Reviews and Comments

This was a really interesting book, and I think it's one where I kinda blame the blurb for messing up my reading of it. The basic premise is that a Nigerian-American woman, down on her luck, writes a book about robots in a post human future that ends up becoming a huge international success (not a spoiler, literally part of the blurb). But then the blurb says "something strange begins to happen", which made me expect something supernatural or magical realism-ish to happen, and I kept expecting, and kept expecting, but it didn't come. Because that's not really the type of book this is. It's really just a book about this woman's experience of life and family, and navigating the world with a disability. It is a beautiful book. I love it, and I think I want to try listening to it again sometime later with this mentality. I won't spoil why the blurb thought those words were appropriate, it's truly best to put the book in your queue, forget why you put it there, and read it without the blurb. Buy the book and scribble over the blurb with sharpy.

I finished Wind and Truth, the latest book in the Stormlight Archives by Brandon Sanderson. It finishes out the first arc of 5 books, resolving many of the plot points from the first 4 books while setting up the next saga. It is more clear than every that the Stormlight Archive is the central series in Sanderson's "Cosmere", the one that really ties them all together.

And on the whole, I love it. I love the direction that Kaladin takes, and I continue to enjoy Shalan, although I think her story was one of the weaker ones in this novel. Dalinar and Navany were also engaging, but the real stars, to me, were Szeth, Rhenarin, and above all the rest, Adolin. Yes, Adolin.

The book handles a lot of mental illness and neurodivergence, and even a fair bit of LGBTQ+. Sanderson has a long list of consultants he's used for every one of these issues, but the results are sometimes a bit stilted, a bit too perfect. That being said, for all that those moments were sometimes a bit awkward, they never felt out of place. The main reason is that they were always plot relevant. It didn't feel like being "pulled aside" for a little lecture, or like something was forced in on a rewrite without changing anything else around it. However slightly awkward the moments, they were fully integrated, so they didn't leave much of a lingering bad taste in my mouth (not as much as I'd expected after reading warnings about them from other reviewers).

At this point I think it is clear that the Stormlight Archive has deep roots in Sanderson's own struggles with the Mormon church he (ostensibly?) belongs to. Given his increasingly vocal support for LGBTQ+ characters, I do wonder if he's still as welcome.

Anyways, Dalinar in particular might be, I think, Sanderson's self-insert character, and Dalinar's journey is all about reconciling reality with a faith he grew up in, and finding it lacking. (I'll say no more, lest spoilers).

But yeah, overall, I highly recommend the series to anyone with the time to read it.

This book reads like stage directions, and perhaps it would be even better suited as a play.

The book tells 4 stories about 4 different women and their experiences sitting in a special chair in a special cafe drinking a special cup of coffee (after they the moody ghost woman goes for her daily pee) and going back in time.

Each person goes back to speak to someone they know and love, and in all cases, as is repeatedly emphasized, they are not able to change anything that happened between that time and the time they sat down to go back. But they all come back changed. In story after story, we see how although looking back and interrogating the past can't change what's already happened, it can change where go in the future.

My biggest critique of the book is that it suffers from "women written by men" syndrome. The women are described by their attractiveness, their attitudes feel like a male-centered cliche ('tears are just a weapon to manipulate men', 'oh I'm a woman I don't need friends or an email'). The last story also has some deeply misogynistic undercurrents.

Overall an interesting book with a solid and distinctive time-travel premise, and a solid message supported by that narrative tool.

Another unflinching look at the history of US crimes against black people (an other minorities) through the lens of historical fiction.

Sensitive and heartfelt, full of living breathing characters, and also unflinching in its portrayal of the forced/coerced sterilization campaigns in the 1970s. I was deeply touched by the protagonists efforts to improve the lives of others, and her relationship with the family she tried to help. It also paints a sensitive and realistic picture of the challenges of poverty, and highlights the deep violation of trust committed in the name of "medicine".

I work in the biomedical field, and I studied physics before that. Most of my friends are in scientific or medical professions. So I know from experience the beauty, value, and nuance of the scientific method, and the good and the bad of academia and medicine as a whole. It can do a lot of good, and it is heartbreaking to see so many in the public turn against it. However, books like Take My Hand shine a light on the skeletons in our collective closet. It expertly conveys how deep the betrayal of trust between a medical and scientific establishment and a community can cut.

Although a lot of the vitriol today comes, ironically, from those that were explicitly not part of these illicit experiments, there are real examples that taint the field and can't be entirely washed away. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study targeted black men, and the Relf sisters, on which the Williams sisters in Take My Hand are based, were a canary in the coal mine for a vast program of coerced sterilizations and contraceptive experiments on Latina and black women, and those with disabilities.

I think there is a warning to the academic and medical communities, in this story, that when we see something wrong, we must say something. Be the protagonist. Make a stink. Stop it as soon as possible because these things can only continue when good people are silent. Failure to stop this kind of thing before it starts can plant the seeds for the fields' destruction, even if it takes decades to grow to fruition.