Surrender, Dorothy: Reviews

Cat Ladies

When The Editor Across the Aisle showed me the trailer for the documentary Cat Ladies, I knew I had to secure a screener for review.

Meow. She collects their whiskers. 

We howled with laughter when we realized the documentary was, indeed, about cat ladies, which I would totally be if left to my own devices and didn't fear my house smelling like cats. And if Beloved didn't exist. He is very tolerant of Petunia Cookie Dough, but more than one? Katie, bar the door. You know, thinking about it more, I wouldn't ever be a cat lady. But I do like cats.

I was expecting sort of a funny movie. Instead, I was disturbed. And sort of sad.

But also fascinated -- and isn't that what a good documentary is designed to engender? Fascination with its subject? Maybe enough discomfort to get you examine your life?

 
"They take care of me by letting me take care of them."
 
They all kept saying "I don't understand why people call me 'the crazy cat lady.'"

One of them has 127 cats. She didn't even know how many she had until she counted them.

EEEK.

But you can't look away. The themes here are so uniquely human. It's so not about the cats.

 

The Double-Daring Book for Girls

I love just about anything Andrea J. Buchanan and Miriam Peskowitz do. I loved The Daring Book for Girls, and their follow-up, The Double-Daring Book for Girls, built on the first nicely.

 

There's not a great detraction from the first book. The Double-Daring Book for Girls is a hodge-podge of instructions, definitions and recipes for everything from sailing phrases to calligraphy to optical illusions to The Nobel Prize. It's an old-school looking hardback with that awesome 5th-grade-textbook font and thick pages that smell like the second floor of your childhood library. I'm excited my daughter is getting older and will be able to crack the spines on these books soon. They make me feel like a girl again.

A Is for Admission: The Insider's Guide to Getting into the Ivy League and Other Top Colleges

Michelle Hernandez is a former assistant director of admissions at Dartmouth College. In her book, A is for Admission: The Insider's Guide to Getting into the Ivy League and Other Top Colleges, she describes in intimate detail the algorithm used by the Ivies to rank students based on class rank, class type, extracurriculars, test scores, and oh, yes, G.P.A.

 

I'll admit I didn't read this book cover-to-cover, because it's a reference book. I think if I were really interested in getting into an Ivy League school, I would've been fascinated. When I agreed to review the book, I was thinking it would be more narrative than it actually is, so as an intermediately degreed 35-year-old, I was bored. I'm not planning to get a PhD, and I'm not planning to encourage my five-year-old to start taking advanced placement journal writing in kindergarten to woo Yale. However, I know if I did want her to go to the Ivies? I might consider starting now.

The book discusses sports, legacies, financial aid, communication between schools and other -- frankly -- insider topics. Hernandez does a good job -- she's startlingly transparent -- but be prepared for a very dense and statistics-filled tome that will probably depress you and your little Ivy-tastic kiddo just a wee bit. They don't call it the Ivy League for nothing.

Insatiable

Having experienced eating disorders in high school and college, I immediately agreed to review Insatiable: A Young Mother's Struggle with Anorexia, when it appeared on the e-mail of upcoming titles.

Erica Rivera's memoir is very raw, surprisingly raw, considering she describes leaving her two young daughters alone and sleeping in her house while she went on pre-dawn, 90-minute runs. Brave, but necessary, because without that level of detail, it's hard to appreciate how this mental illness -- for that's what eating disorders really are -- can distort reality for those who suffer from them.

Rivera describes chewing and spitting, binging and starving with self-deprecating prose both disarming and disturbing. Her recollections brought back a lot of my own memories, and I was surprised at how similar our inner voices were.

The ending left me wanting follow-up, but that's how eating disorders work -- you're never really sure if they're gone forever. You just keep eating and hope for the best.

The Cat's Pajamas: 101 of the World's Cutest Cats

I've had photographer Rachel Hale's coffee-table book, The Cat's Pajamas, for a really embarrassingly long time. But there's a reason the review has taken so long.

My daughter made off with it. From the moment I got it, she was transfixed by pictures of cute kittehs in all sorts of poses. Some sweet, some just shockingly beautiful. She'd page through them while I worked, cooing and gahing for seriously forty-five minutes straight.

Each photo is accompanied by a description of the breed in the picture, so if you or a friend is looking to invest in a beautiful cat (or just like looking at them), this book is more beautiful than any other breeds book I've ever seen. Or if you're just an LOLCats fan and like looking at cute stuff, this works, too.

I'd better hide the book before it disappears again.

WalkingFish Fishing Journal

Blondie loves to fish and has been talking about teaching the little angel to fish for a while now, so when WalkingFish Books contacted me about reviewing their Fishing Journal, I said what the hey?

Let's just get this on the table: I don't fish. So I'm not really sure what's important in a fishing journal. However, this seems pretty thorough -- leaving spaces to document who you fished with, how many you caught, released, kept, weights, tides, moon phases -- crazy stuff.

I also really liked how at the bottom of each page is a little picture and description of different kinds of fish, including their scientific names. I imagine that could be pretty entertaining while you're waiting for the fish to bite.

So Blondie, come on down. We're all ready for you.

Child Care Today

I'm just going to come right out and say I'm not going to do Penelope Leach's new book, Child Care Today: Getting It Right for Everyone, justice.

Child care is one of my political pet projects. I believe every parent should have access to quality child care if America wants to compete on a global level with its own workforce. The financial and mental burden placed on parents to locate and finance child care good enough to feel comfortable leaving kids and going to work is insane. It's the most difficult thing I've ever dealt with, and I have the means to afford quality care. I don't work weird hours or swing shifts. I have a vehicle that I can use to drive to my child care provider's location. I'm one of the lucky ones -- and I still think it's horrible and it sucks and I've never been more terrified than when my daughter was in what I considered to be a subpar facility as a baby because there were no other options.

I didn't make it through Leach's incredibly well researched book. It was much more academic than I expected it to be, but that's fine -- it's an amazing resource and one that I intend to go to when writing on this subject in the future. Leach digs through crazy volumes of research in the U.K. and the U.S. and talks about child care on a global level -- giving me insight into how other countries handle child care and how we might improve things in our own country.

So, I apologize to you, Ms. Leach -- you really killed it with this book, and I did not have the mental energy to get through it, but I'm very happy to own it and intend to use it as a resource to make me smarter in the future.

Evolution Rx: A Practical Guide to Harnessing Our Innate Capacity for Health and Healing

Ever since I read The Moral Animal, I've been interested in how evolution has shaped human behavior. Enter Dr. William Miller's book, Evolution Rx, which I got recently for review.

Dr. Miller, who teaches a related class at the University of California, Santa Barbara, believes our bodies are mostly equipped to heal themselves, with the exception of dangers that weren't around in the caveman games (such as burns, smoking, and eating too much food). Too much food, indeed, seems to top the list of dangers.

Some of Miller's advice I liked, such as the idea that sun exposure and a little wine are actually good for you. Other ideas, such as Miller's description of morning sickness, made me want to dismiss all his ideas completely, because he was clearly guessing about the morning sickness.

As I've seen in my patients, an understanding that her discomfort is good for her baby -- along with sticking to easily assimilated foods -- eases symptoms without medication, in most cases.

LIE LIE LIE LIE LIE LIE

Anyway.

Overall, Miller's book is an easy and entertaining read, but it seems, like most of these books, to be too generalized. True, flitting about in the sun worked for our hairy, coarse-skinned forebears, but they didn't have to deal with air pollution or holes in the ozone layer. They may have survived toxic food, but they probably didn't do it easily or painlessly. We don't know. They didn't have Flip Video. And since they didn't, it seems flippant and overreaching to assume just because they were adapted to their environment that it -- like morning sickness -- was anything but suffering.

April & Oliver

Freshman novels. New writers. New FICTION writers. I chose April & Oliver from the list of possible review books for all of those reasons. Will it be good? I always wonder. Do first-time novelists ever make it?

Some of them do.

April & Oliver is Tess Callahan's first novel. If you like sexual tension and stories of lifelong friends, this is the read for you.

The writing is tight, tighter than the plot. I got a little lost with the nuances of how April & Oliver are connected -- there are family ties that aren't really family ties, and I think the story would've actually been stronger without the opening death of April's brother, Buddy. So many things happen in this book over such a short period of time I got lost a little. But the sentences were so lovely I got over it pretty fast.

What I didn't like about it? Somewhere along the line, I stopped identifying with April. I have this problem in my own writing -- writing from close third and drawing every other character as more complex and sympathetic than the heroine -- and so maybe I'm hypersensitive to it in other people's writing -- but it seemed to stand out here. Everyone was always saying how tough April was, and I couldn't tell if it was an act or if she really didn't care anymore. If she doesn't care, how can I care about her?

What did I like about it? The writing.

"A picture was taped to the back of the tank. At first April thought it was a landscape. Then she recognized the hills as hips, the river a seam between a woman's thighs. Her nipples were pink as pieces of coral, her hair lemon blond. The walls of the tank were stained with algae. An angel drifted, fins folded, kissing the surface for air. April wondered if fish could drown."

What else did I like? The story of April AND Oliver. The twists! The turns! The longing! THE ENDING!

The ending.

LOVED THE ENDING!

Here's to hoping Callahan is sitting at her laptop writing another novel right now.

K2W Home Repair Workshops

Seriously, this past weekend I had some real fun at K2W Workshops in Overland Park.  I got to knock holes in stuff, and nobody told me I was doing it wrong. It totally rocked.

(Note to readers: This was a a review workshop. In other words: I didn't pay for it.)

Average Jane wields her drill.

I was really excited about the basic repair workshop, primarily because I was going to learn to patch holes in drywall. If you'll recall, I'm good at creating them.

 

Move along, now. Nothing to see here.

So anyway, this class went from 9-4. It was serious business. I attended along with a bunch of strangers and Average Jane and Cagey. We sat at cute little desks with lots of tools.

 

Totally not your high school shop class.

Next, they let us write on the walls behind us.

 

See that towel rod? I installed it, all by myself.

 

Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Next, we learned to repair holes in drywall.

 

Learning how to make the hole SQUARE.

 

Krista's patch looks awesome.

 

Julie demos the "California patch."

 

Some things you learn too late in life.

Next, we moved on to electricity. We learned to install a new switch, a new outlet, and a light fixture.

I must say, I was really good at this. Shockingly good.

HA HA.

 

First fixture.

 

Second fixture.

 

Kelli also did a lovely job.

We finally finished by exploring the glory that is plumbing. Many disgusting stories followed, some of which involved dental floss.

Lunch was served, and the retail value for my instruction was $135.00. Beloved was all, "What? You didn't get any tools?" But I thought the class was worth the money and my time. To not have to call an electrician or plumber for every little thing is immensely worth it to me, and not everyone has my husband or my father at their disposal.

And honestly, even though I'm surrounded by handy males, I like to be able to do things MYSELF. I loved it. It was a long day, though -- if you can divide it up, you might try doing that. Divorce party? College graduation? Girls' Night Out? Go for it. I recommend.