Review of Our Voice of Fire: A Memoir of a Warrior Rising, by Brandi Morin
LIBER: A Feminist Review
For decades, the movement to address the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls (MMIWG) in North America has used a range of strategies to show non-Native people what Native people have known for hundreds of years: Indigenous women and girls, as well as queer, trans, and Two-Spirit people, are disproportionately victims of violence and homicide.
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Review of Admissions: A Memoir of Surviving Boarding School, by Kendra James
LIBER: A Feminist Review
In the mid-2000s, Kendra James was the first African American legacy student at the Taft School, an upper-crust boarding school in Connecticut. The young James had visited the school during her father’s reunions, which gave her a sense of connection and familiarity, yet nothing prepared her—not her middle-class suburban life, her New Jersey public school education, or her upbringing by college-educated parents—for the ordeal of her three years at Taft.
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Longform review of How to Be a Girl: A Mother’s Memoir of Raising her Transgender Daughter, by Marlo Mack
Women’s Review of Books
Transgender children are in the news. This is, at best, a mixed state of affairs. A recent spate of documentaries, including the 2020 HBO film, Transhood, aims to provide less sensationalistic and more nuanced storytelling than previous mainstream media coverage, with trans youth sometimes acting as authors or co-creators. But increased visibility in both traditional and social media has met with backlash.
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Review of Beauty, by Christina Chiu
Women’s Review of Books
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Christina Chiu’s fast-paced and unsettling novel, Beauty, follows the life trajectory of Amy Wong, a second-generation Chinese American living in New York City whose plans to forge a career in fashion and find love get derailed.
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Women’s Review of Books
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In 2012, women’s and gender studies scholar Charlotte Pierce-Baker published a memoir, This Fragile Life: A Mother’s Story of a Bipolar Son, which explored the experience of mental illness and addition in an African American family.
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Review of The Bold World: A Memoir of Family and Transformation, by Jodie Patterson
Women’s Review of Books
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Amidst the recent boom of parental memoirs about raising transgender kids, Jodie Patterson’s The Bold World: A Memoir of Family and Transformation provides a refreshing and consequential examination of the author’s experience raising her youngest son, a “boy called Penelope.”
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Review of Freshwater, by Akwaeke Emezi
Women’s Review of Books
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I can’t remember the last time I read a book as original and disturbing as Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater.
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Review of Homegoing, by Yaa Gyasi; Under the Udala Trees, by Chinelo Okparanta; The Book of Memory, by Petina Gappah
Women’s Review of Books
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In her now-famous 2009 TED Talk, the writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie explains the “danger” of knowing only a “single story.”
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Review of The Goddess Pose: The Audacious Life of Indra Devi, by Michelle Goldberg
Women’s Review of Books
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You don’t have to own a mat to know that yoga has transformed from a countercultural interest into a multibillion dollar “growth industry.”
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Additional book reviews published in Brain, Child: The Magazine for Thinking Mothers, The Christian Science Monitor, In These Times, Newsday, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Times-Union, Women’s Review of Books, The Washington Post, and Yale Alumni Magazine.
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