Book of the Day Roundup: February 20-24, 2023
Marry Me a Little
Rob Kirby
Graphic Mundi
Softcover $21.95 (112pp)
978-1-63779-039-7
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
A heartfelt memoir that also serves to document LGBTQ+ marriage in the US, Rob Kirby’s Marry Me a Little combines the personal and the political into a single, affecting graphic novel.
Kirby’s story centers on October 3, 2013, the date of his marriage amid heated national debates on the subject of LGBTQ+ equality. The book alternates larger looks at the political landscape with more intimate views of the daily lives of Kirby and his husband and their thoughts on the subject of marriage. A wedding that once didn’t seem possible is met with happiness and a sense of fulfillment, but also conflicted feelings about the ceremony’s importance and what it should look like.
Kirby shares his opinions on several subjects; not everyone will agree with his takes, whether his points are political in nature or about his selections for the best wedding songs. It all serves as characterization, revealing the person behind the marriage tale. While discussing weddings in television and film, Kirby observes that “real life is so much less dramatic than the movies.” Yet this real-life account is intimate, opinionated, and interesting, with thoughtful, memorable lines like “Marriage doesn’t define a relationship unless you want it to.”
The book’s limited color palette uses black, white, red, and blue, the latter two enhancing the visual language by emphasizing specific elements of the drawings or text. The book’s quiet simplicity reinforces Kirby’s message: people in love sometimes wish to express that love in the same ways as everyone else, and they should have that right.
Marry Me a Little highlights the human beings behind the politics of LGBTQ+ marriage.
PETER DABBENE (February 17, 2023)
I Want a Better Catastrophe
Navigating the Climate Crisis with Grief, Hope, and Gallows Humor
Andrew Boyd
New Society Publishers
Softcover $24.99 (416pp)
978-0-86571-983-5
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
“Mass extinction and social collapse” are “a hard set of lemons to be making lemonade out of,” environmental activist Andrew Boyd admits. I Want a Better Catastrophe is his inventive, no-nonsense manual of constructive and philosophical responses to climate breakdown.
Here, the climate emergency is a “personal existential crisis for each of us.” While Boyd—the founder of creative protest measures including the Climate Clock and Climate Ribbon—is used to hoping against the odds and the evidence, this text strikes a somber tone. Humanity, he writes, is on a “path of profound grief,” and to cope with this “impossible new reality,” people will need the wisdom, rituals, and stories that literature and spiritual teachers offer.
In keeping with the theories of the Post-Carbon Institute, the book envisions four possible routes for the human future, two of them disastrous (denial and competition) and the others more promising (“powerdown”—a drastic scaling down of economies and sharing of what remains; and solidarity). Eight interviews spotlight scientists, campaigners, and gurus who have reckoned with the worst-case scenarios. Their approaches vary: evolutionary biologist Guy McPherson predicts imminent human extinction; activist Tim DeChristopher, who attended Harvard Divinity School, advocates rituals and pastoral care; Buddhist teacher Meg Wheatley advises an embrace of chaos and pain; and Indigenous botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer speaks of gratitude to the earth and heart experiments, like asking oneself, “What do you love too much to lose? And what are you going to do about it?”
Boyd’s wisecracking and sardonic attitude temper the sometimes gloomy predictions he’s bound to report. He views gallows humor as “cosmic defiance, a reframing.” Along with dialogues, he slots zany figures, thought experiments, and honest anecdotes into his imaginative framework.
I Want a Better Catastrophe may well be the most realistic yet least depressing end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it guide out there.
REBECCA FOSTER (December 27, 2022)
Owlish
Dorothy Tse
Natascha Bruce, translator
Graywolf Press
Softcover $16.00 (224pp)
978-1-80427-034-9
In Dorothy Tse’s novel Owlish, a bizarre love affair upends a respectable man’s dull but orderly life in a city that is anything but ordinary.
Perhaps it was inevitable that Professor Q, a middle-aged man caught in a dead-end job and a sexless marriage, would decide to have an affair. But his paramour is no ordinary woman: Aliss is a life-size ballerina doll who enchanted Q from the moment he laid eyes on her. On advice from his old friend Owlish, Q finds a “love nest” for himself and Aliss within an abandoned church—sparking a chain of events that can only end in tragedy.
Sexual frustration dogged Q for most of his life, even after his marriage to beautiful but unresponsive Maria. This manifests itself in an obsession with sexual imagery and female dolls. His fantasies pervade his dreams and rule his waking life until he is too far gone to recognize his slow but sure drift from reality—a drift that others, more clear-eyed and sometimes more unscrupulous than he, cannot fail to notice.
Fanciful, offbeat prose captures the surreality of Q’s world. Though born elsewhere, through a traumatic series of events, he came to Nevers, a city in a developing nation where propaganda and willful ignorance obscure the price of progress. Q, infatuated with his new romance, ignores the unrest rocking his troubled city until he is caught in its grip. He never does figure out the full story behind his affair, his city, or the truth about his friend Owlish—indeed, he is incapable of such thoughts. All that is left to him is the only thing he ever truly possessed: a fantasy.
Owlish is a dreamlike novel about how the things one cannot see or refuses to acknowledge can still cause harm.
EILEEN GONZALEZ (February 17, 2023)
On a Woman’s Madness
Astrid Roemer
Lucy Scott, translator
Two Lines Press
Hardcover $24.95 (284pp)
978-1-949641-43-1
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Astrid Roemer’s novel On a Woman’s Madness, a Black woman struggles to find happiness in a world designed to push her down.
Noenka, already a misfit because of her race and family history, becomes a true outcast when she leaves her husband. After being forced to leave her job at a Christian school, she exits town to escape further judgments. Then she meets Gabrielle, a housewife with her own traumas to bear. The women enter into a relationship that both completes them and tears them apart.
The narrative moves back and forth in time, showing Noenka’s present circumstances and the tumultuous upbringing that helped mold her into the woman she is. The only lasting bright spot is Gabrielle, whose reputation as an alcoholic obscures her personal struggles, her resilience in the face of loss and discrimination, and her deep loyalty to those she loves. But the women’s happiness is threatened by factors beyond their control: their husbands, social expectations, homophobia, and their own haunted pasts. Noenka recalls troubled relationships with her spouse, friends, religion, and sexuality, and the one inescapable fact that affects them all: her Blackness. The legacy of colonialism and slavery affects both Noenka and her nation, Suriname, as she fights to escape her brutish husband and stay with the one she truly loves.
The dialogue flows as if from another world: grand and old-fashioned. Noenka’s story unfolds in similar fashion, with dramatic twists and terrible revelations. She and Gabrielle find each other against all odds, but only the most extreme measures offer them even the slimmest hope of freedom—and only they can decide if that freedom is worth facing another kind of prison.
On a Woman’s Madness is a novel about the difficulties of life as a queer Black woman in a colonized country.
EILEEN GONZALEZ (December 27, 2022)
We Will Be Free
The Life and Faith of Sojourner Truth
Nancy Koester
Eerdmans
Hardcover $29.99 (293pp)
978-0-8028-7247-0
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Knowing the difficulties involved in documenting enslaved people’s lives, Nancy Koester made multiple trips to sites where Sojourner Truth lived and traveled; she also analyzed her dictated letters, speeches, and newspaper accounts in order to construct We Will Be Free, an impressive chronology of this powerful figure in American history, seen through the prism of her unshakable religious convictions.
This is a fascinating portrait of nineteenth-century America with parallels to contemporary social polarization. It is engrossing to read how Truth overcame obstacles and tragic events to become an eloquent, influential preacher and orator during the turbulent decades around the Civil War. The transformation of enslaved Isabella Baumfree into formidable Sojourner Truth is riveting; Koester demonstrates her shifting perspectives as an enslaved person, freed housekeeper, and a loyal adherent to a religious zealot before she blossomed into her own as an itinerant preacher and activist. She stood down bigoted mobs, argued with Frederick Douglass, counseled presidents, and challenged allies within the antislavery and women’s rights movements.
Koester centers Truth as an inspiration for Black women’s activism. Although she held deep religious beliefs, she also delivered pointed criticisms of Christian nationalism and mainstream churches who “failed to live out their creed.” The book conveys her intensity and confidence in speaking truth to power via quotes and eyewitness accounts. It also dispels myths about the relative humanity of Northern slavery, its entanglement in Southern agriculture and trade, and bigotry and violence in northern cities.
We Will Be Free is an insightful book that shows how Sojourner Truth’s faith made her resolute and strong, helping her to share a vision of an egalitarian United States that lives up to its promise of rights and opportunities for people of all faiths, backgrounds, and genders.
RACHEL JAGARESKI (February 17, 2023)
Barbara Hodge
