October 2018

🎧 P.S., I Still Love You ⭐️⭐️⭐️
🎧 Always and Forever, Lara Jean⭐️⭐️⭐️
🎧 Hillbilly Elegy ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 

I'm Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter by Erika Sanchez

When Julia is worried that saying in her college application that her parents are undocumented, fearing it could lead to them getting deported, her teacher says, “Trust me...we’re in Chicago, not Arizona. That doesn’t really happen here. Not like that. No one is going to read your essay and track your parents down.”  (Chapter 13)

I had high hopes for this book. Maybe it was disappointing to me because I expected the Mexican-American narrator to be just a little more...well, likeable. (Yeah, a likeable protagonist is important to me.) The story does portray the life of a daughter of immigrants, and raises many important issues (privilege, the role of religion, sexuality, abortion, freedom vs duty to family). This alone made the book worth reading. I guess I just didn’t really like the way these issues were raised. Julia as a narrator was very one-sided in her depiction of these things. It’s not that I minded her opinion, but that she thought her view was the only sensible, and couldn’t imagine anyone with a brain disagreeing with her. Obviously this is a YA book, and maybe this is just an accurate depiction of the way a teenage narrator thinks? But I would have hoped a book intended for a teenage audience would find a way to inspire appreciation for at least a little bit of nuance!

Similarly, I wanted to appreciate that this book portrays mental illness (depression). But it was very disturbing to me that until late in the story, I could not tell for sure if the character was dealing with depression, or was just being an angsty and self-pitying teenager.

What brought the book up to three stars for me was Julia’s gift for metaphors. I want to read through this and write down all of her “it was like…”s and her “I would rather”s. Here are a few of my favorites:

“It makes me feel like all my insides are being vandalized.”

“Her perfume smells like a dusty flower in summer twilight.”

“I feel like a three-headed alien in my own home.”

“...makes me feel as if something were filling my chest with sarm syrup, as if all my bones were being slowly removed from my body.”

“I would rather poke my eyes out like Oedipus than sit through another episode of that garbage.”

THUG

We bookworms know the book is better...BUT the movie was gooooood. I thought the casting was flawless, each actor gave a magnificent performance, and the scene at the end when Starr finds her voice was even more powerful on the screen. Also, I don't know when I've ever cried so much in public.

Gay Girl, Good God by Jackie Hill Perry

"...many have forgotten that the gospel is about God in the first place. When the Christian life has become a practice in doing everything else but making Jesus known, what will we expect of our gospel presentations? They will naturally result in the telling of something empty and void of power, more moral than anything, insufficient to make men and women believe that they can be saved by and for some other means than Jesus. Getting back to the foundational call of making God the center of our churches, our conversations, our doctrines, and our lives will ensure that he won't be left out of our evangelism. Surely, no man who has made God small in his own life will have the Godward focus to make him big in ministry to others. Christ has simply come to make us right with God. And in making us right with God, he is satisfying us in God. Our sexuality is not our soul. Marriage is not heaven. And singleness is not hell" (Chapter 17).

"God's image was what womanhood was born out of, not the 1950s Polaroids of white women baking cookies while talking loud enough to be heard and quiet enough to not call attention to their intillect. Neither that, nor the pictures of women, jaded and committed to speaking at men like they were negligent children or dogs you don't trust without a leash. The self-proclaimed liberated women was far beyond the picture God cared for me to become. The temple being used rightly was important to Jesus, and I felt as if there was a shared passion for my womanhood. How I moved about the world as a woman mattered to God" (Chapter 11).