even knowing her. ::Insert eleventy-billion eye-rolls here:: 

To be clear, I didn't think this book was bad, despite how it sounds. It's just a genre that I personally struggle with but try to read every now and then, especially because, like I said, I'm easily influenced by Bookstagram and 9/11 stories. I'd say that if you liked books like Me Before You by JoJo Moyes or One Day by David Nicholls, or even Tell Me Lies by Carola Lovering, you'd probably like this book. 3/5 for me.

Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty by Anderson Cooper and Katherine Howe is exactly what it sounds like. It starts with the Commodore and follows the family through until the last member of the dynasty, Cooper’s mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, died in 2019.

Some of the details about the Vanderbilts as New York elite during the gilded age are absolutely wild. Even more so than a young Anderson Cooper going to Studio 54 with his mom in the 70s. My favorite story was about a rather unfortunate looking girl who was desperate to social climb and marry rich, but since she wasn’t very attractive, her mother spent what would be $6.5 million in today’s money to throw a very lavish ball where she met a Vanderbilt (and later became one of the first women of the elite to publicly separate and divorce him before going on to support women’s suffrage in her old age). That wasn’t the best part of that party, though. It was a theme party and one of the guests came dressed as a cat. Her skirt was made of real cat tails. The bodice of her dress was made of SKINNED CAT HEADS 😳. Her hair was done around a headpiece, which was a real taxidermied cat. She wore a black ribbon around her neck with a bell and the word “puss” on it. The gilded age, man.

Some parts of it (like ones about yachts and horses) didn’t interest me that much, but the party details were pretty fantastic. I was also intrigued by the relationship (loose term) between Gloria Vanderbilt and Truman Capote… before and after he fell out of favor with everyone in NY because he was … well, he was a bitch. 

Anyway, back to the Vanderbilts. The epilogue was really interesting in that Cooper walks us around New York, telling us what famous landmarks now stand in the places where his wealthy family once lived, many of them forced out after losing all their money, which is apparently the Vanderbilt way.

Very interesting read if you’re interested in things like New York society, American dynasties, Edith Wharton’s New York, etc. Audiobook is good if you prefer to have this info presented in a way that sounds like Anderson Cooper is reporting just outside the scene (it’s sometimes distracting). 3.5/5.