thereadhersrecap's reviews
271 reviews

Frida Liu had a very bad day.

She left her eighteen-month-old daughter Harriette at home while she went to the local coffee shop for an iced coffee. What was meant to be a 10 minute trip to the coffee shop turned into a two-hour abandonment? Emergency removal of Harriette takes place and Frida is sent to a new reform program for bad mothers for an entire year.

“Now, repeat after me: I am a bad mother, but I am learning to be good”

Frida’s entire life gets scrutinized by the courts. What was it like growing up? What were you doing on the day of the incident? Why did you leave her at home? Do you let her watch television? An endless scrutinization. Frida falls into a ceaseless “I should have” shame spiral. It’s honestly something I’ve struggled with myself. Constantly questioning whether you’re doing the right thing for your child, always second-guessing yourself, always thinking you should have done something different.

The School takes on a prison-like feeling right from the start. She’s not allowed anything from home, she’s only allowed to wear the “school” uniform, guards are in rotation, weekly phone calls home (if she’s lucky), and constant video monitoring.

“She is a bad mother among other bad mothers. She neglected and abandoned her child. She has no history, no other identity”

One mother locked her 6 kids in a hole in the floor. Another was there because her daughter broke her arm sliding down a slide. Another whose daughter had bruises on her arms, another lost custody when she turned herself into the psych ward. The mothers gossip incessantly about each other. They obviously all made terrible mistakes, some worse than others, but it's questionable whether they deserve to be sent to what I feel is a prison for mothers.

The mothers go through a series of classes of psychological torture. It’s honestly disturbing. It’s like Squid Games meets some kind of dystopian robot movie. The mothers must prove their good mothering by completing each unit assessment perfectly. If they pass, they are allowed the privilege of a 10-minute video call with their family.

This book is very terrifying and downright disturbing but also eye-opening. It questions what it means to be a mother in today’s modern world. What determines a good mother from a bad mother? It criticizes the expectations society has on mothers as well as what mothers expect of each other and of themselves.

So I actually did not finish this book.....

It started off great! Mid hookup. I was immediately interested. There are not many books that start off with the main characters hooking up.

Then, it kind of got boring. The story introduces the main characters (Hazel and Afi), the reason for their hookup and their feelings towards each other. It cuts to another couple (Hazel's sister and her partner) and starts to introduce their relationship and their problems. I was waiting for the story to get interesting or at least have a concept for me to grasp onto and keep me reading. But I did not find that to be the case.

I appreticate the diversity of the characters but also found their development lacked depth. I found myself wanting more. It seems like it had promise - maybe if I kept reading? But I found myself easily distracted.

zamn, what a collection!

Cathy Park Hong puts into words the Asain American consciousness in this part memoir part culture criticism essay collection. Each essay, accompanied by personal accounts, embarks on an examination of the racial experience in America.

The book centers around the term “minor feelings” which Hong defines as an everyday experience of being nonchalantly confronted with racial remarks and having your perceptions of that experience questioned or dismissed. It stems from a lack of change for the purpose of keeping an individual in place.

“The problem is not that my childhood was exceptionally traumatic but that it was in fact rather typical.”

This book helped me to reflect on my own experiences and feelings being a Hispanic Pacific Islander and I found a lot of what Hong described resonated with me. As she stated, this collection does not encompass the entirety of the Asian American experience but it is a jumping-off point to further discussion on racial inequality in America.

Honestly, everyone should read this book!

Memorable quotes from the book:

“For as long as I could remember, I have struggled to prove myself into existence.”

”Racial hatred is seeing yourself the way the Whites see you, which turns you into your own worst enemy.”

“Writers of color have to behave better in their poetry and in person; they had to always act gracious and grateful so that white people would be comfortable enough to sympathize with their racialized experiences.”

“Will there be a future where I, on the page, am simply I, on the page, and not I, proxy for a whole ethnicity, imploring you to believe we are human beings who feel pain?”

“Writing about race is a polemic, in that we must confront the white capitalist infrastructure that has erased us, but also a lyric, in that our inner consciousness is knotted with contraindications. As much as I protest against the easy narrative of overcoming, I have to believe we will overcome racial inequities; as much as I’m exasperated by sentimental immigrant stories of suffering, I think Koreans are some of the most traumatized people I know.”

“In our efforts to belong in American, we act grateful, as if we’ve been given a second chance at life. But our shared root is not the opportunity this nation has given us but how the capitalist accumulation of white supremacy has enriched itself off the blood of our countries. We cannot forget this.”

“Our respective racial containment isolates us from each other, enforcing our thoughts that our struggles are too specialized, unrelatable to anyone else except others in our group, which is why making myself, and by proxy other Asain Americans, more human is not enough for me. I want to destroy the universal.”

This was such a creative outlook on relationships. The format was email and text dialogue between 2 people in a relationship and their best friends. It’s so fun to see the friends interactions/reassuring of each other!

But, who uses emails nowadays?

And also they throw around the R word quite a bit and I’m not down with that.

Overall it’s short and sweet and fun.

Journalist Chani Horowitz is given the chance of a lifetime, an interview with Hollywood’s heartthrob, Gabe Parker. And he’s her biggest celebrity crush (I’m talking shirtless screensaver kinda crush

Frances is all kinds of messed up. She’s drunk more than sober, dysfunctional, and unreliable. She’s me in college.

She invites her girlfriend (who she hates!) to live with her to use her to pay off her drug dealer. The whole plan goes wrong when she ends up sedating Elaine before getting the money. Now she has a pissed off torture happy drug dealer looking for her.

I think Dawn WInter did a bang up job with this novel. At some points it does feel a little redundant. Like what more could you possibly complain about?? But, it also touched on some heavy trauma and mother-daughter relationship woes.

If you love women behaving badly (who doesn’t?) then this is sure to make you L O L.

Rages Series!

I read the final book to this series first (The Emma Project) and absolutely loved it. This one was not as good but I still enjoyed it.

It could have included more steamy moments between the characters.

I did like the diversity of the characters. And I like how the topics of prejudice was tied in without being in your face about it.