Reviews and Comments

If I had to choose one book to keep with me this would be it. I spent six years listening to the audio book because each chapter, each paragraph really, is transformational. I'll likely start the book over again on paper, and read the young adult version. It's a religious experience. It offers a new way to live that is so against the grain that you need to read and reread to keep shifting into this new mindset.

Every chapter is important but the last is so so relevant to today's fascist world.

What's amazing is that it's not framed as spiritual or self-help, although I can see that other reviewers felt the same way I do about it being a spiritually transformative experience. Kimmerer is a scientist, an indigenous scientist with a wide lens, and the book is chock full of scientific observations and surprising, beautiful facts.

In a way this is about wandering in the woods like Mary Oliver. It's also a mythological text. It's also a reflection on what it means to be an indigenous academic, or to be indigenous at all. It's also a review of her academic and personal life's work. It's an exploration mainly of the U.S. natural world. It's delicious description. It's an environmentalist's handbook.

It's also incredibly soothing to listen too. I kept coming back to listen to the next chapter when I wanted something that felt so true I could melt into the words.

The book is useful, accessible, and affirming. I'm sure it's needed but all the trans autistic kids I've met already know this stuff. It's a bit like, grown ups catch up on the internet, and in that way is more for grown ups or maybe for teens who have very restricted internet usage.

Still, it's the good stuff, the cream skimmed off the top, from the mess of internet they navigate everyday.

I really wanted to like this and I do like the topic and the author's voice. Intuition is a thing that operates in many people's lives unspoken because it's put in so much doubt. And the core question of the book is so useful: is it intuition or anxiety?

The main problem is the format. By trying to be mainstream and fill more than half the book with scientific interviews, Greenwood sidelines her own most interesting insights and experiences with psychics. She even says so in the end, that she's swamped her own voice checking it against others. I wish the book was more focused on stories about intuition and the role it plays in people's lives, with a lot of the science and caveats as footnotes instead of 2/3 of the book.

Still, by reading this i did get help with the core question--is it intuition or anxiety?--and I've found the tips useful in everyday life.

This book felt like jumping into a raft on fast river knowing you'd be picked up and carried home at the end, but surprised over and over along the way.

It's a quick fairytale and a satisfying story, and while at first I didn't appreciate some of the strangeness of the world-making, by the end it sits right and will stay with me.

The characters are somewhat flat, but in that way it's more of a fable than a novel or even short story, so it works.

There is so much clarity in this book. I'm a white person who has been doing anti-racist work for decades, and I still get muddled when trying to talk to people about things like cultural appropriation and microaggressions. Ijeoma is gifted as combining personal stories with impactful, concise summaries of emotionally charged topics. Highly recommended for anyone who wants to take steps toward equality.

I love that this book is based in lived experience, is accessible and concise, has beautiful illustrations, and acknowledges how hard it can be to move forward with OCD treatments. Because it's aimed at teenagers it is truly consent based, rather than shaming or bossy, but I would recommend it for anyone or for friends and family of someone with OCD.

This book is doing crucial work and does it well combining piles of studies with people's stories and interviews. The core thesis is around Health at Every Size, that we mainly have correlative studies to demonstrate fat=unhealthy, not studies showing being fat causes someone to be unhealthy, and we do have studies showing anti-fat bias to be incredibly damaging to mental and physical health, raising stress levels and easily triggering eating disorders. The most frightening thing is how often eating disorders get missed in fat people, and how anti-fat biased doctors are. There are some great suggestions for talking with kids.

It's a bit of a slog to read the whole thing. The blog/substack "Burnt Toast" by Virginia Sole-Smith has more easily digested articles for the general public. The book is worth checking out especially for the conversation starters or if you feel yourself waffling about your own commitment to health>weight loss.

Reading Mardou's comics about internal family systems has been life changing, so I owe her a debt. This is a beautifully composed work of art and a dramatic personal journey. She does a great job balancing powerful bits of info from trauma research and psychology with story telling. Overall I highly recommend.

Four stars because I felt something was missing. I actually think I got more from reading comics on her socials, that went into more short-story style deep dives on CPTSD flashbacks and crises, and how she used IFS to handle them. I wish there had been just a few more of these in the book. The story is there, but the moments where she was really lost seemed wrapped up in too pretty of a package. The comics she published online while writing this got lost in the confusion of emotional flashbacks, and that was more meaningful to me in terms of "how do we handle trauma as adults?" The book by itself feels like you could do Internal Family Systems therapy as a linear progression.

I highly recommend reading the book and also exploring her work she's published on instagram and elsewhere.

Well written. Also very upper middle class, very heteronormative, very neurotypical. It's like attachment styles are perfume choices and you can make a different choice.

Lots of studies but almost every one seemed like "these kinds of people are better and happier and look they will be better and happier in the future, so if you want to be happy you should act like them." The ableism was painful. The heteronormative erasure of queer love was painful. No serious reckoning with trauma or racism or desire or anything that actually shapes people's lives.

I would have enjoyed a light-hearted memoir about the author's friendship journey, which really seemed to be at the core of what she was trying to say. Even more if that memoir got more serious and started playing on the queer desire that repeatedly gets written off and supressed throughout each anecdote, personal and historical. A la "Carol," a la "The Hours."

This book is full of poems about life in Palestine, longing for home, and grief when there's no moment to grieve because the cruelty keeps expanding and sucking in more and more of what you love. The poems are funerals interrupted mid sentence by bulldozers ripping up the grave on livestreams.

We all have the public, achievement, visible side of our lives. And then the parts of our life that may or may not be visible, but that's how we are really doing. That's what we really want to talk about. That's where the heartbreak is. This book is a guide to the heartbreak parts, to how we are really doing. Not a self-help book about how to get through school or your first job, but about how to get through the heartbreak and feelings of rejection or the true friendships or how to take steps toward what makes your heart soar. It's like the essential oil of advice columnists, the part where they reflect back to you what your real concerns and priorities are.

I want to gift this book as a sweet 16 present, a graduation present, a 40th birthday present, to just about everyone as well as myself. It's one of those books where you don't really read it, you work through a page and then let that page ferment in your mind for a month.

It helps with some of the trickiest things. How to know when your instincts are telling you no versus when your conditioning or that critical voice in your head is undermining your dreams. How to thrive where there is no time, no money, no rest. How to apologize. How to argue. How to receive a compliment or criticism. Not just "you should accept compliments" but how to actually do these things, step by step, with illustrations and bullet points. Like "how to be a better human for dummies." Without universalizing, without skirting over the our entanglement in imperialist white supremacist heteropatriarchy.

I need my own copy to refer to and another to cut out and make posters for my wall.