shelfreflectionofficial's reviews
812 reviews

“My whole body thrums with fear. It tells me to run. It tells me that the hunter is here, and I am prey. I have always been prey.”


If you like books about dysfunctional families and lots of twists, this is the book for you!

This one is a wild ride where you’re never quite sure who is the hunter and who is the hunted. Every time I thought I had a piece right, Marshall switched it up!

It’s also an atmospheric story as it takes place at an isolated mountain mansion family property around Christmastime where there is of course, no cell reception. The characters stay in their own cabins on the property and the snow is its own element in ‘A Killing Cold.’



The main premise is this:

Theo and Connor are recently engaged (after having only met a few months ago) and headed to Connor’s wealthy and influential family’s property in the mountain woods of New York where Theo has a couple weeks to impress them and be accepted into their curated life.

“All I have to do is convince them that I love him, that I’m charming, that I’m not just interested in his money.”

“All I have to do is ignore the text on my phone… The text that arrived last week from a number I’ve never seen before. ‘Stay away from Connor Dalton.’”

Theo has her own secrets she’s been keeping from Connor— her name isn’t really Theo. And her parents aren’t really dead, but if Connor finds out the truth about them, he might leave her forever.

“The story isn’t about what happened in the attic. It’s about what happened after— what happens when I feel trapped. It is dangerous to corner a wild animal. Even a wounded one.”

There is also part of her childhood she knows must have been traumatic because she barely has any memories of that time and most of them come in the form of nightmares with an ‘antler man’ and running away.

“I’ve never minded blood. It’s a trail to follow, back through my memories.”

The mysteries and secrets pile up as she meets the various family members and learn of their vices and their tragedies, including the mysterious death of Connor’s charming father and the desolate cabin that is no longer used or talked about.

Even as Theo confronts the reality that someone is trying to keep her away from Connor, she’s also discovering that parts of the family property are familiar. Snippets from her memories come back and she realizes the chilling fact: She’s been here before.

“I thought all of this was a coincidence, too wild to be true. But what if it wasn’t? What if I didn’t stumble my way here? What if I was led?”



I will say that if abuse is a trigger for you, you may want to pass on this one as it depicts both adult and child abuse.

I will mention here that it was really hard to read about what happened to Theo with her adoptive parents, especially when the parents attempted to justify their heinous behavior and parenting with what I’m assuming Marshall is portraying as a Christian Bible.

“Holy words wound their way through it, but it was pure punishment. It was like something had been set on fire in Beth’s soul and decades of being a demure and submissive wife became nothing but kindling for her rage.”

She never identifies what religion they claim to be; there are elements of their beliefs surrounding gender and sex that are associated with Christianity but it’s clear that if the Bible is their ‘foundation’ they’ve discarded and twisted most of it because there is nothing biblical about what they said and did to Theo.

It’s hard to read about child abuse but it’s even harder to read it knowing someone had the words of life but were blinded by evil and instead offered only pain, violence, and a wrong theology about sin that not only hurt that child physically but emotionally, spiritually, and in every sense of identity and security.

“I’m a devil-child; my parents are alive, they just don’t want me.”

“Who am I? Maybe I’m no one. Maybe I didn’t come from anywhere at all. Maybe there’s nothing inside me except all the little pieces I’ve collected from the people I’ve wanted to love.”



There were some reviewers who thought the plot was tired and relied too much on fate. I guess I haven’t read a lot that are similar to this one— probably the most similar would be The Family Bones, The Alone Time, or The Fury but even those have their own thing— so it didn’t feel overdone.

There was perhaps an element of fate but truly so many stories require that because ultimately stories set out to answer the question ‘what if’ such and such happened, not ‘here’s how this could legitimately happen’ so for the most part I take no issue with that either.

However, when she unlocked the phone after only a few tries by using the mother’s birth date I was like— nope, no one uses that and even if they did, how would she know this lady’s birth date? She wouldn’t.


A couple times I was nervous that the author was playing up the main character’s recklessness or the mystery of what she did in her past too much so that the culmination of everything was going to be explained in a stupid or stereotypical way or just be not a big deal in general. I’m pleased that Marshall didn’t do that. The direction she took was disturbing and tragic but was a better way to tell the story than how many other authors opt to do.



Recommendation

This story is a pretty tangled web of secrets and is definitely a thrill ride. I found it all very compelling, however there was some content in it that I usually avoid and may be something that would keep certain readers from picking it up, including a decent amount of swearing and a few brief, but graphic sexual encounters.

The reviews are a bit mixed on this one and several mentioned they loved her book What Lies in the Woods better (which had also been on my to-read list) so I might still give that one a shot. I liked the complexity and unpredictability of her book but am still deciding if it’s worth wading through some of the other stuff or not.


[Content Advisory: 41 f-words, 18 s-words; some brief but graphic sexual encounters, a couple prominent characters are LGBTQ; some gore; adult and child abuse; miscarriage]

[4 stars: Would normally give it 3 stars because I didn't love it, but I think it did what it was supposed to do and I'm not a teenage girl sooo]


I pretty much just read this because it fit what I needed for my reading challenge— it’s not one that would normally draw my attention.

It’s a book written for teens and it definitely reads as such. Even the size of the book lends to that audience. It’s a smaller, square-ish book and is easily read in a day or two.

There’s nothing too complicated about the book, it’s a pretty straightforward ‘origin story’ for Snow White’s evil stepmother— how did she become so evil that she would try to kill the daughter of her beloved late husband?

Since the book is so short, there’s really not a lot of space to go into deep character development or to dredge up all the mysteries of the Queen’s childhood.

If you are a Disney fanatic, then you’ll probably enjoy this book and spending time in Snow White’s story.

I like watching Disney movies, but the Disney princesses aren’t really something I get excited about. I was interested to see how Valentino would shape the origins of the evil Queen and I think she did a decent job.

But overall the book was pretty mediocre for my tastes. The last part of the book is basically a description of the well-known Snow White story/movie so this book is not a complete original story.

The theme of the book comes as no surprise— beauty and vanity. I was hoping for some creativity but Valentino went with the obvious. It’s the concept of the story, but it just feels a bit shallow and uninteresting to me.

I agree with some other reviewers that only calling her the Queen and not using her given name doesn’t help to humanize her, which I believe all villain origin stories attempt to do. Which is also why I’m not a big fan of them. There’s never an excuse to be evil and any attempt to justify evil is a big pass for me. Sure, we can be sympathetic to their tragic childhoods and lament that they weren’t loved like they should have been, but there’s a thing called resilience and turning evil is not the only path. I prefer hero stories and those who rise above their circumstances to help others, not hurt others, so sue me.

Awhile back I had started the Once Upon a Time TV show (still haven’t finished it yet) and I did enjoy how they brought the fairy tales to life and gave some backstories to the characters and connected them all together. Obviously they had more to work with then a couple hundred page young adult book, but for me, I’d rather watch that then read this entire series.

This is Valentino’s first book and the first in a series of (currently) 12 books, each with a different Disney villain.

I think this would probably be a great series for a teenager to read. If it weren’t for the dark magic and the bloody heart I would say the audience for this book could even be younger than teens because of the writing.

Either way, I’m not sure there will be very many adults who desire to spend their time on it.


[Content Advisory: No swearing or sexual content; does have dark magic]

“Deceiving the Nazis was one thing, deceiving her husband was quite another.”


I was intrigued by the subtitle indicating this being the story of the ‘real’ Miss Moneypenny, the character in Ian Fleming’s James Bond books.

It was just an okay book.

I think the ‘true story’ aspect of the story is what saved it. Without it, it would have been a pretty boring and anti-climactic book because it doesn’t necessarily focus on any one plot/conflict as much as just the lives of the two women written about: Paddy and Friedl.

For a WWII novel, it seems to diverge quite a bit in the feel of the story compared to most of the other WWII books I’ve read.

When you read a WWII novel you usually confront the atrocities of the war, the starvation, the rations, the hardship, the violence, the loss of loved ones, the evil of the enemy. They’re usually visceral and/or heartbreaking. You usually read about the acts of courage and bravery in the face of danger and at great personal cost.

This book felt pretty removed from the war. It felt almost luxurious and high class. Thinking back, I’m not sure there was ever really a death talked about except a passing mention in the Epilogue.



Christine Wells wrote this book to follow the lives of two women who worked in/with British Intelligence: Victoire “Paddy” Bennett, who is the likely inspiration for Miss Moneypenny, and Friedl Stottinger, an Austrian double agent.

I’m assuming most people who are big Ian Fleming fans already know that during WWII he served in the Royal Navy’s Intelligence Division in London where he helped with covert spy operations. I wasn’t aware of that so it was interesting to see what he did for a living before he wrote the James Bond novels. It gives a lot more context and curiosity to what potentially inspired those Bond stories.

Paddy worked as his secretary and was privy to a lot of the spy operations and intel. She even participated in one of Fleming’s major operations called Operation Mincemeat. In this operation they took a dead civilian body, dressed him as a Naval officer, planted false military information on him, and left him off the coast of Spain to be discovered and hopefully get that information passed along as legitimate to deceive the Germans as to where their troops were planning to attack around the Sicily area.

I had heard of this operation and I can’t for the life of me figure out where— was it another historical fiction book? Did I watch the movie (2021)? I don’t know. So it wasn’t as fantastical or shocking to me since I already knew about it, but for those who haven’t I can see how that would be a really interesting story to learn about.



I feel like the book summary is a bit misleading when it says,

“Soon, the lives of these two extraordinarily brave women will collide, as each travels down a road of deception and danger leading to one of the greatest battles of World War II.”

Their lives don’t really collide until the very end and though collide is literally accurate, it feels very brief and largely inconsequential. Only Friedl experiences a bit of danger (toward the end of the book) but again, it’s mostly just an interrogation that doesn’t last very long. They both are entangled in deception and that’s where I think the bulk of the storyline rests.

‘Leading to one of the greatest battles’ seems to imply that we are going to encounter this great battle and read about it happening. Nope. They ‘launch’ their operation and then they go about their daily lives until they get word about how it all ended up.

Most of the book feels like a recounting of a night at a club after another. Lots of elite parties. They do their office jobs and then they go out with their friends to eat and dance and they may be ‘gathering intel’ but it’s not high stakes in London. Sure, there are air raids, but you don’t ever really feel like they are in danger. If there is rationing happening and food scarcity, you would never know it. If there is a shortage of proper clothing and household necessities, they never encountered it.

If that’s really what life was like for them, then that’s how the author has to write it. I mean I’m glad not everyone was in dire straits during the war and I do want the the truth about what it was like for them, but in terms of a good, compelling, engaging story that grabs your attention and keeps you reading and invested, I don’t think it really did that. Sure they made some ‘tough’ choices but it never really felt that tough.


I would read it more like a biography than historical fiction. It was just…. lightweight… for a WWII novel.

In the huge swath of WWII literature, I’m not sure this makes much of a mark other than a James Bond-fan read to get some background on Ian Fleming’s life. Granted, I’m not even that and though I’ve seen some of the Bond movies, I could not tell you anything about Miss Moneypenny. So maybe I shouldn’t have been intrigued by this book after all— what am I doing here? Haha!



There were also a couple other things that seemed played up. Considering these were two of the major events in the book, it seems fine to critique them.

One of Friedl’s tensest scenes involves a negative of an important photograph. She goes to great lengths to obtain it and secrete it away as an ‘insurance policy’ of sorts? There is a lot of hubbub around it. But it’s not even clear that this negative poses any real sort of risk to the mission. It was supposed to be destroyed as precautionary but just because it wasn’t destroyed didn’t mean anything. Who even knew about it? For one of the main ‘big’ things in the storyline, it felt pretty minor.

The other major encounters is when Paddy, who is recently pregnant, is hit over the head with a cosh. When she comes to she is very alarmed about the baby and they talk about taking her to the hospital for a few days and how she got a fever— which I guess could be a result of a concussion— but then Paddy’s thought is “by some miracle they had kept the baby safe” and I was like… you got hit in the head and you fell down, I don’t think the baby was ever in any real danger? It just felt like an exaggeration in an effort to create some danger or tension but felt fairly minor.



I also want to mention a British term that I hadn’t come across yet:

Friends often called each other ‘old thing’ which just made me laugh a little because it just doesn’t sound like an endearing term even though it was supposed to be. Do people still use this term in Britain?



Recommendation

Unless you’re really interested in Ian Fleming or Operation Mincemeat, I’m not sure this is the WWII book you want to read. 

Or I guess if most WWII novels are too intense for you and you’d like the WWII setting without all the violence, danger, and heartbreak, this would be a good option. 

But otherwise I think this book is pretty anticlimactic and boring. It is interesting to read the true story aspect of it, but that might be all it has going for it. 

It wasn’t terrible to read while I was reading it, but by the time I finished it I was like- that’s it? Not much really happened I guess…

“God cares much more about how we eat than he cares about what we eat.”

“A thousand years ago, most of the human lifetime was taken up with the business of getting enough food and cooking it. This is still the case in some areas of the world… We have different challenges to face. Our challenges have to do with decisions, with images, with self-control, with generosity, and with resources. In a word, ours are the challenges of stewardship.”


This is a must-read!

It was written in 2020 but still feels very applicable to the ‘food climate’ today and does a lot to look at how perception of and interaction with food has become complicated— broken. Tilly restores these perceptions and interactions, offering a balanced look at the ‘food pitfalls’ we all find ourselves in and how Jesus speaks into them.

I borrowed this book from a friend, and I have to admit, it sat on my shelf for awhile because the whole ‘make your own sourdough bread’ craze is alive and well around me and in my memory, that was what was on the cover of this book; I thought I knew what the book was going to be about. I am not about to start making my own bread and growing my own garden. I think that’s awesome for a lot of my friends and I often reap the benefits of their endeavors, but that’s not what preparing food looks like for me. I didn’t want to read a book that tried to convince me that that was the most biblical way to feed my family.

Turns out, I shouldn’t have avoided this book for so long! And look, it’s not even a perfect sourdough loaf on the cover!



I also need to admit that once I realized she wasn’t going to make me feed a little yeast monster, I did have some moments of self-righteousness— ‘At least I’m not like those people!’, ‘At least I’m not doing that!’, ‘Oh good, I’m doing the “right” thing!’ (I have always been a person who intentionally avoids trends so dieting or food trends have never been my jam) but then I’d get to the next chapter and get my own dose of conviction and recognition of a different food-related sin that I DO need to own.

That’s what I mean by balanced. No one gets a free ride in this book. Which is important because there has been a lot of judgment towards others regarding their food preparation and food eating habits or practices. I see it everywhere, and I confess I am part of it— maybe not online or to someone’s face, but I feel it in my heart.

Why do we judge? She quotes from this article from The Atlantic:

“You are not merely disputing facts, you are putting your wild gamble to avoid death against someone else’s. You are poking at their life raft. But if their diet proves to be the One True Diet, yours must not be. If they are right, you are wrong. This is why diet culture seems so religious. People adhere to a dietary faith in the hope they will be saved.” - Michelle Allison

Michelle’s talking about diets specifically, but the principle applies more broadly. We need food to survive. Food affects a lot of things in our bodies and lives. Even if we don’t necessarily want to be super healthy, most of us at least don’t want to be stupid or harming ourselves with what we eat. To make ourselves feel better about our own choices and confident that we’re not stupidly hurting ourselves or our families, we make judgments about other people’s choices to elevate our own choices. Because whether consciously or subconsciously, we’ve put our hope in what we eat.

Tilly says,

“Food is complicated for so many good reasons. It’s complicated by our sin and by our bodily afflictions in a fallen world. It is complicated by scarcity, and it is complicated by plenty. It is complicated by social pressure and pride. It’s complicated by economic forces. It’s complicated by the fact that even though Jesus and Paul tell us that we aren’t contaminated by what goes into the body but by what comes out of it, our default approach to physical things is to assume that the stricter the rule, the holier the person.”



The first part of her book she describes the four major food sins or ‘poles’ that can be seen as two spectrums:

Asceticism vs Gluttony

Asceticism: “too proud to enjoy the enjoyable”

Gluttony: “we cannot be satisfied” (not just overeating)

and

Snobbery vs Apathy

Snobbery: “consumed with being on the right side of food history… acted out mostly in front of others on social media or over the supper table”

Apathy: “refuses to find objective fault with McDonald’s McRib sandwich and is too lazy to learn how to cook”


I was able to peg myself on one of these, and you may too, but even if you can’t at first glance, once you hear her explanations and descriptions of how these sins affect the way we eat, you may be surprised that what you’re doing puts you in one of these camps.



The push of this book is not to argue for a specific diet or food preparation method. It’s to help us understand that what we eat is not the ultimate thing. It’s our heart and our treatment of others while we’re eating that matters.

One of the passages she references is 1 Corinthians 10 including these verses:

“‘All things are lawful,’ but not all things are helpful. ‘All things are lawful,’ but not all things build up. Let no one seek his own good, but the good of his neighbor… So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God”

Part of the brokenness food has caused is brokenness of fellowship. Our diets or food restrictions often keep us from being with others. The way we eat often keeps us focused on ourselves instead of serving others. It may isolate us or prevent us from creating a welcoming environment where all can come and eat and build relationship.

“Food can be a means to love people. Food can purchase an audience to talk about the things that matter to both of you.”

“When we use hospitality as an aid and a vehicle for intimacy and truth and worship, we are using it as it was intended to be used, and as I think it will be used in the new heavens and new earth.”

Part of the brokenness food has caused is also a failure to believe that God is enough or that he will provide. It’s a shifting of priorities; we want to be a specific weight or we end up not enjoying God’s gift of food. The way we eat consumes us and becomes an idol. If we’re talking more about what we eat or don’t eat more than we are talking about Who actually brings salvation, we have created an idol.

“Idolatry isn’t a bowing down response to imaginary problems; it’s a bowing response to very real problems. In fact, our problems are the most real thing about idolatry— it’s the solution that is illusion.”



Tilly addresses a lot of things surrounding food including: dieting, eating disorders (which she experienced personally), allergies, fasting, learning to cook, alcohol, and the idealism of international cuisine.

I thought she handled all of these potentially controversial topics really well and really did change the way I look at the ‘problem’ of food in many areas.



What Stuck Out to Me

I love the title— Broken Bread. Tilly reminds us how Jesus called himself the Bread of Life. And on the night when he was arrested he ate the Last Supper with his disciples and told them as he tore the bread, ‘This is my body, broken for you.’

The title has a double meaning. Jesus is the broken bread, broken for us so that we could be free from the slavery of our sin. Yet here we are, a couple thousand years later, broken, living according to our fleshly desires surrounding food that’s keeping us from breaking bread with others. A very good reminder of the broken bread we should be filling ourselves with.



To really experience the joy of eating and tasting and enjoying the gifts of God in food and taste, she suggests every once in awhile hosting a nice dinner party with friends and going all out with it— a shadow of the feast that is to come in the new heavens. I love a good party so this feels a little inspiring to try to make something like this happen— a way to bless others with a nice meal.



When we only had one kid, we would often have our dinners in the living room watching TV. We would pull our daughter’s high chair next to the couch and we would eat while we watched. But we realized that sitting at a table was an important practice that had a lot of benefits. We quickly switched to eat almost all of our dinners as a family, without the TV on (with the exception of Sunday pizza nights). Tilly affirms the value of this and I liked how she described this practice:

“You’re providing a meeting place where the good things about a family can be practiced and enjoyed. You’re putting in a scaffolding, a structure around which much more can be built, with potential for bodily, cultural, relational, and spiritual benefit.”

We also are adding in some new habits around the dinner table from the book Habits of the Household by Justin Whitmel Earley (that we’re still reading).



I may not struggle with dieting or food trends, but I have a real struggle with the dailiness of eating. I have to make my family dinner every night for the rest of my life?! That’s a lot of days. I often feel the weight of that or lament the work it takes to prepare a meal with no real appreciation for all my time in the kitchen.

It was convicting when Tilly said, “In some ways, the attitude with which you engage yourself in the menial is the truest measurement of your joy.” She talks about how it’s easy to feel joy in the extreme highs and lows because we are signaled that we should, but it’s harder in the day-to-day steady times to see joy. I think as a mom, that’s the hardest area to find the joy— the menial.



When I was part of a Christian mom’s group, there were social activities scheduled every month and I grew uncomfortable with the amount of remarks made about wine. Almost every event included wine; there were lots of comments at our regular meetings about just getting to the end of the day when they could have a glass of wine.

I really appreciated Tilly’s comments about this ‘I need wine’ mom culture that is so often joked about in Christian women groups.

“The problem is that these jokes are a form of exhortation. What they communicate, essentially, is this: ‘The Holy Spirit is not sufficient for you. What you need is wine.’”

“If we lean into alcohol or coarse jokes about alcohol, we miss opportunities to exhort one another in ways that actually help.”

Tilly does not abstain from drinking (though I do) but she has a really biblical understanding of what that freedom to drink alcohol should look like and how we steward that freedom around others.



At the heart of our preoccupation with food is that we have desires that need to be filled and we so often look to fill those in the wrong place.

“The thing is, your heart is a pursuing heart. It’s running after something at all times; you are full of longings. So which lesser longings are you allowing to dim your longing for God?”

“Your attempts to rein in the chocolate habit—even in the name of Spirit-borne self-control—may be successful, but they’ll only allow you to exchange idols for idols until your heart is in pursuit of the thing it was made to pursue.”



What Was Missing

There was one thing that I wish she would have addressed that she didn’t. My biggest battle surrounding food is something that was not in this book: my four kids. I have always had major struggles with getting my kids to eat their food. I’m sure I messed up my early parenting in some ways that caused this, but regardless, the problem with enjoying my food, or with caring about learning how to cook new things, or just taking the time to make a meal in general is that so often it gets complained about and ends up getting thrown away.

I’m not super motivated to make meals if they won’t eat them. It becomes more of a chore and not super pleasurable when kids are crying because they’re hungry and they don’t like the food.

I would have liked to hear her thoughts on handling that. I have not created an environment where my kids are used to getting special treatment, separate meals than the family, or a steady diet of chicken nuggets and mac and cheese. Yet I’m also not making them eat olives and mushrooms or spicy or slimy food.

How do I appreciate food and its preparation under these circumstances? How do I let go of the waste just to present them with the labored over food?

I had to laugh when she said: “Find ways of cooking things for the whole family that promote wellness and enjoyment. Stumped? Start with beans. Find out ways to cook beans in ways you all enjoy…”

Beans?! I’m doomed. I will eat green beans and baked beans and chili beans if they’re blended up first and then added to the chili, but beans are something I have a really big mental and taste block with. What’s the second option?!



Read as a Group

At the end of each chapter was a ‘Food for Thought’ section that offered a few discussion questions, some practice suggestions to put things into action, and then a couple other related books to read.

I think this book would be a great book to read and discuss in a group to share your different experiences with food and help each other keep our ‘food sin tendencies’ in check, and find ways to use food to serve others, perhaps even together.

A couple books she quoted from that I’ve read and enjoyed- The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis and Eve in Exile by Rebekah Merkle.

I’m not sure how many of the other books I will read because I’m not a culinary enthusiast, but a couple that seemed at the top of the list she would recommend would be The Supper of the Lamb by Robert Capon and John Pipers book, A Hunger for God.



Recommendation

This is a very important book to help you see how you can ENJOY food and how you can use food to bring people together because what we eat is not as important as how we eat.

I recommend this book for all people, whether you think you struggle with food or not. It’s for sure for people who find themselves consumed with diets or trends or who eat indiscriminately to no end, but it’s also for the people who cast judgments on other people’s practices. The principles Tilly discusses run deep and will inform even more than just food in your life.

There is freedom and redemption in this book. But it’s a biblical freedom that promotes building up our neighbors and using food to the glory of God.

“For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery… For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another.” - Galatians 5:1, 13

“Every mother knows the reason Robert Frost took the road less traveled is because he wasn’t traveling with children who needed to go to the bathroom every thirty minutes.”


I was originally planning to read this for my ‘funny memoir’ reading challenge prompt— which it would 100 percent qualify for— but I decided to use it for ‘might make you cry’ because in between all the laughs, Melanie Shankle reminds me how precious it is to be a mom and that the years are indeed short and I can already feel them slipping by as my oldest is 8— the same age as Melanie’s Caroline (in this book) who, like my daughter, got her ears pierced on her 8th birthday.

This was such a fun, entertaining, and relatable book! I read it in only two days because I didn’t want to put it down. I was sad when it was over.

She has a great sense of humor and style of writing. I like the stream of consciousness and parenthetical asides way of telling stories— similar to Jenny Lawson’s book Broken (in the best possible way). I felt inspired reading this book because I’d love to write a funny memoir and Lawson and Shankle’s style is what I would want to do.

“Over the years, people began to tell me I should write a book. And I really wanted to. Except for the whole part that actually required me to sit down and write. But then I decided, how could eleven people and my dad be wrong?”

It was fun to be inspired, and I think I might be able to get the required eleven people. Time will tell.



I may not have the same perspective on alcohol as Melanie, or understand all the 80s-kid references, and for sure would never be mistaken for a fashionista, but I am also a shirt hoarder with many-a-shirts from high school still in my closet; I’ve definitely been told that my aviator sunglasses did not work with my face shape (I’m still sad about it); and I do feel many of her feelings in the marrow of my bones.

Like: dogs are not babies; baby wipe warmers are a trap; and I’ve contemplated how bad of a mother I would be if I let my baby sleep in her poop.



Melanie had first started a blog called Big Mama when her daughter, Caroline, was three years old. That was the catalyst that led to this book. She has since written a few more books (a friendship one and a marriage one among others), and her latest one is about parenting in the teenage years. She does a podcast with Sophie Hudson called Big Boo Cast. (Their blogs are Big Mama and Boo Mama). I listened to part of an episode out of curiosity and they both are very much from the South. It threw me off because I definitely didn’t read this book to myself in a southern accent but I feel like that does change the vibe of it if I had.


Here is Melanie’s perspective on motherhood:

“It will break your heart and make you laugh harder than you ever imagined. You find yourself alternating between feeling like your friends talked you into some sort of pyramid scheme so you could share in their misery and thinking this is the most fulfilling thing you’ve ever done in your life.”

She shares her heartache when she miscarried and she shares her struggles of being a working mom and wanting to stay home and how they ultimately came to that decision.

“From my perspective, I’m just thankful that if I’m going to spend my days with someone who ignores half of what I say and acts like she knows better than I do, it’s my daughter.”

I share her sentiments on epidurals. Whenever I felt pressured to do it naturally, I kept telling myself- You don’t have to be a hero!

“There are women who want to experience childbirth, but those are probably the same women who run marathons… my birth plan was a single sheet of paper with ‘EPIDURAL!!!!!’ scrawled in large letters with a Sharpie pen.”

I have googled enough symptoms to affirm her claim that “Google loves nothing more than a cancer diagnosis.”

I, too, have caught my daughter’s throw up. In my bare hands. Granted, I indirectly (or directly) caused the incident by forcing her to swallow the chicken nugget she’d been chewing for the last three hours. And sitting on the floor while pregnant does not offer a lot of escape options.

I truly understand what it’s like to have two weeks that “were filled with more meltdowns and drama than an episode of The Bachelor.”

Caroline told people at church, “I get so bored. I ask my mom to play with me, but all she does is sit on the couch. She’s real lazy.” I’ve also had to deal with that insecurity when my daughter asked me why I’m a “sitting down mom.”

And I would not put it past me to spend time on a soapbox that I would live to regret (because someone’s gotta do it): “I made a point about the whole thing just seeming like a ridiculous waste of time and money since I like to climb on the occasional soapbox concerning topics I think won’t ever apply to me.”



One thing I love about this book is that it’s not just funny stories and it’s not over-spiritualizing everything so that it’s a ‘Christian’ book. It’s an honest and sarcastic look at the ups and downs of motherhood while at times recognizing that God designed our lives to require caring for others because it grows us and teaches us things about him and about ourselves.

Melanie draws some good connections that are important reminders when we’re bogged down in the mess and the schedules and the meltdowns, that just as we are sacrificing for these little humans, Christ sacrificed for us. And this pure, impossible love we are filled with when we look at our babies is nothing compared to the Father’s love for us. He enables us to be the mothers we are and just as we prepare our children for the world and can picture who they will grow to be, so does God when we are in the exhausting trenches of motherhood. He is refining us and redeeming us.

“He sees us— really sees us— not just for who we are at any given moment, but for what we could be one day.”

“I realized this whole process was such a striking picture of how Christ works in us. He takes our disappointments, rejections, and hard times, and he makes something beautiful. He creates life and shows us what beauty looks like in places where we look and see nothing.”

“It’s those moments when I realize I have to extend grace to Caroline as she figures these things out by trial and error in the same way God lavishes me with mercy, even as I make the same mistakes over and over again.”

“I believe motherhood gives us the first true glimpse of how God loves us. The kind of love that’s irrevocable, unrelenting, unconditional. I think it’s the closest humans get to living out 1 Corinthians 13. Motherhood is a Holy Communion with Goldfish crackers and juice boxes.”



So I loved the stories and the humor, but I also loved how she brought me back to the wonder of being a mom. Her prayer for Caroline is what I desire for my kids. I’ll have to think of some sort of boy thing that’s bright and shiny instead of sparkly earrings, but yes, that they would reflect the light of Christ.

“Daniel 12:3 says that those who are wise will ‘shine like the brightness of the heavens, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars for ever and ever.’”


Recommendation

I definitely recommend this book. It’s really funny and relatable— at least for moms or those who desire to be. 

It’s an uplifting read that makes you both laugh make you cry those ‘they’re growing up too fast’ kind of tears. 

And it will remind you of the gravity and meaning of your role as a mom in the daily battles of lunches and clothes, bodily fluids, and wondering when birthday parties stop being the most important thing they ever do.

I’ll probably read another one of her books. I’m not sure my heart can handle the teenage years one yet, but maybe the marriage one would be okay for my life stage at the moment. 

“If you’re watching this, I’m dead. And others will be soon if you don’t act fast.”


Maldonado is an auto-read for me. I’ve really enjoyed this Daniela Vega series: A Killer’s Game took Dani into an undercover ultimate escape room style only one person gets out alive situation; A Forgotten Kill has Dani simultaneously chasing down a serial killer and getting to the bottom of her father’s murder.

A Killer’s Code brings back the man she went undercover with in book one (Gustavo Toro): as a hired assassin he kept an ‘insurance policy’ on those who hired him, a treasure trove of evidence and information the FBI would love to get their hands on. With his final days he sets up a ‘treasure hunt’ of sorts with clues and puzzles to lead the FBI to the stash in an effort to keep it safe from those who don’t want to be exposed. From New York to Las Vegas to Arizona’s Superstition Mountains, the hunt is on for the prize.

[Also, cool teeniest of shoutouts to Des Moines in the book!]


Like most of her books, this was a fast-paced read and full of action.

In this book you start to worry if the FBI will come through because Foley and his ‘boss’ seem to always be a step ahead of them on the hunt. They have a lot to lose if they can’t get to the evidence first.

Each of these books was released a year from each other. I think it would have been a lot better if I could have read them back to back instead of waiting a year. I did not realize this but apparently book one happened only a few weeks before A Killer’s Code. It’s crazy to think all that happened in such a short span of time! Probably a bit unrealistic, but I suppose this one couldn’t be too long after the first one considering its content. I wonder if she had had that planned from the beginning.

The long time in between had me struggling to remember some of the details. In my review for A Forgotten Kill I noted there was some groundwork laid for a possible romantic interest for Dani that could develop but I couldn’t remember if that was with Detective Flint of with SAC Wu. I wish I could have remembered what some of those details were because that was definitely a thread of A Killer’s Code and without knowing those details, some of it seemed a little out of nowhere.



There were a few things I was hoping for that didn’t come to fruition the way I would have liked. I was hoping Dani’s siblings would have played a larger role. I wonder if Maldonado will do a spinoff series following Axel’s career in the FBI with Dani as a side character.

I was also hoping Dani’s mother’s drawing was going to be an answer to one of the clues.

And I was hoping after we found out who the ‘boss’ was (which was about halfway) that there was still going to be another big reveal of a good guy who turns out to actually be a bad guy and doesn’t want the evidence to expose them.

Toro says in his video- “You’ll be surprised at some of the people you’ll be arresting.” So I wanted to be surprised when they arrested someone!

It was a little strange to know who the bad guy was for so long without another reveal.

I still loved the book, but just a few of my ‘I wish’ moments.



Historically speaking Maldonado has written trilogies. If that pattern holds true, then this series is over and we need to be on the look out for something new! I’m looking forward to seeing what she’s been working on.

She has written strong female characters in law enforcement jobs as that is Maldonado’s background. I wonder if she will explore a different type of character or scene in her next books.



Some other random comments:

Maldonado sent me down a rabbit trail looking at synesthesia which is really fascinating. Apparently if you have this, you have a pretty decent chance at becoming a professional artist or musician because so many of them do. I’m still trying to grasp what it would be like to taste colors or see sounds. So trippy.

I just picture Patel exactly like Aram Mojtabai from the Blacklist. They seem like they have very similar personalities so that’s who I imagined while reading this book.

Foley kept trying to stage murders like accidents and suicides but I had to chuckle because it never worked for longer than a couple minutes. It would have just been easier to shoot the person then exert all the energy and resources and time to pretend it wasn’t.



Recommendation

I would definitely recommend this book and the other books in the series! They are action-packed thrillers with likeable characters and a strong female lead.

There are no caveats. Maldonado is just a great author!



[Content Advisory: 10 f-words, 26 s-words, 1 b-words; no sexual content]

**Received an ARC via NetGalley**

“God made me a mother because he jealously and rightly desires praise for his own name, and this is how he saw fit to do it. God aims to glorify himself through my family, and we all get carried along by his grace.”

“God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that having all sufficiency in all things at all times, you may abound in every good work.” [2 Cor. 9:8]


I wanted to really love this book. The title spoke to a desire I’m currently feeling: I don’t want my busy and exhausting life to keep me from treasuring Jesus.

Do I feel like this book fulfilled that claim for me? Not particularly.

If you’re only going to read a couple books this year, I’m not sure I would convince you this should be one of them.

I really struggled processing this book and talked to several people to figure out where the disconnect was for me.

I wondered if I had just read too many parenting books recently that this one felt superfluous. I wondered if I was just getting distracted too often while reading so I was missing things I shouldn’t have. I wondered if I was just overthinking everything and trying to add prescriptions where there shouldn’t be.

I’m not sure if it was any, all, or none of those reasons, but I just felt frustrated with the lack of application in this book. There was a disconnect for me with taking what I was reading and how to put legs on it.



Gloria Furman has had a lot of challenges in her motherhood with her husband’s nerve disease and with their relocation to a new culture in the Middle East. She definitely has faced a lot and experienced how much she needed Jesus to endure these challenges.

I can tell from reading her book that she knows her Bible and she has a lot of wisdom. She can articulate the gospel well and knows the blessings and promises we have in Christ.

I can tell from her parenting examples that I can relate to many of them. I’ve felt the same feelings of anger, exhaustion, feeling overwhelmed, etc.

What frustrated me with this book was what I felt was the gap between these two things.

I know the feelings. I know the gospel. But how exactly does the gospel speak into this exact parenting moment. What should I be saying to myself or to my kids? What is the action? What does grace actually look like in this specific parenting moment?

In the heat of the moment when two of my kids are fighting for the millionth time about whether it’s dark outside, another one is singing karaoke in a microphone with the volume of an entire show choir, and the other one is asking me all the questions, not listening for the answers and then asking the questions again, and I’m stressed about making dinner and cleaning the house to host small group, I am yelling at all of them. I’m not sure I have the wherewithal in that moment to be calm and sing the praises of the Psalm. The arguments have to be dealt with, the things have to be done, the microphone has to be unplugged. I need to know how to get from the big feelings to the gospel when I’m maxed out. When my hands are full.

Maybe she explained this and I missed it. Maybe I’m asking for too many specifics.

I’m not sitting here wishing this book was a parenting hack, five step guide to perfect parenting. I’m not looking for a mom-hype book that misses the depth of reality.

I’m just trying to figure out how to treasure instead of be exasperated. I know about God’s grace. But at the same time grace often feels like an enigma. I have a hard to time knowing how to specifically apply it. Sometimes I think grace is misapplied or misused.

Maybe I just need to read a book specifically about grace? She did mention Jerry Bridges’ book called The Discipline of Grace. That may be something that would resonate more with me right now.



All that to say, there were a lot of things Furman said in her book that I liked.

She says there is “beauty and brilliance and God-given dignity to a mother’s work.” What we do is not pointless, meaningless, or common.

She says we should see our “mundane moments for what they really are— worship.” There are thousands of opportunities every day to worship God by doing what we are called to do. Every time we feed our children and discipline our children and teach them what is right and wrong is a moment of worship. When we sacrifice our time and our bodies for our children, it’s an act of worship.

She says, “Our joy cannot be wrapped up in motherhood but only in God… The gifts that God has given mothers cannot be contained or quantified by their children.” We can’t turn motherhood into an idol that defines who we are or gives us value. Of course being a mom gives us joy, but our joy has to go beyond that to One who gave us the gift of our children.

She says, “When I view motherhood not as a gift from God to make me holy but rather as a role with tasks that get in my way, I am missing out on one of God’s ordained means of spiritual growth in my life.” It’s easy to get into the routine of motherhood and see it as a checklist every day. But the purpose of motherhood is more than checking the boxes, it’s a way that God grows us and growth happens in the hard times, the dark times, the weak times.

She says, “I say things like ‘I really need the baby to take his nap this morning’ which is a fine thing to say and a fine thing to look forward to. But if, come lunchtime, the nap hasn’t happened, and I’m so emotionally wasted by it that it ruins my afternoon, then I’ve probably put more faith in that nap than in the never-changing circumstances of the gospel.” This was a convicting thought to me. I feel like I have put faith in a nap and that I’ve allowed bad days to get worse because I’ve let those feelings take over everything— when things didn’t go as planned I gave up the rest of the day to that attitude.

She says, “My children, although they probably can’t articulate it yet, are relieved that when I treasure Jesus, they are freed from the burden of being the center of my world. No child should have to shoulder the weight of her mother’s glory and reputation.” I see this happen to a lot of kids and know how important it is for parents to be secure in their life and identity in Christ rather than in their role of parent which often hinges so much on their child’s performance and obedience.

She says, “I need to own up to my weaknesses so that I can prize Christ’s power.” I need to stop doing everything in my own power and control but seek the Lord’s strength for every day.

She says, “The Bible describes motherhood as neither a diminishing of a woman’s personhood nor the sum of her personhood. Womanhood, ultimately, is about a different person altogether… the highest aim of womanhood is being conformed to the image of Christ.” We are not less than mothers but we are more than mothers and our ultimate purpose to worship God in all we do and become more like him every day.



The copy of the book I read was a re-release of this book which was originally published in 2014. This new edition includes study questions at the end of each chapter. I liked the questions and felt like they would inspire good discussion. They also offered a deeper reflection into other Scriptures which would add to a study to spend time in the Word.

As far as I am aware, that’s the only change in this edition.


Recommendation

This book is not a bust. A lot of women have read this book and felt like it spoke to them in life-changing ways.

There wasn’t really anything in the book that I thought was problematic. Although, I do agree with another reviewer who commented on Furman’s story about being frustrated about her washing machine and needing to repent about her reaction to it being a little over the top. I may have differing ideas about when frustration becomes a sin.

But, anyway, I’m not going to tell you not to read it.

If you’ve never read a book about motherhood and the gospel, then this may be more likely to resonate with you.

If you’ve read a lot of books like this, I’m not sure this one will stand out amongst the others.

I think for where I’m at right now, this just wasn’t the book for me. It’s quite possible I could revisit it another month, another year, and be more connected with what Furman is trying to say.




**Received a copy via Crossway in exchange for an honest review**

“I did what I do best: I made the problem go away.”


I’d been putting this one off for no apparent reason and I finally pushed myself to read it and I’m glad I did!

This was a good thriller, but would have been better with less swearing. I definitely figured out aspects of it but not everything. McCreight did a good job of putting out new evidence or suspects to think about that make you forget about your previous theories. There were a couple surprises!

This is one of those books that has a lot of elements in the writing to present different angles of the conflict where it could feel a bit jumbled.

My opinion of the book largely weighed on how the ending would go— can all these things work together? If the ending would have been unsatisfactory all of those extra elements would have felt distracting and cumbersome, but since I thought the ending went really well, those elements were pulled together in a way that made sense.



I agree with another reviewer that it would be better not to read the full Goodreads summary before reading the book. So here’s the basic plot:

Cleo, a college student, arrives home to find food burning in the oven, blood on the floor, and her mother missing without a trace. The pair had become estranged as Cleo felt her mom, Katrina— who was a corporate lawyer and ‘fixer’, was overbearing and controlling. As Cleo unravels the puzzle of her mother’s life and past, she realizes there was a reason for her mother’s ‘madness.’

“I never saw my mom as a full person separate from me. And now that she’s a person who’s missing, I may never have the chance.”

The book contains ‘present’ chapters from Cleo’s POV— titled by the number of hours her mom had been missing, ‘past’ chapters from Katrina’s POV— titled by the number of days before she disappeared, excerpts from court documents from a case her mother was working, text conversations between a couple unknown people, excerpts from therapy sessions Cleo went to, diary entries from Katrina’s childhood, and a few newspaper and Reddit articles.


The main characters aren’t particularly likeable, but McCreight puts a lot of effort into drawing you in and becoming invested in their story because of their strained relationship. You feel the burden of a mother trying to connect with her daughter, doing everything she can to help her daughter and wanting what’s best for her. You also feel Cleo’s teenage (aka ignorant) resistance to that control and her gradual realization that her mother does care for her and her flaws come from a place of pain that she didn’t know about.

You see where things went wrong and you really want Cleo to find her mom alive so they can become reconciled. As a mom, it’s one of my fears that my kids will grow up and make bad choices or not want to be around me or care what I think about anything so I tended to feel more empathy for Katrina.

I just don’t understand the whole ‘I don’t like how my mom treats me so I’m going to go do the worst things and deal drugs just to piss her off’ kind of thing. Why is this a good idea?! And if you know it’s not, why don’t you care?!

I was glad to see that Cleo wasn’t so stubborn that she would be completely oblivious to the truths she discovered. And even though she made a few questionable choices in her investigation, I’m glad she wasn’t so stupid as to completely leave the police out of everything.

“I try not to squirm under the weight of her stare, knowing I need to come clean. It’s not too late to start telling the actual truth for once in my whole stupid life.”



The title insinuates that the mother and daughter are the same in some way. Their differences are made clear from the start:

Katrina: “I was excellent at doing. I wasn’t so good at feeling.”

Cleo: “I love messy things. I am a messy thing. Messy and confused and irrational and overemotional. But at least I feel things. I feel everything.”

But as the story continues you realize they have some things in common.



This might be a bit of a spoiler: (view spoiler)


Last thing- unless I missed something, I would like to know how the money squabble ended. Did she ever get her money back? That probably should have been included in the Epilogue…



Recommendation

I did enjoy this thriller a lot and read it pretty quickly. Because of all the swearing, I’m not sure if I will read more of hers, but for some reason the swearing didn’t feel as jarring in this context as it has in others. I’m not sure why, but that’s just my initial reflection after reading it.

I always enjoy a thriller that I can’t completely figure out, at least right away.

If you can handle the swearing, I would definitely recommend. If you try to avoid swearing, then this may not be the right book for you, but I’ll let you decide. I’ve definitely read books worse than this in that department but everyone has their own convictions.




[Content Advisory: 65 f-words, 41 s-words, 8 b-words; rape; a couple very brief sex scenes]

**Received an ARC via NetGalley**

“She had been acting her entire life, which meant she was the best liar that she knew. Well, second best.”

“You can escape town, but you cannot escape blood. Somehow, the Vignes twins believed themselves capable of both.”


This book wasn’t really what I was expecting when I saw the title. I thought (because I didn’t read the summary and just knew the book was about twins) that one of a set of twins goes missing. They make it seem like that for about the first few sentences of the book but nope. The twins just skipped town.

So The Vanishing Half is not a thriller but a long drawn out look at twin sisters who move away from their hometown in search of a different life. They go their own ways, have daughters, and we see how their choices then in turn impact their daughters’ lives.


This book started out fine and I felt interested in how these sisters’ relationship was going to change and grow and how they would reconcile. But then it just felt like it was taking forever and then the sisters take a backseat as we spend a lot of time on the daughters. Every time you think you’re getting somewhere with one character, surprise! the next chapter is someone completely different.

When you read a thriller you kinda know where the story is going and when it’s about to be done. In this story, I just felt like I had no idea where it was going or when it was going to stop. And not in a mysterious way, just a… what are we even doing here? kind of way.

I agree with a lot of other reviewers that I would have preferred more focus on the sisters than the cousins and that they would have had more interaction and character development with each other. But we don’t really see them together until the last few pages and a few snippets here and there.

It did just feel like this book tried to do too much and so instead of doing one thing really well it did a lot of things but not so great.



The writing style was also pretty hard to follow at times. Lots of jumping around chronologically and adding backstories in the middle of present-day stories. For example, within a single paragraph she talks about what the character is doing, what the character is going to do in a year, and then backs up to a year prior to the present to share a little backstory. All in like 4-5 sentences! It’s just chronological whiplash and I don’t enjoy that style of writing.

There were also some poorly worded segues into new thoughts that the author wanted to include but apparently didn’t know how else to incorporate them into the story.

For example, one new paragraph started: “Here’s something she hadn’t thought about in forever:” And then she told a story about the past. It just didn’t feel creative or cogent.

Bennett would also start new sections or chapters without using names, only pronouns, so you had to figure out who this was about. But then she uses the name within a paragraph or two so it’s not like it was really supposed to be hidden, but now you have to go back and reread the ambiguous stuff once you got the name so you know what you were supposed to be getting from it all.


One other major disappointment: I liked Early’s character and that he was going to help Desiree find her sister, but he ended up being pretty inconsequential. He tried to find her, and then, he just couldn’t. Oh well.

Plus if Desiree’s husband really wanted to find her, he knew she was from Mallard. Even if he thought she would never go back, if you’ve looked everywhere else why wouldn’t you at least check? It would be super easy to pop on over to this super small town and see if she’s there. No bail bondsman required. But apparently checking the only other town she knows well was beyond him. Doesn’t make any sense.

Again, not super important to the unfolding of the plot since this wasn’t a thriller, but feels like a plot hole that was just ignored.



Popular Themes

The most talked about themes of this book are the ideas of race, colorism, and passing.

The twins are light-skinned blacks living a whole little town of similarly colored people who look down on dark-colored blacks.

When the twins leave town, one ends up marrying a really dark-skinned man and the other one ends up moving to California and passing as a white woman.

The twin who comes back, Desiree, is fleeing an abusive husband and returns to town with her dark-skinned daughter, Jude. They have to face the discrimination in town for all of Jude’s childhood. But we don’t get much of that because Jude’s part of the story jumps ahead to when she goes away to college.

The twin in California, Stella, had realized that she had more access to things and opportunities if people thought she was white. (A lot of this story takes place during the 60s and 70s.) There was segregation and discrimination against black people and so she saw a way to live the life she wanted. But it required her to ‘act white.’ She realizes that befriending black people would blow her cover so we see the cost of her lie in many ways. Her daughter, Kennedy, grows up in this privileged, wealthy environment without any knowledge of where her mother came from which has caused a big rift in their relationship.

‘Colorism’ is defined as: prejudice or discrimination against individuals with a dark skin tone, typically among people of the same ethnic or racial group.

‘Passing’ (in the context of this book) is defined as: the ability of a person to be regarded as a member of an identity group or category, such as racial identity, ethnicity, caste, social class, sexual orientation, gender, religion, age or disability status, that is often different from their own.



I had never read a book with these two concepts portrayed so vividly.

It just fleshes out more of the complexities of the idea of race. It just made me wonder: what does it mean to be white? to be black? what is black culture? what is white culture?

Race is a social construct. People have differing melanin levels. How does one really classify themselves when our skin shades vary so much. Unfortunately there is historical significance to what race means. But that’s not how God intended it.

We are all part of the same race. We all share a common ancestor.

The apostle Paul taught the Greeks in Athens: “he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God…” (Acts 17:26)

It’s sad whenever we read in history of people discriminating and hating groups of people. It has happened in every generation and as long as sinful man lives, it will most likely continue, because at the heart of racism or prejudice of any kind, is sin.

It’s always tricky to talk about race in a way that acknowledges the realities of the past without perpetuating a concept that is divisive. As I was reflecting on these things in anticipation of writing this review I was listening to THIS podcast and appreciated their insights on differentiating between race, culture, and ethnicity and how ethnicity is important but it should never be our primary identity. I see today where many people have turned their race or ethnicity almost into this idol they worship, whether that’s white, black, Latino, Asian, etc.

When our primary identity is in Christ and who HE says we are, we are able to find unity and reconciliation in the blood of Christ. We are able to live as one family, sinners who have been rescued by our Savior and Creator who adopted us to new life, new creations living in peace and love by the power of the Spirit.

When I read a book like this I grieve the experiences of dark-skinned blacks who were treated egregiously simply because they looked different. I grieve the experiences of light-skinned blacks who had to make impossible choices that may protect them from some things but cause pain in other ways.

Sometimes it’s hard to know what to do with these feelings, especially in a world today where there is cultural tension surrounding race. I remember these helpful words from Isaac Adams in his book Talking About Race:

“We can rest in this truth: our job is not to completely eradicate the world of racism; it is to faithfully follow the One who will. And vengeance and perfect justice belong to him.”



Two Ways to Live

The theme I most noticed, though, was the idea of living split lives.

“She’d always known that it was possible to be two different people in one lifetime.”

We have twins splitting from their ‘conjoined’ existence into choosing their own path. We have Stella living as a white woman when she’s really black. We have Reese, previously known as Theresa, living as a man even though her biology reveals she is a woman. We have Barry, a man who gets two days a month to dress up in drag and be Bianca.

I actually thought it was interesting that Bennett decided to juxtapose the race-specific double life with the gender-specific double lives.

Some reviewers weren’t thrilled with the character of Reese because Reese’s significance in the story seemed more like checking the ‘diversity’ box without actually exploring the whole LGBTQ storyline. Others were uncomfortable with the comparison to Jude because it didn’t feel right to say they are similar.

In the story Jude, who has experienced the prejudice of her hometown, tells her ‘boyfriend’ Reese that she wishes she had lighter skin. Reese says she shouldn’t think that, that her skin is beautiful the way it is. Meanwhile Reese is saving up money to get breast removal surgery. Why is it wrong to want to change your skin color but not to want to change your gender? Especially when race is not coded into every cell of your body but gender is?

There are several comments throughout the book about ‘acting’, ‘lying', and ‘pretending.’ Barry says of being in drag: “It was fun because everyone knew that it was not real.” Reese thinks, “How real was a person if you could shed her in a thousand miles?”

Living our ‘true selves’ is a priority in the world today. But if we want to be our true selves, we need to know truth. It is important to know what is real.



I know I am in the minority when I say that I don’t ascribe to LGBTQ ideology. I know that puts me at risk for backlash. But in a book that sets these things next to one another, I can’t pass the opportunity to communicate that it is true: our bodies do matter and what we do with our bodies matter.

I love this quote from the excellent book, What God Says About Our Bodies by Sam Allberry:

“Your body––my body––is not just there, happening to exist. It means something to God. He knows it. He made it. He cares about it. And all that Christ has done in his death and resurrection is not in order for us one day to escape our body, but for him one day to redeem it.”  

God created each one of us on purpose. When he made Adam he started with fashioning his body and then breathed life into him. The bodies he gave us were intended for us. That doesn’t mean we don’t face challenges in the bodies we have. We have various limitations and struggles with our bodies.

Even though our bodies are not ultimate, it’s popular to believe that our true selves have nothing to do with our bodies— just something deep inside us; thus, changing our bodies to ‘match’ our insides is the noble and right thing.

“Theologian Tom Wright puts it this way: The great controlling myth of our time has been the belief that within each one of us there is a real, inner, private “self,” long buried beneath layers of socialization and attempted cultural and religious control, and needing to be rediscovered if we are to live authentic lives.”[Allberry]

but

“‘who I really am’ can’t be considered without reference to my body.” [Allberry]



This book presents multiple ways where people live a split life: appearing one way but feeling different inside, wanting to be someone different, or trying to express on the outside what they feel on the inside but not quite feeling a unified self.

I think this is a really good theme to consider. When we live outside of our design we do feel that split, that something is not the way it’s supposed to be. We are not meant to live double lives.

Jesus said, “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other.” (Matt 6:24)

I know Bennett was not presenting this case in the way she wrote the book, but we can still learn from these characters in their struggles. We should seek to live a unified life. The Bible tells of two ways to live: either Jesus is King of your life or he isn’t.

Paul wrote in his letter to the Corinthian church, “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.” (1 Cor 6:19-20)

What we do with our bodies or believe about our bodies reveals who our master is: our Creator who designed our bodies to be used a certain way? or our own desires? Do we do whatever feels right at any given moment? Or do we sacrifice what we want in order to follow God’s commands? We can’t have it both ways.

Allberry explains this verse in Corinthians this way:

“In any other context, hearing that we are not our own, that we have been bought with a price, would be devastating. It would indicate a lack of freedom, dignity, and worth. But when applied to Jesus, the opposite is the case. Belonging to him is the only way to true freedom. Nothing could be more dignifying. And nothing shows our worth more than Jesus shedding his own blood for us. To belong to him is the highest and greatest blessing we could ever hope for.” 

True freedom can’t be found in altering our bodies. Whether that means changing our skin color or removing our private parts. Freedom is found in embracing Christ and his way.

Our cry should be like the psalm writer who says, “Teach me your way, Lord, that I may rely on your faithfulness; give me an undivided heart, that I may fear your name.” (Ps 86:11)

And so when I read this book, I also grieve for those who, like Barry or Reese, feel at odds with their bodies. It’s a struggle I don’t know, but I can imagine it’s really hard and lonely. I grieve that people like them have also experienced discrimination, hate, and harm.


Even if I have a different ideology than the LBTQ community, we are all image bearers of God and should be treated with compassion and dignity. Our worth is not tied to our skin color or our gender or any other characteristic of who we think we are. Our worth is inherent because we were all created by God.

When we live in rebellion to God’s design for us, we feel the strife and the discontinuity, but if we align ourselves with Christ, our identity is no longer in our skin color, our gender, our sexuality, our ethnicity, our feelings. Our identity is now: ‘redeemed’. Our hope is no longer in fixing our bodies to align with our feelings, it’s in knowing that perfect bodies await us when Jesus returns to take away our pain, discomfort, and dysphoria. We endure because life on earth is short and eternity is long.

One of the characters in the book “was always inventing her life.” We think it’s up to us to write our own stories and make something of ourselves. But I love what Rachel Jankovic says in her excellent book You Who?: Why You Matter and How to Deal with It:

“the more we try to build up an identity apart from God and apart from His Word, the less truly “us“ we become. It doesn’t matter how long or thoughtful or detailed the story you were writing is. If it is written by a character in the story rather than the Author of the story, it can only ever be tiny; it will always be minuscule by comparison. You cannot, as a character, out-write the Author of you.”


There are a lot of fiction books that explore what it means for characters to find ‘freedom’ from whatever is plaguing them. We write about that dilemma because that is our dilemma in real life. We all feel chained by something.

It’s the right thing to reflect on. Seek for answers. I don’t think The Vanishing Half will necessarily lead you into the path of truth, but I know God can show up anywhere for anyone. My hope and prayer is that all will find freedom from their chains!



Recommendation

This book wasn’t for me. And the primary reason is that it dragged and didn’t feel like it had any major conflict. The story was spread too thin across the four women and I didn’t feel invested in their relationships when their connections were so minimal and fleeting.

I also didn’t feel like there was much redemption in this story.

Combine all that with the annoying chronological whiplash, and it wasn’t one that’s going to stick with me.

However, I think this is one I’m not going to say ‘don’t read.’ I think a lot of people can enjoy this book. I think my review will probably tell you enough to know if it’s something you want to get into or not.

[Content Advisory: 7 f-words, 18 s-words, 2 b-words, and using the Lord’s name in vain quite a bit- probably half of the swearing came just from Kennedy’s character; some sexual content- including a few graphic but brief scenes; details about a girl’s story in becoming a man (Theresa/Reese); describes briefly a lynching]

I rarely leave a book unfinished, but I had to do that with this one.

This isn’t how I wanted my first book and review of the year to go.

But I read 34 pages of this book and I was upset. Disturbed.

So I asked a Facebook reading community for insight on whether or not I should continue based on the concerns I had. Turns out a few people agreed with me, but most of the people loved this book and author and encouraged me to continue, even saying it was one of their favorite books though didn’t really say why or give any concrete reasons for finishing.

Ultimately, I decided not to continue reading it.


Here’s where I’m at:

The Tea Girl of Hummingbird starts out in a mountain village somewhere in China, the home of the Akha tribe.

We learn about a variety of their cultural practices including spirit worship, the superiority of males over females, and all the superstitions surrounding these elements. For example, they encourage husbands to climb trees a lot because they think that will help their pregnant wives have a boy.

Within the first 34 pages the main character, Li-yan, is helping her mother, the village midwife, deliver her sister-in-law’s baby. She is having a hard labor. They call the village shaman who says that an outside spirit was insulted when Deh-ja made a mistake in her ancestral offerings. So they make her— during labor while she is in severe pain and bleeding— get up and sweep the room with a broom to sweep away the “malevolence.”

She eventually delivers a baby boy. Great news! But then they realize she has another baby inside her. Twins. Bad news. The worst news. Here’s what they say:

“Twins. Human rejects… Twins are the absolute worst taboo in our culture, for only animals, demons, and spirits give birth to litters.”

“These are our rules… Human rejects need to be sent to the Great Lake of boiling blood. This is how we protect the village from idiots, the malformed, or those so so small they’ll only prolong their own deaths. it is us— midwives— who keep our people pure and in alignment with the goodness of nature, because if human rejects are allowed to do the intercourse, over time an entire village might end up inhabited by only them.”

And so they murder the twin babies. And then they banish the parents of the human rejects and burn their house down.

Just. What in the actual heck??

Yes, I’m a mother of twins. Twins who came early and were very tiny and are now four and thriving. That is part of my disgust with these cultural practices. But killing ‘undesired’ humans across the board is wrong. Period. Regardless of circumstance or culture.


And bottom line is: I didn’t feel good about reading a book about it.

I asked the online community if this was going to be a book that tried to portray the Akha culture as beautiful and valid because I knew I wouldn’t be able to handle that. I didn’t get a lot of clear answers on this. At least one person claimed that the characters acknowledge the wrongness.

Li-yan eventually has a baby of her own (out of wedlock) that would also require murder, but she decides to rebel against her culture and give her baby up for adoption. The story then (based on the summary) follows the daughter and the mother’s life and their yearning for each other.

Honestly, I don’t know a lot about the book. Maybe what I read is such a small snippet and not the main focus of the book at all.

I don’t know what kind of redemption is found or not found in this book. It could be that I should have given this book a full chance.

But I have too many books to read to spend my time reading one that makes me upset. I largely read because I ENJOY reading. This book did not bring me joy.


I do like reading a variety of genres and historical fiction is one of them. I have read some hard books that talk about hard things. I fully understand that history is not neat and tidy. I do think it’s important to read about things or people that are different from me.

However.

Murdering babies is not just something ‘different’ than me and my beliefs. It’s evil. The worship of spirits is evil. (Which is why I avoid horror books and books with devils and witches and stories that glorify their existence)

I decided that it would be wiser for me to forgo the rest of the book than to endure more of the same thing.

The summary says the mother and daughter both look for meaning in studying the tea that shaped their heritage. If that is the only hope this book provides, I’m still not seeing anything worth sticking around for. I can’t imagine there’s much deep and solid meaning for broken people in a farming process.

Further, it’s not really just reading the history of something that happened but is no longer a thing. Wikipedia says this culture ‘stopped’ this practice only 20 years ago and now puts the babies up for adoption instead. It also says that people from Laos claim the practice isn’t completely eradicated.

I will pray for the Akha people and for all the babies growing in the wombs of the Akha women that they will see life, but I cannot read this book.



I’m not saying this specific book does this (because I didn’t read the whole thing) but I often feel like there is this idea held by lots of people that all cultures are equally valid. That we can’t critique another culture. Who are we to say what other people do or believe is wrong?

‘Fascinating’ and ‘interesting’ can be words used to describe the way the Akha tribe builds their homes or cooks their food or how they make tea. They cannot be used to describe their other cultural practices that are evil.

Culture has to be able to be critiqued. My own American culture has to be critiqued. There is no culture that should be immune from the questions- Is this right? Is this good? Is this true? I hope that people write about the American and European culture of killing babies via the method of abortion as abhorrent. Essentially abortion is the same thing the Akha tribe is doing and we should be equally disgusted by it because life is something to be treasured. Always.

If there is ever a book that tries to portray the evil elements of culture as purely ‘interesting’ or ‘worth learning about’ and then moving on with our day, I will gladly never read it.

This may or may not be that book, but I didn’t want to take the chance.

Is this decision perfectly consistent with my reading choices in the past? Probably not. I don’t know. I think it’s impossible to really read consistently across time. I can only do my best every time I pick a book to read.

I chose this book originally because it fit my reading challenge prompt of ‘a book set in a different culture than your own’ and it definitely qualified, but there are plenty of other cultures that I would rather read about and I think that’s okay.



Recommendation

I don’t really recommend this book based on what I read.

There is clearly many people who feel differently about this book and that may describe you. If you feel you can handle reading it, you are now going into it more informed and you can make the best decision for you. Maybe you can separate out the evil from the good and focus on other elements.

But let my review be the permission you need, if you feel similarly to me, that NOT reading this book is okay too. It does not mean you don’t care about the Akha people or other cultures in general. It does not mean you choose to be ignorant about hard things. It just means you won’t enjoy the book and have chosen something different.


[Content Advisory: as of 34 pages there is spirit worship and the killing of infants]