Tara Westover’s memoir, Educated, is difficult to digest. She’s the youngest of seven children in a fundamentalist Mormon family in rural Idaho. Her father rules with the proverbial iron fist. He’s a survivalist, a millennialist, a conspiracy-theorist. He keeps his children out of school, refuses them medical care, continually places them in physical danger. Her mother resists in small ways but ultimately caves whenever the father demands her submission. One of her brothers educates himself well enough to get into BYU and encourages Tara to […]
So much talk of faeries, and none of it good
I love physical books. Aside from not being able to read e-books for any sustained period of time, I love the look and feel of physical books and wish every room in my home were lined with shelves that I could fill with a never-ending stream of new books. Hannah Kent’s The Good People is one of the most gorgeous physical books I’ve ever seen, with the murky underwater blues and teals overlaid with a metallic copper leaf that partially obscures the title and amplifies […]
I’m so late to this great party, I almost want to punch something.
Let the making fun of me begin: I am newly and totally obsessed with Stephen King. Brief backstory: when I was 7 or 8 years old, I started reading “Cujo.” It gave me nightmares: long, scary, repeated nightmares. I never finished it, because No More Stephen King For Me, said my parents. And then, somehow, in my mind, the idea of Stephen King’s writing… well, I guess it morphed from “OMG, that guy is scary” to “Meh, airport reading. Basically the James Patterson of horror.” […]
Unsinkable doesn’t quite stay afloat
Many Canadians like myself remember Silken Laumann’s amazing perseverance after a severe leg injury, to win a bronze medal only 10 weeks later at the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona. Even without the gold, she was one of the hero stories of the game, and certainly an important one for Canada. One day, I happened across an interview to hear her talking about her memoir, Unsinkable. She sounded quite passionate and open about her life, so I looked forward to reading it. After a long wait […]