MixedThe Los Angeles TimesThe memoir starts to lose its steam and its candor ... Zappa paints a heartbreaking picture of the childhood that shaped her, but she’s less specific and present as her story moves into adolescence and adulthood and she tries to figure out how to deal with her trauma ... Comes across less as a book than as a plea from that wounded child, still searching for someone to see her and recognize that she’s in pain.
Elaine Castillo
RaveLos Angeles TimesElaine Castillo’s How to Read Now begins with a section called \'Author’s Note, or a Virgo Clarifies Things.\' The title is a neat encapsulation of the book’s style: rigorous but still chatty, intellectual but not precious or academic about it ... How to Read Now proceeds at a breakneck pace. Each of the book’s eight essays burns bright and hot from start to finish ... How to Read Now is not for everybody, but if it is for you, it is clarifying and bracing. Castillo offers a full-throated critique of some of the literary world’s most insipid and self-serving ideas ... So how should we read now? Castillo offers suggestions but no resolution. She is less interested in capital-A Answers...and more excited by the opportunity to restore a multitude of voices and perspectives to the conversation ... A book is nothing without a reader; this one is co-created by its recipients, re-created every time the page is turned anew. How to Read Now offers its audience the opportunity to look past the simplicity we’re all too often spoon-fed into order to restore ourselves to chaos and complexity — a way of seeing and reading that demands so much more of us but offers even more in return.
Kendra James
RaveLos Angeles TimesThe book is, not incidentally, an excellent memoir. James is unsparing and hilarious about her adolescent foibles, her outré fashion choices and insistence on telling everyone about her hobby of writing erotic fan fiction. Many former intense young nerds will cringe with loving recognition ... James’ generosity toward her younger self extends to everyone she writes about, even the classmates whose racism she describes. Ultimately, she seems less interested in indicting them than in thinking about the system of exclusive education that has encouraged their myopia about race and class—about any lives markedly different from their own—to flourish unchecked ... James has written a must-read book for prospective prep-school parents as well as white graduates seeking to better understand what these kinds of elite schools can offer their students—as well as what they, by their very nature, cannot.
Julie Buxbaum
PositiveLos Angeles TimesIt was important to Buxbaum that Admission doesn’t read as a plea for sympathy; instead, she sees it as an attempt to understand Chloe’s experience in all its messy complexity. \'The point of the novel is not to make you like the main character but to understand them,\' she says. \'As a culture, we don’t have the impulse to understand these teenagers, but it’s important that we do, because it tells us this larger story about how we’re raising a generation.\' ... Ultimately, the questions Buxbaum asks apply not only to the extreme cases we see in the tabloids but to any parent who must draw the line between helping their child succeed and showing them how to live. We can all agree that what Singer’s clients did was appalling, but what about sending a child to an elite private school instead of a public one? What about getting them an SAT tutor, or having your professional writer mother give your college essay \'a little polish\'? One of the people Buxbaum was seeking answers for was herself.
N. K. Jemisin
PositiveThe Los Angeles Times... a novel concerned with the pleasures and violences of urban life, so it makes sense that reading it feels a little like riding the subway for the first time. You barely have a moment to steady yourself — grab a seat, or at least a pole — before the world is lurching forward, dragging you into inky darkness, pulling you around corners at breathless speed ... Jemisin brings all of her considerable skill and talent to bear on The City We Became, which is epic in ambition and scope ... If all of this sounds a little bit obvious — a thriving, diverse city threatened by, well, uniform whiteness — in Jemisin’s hands it’s anything but. She uses the imaginative space provided by speculative fiction not just to score a specific political point, but also to deepen and widen and weirden our understanding of the world ... layers emotion — tenderness and fear and ferocity — into all of that world-building infrastructure. Writing from each of the avatars’ perspectives allows Jemisin to weave an astonishing amount of information into her narrative without slowing its momentum: She teases out the histories and demographics of each of the boroughs she describes and then gives all of that data texture and weight. The city is at once a larger-than-life myth and also a human-scale experience; it is the avatars’ home just as much as any of their individual apartments might be, and you feel the depth of their attachment to it on every page ... The book is, in some sense, a rallying cry, a call to arms: If you live in a city, it’s hard to read it without wanting to fling yourself on the pavement in tears of both gratitude and frustration ... Jemisin mostly keeps her morals from overshadowing her storytelling, but there are a handful of moments where the wokeness calls too much attention to itself...But such moments are rare and, for the most part, The City We Became is thrillingly expansive without ever becoming abstract or high-flown. Speeding through its pages feels like walking down a beloved city block: gloriously familiar and yet always shimmering with the promise of the unexpected.
Rebecca Tucker
MixedModern FarmerThe book centers on a nuanced idea, but that idea is done a disservice by the briefness of the volume. There are plenty of provocative statements, but not quite enough room to flesh out a convincing argument for them. This is particularly frustrating, because Tucker’s thesis—that the sustainable food movement needs to get comfortable with technology invented after the 1920’s if it’s going to feed the world—is as important and interesting as it is complicated and controversial. For many who’ve been turned off by the puritanism of the food movement and its focus on ethics over economics, this book provides a welcome dose of real-talk rooted in practical and empathetic thinking ... While her points are well taken, she fails to reckon with some of farmers’ objections to the corporatization of their work, which can hinge on intellectual property, ownership and capitalism itself than anti-scientific bias ... Tucker acknowledges that farmers might have legitimate concerns about the security of the data harvested by these technologies, but by and large, she dismisses those who reject precision farming’s possibilities as \'purists\': people who see smart and automatically think bad ... Do these objections outweigh the imperative to figure out how to feed those who are hungry? It’s an interesting question; it would be interesting to see Tucker wrestle with it, but, unfortunately, that’s not in A Matter of Taste’s purview ... It’s a fascinating look at some up-and-coming technologies, but not a comprehensive argument for them—interesting if you go into it on Tucker’s team, but not likely to convince you if you don’t already agree with her views.
Eve Babitz
PositiveThe New Republic[Babitz] does not romanticize the lifestyle that leads to Jacaranda’s condition, nor the social norms that allow it to disappear in plain sight. Jacaranda’s constant drunkenness allows her to pretend that she’s not afraid of anything, that she’s never been hurt or disappointed; it’s the same hazy denial of complication or pain that people imagine as the default state of all Angelenos. But in fact, Babitz makes clear that this mindset is a wasting disease—something you have to descend into and then recover from ... Babitz makes just as much space on the page for recovery as she does for addiction. She allows it to be messy and unnerving, vital and unstable ... Women like Babitz, and cities like Los Angeles, make it look easy to be charming. They invite you to imagine that there’s no trick to it, just effortlessness. They seduce you with an image that glitters, and tempt you into believing that someone’s life is easy, even if it isn’t yours.
Alana Massey
RaveThe New RepublicMassey makes no secret of the fact that she reveres her subjects. The fact that she has a master’s in religion from Yale Divinity School lends weight and nuance to her discussions of the culturally deified ... Massey is refreshingly unapologetic about the low points of her own past, which includes a history of patchily-treated mental illness and eating disorders. She writes about her work as a stripper with unemotional frankness, discussing the labor conditions the way she might any other job. Massey engages lovingly but thoughtfully with the lives and work of her subjects, and she offers herself the same even-handed treatment ... Massey write(s) into history a tradition of female cultural and personal experience previously absent from the record.
