women writers

April 2022 Reading Round Up: Dark Fantasies & thoughtful Mysteries

| Rebecca Valley

For our April reading roundup, we’re going dark, with a selection of fantasies and mysteries that take a close look at the often ugly underbelly of the human experience. These books take on dysfunctional relationships, grief, addiction, murder, and even human sacrifice as their subjects. But while the novels in this roundup might have gritty, even frightening, exteriors, at their core they also force us to consider what it means to love and be loved—and how hardship gives us space to reconsider what we value.

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Review: Seeing the Body by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

| Rebecca Valley

Seeing the Body by Rachel Eliza Griffiths (WW Norton and Co. 2020)

Reviewed by Margaret Anne Kean

“…her body was the only home/I cared about.”

Poet Marilyn Nelson has said “when you go to listen to a poet read, you leave having learned not only about the poet’s reality but also about the reality you are living.” She calls this “communal pondering.” Through Rachel Eliza Griffiths’ exquisite fifth book, Seeing the Body, we are invited into communal pondering about the physicality of grief, silence and absence, as the poet grapples with her mother’s death, its effect on the poet’s body and psyche, and the necessity of living beyond such a monumental loss.

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In the Gardens of Frida Kahlo and Vita Sackville-West: An Essay by Emily L. Quint Freeman

| Rebecca Valley
An image of Freeman’s garden

Written by Emily L. Quint Freeman

Freeman considers gardening as the ultimate art by discussing the notable gardens of two famous, queer woman artists.

Gardens are both art and autobiography, a landscape of self-expression combined with a love for natural beauty. As the great artist and garden-maker, Claude Monet, once observed, “I perhaps owe becoming a painter to flowers. My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece.”

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Review: Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg by Emily Rapp Black

| Rebecca Valley

Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg by Emily Rapp Black (Notting Hill Editions 2021)

Reviewed by Melissa Greenwood

Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg is an essay collection by Emily Rapp Black that follows two female artists for whom “create or die” and “laugh or die” are important mottos. These artists, Frida Kahlo and Rapp Black herself, live through their share of heartache. They know that art is survival, especially after several “crucible experience[s].” For Kahlo: polio, a “philandering husband,” miscarriages, and a street car crash that is followed by thirty-two operations, including one that leaves her an amputee. For Rapp Black: five surgeries during her childhood (a birth defect requires that, at the age of four, her left leg be amputated), two divorces, and the loss of her first child—her nearly three-year-old son, Ronan—to a terminal illness, Tay Sachs disease.

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November 2021 Reading Round Up: Fresh Perspectives

| Rebecca Valley

This collection of microreviews is a little more eclectic than usual. But these books, which range from history to YA to literary fiction and beyond, share a common thread: the way they ask readers to see the world in new ways. These books offer fresh perspectives through reinvention and retelling, but also by simply narrating from points of view that are rarely heard or respected. This month’s books include a stunning queer retelling of the Peter Pan myth, a genre-bending memoir-cum-historical-treatise on slave revolts, a graphic novel for kids that tackles chronic illness, race, and Latinx culture, and much more. In each story, we are asked to reconsider our old ways of knowing, and make space for new narratives.

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Review: Requeening by Amanda Moore

| Rebecca Valley

Requeening by Amanda moore (ecco press 2021)

Reviewed by Leonora Simonovis

When members of a beehive are diseased—when their temperament changes or the queen is unable to lay eggs–– beekeepers use a practice called requeening, in which one queen is substituted for another to disrupt the current patterns in the hive and create new healthy patterns that will allow its members to grow and thrive. It is impossible not to notice the irony: the queen has an important role in keeping the hive actively developing and yet, once her “usefulness” has passed, she is discarded. 

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Review: The Empathy Diaries by Sherry Turkle

| Rebecca Valley

The Empathy Diaries: A Memoir by Sherry Turkle (Penguin 2021)

Reviewed by Patricia Steckler

My mother kept secrets and spoke to me in a kind of code. Nothing was straightforward. From childhood, I had to figure out how to read her mind, to intuit the contours of her reality. If I developed empathy, at first, it wasn’t so much a way to find a connection as a survival strategy. (xx)

Secrets, taboo topics, and mystifying family tensions set the stage for Sherry Turkle’s memoir, The Empathy Diaries. Her memoir is a transformational journey from an anxiety-infused childhood to an adulthood devoted to psychological insight and excellence in scholarship. Turkle is the Abby Rockefeller Professor of Social Studies, Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Her highly regarded books, especially Reclaiming the Conversation: The Power of Talk in the Digital Age and Alone Together, probe the psycho-social impact of the digital world.

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Review: The Disturbed Girl’s Dictionary by NoNieqa Ramos

| Rebecca Valley

The Disturbed Girl’s Dictionary by NoNieqa Ramos (Carolrhoda Lab 2019)

Reviewed by Kathryn Leonard-Peck

In this hybrid review, Leonard-Peck combines poetry and critical reading to map the emotional landscape of this stunning YA novel, which as a 2019 YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults Selection and a 2018 New York Public Library Best Book for Teens. For more reviews that challenge the form, click here.

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