Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay

Summary from Goodreads:
From the bestselling author of Bad Feminist: a searingly honest memoir of food, weight, self-image, and learning how to feed your hunger while taking care of yourself

“I ate and ate and ate in the hopes that if I made myself big, my body would be safe. I buried the girl I was because she ran into all kinds of trouble. I tried to erase every memory of her, but she is still there, somewhere. . . . I was trapped in my body, one that I barely recognized or understood, but at least I was safe.”

In her phenomenally popular essays and long-running Tumblr blog, Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and body, using her own emotional and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health. As a woman who describes her own body as “wildly undisciplined,” Roxane understands the tension between desire and denial, between self-comfort and self-care. In Hunger, she explores her own past—including the devastating act of violence that acted as a turning point in her young life—and brings readers along on her journey to understand and ultimately save herself.

With the bracing candor, vulnerability, and power that have made her one of the most admired writers of her generation, Roxane explores what it means to learn to take care of yourself: how to feed your hungers for delicious and satisfying food, a smaller and safer body, and a body that can love and be loved—in a time when the bigger you are, the smaller your world becomes.

I have been WAITING AND WAITING for this book.  A new Roxane Gay collections of essays/memoir.  Give it to me now.

I don't think I can write anything coherent. Roxane's book is beautiful and gutting, full of sharp cultural criticism about how large bodies (fat people, particularly fat women) are perceived running parallel to an account of her life After and how broken she became. I don't know how she found the courage to cut this book free from her mind and allow us to read it but she did. It had to be so hard because I felt physical pain in my chest while I was reading it.  I am in awe of her strength.

Dear FTC: I read a digital galley of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss. I'll buy it, too, probably.

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

Summary from Goodreads:
The captivating first novel by the best-selling, National Book Award nominee George Saunders, about Abraham Lincoln and the death of his eleven year old son, Willie, at the dawn of the Civil War

On February 22, 1862, two days after his death, Willie Lincoln was laid to rest in a marble crypt in a Georgetown cemetery. That very night, shattered by grief, Abraham Lincoln arrives at the cemetery under cover of darkness and visits the crypt, alone, to spend time with his son’s body.

Set over the course of that one night and populated by ghosts of the recently passed and the long dead, Lincoln in the Bardo is a thrilling exploration of death, grief, the powers of good and evil, a novel - in its form and voice - completely unlike anything you have read before. It is also, in the end, an exploration of the deeper meaning and possibilities of life, written as only George Saunders can: with humor, pathos, and grace.

It is said that the night Willie Lincoln, who died at the age of 11 of typhoid fever, was laid to rest his father Abraham Lincoln came to the cemetery to visit the body.  It is also said that he held his son's body, spoke to it.  George Saunders has taken this historical nugget and turned it into a masterwork of beauty and pathos.

Lincoln in the Bardo is a novel narrated largely by the shades that inhabit the Georgetown cemetery over this single night.  These shades are trapped in this limbo, hampered by need, want, and fear.  Their forms are grotesquely reshaped by their obsessions and sins, for want of a better word.  Willie Lincoln's shade becomes a focus of attention in the cemetery for children's souls do not linger in this purgatory.  If they do, a horrific fate awaits.  Three shades, Vollman (a businessman), Bevins (a printer), and the Reverend Thomas, do their best to encourage Willie's soul to ascend.  But Willie's father has promised to return and so the little boy waits despite the increasing danger.

Lincoln in the Bardo is an incredible first novel from a master of the short fiction format.  The shared narration is reminiscent of a Greek chorus or a conversation, rendered on the page like the script of a play. These shades are not Dickens's ghosts - they are venal, vengeful, lustful, racist, distraught, obsessed with property, old lovers, old slights by family members, old wounds.  In a way, they are in collective denial of their state.  Saunders reflects the condition of the United States, torn by the Civil War as it reached the height of its bloodiest battles, in the inhabitants of this cemetery.  The limbo of Saunders's Bardo is not the Dantean Limbo of the Inferno, with the virtuous pagans living peacefully throughout eternity; this limbo is menacing, with an undercurrent of evil.  It swirls around Willie Lincoln, who waits in vain for his father to take him home.

I read this book almost immediately upon receiving the galley direct from George Saunders's hands. It proceeded to wreck me emotionally for the next 350 pages.  The uniqueness of the format allows the characters to speak directly to the reader without any sort of narrative interpretation or point-of-view.  I could read this over and over and keep finding little nuggets to wonder over.  I intend to purchase the audiobook edition of Bardo, which has a star-studded cast of 166 readers including Saunders himself, and just submit to it completely.

Lincoln in the Bardo is available on February 14 - you must read it.

Dear FTC:  I have a signed galley from BEA, which was an absolute highlight of the conference. Thank you so much to Random House and George Saunders for this book.

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

Summary from Goodreads:
Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hellish for all slaves, but Cora is an outcast even among her fellow Africans, and she is coming into womanhood; even greater pain awaits. Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her of the Underground Railroad and they plot their escape. Like Gulliver, Cora encounters different worlds on each leg of her journey.

Whitehead brilliantly recreates the unique terrors of black life in pre-Civil War America. The Underground Railroad is at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman's ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share.


If The Underground Railroad doesn't win all the literary prizes this year then those judges have no idea what they're missing.

This a raw, searing, gutting novel of will and grit and fear and mistrust and hope. Whitehead has pulled from so many parts of history to create the world that Cora occupies, from racism and the inhumanity of slavery to eugenics to Tuskeegee. All the open wounds laid bare.  Whitehead also chose to use elements of magical realism and alternate history novels to explore different ideologies that have been floated in the past regarding racism and segregation.  Cora is transported between states using a literal underground railroad - one state seems to have a sort-of progressive benevolent (yet menacing) segregation, another violently rejects all African-Americans or sympathizers, another presents an ideal utopia.  The plot and writing are truly phenomenal. A masterpiece.

(My only regret is that Oprah surprised us by picking this for her bookclub, moving up the publication date by over a month and goofing up my reading schedule.  I had just finished being wrecked by Homegoing so wasn't able to get this at the beginning of the month.)

Dear FTC: I got an ARC of this book at the Adult Author Breakfast at BEA and you can be sure that I'll be buying a copy of this, too.

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

Summary from Goodreads:
The unforgettable New York Times best seller begins with the story of two half-sisters, separated by forces beyond their control: one sold into slavery, the other married to a British slaver. Written with tremendous sweep and power, Homegoing traces the generations of family who follow, as their destinies lead them through two continents and three hundred years of history, each life indeliably drawn, as the legacy of slavery is fully revealed in light of the present day.

Effia and Esi are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman and lives in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle. Unbeknownst to Effia, her sister, Esi, is imprisoned beneath her in the castle’s dungeons, sold with thousands of others into the Gold Coast’s booming slave trade, and shipped off to America, where her children and grandchildren will be raised in slavery. One thread of Homegoing follows Effia’s descendants through centuries of warfare in Ghana, as the Fante and Asante nations wrestle with the slave trade and British colonization. The other thread follows Esi and her children into America. From the plantations of the South to the Civil War and the Great Migration, from the coal mines of Pratt City, Alabama, to the jazz clubs and dope houses of twentieth-century Harlem, right up through the present day, Homegoing makes history visceral, and captures, with singular and stunning immediacy, how the memory of captivity came to be inscribed in the soul of a nation.

I missed Yaa Gyasi's signing line at BEA (rats) but I was able to get approved for an Edelweiss galley and for that I am so grateful (Gyasi will be signing at Prairie Lights in October, yay for Iowa Writer's Workshop alums).  This is a book that will stay with me for a long time.

The structure of this novel serves up the plot to perfection.  Once Effia and Esi are introduced in adjacent chapters - in settings both sublimely beautiful and terrible - the plot unfolds through two branches of the family tree.  Every chapter follows a subsequent generation, alternating branches, Effia's line then Esi's line.  Reading other reviews, I noted that some readers were frustrated that Gyasi changed narrators so often. Just when we wish to have more time with a character, we jump branches and generations.  But I thought this was such a good way of representing the pull of time.  The characters cannot go back to have questions answered, to find things that were lost, or make different choices. Time only goes forward.  This was especially true for those chapters set among Esi's descendants who were sold into slavery in the American South - there was no going back to know one's grandparents, or home village, or ancestral tongue.  Brutal.

Homegoing is so well-crafted it's almost unbelievable that this is a debut. This book will break you, in a good way.  Keep the tissues handy.

Dear FTC: I received a digital galley from the publisher via Edelweiss.

The Queen of the Night by Alexander Chee

Summary from Goodreads:
Lilliet Berne is a sensation of the Paris Opera, a legendary soprano with every accolade except an original role, every singer’s chance at immortality. When one is finally offered to her, she realizes with alarm that the libretto is based on a hidden piece of her past. Only four could have betrayed her: one is dead, one loves her, one wants to own her. And one, she hopes, never thinks of her at all. As she mines her memories for clues, she recalls her life as an orphan who left the American frontier for Europe and was swept up into the glitzy, gritty world of Second Empire Paris. In order to survive, she transformed herself from hippodrome rider to courtesan, from empress’s maid to debut singer, all the while weaving a complicated web of romance, obligation, and political intrigue.

Featuring a cast of characters drawn from history, The Queen of the Night follows Lilliet as she moves ever closer to the truth behind the mysterious opera and the role that could secure her reputation -- or destroy her with the secrets it reveals.

The second I heard that Alexander Chee had a novel coming out about a Belle Époque opera singer with a secret I went on a mission to figure out how I might ferret out an advance copy.  I put The Queen of the Night on pre-order in hardback but I knew I was going to need time to read, and re-read, and digest.  Basically, I just want to snuggle the book and pet it because it is that good so I'll try and write something reasonably coherent.

Lilliet Berne is what is known as a Falcon soprano (named for the first such singer, Cornélie Falcon), with a voice of incredible darkness and power but a very fragile physical instrument.  Lilliet's secrets have secrets, secrets that could be deadly.  When she is offered an original role, an accolade that would cap her career, the opera's libretto threatens to bring her secrets to light.  The librettist is an unknown, the novel it is based on unknown to Lilliet.  As she recalls her life, delving through many layers of intrigue and disguise to determine which person betrayed her, the reader begins to wonder: who is Lilliet and what will happen to her?

The Queen of the Night is a novel at the intersection of Romanticism and Realism, two major movements in nineteenth-century art.  The surreal nesting of Lilliet's many-layered life inside the harsh reality of an orphan in Paris during the Second Empire.  The sturm und drang of the opera next to the monotony of being a grisette in Empress Eugénie's vast wardrobe.  The glittering heights of celebrity outline the horrifying years when Lilliet is treated as a possession.  Were this to become an opera, Verdi would have to compose the music.

Throughout the novel, Lilliet muses on the ideas of fate, hubris, and vengeance, giving us a glorious line:

...the gods did not kill for hubris - for hubris, they let you live long enough to learn. (p46)

Lilliet is the Queen of the Night - a role she loves for its dark power and famous for the fiendishly difficult "Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen"/"The vengeance of hell boils in my heart," is Carmen - trapped by the hand of cards dealt to her, is Violetta - caught between her heart and her past as a courtesan, is Leonora - the casualty of a revenge plot decades in the making.  As Lilliet notes: "victory, defeat, victory, defeat, victory, defeat."  As I was re-reading the book, I noticed that I wanted to listen to Mozart's Don Giovanni and Pucinni's Tosca.  Odd, because Giovanni is a baritone role, clearly not something Lilliet would sing, and Tosca did not premiere until 1900, well after the events of the book.  But there is something echoed in Lilliet's struggle against what she views as a curse brought on by hubris: Giovanni brazenly inviting his doom to supper and Tosca singing her haunting aria "Vissi d'arte" about art and prayer.

Tucked in among all the activity with circuses and Emperors and celebrity and opera, there is the simple story of a teenage girl who believes she is to blame for a karmic misfortune.  In her haste to get away she commits error after error as any inexperienced, grieving teenager might do, stumbling into misfortune and by sheer strength of will and cleverness keeping herself alive.  She becomes the famous Lilliet, leaving the adult woman to salvage what is left of the little girl from the Minnesota prairie.  Whatever your thoughts on opera as a music form, this coming-of-age tale with its mysterious twists and turns is the heart of Chee's novel.  A brilliant book to start 2016. 

Bellissima.  Bellissimo. Bravo.

PS: If you aren't familiar with opera - it isn't all Valkyries with blond braids and Viking hats, trust me - I suggest the following list of discs to check out:
Renée Fleming, "The Beautiful Voice", "Bel Canto", "Renée Fleming"
Jonas Kaufmann, "The Verdi Album", "The Best of Jonas Kaufmann"
Bryn Terfel, "Bad Boys", 1996 Don Giovanni recording
Joyce DiDonato, "Drama Queens", "Diva Divo"
José Carreras, "Passion"
The #1 Opera Album and The #1 Opera Album II - these are compilations with both older and newer recordings but wide range

Dear FTC: I did a first-read of this novel using a DRC provided by the publisher via Edelweiss and then I bought a copy because why the hell wouldn't I?

The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F*ck: How to Stop Spending Time You Don't Have with People You Don't Like Doing Things You Don't Want to Do by Sarah Knight

Summary from Goodreads:
THE "GENIUS" (Cosmopolitan) NATIONAL BESTSELLER THE ART OF CARING LESS AND GETTING MORE Are you stressed out, overbooked, and underwhelmed by life? Fed up with pleasing everyone else before you please yourself? It's time to stop giving a f*ck.

THE ART OF CARING LESS AND GETTING MORE
Are you stressed out, overbooked, and underwhelmed by life? Fed up with pleasing everyone else before you please yourself? It's time to stop giving a f*ck.

This brilliant, hilarious, and practical parody of Marie Kondo's bestseller The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up explains how to rid yourself of unwanted obligations, shame, and guilt--and give your f*cks instead to people and things that make you happy.

The easy-to-use, two-step NotSorry Method for mental decluttering will help you unleash the power of not giving a f*ck about:
Family drama
Having a "bikini body"
Iceland
Co-workers' opinions, pets, and children
And other bullsh*t! And it will free you to spend your time, energy, and money on the things that really matter. So what are you waiting for? Stop giving a f*ck and start living your best life today!

Warning: If you don't like cursing, specifically "fuck" and all it's creative uses, this book (and review) are likely not going to be your cup of tea (I read a review where the reviewer complained there were too many f-bombs, etc. and I almost commented with "duh".)

So, Sarah Knight - having KonMari'd her physical space - decided that she needed to something about the energy drain that giving too may fucks about things you don't actually like or care about.  She developed the NotSorry Method.  I.e. if you really don't like Tuesday night booze and karaoke with other people in your office (whom you don't otherwise socialize with) because it makes your Wednesday morning hellish, and you care far more about doing your job well and impressing your boss than what Janet four cubicles over thinks about you, then politely decline the karaoke and don't give a second thought to Janet.  And so on through all the different relationships and scenarios in your life.

The parody aspects of this book - aping the layout and terminology of Marie Kondo's The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up - are hilarious.  But all that aside, Knight's message of only giving your mental space, time, and energy (and occasionally) money to people and things you care about is a really good one.  Definitely a fun, useful book for a new year.

Dear FTC: I purchased my copy of this book.

Slaughterhouse 90210 by Maris Kreizman

Summary from Goodreads:
The perfect book for anyone with a Netflix account and a library card.

"Smart, sharp, and hilarious, Slaughterhouse 90210 is the perfect pick-me-up and never-put-me-down book." - Jami Attenberg, bestselling author of The Middlesteins

Slaughterhouse 90210 pairs literature's greatest lines with pop culture's best moments.

In 2009, Maris Kreizman wanted to combine her fierce love for pop culture with a lifelong passion for reading, and so the blog Slaughterhouse 90210 was born. By matching poignant passages from literature with popular moments from television, film, and real life, Maris' work instantly caught the attention (and adoration) of thousands. And it's easy to see why.

Slaughterhouse 90210 is subversively brilliant, finding the depth in the shallows of reality television, and the levity in Lahiri. A picture of Taylor Swift is paired with Joan Didion's quote, "Above all, she is the girl who 'feels things'. The girl ever wounded, ever young." Tony Soprano tenderly hugs his teenage son, accompanied by a line from Middlemarch about, "The patches of hardness and tenderness [that] lie side by side in men's dispositions." The images and quotes complement and deepen one another in surprising, profound, and tender ways.


With over 150 color photographs from some of popular culture's most iconic moments, Kreizman shows why comparing Walter White to Faust makes sense in our celebrity obsessed, tv crazed society.

Do you like books?
Do you like pop culture?
Do you like movies and television?

You may like Slaughterhouse 90210, then.  Maris Kreizman has married literary and pop culture moments in meme-like fashion.  Some are poignant, some are hilarious.  And if you already follow the original Tumblr blog, you likely won't remember all Maris's posts (many of the cross-cultural pieces were new to me and I've been a follower for quite some time). The juxtapositions are spot-on. There's even a helpful appendix for those of us who, like me, can't immediately place the photograph of the TV show or movie.

Dear FTC: I purchased my copy of this book.

Mãn by Kim Thúy

Summary from Goodreads:
A triumph of poetic beauty and a moving meditation on how love and food are inextricably entwined, Mãn is a seductive and luminous work of literature from Kim Thúy, whose first book, Ru, was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, received a Governor General's Literary Award and won the nationwide book competition Canada Reads.

Mãn has three mothers: the one who gives birth to her in wartime, the nun who plucks her from a vegetable garden, and her beloved Maman, who becomes a spy to survive. Seeking security for her grown daughter, Maman finds Mãn a husband--a lonely Vietnamese restaurateur who lives in Montreal. Thrown into a new world, Mãn discovers her natural talent as a chef. Gracefully she practices her art, with food as her medium. She creates dishes that are much more than sustenance for the body: they evoke memory and emotion, time and place, and even bring her customers to tears. Mãn is a mystery--her name means "perfect fulfillment," yet she and her husband seem to drift along, respectfully and dutifully. But when she encounters a married chef in Paris, everything changes in the instant of a fleeting touch, and Mãn discovers the all-encompassing obsession and ever-present dangers of a love affair. Full of indelible images of beauty, delicacy and quiet power, Mãn is a novel that begs to be savoured for its language, its sensuousness and its love of life.

Mãn is a book that I might probably have picked up and read all on my own.  It was slated for feature in the Discover Bay at the store (I walk past the display multiple times during a shift) and I like to pick books out of that list.  However...some smart person at Kim Thúy's publisher decided to purchase sponsorships for Book Riot podcasts so for a week-and-then-some this book was in my ears.

Of course I had to have it.

Mãn is one of the best, best books I read or will read this year.  It is a beautiful, slim, delicately wrought novel comprised of tiny flash-style chapters and a word for each chapter translated into Vietnamese in the margin.  (Aside: the physical design of Mãn is soul-destroyingly beautiful.)  It is a the story of a woman trying to find where she belongs in the world.  It is the story of a culture that has held onto so many of its traditions even as its people are forced to disperse around the globe.  It is the story of ordinary people who make sacrifices.  It is a story of how food can convey emotion and memory.  All of this is packed into 140 spare, quiet pages.

A perfect novel for a rainy, quiet evening.  I'll definitely have my eye out for Ru in the future.

Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish

Summary from Goodreads:
From the incomparable David Rakoff, a poignant, beautiful, witty and wise novel in verse whose scope spans the 20th Century.

David Rakoff, who died in 2012 at the age of 47,  built a deserved reputation as one of the finest and funniest essayists of our time.  This intricately woven novel, written with humour, sympathy and tenderness, proves him the master of an altogether different art form.

Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish leaps cities and decades as Rakoff, a Canadian who became an American citizen, sings the song of his adoptive homeland--a country whose freedoms can be intoxicating, or brutal. Here the characters' lives are linked to each other by acts of generosity or cruelty. A critic once called Rakoff "magnificent," a word which perfectly describes this wonderful novel in verse.

Unfortunately, I'd never read a work by David Rakoff (I mean book - I'm pretty sure I read at least one or two essays in some form or another) before he passed away.  And it seems particularly mean, on the part of the Universe, that he passed just as this last book came available to the reading population.

Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish is an amazing, gorgeously designed book.  I'm not sure how much Rakoff was involved in the cover design (authors usually aren't) but this is easily one of the most beautiful books I've purchased in a long while.  Kudos to Chip Kidd for the design and Seth for the illustration.  The design is vivid, it stands out, you want to pick it up and hold it.  Then buy the damn thing to take it home and wallow in the language.  A book to own as an art object not just a collection of words on paper.

The rhyme scheme is very simple - just rhyming couplets, so don't let the words "novel in verse" put you off.  It just lulls you into the interlinked stories of various family members and friends as the twentieth century moves along with all the horrors that cropped up as time went on.  In an interesting twist, the sing-song rhyming couplets crossed with the less-than-savory behavior on the part of some characters makes for a weird reading experience. The best sections are the opening chapter (which reminded me of Eleanor and Park in some ways in Peggy's character) and the last two Clifford chapters.

The Ocean at the End of Lane

Summary from Goodreads:
Sussex, England. A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. Although the house he lived in is long gone, he is drawn to the farm at the end of the road, where, when he was seven, he encountered a most remarkable girl, Lettie Hempstock, and her mother and grandmother. He hasn't thought of Lettie in decades, and yet as he sits by the pond (a pond that she'd claimed was an ocean) behind the ramshackle old farmhouse, the unremembered past comes flooding back. And it is a past too strange, too frightening, too dangerous to have happened to anyone, let alone a small boy.

Forty years earlier, a man committed suicide in a stolen car at this farm at the end of the road. Like a fuse on a firework, his death lit a touchpaper and resonated in unimaginable ways. The darkness was unleashed, something scary and thoroughly incomprehensible to a little boy. And Lettie—magical, comforting, wise beyond her years—promised to protect him, no matter what.

A groundbreaking work from a master, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is told with a rare understanding of all that makes us human, and shows the power of stories to reveal and shelter us from the darkness inside and out. It is a stirring, terrifying, and elegiac fable as delicate as a butterfly's wing and as menacing as a knife in the dark.

Neil Gaiman is such a good storyteller he makes me want to cry.  Just the way he builds worlds - they look like our world, but off just a little bit and he slowly scratches away at the intersection of fantasy and reality to reveal the story.  The Ocean at the End of the Lane is like an extension of a Grimm's fairy tale or Sidhe (sp?) encounters.  It just hijacked my brain.

This is my entire Goodreads review:

Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love.

It's like a fairy tale that went for a walk and got lost in someone's memoirs.

So, yeah, go read it.  Wallow in it.  Such a great book to kick off summer.

When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice

Summary from Goodreads:
Terry Tempest Williams’s mother told her: “I am leaving you all my journals, but you must promise me you won’t look at them until after I’m gone.”

Readers of Williams’s iconic and unconventional memoir, Refuge, well remember that mother. She was one of a large Mormon clan in northern Utah who developed cancer as a result of the nuclear testing in nearby Nevada. It was a shock to Williams to discover that her mother had kept journals. But not as much of a shock as what she found when the time came to read them. 

“They were exactly where she said they would be: three shelves of beautiful cloth-bound books . . . I opened the first journal. It was empty. I opened the second journal. It was empty. I opened the third. It too was empty . . . Shelf after shelf after shelf, all of my mother’s journals were blank.” What did Williams’s mother mean by that? In fifty-four chapters that unfold like a series of yoga poses, each with its own logic and beauty, Williams creates a lyrical and caring meditation of the mystery of her mother's journals. When Women Were Birds is a kaleidoscope that keeps turning around the question “What does it mean to have a voice?”

I honestly can't give a review of When Women Were Birds that is anything but OMIGODYOUMUSTBUYANDREADTHISNOWNOWNOWNOW.  The description on the flap copy gave me goosebumps and I sat down to read this in one sitting.  Then I read it over again. Everyone has to read this.  Every. One.

The actual sentence-level writing is the absolute best I've read in a long time, a master-class in narrative non-fiction.  Some of the variations are biographical (the grandmother who shared her love of birdwatching), some are autobiographical (Williams's remembrance of teaching school or developing conservation efforts), and some really defy definition.  A poetic essay?  Memoir?  Philosophical musings on the choice her mother made to secretly break with the tradition of keeping a diary?  Collected together they create beauty.

When Women Were Birds is a book I will come back to again and again at different points in my life.  The paperback edition, newly released, is my staff rec and I've been chasing customers and booksellers alike, pressing it upon them.  Voice, choice, and memory.  Mind-blowing.

Dear FTC: This is my copy that I bought and love and in an amazing twist of fate sent with a friend to Terry Tempest Williams's reading at Prairie Lights were she inscribed it to me.