Another month down means it’s time for another monthly reading wrap-up! I managed to read seven books in February!

I don’t do monthly TBRs because I’m ridiculously spontaneous when it comes to picking which books to read next. Sometimes it takes me three or four tries to settle on one book versus another. So my monthly wrap-ups should be as much of a surprise to my readers as they are to me!

My ratings are on a five-star scale with one being the worst and five being the best.

⭐: Basically this means I didn’t finish it

⭐⭐: I finished it, but wouldn’t necessarily recommend it to others

⭐⭐⭐: It was ok and I would consider recommending it to others under certain circumstances

⭐⭐⭐⭐: I enjoyed it and would definitely recommend it to others

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐: I loved it and it has become a favorite book, or at least one I think everyone should read. I would consider reading it more than once.

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Title: Hunger: A Memoir Of (My) Body

Author: Roxane Gay

Genre: Memoir

Published: 2017

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

There was a lot of hype surrounding this book and I believe it lived up to it. This was a heartbreaking, in-your-face look at the long-lasting effects of sexual abuse. Raped at the age of 12 by a group of boys, Roxane decided that the only way to make herself safe from future assaults was to make herself as undesirable as possible. This resulted in the development of disordered eating in which she gained hundreds of pounds. Any attempt to lose weight would lead to panic that she would no longer be safe and would be abused again. This is truly an important read.

Title: Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

Author: Gail Honeyman

Genre: Literary fiction

Published: 2017

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

I have mixed feelings about this book. I really liked it. It was well-written and the characters were vivid and rememberable. (In my mind’s eye, I pictured a brunette Zooey Deschanel as Eleanor and a slightly paunchier Russell Tovey as Raymond, but with the correct accents.) I think that what this book really boiled down to was mental health, even though it didn’t seem like it was going in that direction initially, aside from the obvious issues with Mummy. The trauma unearthed was shocking and the ending plot twist unexpected. However, I thought there were some significant plot holes that I won’t mention here for the sake of spoilers and that the ending was a bit of a letdown. That being said, I think what this book really gives is an important look at mental health (remember, Eleanor Oliphant is COMPLETELY FINE) that makes the subject accessible to readers. I appreciate what Gail Honeyman did with this book. If the movie produced by Reese Witherspoon moves forward, I will be very excited to see how it turns out on the big screen!

Title: GI Brides: The Wartime Girls Who Crossed the Atlantic for Love

Authors: Duncan Barrett and Nuala Calvi

Genre: History, non-fiction

Published: 2013

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐

This was an interesting book. I realized that during and following World War II, many English and European girls married American GIs, but I had no idea that about 70,000 did so! And I didn’t know either that it literally took an act of Congress to get them over here. This is the story of four young women from England who married GIs and followed them to America after the war. While the stories of Sylvia, Rae, Margaret, and Lyn were at turns fascinating, humorous, heartbreaking, and tragic, it felt like something was missing from this narrative. Although the divorce rate of GI brides was apparently lower than the national average (according to the epilogue), the way the stories were portrayed here seems to imply that few of those 70,000 marriages were happy and that the majority of the “Yanks” were men full of vice. I can’t help but think it might have been nice to portray some happy marriages, too.

Title: Angela’s Ashes

Author: Frank McCourt

Genre: Memoir

Published: 1996

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

I don’t know how I’ve made it this far in my life without reading this. This book is heartbreaking, hilarious, cheeky, and essentially epitomizes the Irish Catholic childhood of the 1930s and 1940s. McCourt, who was born in America, and his Irish-born parents returned to Ireland following the death of one of their five children. What follows is the story of McCourt’s impoverished coming of age in Limerick. As the oldest child, he wants to be a man; to be able to provide the means to survive that his father, who drinks away all of his wages when he can even find a job, can’t seem to provide for his family. McCourt is a child who grows up before his time out of necessity.

Title: Educated: A Memoir

Author: Tara Westover

Genre: Memoir

Published: 2018

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

This was a release-day buy for me and it was gorgeous. I’ve never read anything quite like this memoir. Raised in a religious family by survivalist parents who feared the government and looked with suspicion upon the Medical Establishment, Tara and her siblings were pulled out of school and “educated” at home. It comes to light that Tara’s father, given the pseudonym Gene, was likely suffering from bipolar disorder. This greatly affected the family dynamic, from stockpiling food and weapons to shunning medical care when family members sustained life-threatening and life-altering injuries and burns. Facing abuse from her brother Shawn (also a pseudonym), Tara follows the advice of her brother Tyler and manages to score well enough on the ACT to get into Brigham Young University. It is there that Tara’s eyes are opened to the world of medicine and history, where she hears of the Holocaust for the first time. Continuing to defy her family by pursuing further education, winding up at Cambridge and Harvard, she eventually has to make a decision: return to her family and their controlling ways, or pursue her own life of education.

Title: The Skeleton Cupboard

Author: Tanya Byron

Genre: Medical fiction

Published: 2014

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

I really liked this book, but I’m still not sure what to make of it. The premise of the book is “the making of a clinical psychologist.” It follows the author through her three years of six clinical placements in early 1990s London as she trains to become a clinical psychologist. The stories she tells are enrapturing, interesting, and occasionally shocking and devastating. Told in the first person, they make your heart race. But the only problem is that none of the stories are true. The author states, “The cases that I have written about are entirely fictional.” I understand patient confidentiality. But when you write a book in first person about the people you (apparently didn’t) encounter, it just makes it seem like a sham. The only reason I rated it as high as I did is because it was very well written.

Title: The Fever of 1721: The Epidemic That Revolutionized Medicine And American Politics

Author: Stephen Coss

Genre: Historical nonfiction

Published: 2016

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

This book was a surprise. It is essentially two seemingly unrelated stories at first blush: the Boston smallpox epidemic of 1721 (and the first inoculations to occur in America) and the beginning of the fight for liberty in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the form of freedom of speech and freedom of the press. (I think there’s a reason those are both protected by the First Amendment.) Cotton Mather, of Salem witch trial fame, becomes convinced through reading reports from the Royal Society, as well as testimony from much of Boston’s African population, that inoculation against smallpox by inserting material from an infected person’s sores into cuts on a well person’s body would render that person immune to smallpox. After little success convincing the town’s physicians of the procedure’s merit, a physician named Zabdiel Boylston steps forward and begins to inoculate people, much to the shock and outrage of the Puritan town. In response to this, printer James Franklin and his apprentice brother Benjamin Franklin create America’s first independent (that is, not endorsed by the government) newspaper, which was used to generally condemn the practice of inoculation. Although the story is much more complex, it is truly a fascinating tale of how a scientific advancement against the world’s most deadly disease was intricately connected with a fight to protect freedom of the press and speech in America.

💛ribbonrx