Good morning!
I thought I’d try something new on this blog, and that’s to review books I’ve read. Here’s what I read for the week ending January 5, 2020:
When she was eighteen years old, Carolyn Jessop was coerced into an arranged marriage with a total stranger: a man thirty-two years her senior. Merril Jessop already had three wives. But arranged plural marriages were an integral part of Carolyn’s heritage: She was born into and raised in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), the radical offshoot of the Mormon Church that had settled in small communities along the Arizona-Utah border.
My new favorite genre of audiobooks is memoirs of women who grew up in cults. This was one of several about women who grew up in the polygamist FLDS cults in Utah, Colorado, and Mexico. Each of the stories is similar, yet completely different. Each woman had to make her own path from subservience to independence, and hearing about their journeys is fascinating.
I gave it 4/5 stars on Goodreads.
A canny young woman is struggling to survive by perpetrating various levels of mostly harmless fraud. On a rainy April morning, she is reading auras at Spiritual Palms when Susan Burke walks in. A keen observer of human behavior, our unnamed narrator immediately diagnoses beautiful, rich Susan as an unhappy woman eager to give her lovely life a drama injection.
This was a short homage to ghost stories. My only disappointment with this book is that it was only 61 pages! I would have loved to learn more about the main character.
I gave it 4/5 stars on Goodreads.
Captive: A Mother’s Crusade to Save Her Daughter from the Terrifying Cult Nxivm by Catherine Oxenberg
In 2011, former Dynasty star Catherine Oxenberg joined her daughter, India, at a leadership seminar for a new organization called NXIVM. Her then twenty-year-old daughter was on the threshold of starting her own professional life and they both thought this program might help her achieve her dream. But quickly, Catherine saw a sinister side to the program that claimed to simply want to help its clients become the best versions of themselves…Catherine watched in horror as her daughter fell further and further down the rabbit hole, falling under the spell of NXIVM’s hypnotic leader, Keith Raniere.
Trying to branch out from the FLDS cult memoirs, I came across this. Catherine Oxenberg narrates her book and I was highly entertained by her vocal inflections that let the listener know how she really felt about someone. I hope a memoir from the daughter – or other members of this cult – comes out soon because I’d be really interested to know what the allure was.
I gave it 4/5 stars on Goodreads.
Scratch Beginnings: Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream by Adam Shepard
Adam W. Shepard’s Scratch Beginnings is the fascinating and eye-opening account of the grand social experiment the author undertook in response to Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed. Subtitled “Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream,” Scratch Beginnings chronicles Shepard’s successful efforts to raise himself up from self-imposed rock bottom in one year’s time—a personal odyssey that is sure to inspire anyone who reads about it, instilling new faith in the solid principles on which our democracy was built.
This book made me angry. I tried to remember that the author was young, idealistic, but he was just so patronizing. I know the term “white male privilege” gets thrown around a lot these days, but this book is pretty much a perfect example of that concept.
I gave it 2/5 stars on Goodreads.
The Memory Keeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards
Kim Edwards’s stunning novel begins on a winter night in 1964 in Lexington, Kentucky, when a blizzard forces Dr. David Henry to deliver his own twins. His son, born first, is perfectly healthy, but the doctor immediately recognizes that his daughter has Down syndrome. Rationalizing it as a need to protect Norah, his wife, he makes a split second decision that will alter all of their lives forever.
This was one of those books that I couldn’t put down, but I didn’t want to end, either. I was satisfied by the ending and gave it 5/5 stars on Goodreads.
I included links to Amazon for these books, but I got them from the library and you can probably find them at your local library too!
Have you read any of these books?
