Tag Archives: book-reviews

April 24, 2026 · 6:55 pm

The Guardian and the Thief

Who knew a book so heartbreaking could be so suspenseful. Maybe there are lots of examples? Well here is one: Megha Majumdar’s The Guardian and the Thief. Set in the near-future of India where the climate catastrophe has brought famine and social/political unrest we follow two families as they try – in their unique ways – to escape the conditions that keep them hungry and suffering.

A terrific book for any course wanting to consider ‘social determinants of health’ the book sets up in stark terms (somehow without being annoying about it) the way class intersects with bodies – where they can go, what they can expect, and how they will thrive or fail.

For this reader it was a sort of awe at the way Majumdar manipulates sympathy – vacillating between Ma and Boomba, but then also for Ma and Boomba amid an environment where they are set up to make – in their various ways – chillingly choices about who and what to prioritize, and at what cost. And while it is meant to be the near future, it feels urgent and present in ways that were/are unsettling and uncomfortable: what are we willing to look away from to prioritize our immediate family, ourselves? What will we hoard – if not food, then land, or transportation, or access – and how much do we need to imagine ourselves safe (and from what, or whom) and for how long?

Over the course of one week we are kept in suspense and agony for what they can each control and what is wrested from them. And beautiful writing that lets the reader slip inside the story and align, betray, align again with characters without noticing that the story is being spun.

Go, go and enjoy, while being prepared to be asked to reckon with what you might give up and what you might take so as to save who you claim as your own.

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April 4, 2026 · 12:51 am

A Marriage At Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession and Shipwreck; or, what is wrong with me

There must be something funny in my subconscious that it just keeps picking books about marriage, or divorce, or the complications of marriage or or – but it’s not that I’m seeking these books out. More that the ones that find might right now are… all of a theme. Call it the universe helping me work through it all.

Anyway, Sophie Elmhirt’s non-fiction A Marriage At Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession and Shipwreck follows Maurice and Marilyn on their ill-fated sailing trip from one place to another (exact locations are used in the book, but dear reader, this writer does not care enough to look them up).

Before they set out on the journey we figure out the married couple are odd. Odd as individuals; odd as a couple. They decide to sell their house, built a boat over a few years and dedicate their lives to living at sea. Odd as it is to imagine doing such a thing yourself, odder still (to this reader anyway) that fate or fortune would bring together two people so similarly devoted.

But so goes the world, and so goes Maurice and Marilyn off to sea. ONLY TO BE SHIPWRECKED (it’s not a spoiler, it’s in the title) when a whale bashes up their boat. Honestly many reviews make much of this whale (maybe for the improbability of it?) but the whale did not feature heavily in my read of it, so much as the absolute nuttiness of them having set out without a radio (for the purity!) and working flares (just…. oops).

Of course we know the whole time that things must work out mostly okay because they survive to tell the tale (or at least that was my comfortable read of it until A. suggested that perhaps it was written posthumously based on journal entires and so I spent the rest of the book in gasping suspense worried they’d be eaten by a shark, or let’s be honest, starve/die of dyhydration/exposure etc).

I’ll give you the same gift of suspense and not tell you for sure, except to say that by and large the best parts of the book were not about shipwreck or (possible) survival, but instead were about how these two managed not to eat one another alive (and I don’t mean literally) in the torment of being alone at sea.

I’ve heard – though I am an unreliable narrator on this point – that marriage can be tough and requires Some Work to make it through. One can only guess the kind of fortitude being married while dying at sea requires. Actually, you don’t need to guess. You can read this gripping and engaging book and be reminded – and don’t we all need the reminder right now – of how much hope and love alone can accomplish.

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March 16, 2026 · 12:56 pm

Awake: A Memoir

You might be forgiven for thinking it a tad masochistic to read Awake: A Memoir which is, among other things, about the journey through divorce, at a time when I am doing the same. But! Hear me out. This is a very bad book, and there’s nothing misery loves more than silently judging something for being terrible (or in this case, publicly judging).

Jen Hatmaker writes Awake in the years after she awakes in the middle of the night to hear her then-husband on the phone with his mistress. Hatmaker had been married for twenty odd years, having wed young because of God and Christianity and Etc. In what follows we get short chapters that may or may not have been written with the intention of having them transcribed in cursive script onto a poster to hang – motivationally – on a kitchen wall. Live, laugh, love etc. We are, I think, to believe that Hatmaker’s journey from puddle of emotional ruin to self-actualized independence is one we can all travel are we simply to Focus and Let The Light Shine.

Alas, what Hatmaker spends zero attention on (at all) is the gross privilege she swims in. Oh sure, there’s a chapter where she is aghast to discover she doesn’t know a single thing about her finances or how they work, but there’s never a moment where financial insecurity poses a real threat. Implicit is the knowledge that this is a rich, white woman for whom things like the hydro bill have never properly kept her up at night. This financial security and abundance has the effect of affording (literally) Hatmaker and her children opportunities for ‘self exploration’ and ‘healing’ that include a month of (I kid you not) ‘me camp’ where Hatmaker can simply follow her bliss and #discover herself.

It would be one thing if this privilege were acknowledged and recognized as a security net for self-discovery and confidence that most divorcing women/people do not have access to, but alas, Hatmaker cheerfully narrates the memoir as if the abundance of hoteling and patio remodelling is a given.

Where I do credit her, and what I know I am learning on my own #journey (irony intended), is the incredible strength of community and the friendships that will find you when you need them most. I have been – am – overwhelmed by the care of a network of people (a constellation if you can imagine them all working in tandem to make something for me) who have surfaced – some after years of my neglected communication – to hold me, R and L up. And in this Hatmaker is right: you can pretend that you can survive something as uprooting as divorce alone, or you can submit to the humility of asking for and accepting help. And neither path is easy (how I have bristled at the realization that I alone cannot unstick my outdoor faucet or hang my own TV) but one path opens to more love.

I guess Hatmaker is also something of a Christian celebrity, and I do not envy her the microscope of judgement that must have accompanied her divorce. So while her memoir is kind of gross, I admire her willingness to write her journey publicly and to remind each this reader that shame has no place in this experience – we are all, in the end, just doing our best. Some of us happen to be doing it with enough money to spend a week in a villa.

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February 13, 2026 · 12:45 am

Careless People: Lessons in Narration

Sarah Wynn-Williams used to be the director of public policy at Facebook. She got fired and then wrote a book about her experience working at Facebook and with the senior executives there. She doesn’t think much of the people or the organization – offering many scenes of casual and direct cruelty, indifference and pursuit of profit above all else. Yes, Careless People is a gentle title for the memoir – could have been titled ‘Cruel People,’ or ‘These Fucking Assholes’ or something similar.

And Wynn-Williams gives lots of scenes that support this characterization. Moments where executives knew about harm decisions (or indecision) might cause to whole countries (let alone people) and did nothing. This idea of “they did nothing” is a repeated one by Wynn-Williams – she, the Cassandra calling out the disaster, only to be assiduously ignored. Convinced – or at least claiming to be convinced in the memoir – that the best way to change the company was to do so from the inside.

It’s a bit hard to believe that there wasn’t the tiniest bit of self-interest fuelling Wynn-Williams. Just the tiniest. Like whatever salary she was making played no role in staying on? Like she wasn’t willing and able to let go some of the agonized changes she was trying to make to preserve democracies or to prevent crime or whatever whatever

And I’m prepared to believe Zuckerberg and Sanders are as bad as Wynn-Williams makes them out to be, but in reading it I couldn’t help but wonder (suspect?) that no small part of this book was a desire to exact revenge. Like some of it just read as… vindictive? Even if it was accurate?

Anyway, it made the whole thing read like an exercise in trying to parse what is unreliable narrator and what is accurate. But even with that layer of skepticism, the book is engrossing in its outrage for the callousness, or “carelessness” of the Facebook folks.

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