rosepoints's reviews
129 reviews

something i really appreciated about this book was the way it used displacement to frame the narrative of climate change and the incredibly devastating and real impacts it has on people. i also appreciated the narrative nature of the book, and i would easily recommend this book to people who are newer to reading nonfiction. highly recommend!

altogether, this was a very pleasant read where the author explores the idea of community. it reminds me of a long conversation that winds through a couple of primary touchpoints, whether it be the author's mennonite background or experience with other trans/queer communities. she also doesn't hesitate to name some of the more problematic aspects of community and what it is limited in. i do think that at certain points, the conversation dragged on a wee bit too long, and at certain points, it veered into more observation rather than true analysis. still, i enjoyed reading it and would happily read it again. 

this book manages to be simple yet complex, light yet dense, all as inexplicable as the titular character themselves. i have a hard time pinning what it is about this book that kept me reading, but i'll try my best to explain it.

the premise is that in a small town, a stranger spends the night in the church and is discovered the next morning. they do not know anything about their identity, and so, the town dubs them "pew." they can't place pew's gender, race, age, anything, and their identity becomes slippery, reflecting back the town's own insecurities. pew themselves is the narrator of the story, which makes it even more interesting given the nature of their ambiguity.

there are multiple allusions to other things going on, whether that be a string of disappearances or an annual ritual that the town takes part in. there are also a number of themes interlaced throughout the book, whether that be about race, otherness, religion and the limits of belief, white guilt, hypocrisy, or community. 

however, my main issue with the book itself is that in theory, i like the book and what it's trying to do. however, in practice, the experience of reading it was less than stellar. i love thinking about the idea of the book and what the book was trying to do, but i did not enjoy the execution as much. because of that, i finally settled on three stars as my rating.

i think that this was an interesting short story to read, and it left me thinking for quite a bit afterwards. essentially, the narrator talks about how she is taken to the countryside to recover from some illness. once she's there, she stays in a room with yellow wallpaper, and the plot unravels from there as she alludes to her marriage, her place in society, gender roles and expectations, and illness narratives. 

i genuinely think that this is a good short story that masterfully uses the limitations of its format. however, i think that this just didn't speak to me like i thought it would. still highly recommend to read though!

much like mona awad's "rouge," this book delves into themes of beauty, womanhood, belonging, and grief. however, i think that ling ling huang pushed a little more into the body horror realm and touched upon the asian-american experience of immigration more than mona awad, which makes sense given the main character's background. "natural beauty" never quite struck horror for me, but i found the exploration of bodies and the blurring of the boundary between real and unreal to be interesting enough. 

i did think that ultimately, the characters seemed shallow compared to the depth of the themes the author tried to touch. i also felt like the narrative felt a little simplistic at times as it demonized its fictional equivalent of supergoop. there were places where i felt like the author could've really reached for more unsettling or horrific, but it didn't deter me from the overall reading experience.

altogether, still a good book to read that i could happily read again, but i'm left feeling ambivalent?

admittedly, i am not the target audience of the book because i am not a parent. i mainly picked it up because i wanted to read more about anti-fat bias and fat activism. altogether, i think the author made some good points about how we are conditioned to view fatness as inherently bad and as a marker of moral character, but i felt like sometimes, the anecdotes/case studies of parents and children contradicted each other and diminished the strength of the overall message. perhaps this would've resonated with me more if i was a parent?

something that i think this book does really well is how it manages to be a genuinely conversational history book. i find that a lot of history books i read tend to get bogged down with the dates and timelines, which is probably more of a personal thing rather than a history book thing, but it was a pleasantly surprising experience to read this book. 

as for the actual book itself, i did genuinely learn a lot about american imperialism, especially US involvement in the philippines. although my history classes in school briefly covered american expansionism, immerwahr provided much more context that allowed me to better understand the full extent of the atrocities the united states committed in their former colonial holdings. 

i personally felt like the first half of the book was much stronger than the second half, and i also think that immerwahr spent most of his time on the philippines compared to the other sections on guam and puerto rico. i also felt like he circled around and around the main point instead of deliberately and explicitly coming out against imperialism and neocolonialism. yes, we're not in the philippines anymore, but the united states continues to exploit others in the pursuit of resource accumulation and capital. we are still hiding the empire, and yet, immerwahr never expands on that or extends the history to the modern-day reality. 

given the rave reviews about this book, i expected to like it much more than i actually did. 

the core message of the book itself is important; we seriously should re-evaluate what we consider to be the standard, default person. science and data are not hard-bound facts but rather, malleable things that are deeply influenced by the bias that we put into it. that's a message that i firmly stand by and believe in, and the author provides a dizzying array of statistical examples to prove her point, whether it be related to public transportation or the workplace.

however, i do have several critiques of this book. first, the book is not intersectional and chooses instead to fixate on sex as a strict binary. for a book that claims to espouse the need to be more cognizant of biases, this oddly stood out to me. the whole bathroom spiel is giving terf... there's little mention of race nor sexuality either, and i feel like that led to a lot of missed opportunity within nearly every chapter. 

second, the author is painfully repetitive, to the point where i could start predicting her sentence and chapter structure nearly word for word. it felt like she was providing me a list of facts about sexism rather than a book about sexism, and that doesn't make for a particularly pleasant reading experience. idk, i've read better nonfiction than this that covers the same topic. i could see this being a starter book for a lot of people, especially given its popularity, but it's certainly not the best in its genre.

i read this back in like, 2017 or smth and it fundamentally rewired my brain. that has not changed in 2024 <3

hm, i feel very ambivalent on my final rating of the book. if i think about my reading experience of the book on a surface level, it does feel like a heart-warming book. the characters who try to travel back in time end up overcoming their emotional obstacles and learn more about themselves in the process. but the minute i think a little too deeply about the characters and the specific problems that they wanted to fix, i begin to dislike it even more.

first, i really despise books, shows, etc where the woman dies from pregnancy. i also don't like how the moral of the story for the girl who breaks up with her boyfriend is to wait three years for the boy to come back and marry her, despite the fact that the girl is objectively hotter and smarter and more accomplished than the guy. i also feel super weird about the sister story because she ends up giving in to her parents' expectations of her, and although the story makes it sound like a good thing, i feel bad about the fact that she had dreams of her own too that all got sidelined and made unimportant by virtue of her sister's death. 

idk! maybe i should stop thinking and just take the good vibes that were handed to me in a coffee cup! but alas, i am cursed to overthink.