mwgerard's reviews
1694 reviews

Full review: https://www.mwgerard.com/review-sinners-all-bow/

On a freezing morning in December 1832, a woman named Sarah Maria Cornell was found dead on a local farm - but was it murder, or suicide?

The farm owner, John Durfee, didn't recognize her. She was one of many itinerant mill workers who were largely anonymous and interchangeable in northeast America's industrial revolution. Thousands of people, many of them women, who would have been relegated to farm- and housework in or near their hometown were now travelling to mill towns springing up along rivers in New England. While it offered a modicum of independence, it was hardly a glamorous life. Wages were meager, hours were long, machinery was dangerous, and the living conditions afforded by the salary were humble. Still, it was an option for widows, or other women that had few choices. and it hadn't existed 20 years previously.

Sarah was one of these mill workers and when the townspeople began to look into her death, they found a number of tantalizing clues. She had kept letters in a locked trunk. It became clear that she attended a number of Methodist revival camps and was carrying on a secret correspondence with a Reverend Avery.

Author Kate Winkler Dawson has an incredible talent for finding mysteries and laying them out (see my review of American Sherlock). The reason this case, is particularly intriguing is that Dawson is not the first true crime writer to try to find answers. That title belongs to Catharine Read Arnold Williams, who covered the trial, then interviewed witnesses, and visited locations, including the Durfee Farm (at night, so it would be as similar to the crime's setting as possible). An outspoken supporter of women's suffrage and a woman who left her dreadful husband, she published Fall River in 1833, just months after Cornell was found. She noted that this small town was curiously afflicted with gruesome murder, citing the infamous Borden killings. As well as being the first published American true crime narrative, Williams' account is often credited as the inspiration for Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.

It was a great idea for a book but very poorly executed. There are no stories, no themes, no real historical context. It is a collection of random examples of accidental burials (or close calls). Most are only a couple of sentences long. This needed a serious editor to encourage the author to categorize and contextualize the examples, and show them how to choose stories that have real through-lines and can be explored.

Unfortunately, this is another dud. And Then There Were None is one of my favorite books and I am happy for someone to give the genre a twist, but this novel was all over the place. Multiple points of view that don’t hang together mean the story never coalesces. The overarching voice is all over the place and ultimately makes for a weaker novel.

I have made no secret of the fact that I love reading about doomed Arctic (or Antarctic) explorations. Franklin, the Erebus, and the Terror is probably my favorite one to learn more about, so I was taken with the idea of a book about the crew who tried to find them. Despite trying more than once, I was unable to read this book. The writing was clunky and the format was even more heavy-handed. I really wanted to fill in the gaps of my knowledge of the rescue efforts but I quickly realized this was not the book to do that.

I greatly enjoyed this very well-paced and imaginative novel. With Gothic and folkloric elements, it is also presented in a realistic way – Mina is a novice psychologist and Sam is a journalist looking for a story like this. It makes it all the more believable, and  makes it all the more unsettling.

My review: https://www.mwgerard.com/review-bibliophobia/

Believe it not, bibliophobia is a real thing. The fear of books, or the fear of words and reading, is a psychological condition that disrupts people’s ability to enjoy a book or even a visit to the library. Author Sarah Chihaya recounts her bout with it as well as exploring how we absorb and tell stories.

Sarah is young and successful, teaching literature at a university. She earned her degrees in English and French from Yale before completing a PhD in comparative literature at UC Berkeley. Her entire adult life (and even earlier) centered around close reading, critical thinking, and story analysis. She tore apart writing in order to see how it fit together, and then synthesized new ideas about it. And she was really good at it. Then one night, her brain stopped. She sat down on a snowy stoop and fell asleep.

She had a nervous breakdown, a collapse that required hospitalization to treat the exhaustion. She eventually returned home to begin slowly putting things back together. But there was one hurdle she hadn’t anticipated — a fear of reading. Even looking at a page, the words would swim and she couldn’t find any meaning in them. She had bibliophobia.

As she revisits the struggle in this memoir, she also considers her relationship to certain books over her lifetime. She reconsiders how we find meaning and enjoyment in reading, and writing, with insight and even humor.

Sarah has found her words again, and some balance in her life. Her memoir displays both her talent as a writer and thinker. She reminds us all of the need to take care of ourselves, even in our enthusiasms. After all, we can’t enjoy that which sustains us if we allow it to consume us.

Despite the gravity of the topic, and the scholarly nature of her expertise, this is a thoroughly engrossing, diverting, and approachable read, no matter your background. It is incredibly humble and human — the first ingredients in any good foray into writing.

No shrinking violet here. This was an interesting mashup of fairytale and Victorian heroine fiction. It kept a good balance of realistic integrity with the more fantastical elements.

Read via NetGalley.

I don’t normally read sociological essays but this one was brilliant. Zimmerman goes back to the earliest written stories about monsters, witches, creatures — and women — and how they are described. Then she traces how those characterizations evolve over time, reflecting eras, cultures, and societal changes. It was very eye-opening.

Read via Libby app from my library.

An excellent example of truth being stranger than fiction, Abbott Kahler has collected all the details in the weird history of Floreana and its inhabitants. What began as a (possibly misguided) attempt at a self-sufficient utopia, ends as a proof that Hell is indeed other people. The story is made even stranger by the characters who populate it — for no one who decides to live in a hut on a volcanic island can be entirely normal.