Simon & Schuster – Page 3

The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl

February 25, 2018 RaeAnna

Read: Yes
Length: 224
Quick Review: Issa Rae has entered our homes and hearts as the quirky, awkward, lovable, black girl through her YouTube, writing, TV show, and more. Her book makes her even more relatable.

I am behind on the times, so I discovered Issa Rae about four months ago when I binge watched Insecure. I immediately fell in love with her writing, acting, and message. As a self-proclaimed bookworm/nerdy girl, I could completely relate to her bathroom mirror pep talks and internal dialogues. The cover of her book intermittently popped up on my Instagram feed since I started, and after watching her show, I put two and two together. So I ordered her book.

The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl is honest. One of the more, honest memoirs. She tells things straight (as straight as personal memories can be). Her sense of humor drenches the novel with gripping laughs. She is self deprecating in the way only someone who is truly comfortable in their awkwardness can be.

Rae pulls you in with her familiarity and wit. The words “black girl” in the title lead me to believe the book would be fairly politically charged. In fact, it was quite the opposite. Rae has her moments of political and cultural commentary, but for the most part she just tells her story, which being a black girl is a central element. Blackness is a central theme throughout her book. She emphasizes the importance of not having a black cookie cutter because one size does not fit all.

At only 200 pages, it is an incredibly quick read definitely worth your time.

P.S. Issa Rae… I LOVE Tootsie Rolls. Like really love Tootsie Rolls. I was the kid that dove for them at parades. Thinking of which, I was the only kid diving for them at parades. I have also dated Asian men. I had never thought of it until you brought it up… but I guess there is a correlation. Which means! Like Asian men, Tootsie Rolls are under-coveted.

Memorable Quotes
“The gamut of “blackness” is so wide.”
“Black women and Asian men are at the bottom of the dating totem pole in the United States.”

Title: The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl
Author: Issa Rae
Publisher: Atria Paperback (Simon & Schuster)
Copyright: 2015
ISBN: 9781476749075

Books, NonFiction

Year of Yes

February 18, 2018 RaeAnna

Read: Yes
Length:
Quick Review: Shonda Rhimes owns Thursday night and lives in Shondaland. But she wasn’t happy, so she embarked on a year of saying yes.

Shonda Rhimes grew up in Chicago, graduated from Dartmouth then USC School of Cinematic Arts, and went on to write movies in Hollywood. In 2005, she launched her first show: Grey’s Anatomy. She went on to create several more shows. Today, every show on ABC on Thursday nights she has brought to life.

Rhimes begins her memoir with a disclaimer, which states she is old and a liar. She loves lying. She’s a professional liar. Because… it’s her job! She’s a writer. Playing make believe is her job. No matter how much she loves lying, she’s keeping it real in her memoir. She then has a prologue about the events leading her to her year of yes. Then her book begins.

Rhimes is a successful woman of color in Hollywood, which is still rare. She was unhappy even though she seemed to have everything: a job, money, TV shows, success, power, family, friends, and three beautiful daughters. She decided to spend a year saying yes to the opportunities that came her way. As the year progressed, she began to notice her quality of life changing.

I can personally identify with her childhood as a bookworm and potential, future writer. As a child, she used to shove books down the back of her pants, so she could sneak off and read. When I was little, I couldn’t wait to own a purse. At 10, I bought my first purse; it was big enough to hold a book, and that’s all I ever carried in it. I now carry huge purses because I still bring a book everywhere.

The thing I loved most about Year of Yes, is how real Rhimes kept it. I want to be her friend, quite honestly. She cut the crap. She let people in showing her fragility. She’s a single mom. How does she do it? With help. She is incredibly shy and has stage fright. How did she get over it? She said yes to Jimmy Kimmel.

Year of Yes is her memoir, but I found it so empowering. I don’t want to mom, but her words on motherhood were beyond touching. I wish I could memorize her pseudo-rant because it was perfect. She’s inspiring as a F.O.D. First. Only. Different.

Shonda Rhimes is a remarkable woman with so much ahead of her. An entire generation grew up with her TV shows. I still remember the very first night Grey’s Anatomy aired. She has impacted a shift in television and the way we see the world. She is an inspiration even before reading her book. It’s important for our role models to be something other than perfect. Rhimes tears down the walls of her perfection revealing a woman with faults and imperfections. She’s allowing a whole generation of young women, who look up to her, to be human with bumps in their personalities realize they too can be an F.O.D.

Memorable Quotes
“Sometimes the toilet paper does not win.”
“I am never more sure of myself about a topic than when I have absolutely no experience with it.”
“We’ve all been taught to shame and be shamed.”

Title: Year of Yes; How to Dance It Out, Stand in the Sun and Be Your Own Person
Author: Shonda Rhimes
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Copyright: 2015
ISBN: 9781476777122

Books

All the Single Ladies

January 26, 2018November 4, 2018 RaeAnna

Read: Yes
Length: 339
Quick Review: An in depth look at the transformation in status, perception, and participation American women have undergone in society through the centuries.

20180115_111033(0)-01.jpeg — All the Single Ladies by Rebecca Traister

Rebecca Traister had me hooked when she stated, “I always hated it when my heroines got married” within the first few paragraphs. All the Single Ladies is a look at modern women and where we have come from.

All the Single Ladies is a fun yet in depth look at the history of women with a focus on American women. There are tons of statistics, but you won’t drown in them. The statistics serve a purpose to educate but are still interesting. Traister utilizes her own single life as well as friends, colleagues, and others’ experiences as single women. One thing Traister conveys more than anything else is that singledom is incredibly diverse looking different for everyone.

Traister is not anti-marriage, anti-male, anti-woman, or anti-single. When she began her journey writing this book, she was a single woman living in New York City. At some point in her life and book journey, she met a man. She is now a married woman with two daughters.

This has been on my reading list for awhile since I am a single lady. For as excited as I was, I was also a touch tentative. Rebecca Traister is a white woman. There is nothing wrong with this. When looking at a subject, there is the tendency to look at people similar to oneself. I was worried there would be a deficiency of inclusivity and diversity of perspective, socio-economic background, race, etc. I was pleasantly surprised. From the beginning, she states that she sites more white, New Yorker writers than most of us probably know. Throughout the book, she does a good job of talking about all women and not just those she identifies with. She spends a great deal of time discussing the disparity between white women and women of color, poor women and middle class/wealthy women, and more. She explores the fact women of color and poor women have enabled wealthier classes of women “freedoms.” How there is a dependency between the two discrepancies. How white women have lead change by co-opting opinions and actions of women of color.

Traister spends a lot of time emphasizing the complexities of women’s issues.

Nothing Traister wrote was groundbreaking. At least, it wasn’t ground breaking or remotely shocking to me. I spend a lot of my time listening to women’s stories and reading about the history and complexities of women’s status in society. If it’s not something you have spent a great deal of time lingering on, there will be lots of information packed into a fairly short book.

(I have fun finding mistakes, and she had one mistake on page 153: the date should be 1938 but reads 1838. Oops! Only off by 100 years.)

I highly suggest this book. It’s interesting and fun. Personally, it rejuvenated my love of being a single woman in America. I would love to hear Traister’s opinions about women’s status post the 2016 presidential election.

Buy on Amazon || Buy on Book Depository

Memorable Quotes
“…these single American women have already shown that they have the power to change America, in ways that make many people extremely uncomfortable.”
“Any time women do anything with their lives that is not in service to others, they are readily perceived as acting perversely.”
“When people call single women selfish for the act of spending on themselves, it’s important to remember that the very acknowledgement that women have selves that exist independently of others, and especially independent of husbands and children, is revolutionary.”
““It takes a lot to qualify a man as selfish”” Amina Sow
“The state must play its role in supporting a population that no longer lives and dies within a family unit.”
“at the heart of independence lies money.”
“When it comes to female liberty and opportunity, history sets an extremely low bar.”
“women’s maternal status is often treated as the singularly interesting thing about them”

Title: All The Single Ladies; Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation
Author: Rebecca Traister
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks
Copyright: 2016
ISBN: 9781476716572

Books, Fiction

Children of the Jacaranda Tree

October 3, 2017 RaeAnna

Read Yes
Length 285
Quick Review The complexities of being a parent making choices forever impacting children, and children forever remembering and reeling from their parents’ choices.

Delijani begins Children of the Jacaranda Tree with a booming voice describing a mother’s love and desperate journey for survival. With moments of roman á clef, it is evident the topic of the novel is very near to Delijani’s heart.

The novel is about children growing up against the backdrop of Iran in the midst of the war with Iraq and struggle with the revolution during the 1980’s as well as the early 2000’s. The adults are revolutionaries in prison or raising the children of revolutionaries in prison. The children are grown up trying to piece together the meaning of their lives in relation to their parents and their home country.

The jacaranda tree is in the backyard of a grandmother. Every character goes in and out of this woman’s house. Some stay longer than others, but the tree plays a very small role in the book. Though it becomes a powerful symbol for each person; though, to each person it symbolizes something different.

Delijani is able to write with a palpable sense of fear as it permeates every main and supporting characters’ life in Iran as women, as men, as people, as revolutionaries. The adults fear for their lives and their freedom; they fear how to explain reality to their children. Though the children are too young to comprehend, they are able to sense fear. Every parent must explain the revolution and Evin prison to their children, but each struggles to explain it in a different way. As every parent must explain struggle and hardship, they do the best they can.

History repeats itself. Though decades separate the struggles of the parents and the children, they end up fighting the same battles with the same repercussions always with a sense of fear they will end up in Evin prison, where their parents once were imprisoned. The children repeat their parents’ hopes, actions, lives, and even mistakes. Some children know the details of their parents’ pasts, and some do not. The actions and pasts of their parents belong to the children in one way or another impacting their lives.

Every character in the story is trapped. Some are physically bound, and others are restrained psychologically. They are trapped by past, by grief, by tradition, by prison, by family, by responsibility, by secrets, and more.

Delijani writes a vibrant and emotionally charged novel about a subject so often forgotten, glanced over, or blatantly ignored. It is difficult to imagine this being the reality children had to grow up in less than thirty years ago. Delijani is able to bring that reality to life by telling the stories of so many children left behind.

Memorable Quotes
“It was important to her to know that she could choose those dresses, that this choice, although hidden from view, was still hers.”
“He was no longer anywhere.”
“The past is slippery, unreliable, like melting snow on marble stairs.”
“For secrets steal your childhood away from you.”

Title: Children of the Jacaranda Tree
Author: Sahar Delijani
Publisher: Atria Paperback (Simon & Schuster)
Copyright: 2014
ISBN: 9781476709109

Books, Fiction

Blueprints for Building Better Girls

September 21, 2017 RaeAnna

Read Yes
Length 288
Quick Review A collection of eight stories loosely connected exploring the pressures of being female in a rapidly changing world.

Elissa Schappell tries to approach the issues of modern womanhood with her collection of Blueprints for Building Better Girls. She approaches issues concerning women: sexual assault, rape, motherhood, working, miscarriage, marriage, education, and eating disorders. The women in Schappell’s stories are post-modern women trying to carve out their own paths, but are constantly bombarded with advice from the old guard. Many women eventually succumb to the roles their mother’s filled. Even the characters who go against the traditional have a subconscious voicing the opinions of the older generation. This voice comes out in their opinions of other women; always critiquing and judging other women on their appearance, look, and life choices. The stories are all told from the female perspective. Motherhood, being the perfect mom. The story also explores the complexities of a mother-daughter relationship from both viewpoints of mother and daughter. It also has a brief glimpse into the influence men can have on women as husbands, fathers, brothers, and people in society.

Schappell writes with moments of true insight into the essence of womanhood. She crafts some truly lovely sentences, which scream to be quoted. The stories are loosely linked as some characters or their actions show up in the stories of others. I enjoyed this component of the book, but I also found it highly confusing. Anytime a character was named, I was trying to figure out where I had, if I had, seen them before in the book; it encouraged active reading, but also created a sort of chunkiness to the flow. There were stories with a high level of interaction with the book as a whole; while others called their real importance into question for the collection as a whole.

One of my favorite stories was “Out of the Blue and into the Black.” The main character, Belinda/Bender, is a young woman in college trying to find her own way in the world while figuring out how to live her life on campus after her friend, a main character from another story, was raped by a fraternity boy. Bender was there the night her friend was raped; she feels like she is the only one who remembers her friend and her struggle. The most interesting part of this story was when she calls attention to the fact her guy friends were in an uproar when they found out about the rape. The guys said they would go and beat him up. Another said he would talk to the fraternity president because they needed to know. After time passed and nothing happened, Bender realized it was just male bravado. Men act upset but never actually do anything. The friend who said he’d talk to the president kept brushing it off saying it was a “private issue.” I think this moment in the story makes a point about how swept under the rug and how common place and how ignored and how accepted rape is by the gender who commits it the majority of the time.

The stories take place in different time periods with different aged protagonists from different backgrounds. The majority of the women were educated, middle-class women, all assumably white. The perspective and narrator differs from story to story. This allows for each story to stand apart from the other, but it causes some difficulty with cohesiveness.

Overall, I really enjoyed the book. I don’t think it makes sense entirely as a whole. Each part is really wonderful. Schappell brings attention to a lot of important issues women deal with throughout history and will continue to experience for a long time to come.

Memorable Quotes
“If I stopped him, we’d have to talk. The last thing I wanted to do is talk.”
“I don’t know why he’s so desperate to name me.”
“The label was slut, not charity worker.”
“People have always hated strong women. They fear we’re one turkey-baster away from abolishing men.”
“At least she’d lost weight. Ten pounds in three weeks. What did her mother always say? You have such a pretty face.”
“What did a woman who didn’t want children want? Or what did she want more than children? It was creepy.”
“Still, it wouldn’t be the worst thing to never see my mother again.”

Title: Blueprints for Building Better Girls
Author: Elissa Schappell
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Copyright: 2011
ISBN: 9780743276702

Books

The Greater Journey

June 9, 2017 RaeAnna

Read Yes
Length 558
Quick Review A great look into how Paris affected America and how America affected Paris in regards to art, science, and intellect over the last almost two centuries.

I am a huge fan of David McCullough, who happens to be a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner. I think he is a fabulous scholar, author, and researcher. It is blatantly obvious he has a passion for history with an unparalleled ability to convey an immense amount of research without ever being dry.

The Greater Journey is about Americans who spent time living in Paris. Many of the Americans returned to the US after Paris, but a handful remained in France. The Americans flocked to Paris as the center of style, art, intellect, etc. Paris is commonly known to have been home to American writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway in the 1920’s, but Paris was home to many more American greats as much as a century before.

McCullough never lightly takes on the task of telling the history of a subject. He really goes all out. I always complain how a vast majority of scholars write incredibly dry books. They know so much about the subject that they try and cram in all the details but forget to make it interesting for the readers who do not eventually want to write a dissertation on the subject – so most. McCullough has never fallen into this category of academics. He is always engaging and interesting. I am always impressed by his thorough yet entertaining rhetoric.

I would highly suggest The Greater Journey. If you’re not interested in Americans in Paris, I do suggest his other books on topics ranging from the Brooklyn Bridge to John Adams to the Wright Brothers to American Pioneers and a bunch of other interesting stuff. He’s a great author and historian. I highly suggest him!

Memorable Quotes
“To Wendell Holmes she was a shining case in point of why women should not be excluded from a medical education.” about Madame La Chapelle

Title: The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris
Author: George McCullough
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Copyright: 2011
ISBN: 9781416571766