Books Read This Month
- The Places That Scare You by Pema Chodron
- The German Girl by Armando Lucas Correa
- The Color of Love by Marra B. Gad
- Strangers and Cousins by Leah Hager Cohen
- Briar Rose by Jane Yolen
Favorite Book This Month
This was a much better reading month than last, and all of the reads above were thoughtful and helpful to me in their own way. The Places That Scare You I will probably read again. It's about those things that everyone knows but needs to be reminded of, about accepting and sitting with your emotions instead of letting them control you OR just stuffing them down, the latter of which I've been guilty of for a long time. It's scary to let yourself be vulnerable and feel and scarier still to make sure you don't give them too much control. The German Girl was most interesting to me for its comparison between Nazi rule in Germany and the Cuban revolution, as lived by someone who experienced both. It's also written by a Cuban author, so I'm impressed that it's become such a popular international bestseller. Strangers and Cousins seems simple on the surface, a family wedding story, but becomes much more complex as it posits ideas about treating the strangers in your life like family that I don't completely agree with, though it's an intriguing argument. Briar Rose is a book I probably should have read earlier in life, but I'm glad I got to it. It's branded YA, but it's really a new adult book, as the protagonist is 23. Setting Sleeping Beauty during the Holocaust is an intense idea, but Yolen pulls it off. The book manages to be absolutely devastating yet still hopeful. Yolen pulls no punches.
The Color of Love was my favorite book this month though. I read it in one sitting. It is a perfectly timed parable about racism and love, and I have no end of respect and admiration for Marra Gad. She looks ugliness in the face and loves right through it, and that's a kind of strength I'm no sure I or many people have. It's also just a fascinating and well-written story, and as a sidebar, completely condemns the state of elder care in America. Highly recommend.
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