Educated (a memoir) by Tara Westover

Wow. Just... wow.

Before starting I want to give you a sense of just how good this book is. I started it three days ago, and only got about thirty pages in. The next two days were spent desperately hoarding snippets of time between work and responsibilities to read the remaining three hundred pages. This book is an incredible story, incredibly well written.

On to actually talking about it instead of yakking about how great a read it is. Educated is fantastic. Not just because it's great, but because if the words 'a memoir' weren't so prominent on the cover I would have assumed it was someone's accounts of a many years long fever dream.

From the way the story unfolds, to how every thread ends in a crossroads that will make your stomach twist in a knot and have you fretting over whether Tara will do the right thing, or fold back into her family's backwards ways, this book is well done. The story covers Tara's life over the course of about twenty years. The very strong themes of education, family, dogmatism, and mental health writhe together into the tangled mess that is her family dynamic, and her life's trajectory slowly clawing her way out of the hell she lived in.

If you're not one for gory details or harsh realism, I would not recommend this book. To everyone else: this is a coming of age story that absolutely earns a spot on your library's shelves. Westover's writing, especially in relation to her early lack of education, paints a hauntingly beautiful portrait that you will not want to miss.

Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi

Children of Blood and Bone is a young adult fantasy novel written by Nigerian-American Tomi Adeyemi. The setting is very Nigerian, yet a fantasy setting with large cats ridden like horses, maji, knight-like guards, and fictional kingdoms.

Let's just say this off the bat: It's really, really refreshing to read a fantasy book that isn't set in fantasy England. Fantasy Nigeria was incredibly well done, and just as fleshed out as you could imagine, it was great.

Okay, so into the book review! I loved Children of Blood and Bone. Were there a couple YA fantasy tropes? Sure, but that didn't detract from the depth of this novel. When I say depth, I mean as the target audience of a young person of non-African background you can read this book and have a really good time. On the other hand, if you are familiar with Nigerian history, black history, and socioeconomic issues between West Africans, or West Africa and the world, this book doesn't just talk to you, it sings to you.

Small details from a maji's hair being flat when she has no power, and full and curly into a mane when she does turn social expectations on their head. The class system and obsession with lighter skin tones is addressed in a subtle way. The obvious undertone of talking about race and race based power is done so well that you can say that it is both directly addressed, and yet not so overt that a young reader would pick up on everything Adeyemi is saying.

Another fantastic touch that I would like to bring up was that instead of making up a magical language, Adeyemi simply used Yoruba as the language of the maji. Why is this important? Well, Nigeria is a world power, a strong economy, and a beautiful multilayered nation. Now how many people would say they are interested in learning Yoruba before reading this book? Before you say to me that Yoruba only has a very minor application that it could be useful for, let me remind you that High Valyrian (from Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice And Fire) and Klingon (from Star Trek) are actual language options on DuoLingo language learning software, while Yoruba is not. I love that she's using her platform to subtlety get audiences interested in cultures and languages that just aren't apparent in most fantasy, given that most fantasy is set firmly in the West.

In summary, this book was amazing, and I would definitely gift it to any young reader or fantasy buff in my friend group. I can see why it's already gotten a 17 country release deal and a motion picture deal as well. I look forward to seeing Adeyemi's future works, as she's now firmly on my radar.

Song of a Captive Bird by Jasmin Darznik

Song of a Captive Bird is a novelization of the life of Forugh Farrokhzad, Persian poet and icon of the feminist movement in Iran who came into her own in the 1950s.

The choice to write this as a novel instead of a biography allows Darznik to really delve into the inner turmoil of Forugh throughout her life of crazy twists and turns, with the harsh backdrop of male dominated Iran, and the rise of the Islamic laws in the country after the Iranian coup of 1953. I really enjoyed the historical fiction feel to it. I would say the writing style was not unlike Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt, which is to say it is an incredibly hard story to read, but it's told in a much softened tone so as to feel almost dreamlike through the trying times our protagonist struggles through.

The slow, almost meandering pace of the book allows these very real events to set a solid timeline. Forugh, however, seems almost overwhelmed by the passage of time, and totally unprepared for each next step that meets her because of it. Darznik by no means models Forugh as a fiery, passionate leader- instead she's portrayed as a woman who jumps into things without thinking, and by dealing with the consequences she is propelled into a celebrity status she never truly asked for. This realism of her lack of choice, of a woman whose works became a black market commodity across Iran for a long time without her meaning them to be, is probably my favorite part about how the book is written.

Darznik's research into the life of Farrokhzad was based on interviews, her works, and various things written about her (slanderous or no). Farrokhzad was a fascinating figure, and probably the first to manage to break out the mold of a 'poetess' and into a poet.

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel from start to finish, and I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys learning a bit more about art history, Iran, 1950s style Persian feminism, or just about a woman's struggle to be seen as a person, instead of a commodity.

Thanks for reading my first post, Check back next Saturday for another.

-Bekah

Let's talk about books, baby, let's talk about narrative and theme, let's talk about all the bad things and the good things that can be, let's talk about books.

Hello and welcome to my new blog!

A little about myself: I'm a former sailor in the merchant marine, I'm a returned peace corps volunteer (N daa be Ghana yuma ayii n-be Dagban ya'ali maa.), and I'm currently WWOOFing (volunteering on organic farms) in the US. I have completed NaNoWriMo (nanowrimo.org for the uninitiated) once, and plan to finish my book sometime in 2018.

The point of this blog is to give me a platform to discuss my weekly book, and also to get in the habit of writing regularly and on a schedule. This is easier said than done since I live in a place with iffy electricity at the moment.

A big bonus to my blog is one of our local book stores gives away pre-release books with $5 donations, so I'll mostly be talking about books that will come out in the next couple of months! Isn't that cool? Because I'm limiting myself to pre-release books, I am out of my comfort zone and don't have a whole lot of choice as far as what I'm reading and writing up. So far they've been pretty ace, so I have high hopes for this project.

Love you all, let's get to books!

-Bekah