Author 'Nathan Burgoine posted this simple, direct method of not getting paralyzed by the prospect of having to write reviews. The Three-Sentence Review is, as he notes, very helpful and also simple to achieve. I get completely unmanned at the idea of saying something trenchant about each book I read, when there often just isn't that much to say...now I can use this structure to say what I think is the most important idea I took away from the read and not try to dig for more.
Think about using it yourselves!
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Permission to Feel: Unlocking the Power of Emotions to Help Our Kids, Ourselves, and Our Society Thrive by Marc Brackett
Rating: 3.5* of five
The Publisher Says: The mental wellbeing of children and adults is shockingly poor. Marc Brackett, author of PERMISSION TO FEEL, knows why. And he knows what we can do.
“We have a crisis on our hands, and its victims are our children.”
Marc Brackett is a professor in Yale University’s Child Study Center and founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. In his 25 years as an emotion scientist, he has developed a remarkably effective plan to improve the lives of children and adults – a blueprint for understanding our emotions and using them wisely so that they help, rather than hinder, our success and well-being. The core of his approach is a legacy from his childhood, from an astute uncle who gave him permission to feel. He was the first adult who managed to see Marc, listen to him, and recognize the suffering, bullying, and abuse he’d endured. And that was the beginning of Marc’s awareness that what he was going through was temporary. He wasn’t alone, he wasn’t stuck on a timeline, and he wasn’t “wrong” to feel scared, isolated, and angry. Now, best of all, he could do something about it.
In the decades since, Marc has led large research teams and raised tens of millions of dollars to investigate the roots of emotional well being. His prescription for healthy children (and their parents, teachers, and schools) is a system called RULER, a high-impact and fast-effect approach to understanding and mastering emotions that has already transformed the thousands of schools that have adopted it. RULER has been proven to reduce stress and burnout, improve school climate, and enhance academic achievement. This book is the culmination of Marc’s development of RULER and his way to share the strategies and skills with readers around the world. It is tested, and it works.
This book combines rigor, science, passion and inspiration in equal parts. Too many children and adults are suffering; they are ashamed of their feelings and emotionally unskilled, but they don’t have to be. Marc Brackett’s life mission is to reverse this course, and this book can show you how.
I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.
My Review: The author's credentials are impeccable. I quite enjoyed the read, though I found it very repetitive when read straight through. It occurs to me, however, that the target market...the women who would read Marge Simpson's iconic magazine from the ancient opening credits, Fretful Mother...do not ever have that much time to themselves to read a book straight through. That, plus the simple, direct language and the really easy to remember acronym RULER (see below), make this a very, very useful and helpful read for the trackless wastes of Parenthood that ZERO people are really ready for.
RULER stands for:
None of these tasks are unattainable goals. Each one, in my opinion, would be more effectively done with a professional counselor within a theraputic setting. Nothing to say one can't, or shouldn't, make a start on the process by reading this fascinating (but repetitive) book.
There are multiple editions available from $14.99. The Publisher's site will take you to your favorite bookery.
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Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson
Rating: 3.5* of five
The Publisher Says: What is the nature of space and time? How do we fit within the universe? How does the universe fit within us? There’s no better guide through these mind-expanding questions than acclaimed astrophysicist and best-selling author Neil deGrasse Tyson.
But today, few of us have time to contemplate the cosmos. So Tyson brings the universe down to Earth succinctly and clearly, with sparkling wit, in tasty chapters consumable anytime and anywhere in your busy day.
I CHECKED THIS AUDIOBOOK OUT FROM THE LIBRARY. THANK GOODNESS THEY EXIST.
My Review: I would never buy an audiobook, so this was a perfect solution. I wanted to listen to Dr. Tyson reading his own work, since he knows what he wants to convey and to stress. I had some problems this week that made reading problematic for a few days. This 3h42m listen was a great way to keep my hand in. It was also an enjoyable experience.
Like all ear-reads, I retained about 30% of it, though.
The things I was most interested in learning more about were the particles, and that bit stuck with me just fine. "Charm" and "strange" are opposites, apparently, in the particle zoo. I myownself think of them as two sides of the same coin.
I find Dr. Tyson's voice to be easy on the ears. I am confident, as I listen to him, that he is in full possession of the fact and I can rely on him to educate me. He has a sense of humor that goes down well with me, so that really helped my concentration.
It's a short book, so a hardcover is only $9.49 at Amazon (non-affiliate link).
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Son of a Gun: A Memoir by Justin St. Germain
Rating: 3.5* of five
The Publisher Says: In the tradition of Tobias Wolff, James Ellroy, and Mary Karr, a stunning memoir of a mother-son relationship that is also the searing, unflinching account of a murder and its aftermath
Tombstone, Arizona, September 2001. Debbie St. Germain’s death in her remote trailer, apparently at the hands of her fifth husband, is a passing curiosity. “A real-life old West murder mystery,” the local TV announcers intone before the commercial break, while barroom gossips snicker cruelly. But for her twenty-year-old son, Justin St. Germain, the tragedy marks the line that separates his world into before and after.
Long after his mother’s death is “solved,” closure still seems missing. Distancing himself from the legendary town of his childhood, Justin makes another life a world away in San Francisco and achieves all the surface successes that would have filled his mother with pride. Yet years later he’s still sleeping with a loaded rifle under his bed. Ultimately, he is pulled back to the desert landscape of his childhood on a search to make sense of the unfathomable. What made his mother, a onetime army paratrooper, the type of woman who would stand up to any man except the men she was in love with? What led her to move from place to place, house to house, man to man, job to job, until finally she found herself in a desperate and deteriorating situation, living on an isolated patch of desert with an unstable ex-cop?
Justin’s journey takes him back to the ghost town of Wyatt Earp and the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, to the trailers he and Debbie shared, to the string of stepfathers who were a constant, sometimes threatening presence in his life, to a harsh world on the margins full of men and women all struggling to define what family means. He decides to confront people from his past and delve into the police records in an attempt to make sense of his mother’s life and death. All the while he tries to be the type of man she would have wanted him to be.
Brutally honest and beautifully written, Son of a Gun is a brave, unexpected and unforgettable memoir.
I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.
My Review: I've read a goodly number of memoirs about hardscrabble childhoods...The Glass Castle for one, Cockroaches for a memorable other...but I was not entirely sure what to make of this one. Violence against women isn't uncommon, and the domestic violence that led Author St. Germain's mother to her death was part of an established pattern in her life. It seems very likely that she was an adrenaline junkie, a person whose emotional needs are met by the powerful stimulant our brain feeds us when we're afraid.
Seeking out the fear isn't that uncommon a trait. Many of us climb mountains or watch horror films. The author's mother seems to have gotten her high from relationships with abusive men. It's very sad and very dangerous, and in this case lethal.
The enormous trauma of Author St. Germain's upbringing, the immense psychic wound of his mother's murder at the hands of the man she chose to marry, and the...the strangely deficient paperwork trail her murderer's fellow cops present him with when he returns to the scene of the crime a decade on, all left me...flat. I wasn't used up, wrung out, the way I would've been if I'd been sobbing from the awfulness and waste of it all. I was just...flat.
I suspect the reason is that I wasn't fully drawn in to the story. I did not get past the stage of reading where I lost my sense of separateness, of being outside looking in. It's an alchemical thing that happens when I'm reading certain things. I can't identify why it did not occur this time.
I wished that it had; I expected it to because I liked the guy; if I ever met Justin, I'd want to hug him. But I was outside, looking in, and thus not 4-star-giving wrapped up in his story.
A trade paperback is readily available for $16.00 (less if it's used) by following the non-affiliate link to Amazon.
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All Things Cease to Appear by Elizabeth Brundage
Rating: 3.5* of five
The Publisher Says: A dark, riveting, beautifully written book—by “a brilliant novelist” according to Richard Bausch—that combines noir and the gothic in a story about two families entwined in their own unhappiness, with, at its heart, a gruesome and unsolved murder.
Late one winter afternoon in upstate New York, George Clare comes home to find his wife killed and their three-year-old daughter alone—for how many hours?—in her room across the hall. He had recently, begrudgingly, taken a position at a nearby private college (far too expensive for local kids to attend) teaching art history, and moved his family into a tight-knit, impoverished town that has lately been discovered by wealthy outsiders in search of a rural idyll.
George is of course the immediate suspect—the question of his guilt echoing in a story shot through with secrets both personal and professional. While his parents rescue him from suspicion, a persistent cop is stymied at every turn in proving Clare a heartless murderer. And three teenage brothers (orphaned by tragic circumstances) find themselves entangled in this mystery, not least because the Clares had moved into their childhood home, a once-thriving dairy farm. The pall of death is ongoing, and relentless; behind one crime there are others, and more than twenty years will pass before a hard kind of justice is finally served.
A rich and complex portrait of a psychopath and a marriage, this is also an astute study of the various taints that can scar very different families, and even an entire community. Elizabeth Brundage is an essential talent who has given us a true modern classic.
I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.
My Review: A domestic thriller, and a darn unsuspenseful one. There is, as we're all aware, a long tradition in fiction and in fact of men who kill their wives for what seem to outsiders as heartbreakingly trivial reasons. This is one of those stories. It's not in the least mysterious that the murderer is the murderer. It's the reason I didn't give the book more stars.
I gave it as many as I did because Author Brundage writes about how the people in a small, gentrifying community deal with the end of their safety net of decent jobs and affordable housing. The influx of yuppies from the nearby rich-kids' college who just are not like them at all adds stress to the community. The families who figure in the murder case are tied together by their state of limbo. No one ever is charged for the crime. Although, I remind you, there's really just no doubt at all in the experienced reader's mind who did the crime.
Anyway. The way the author slowly, slowly brings the beginnings of justice to the town's unresolved wounds makes it a worthwhile read.
A Kindle edition is $9.99 at the non-affiliate Amazon link.
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This space is dedicated to Nancy Pearl's Rule of 50, or "the Pearl Rule" as I've always called it. After realizing five times in December 2021 alone that I'd already Pearl-Ruled a book I picked up on a whim, I realized how close my Half-heimer's is getting to the full-on article. Hence my decision to track my Pearls!
As she says:
People frequently ask me how many pages they should give a book before they give up on it. In response to that question, I came up with my “rule of fifty,” which is based on the shortness of time and the immensity of the world of books. If you’re fifty years of age or younger, give a book fifty pages before you decide to commit to reading it or give it up. If you’re over fifty, which is when time gets even shorter, subtract your age from 100—the result is the number of pages you should read before making your decision to stay with it or quit.
So this space will be each month's listing of Pearl-Ruled books. Earlier Pearl-Rule posts will be linked below the current month's crop.
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The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld (tr. Michele Hutchison) {p79}
Rating: 3.5* of five
The Publisher Says: I thought about being too small for so much, but that no one told you when you were big enough ... and I asked God if he please couldn't take my brother Matthies instead of my rabbit. 'Amen.'
Jas lives with her devout farming family in the rural Netherlands. One winter's day, her older brother joins an ice skating trip; resentful at being left alone, she makes a perverse plea to God; he never returns. As grief overwhelms the farm, Jas succumbs to a vortex of increasingly disturbing fantasies, watching her family disintegrate into a darkness that threatens to derail them all.
A bestselling sensation in the Netherlands by a prize-winning young poet, Marieke Lucas Rijneveld's debut novel lays everything bare. It is a world of language unlike any other, which Michele Hutchison's striking translation captures in all its wild, violent beauty. Studded with unforgettable images—visceral, raw, surreal—The Discomfort of the Evening is a radical reading experience that will leave you changed forever.
A LITTLE FREE LIBRARY FIND. IT'S GOING BACK RIGHT NOW.
My Review: Excrement, depression, religious nuttery, what I strongly suspect is a suicide...all still within my tolerance. Then Obbe is disgustingly cruel to his hamster in front of his very young sisters and Jas says:
'Right,' Dad says, 'off to your bedroom, you, and pray.'
His shoe hits my bum; the poo stuck up it might have shot back up in my intestines now. When Mum learns the truth about {the hamster} she'll get depressed again and won't speak for days. I glance at {her brother and sister} one last time, then the Lego castle {where the dying hamster is hidden from their father). My brother is suddenly busy with his butterfly collection. He probably just beat them out of the air with his bare hands.
That's page 79. Add in a parent hitting a child with a shoe and I am just not here for it. I don't think others will have my sensitivity to animal cruelty or using an object to strike a child, and the imagery is so well-rendered into English I forgot it was a translation; whatever there is to recommend it, I can not, and do not wish to, go there.
It's $11.19 trade paper, or $9.99 on Kindle (non-affiliate Amazon link).
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Shutter Man by Richard Montanari (p115)
Rating: 3* of five
The Publisher Says: Plagued with a rare disease that prevents him from recognizing faces, Billy carries a photograph in his pocket that is his only way of identifying his next target. Killing is in Billy's bloodline, as a member of Philadelphia's dangerous Farren crime family.
While Billy stalks Philadelphia, Detective Kevin Byrne is assigned to a series of bizarre home-invasion cases and is joined by his former partner-turned-assistant district attorney, Jessica Balzano. Their investigations circle Byrne's childhood neighborhood of Devil's Pocket, and they find themselves revisiting a crime from Byrne's past that has haunted him for decades. What Byrne witnessed as a child in Devil's Pocket jeopardizes the Farren family--which makes him the next target on Billy's hit list.
A multigenerational story of hardship, guilt, and redemption, Shutter Man is Byrne and Balzano's most tense and personal case to date.
I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.
My Review: Maybe I should've said "no" to this ARC. It's #9 in a series I've never read before. That doesn't usually go well for me, does it for you?
Byrne, the cop, is trying to chase down a man who kills women, apparently for fun. Byrne keeps...checking out...and there are these portentous passages that Mean Something™:
Byrne knew what he should be doing, where he should be pointing his day, but he couldn't bring himself to do it. He knew that what {a guy} had seen today in the Pocket would remain between the two men. {The guy} was a brother cop, and Byrne didn't have to concern himself.
He tried to get back to work, but that small cardboard box, and its contents, kept calling out to him like a dark specter from his youth.
I honestly don't think there's anything in there that does a good job of making me turn the page to see what's next. It's not terrible writing; it's bland to me and, like a ginger-infused blancmange, doesn't work the way it was obviously meant to.
It's $2.99 on Kindle, if you'd like to try it for yourself.
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Thoreau in Love by John Schuyler Bishop (18%)
Rating: 2.5* of five
The Publisher Says: In 1843, a repressive puritanism still hangs over Concord, Massachusetts, and Henry Thoreau, twenty-five years old, wants out. When his mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, gives him an opportunity to move to New York City, the lively center of the growing nation, Henry leaves Concord with no thought of ever returning.
In his journals, the 250-some pages about his trip to New York have been ripped out, the only substantial number of pages missing from the forty-seven journal volumes. What was so scandalous that Thoreau—or, more likely, his literary executor—decided no one should see it?
And why did Thoreau stay only six months in New York?
Thoreau’s biographers go out of their way to convince us that the writer was heterosexual, although he never married and wrote freely in his journal about the beauty of men. His poem “Sympathy,” one of the few published in his lifetime, is a love poem to a boy who was his student. About that poem, one celebrated biographer went so far as to say, “When he wrote ‘he’ Thoreau really meant ‘she,’ and when he wrote ‘him,’ he really meant ‘her.'” When in his journal Thoreau wrote, “There is more than maiden modesty between us . . . I have no feature so fair as my love for him,” that same biographer said, “There is little doubt that ‘her’ was meant. . . . There are, indeed, many passages . . . where Henry’s emotional experiences with women are memorialized under a camouflage of masculine pronouns.”
By denying Thoreau's real sexuality, scholars have reduced him to a wooden icon. But this sexuality can humanize the man.
“Thoreau in Love” imagines the time of the missing pages, when Thoreau emerged from his shell and explored the wider world and himself before he returned to Concord, where he fearlessly lived the rest of his life and became the great naturalist and literary giant.
My Review: I do not remember how I came to be given this book, but it has been on my Kindle since 20 June 2013. Nine years! And no review! Sinful wicked shame and contumely be heapèd upon me.
My response to the 18% I read is best spoken in the deathless phrase of a writer whose words are endemic to Goodreads: "the words and the sentences curled themselves into knotty shapes that did not fit the shape of my brain."
I am out.
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The Happy Numbers of Julius Miles by Jim Keeble (p59)
Rating: 3* of five
The Publisher Says: Julius Miles is a mathematical genius, but he is hefty of frame, awkward with the opposite sex and struggling to bring his existence into balance. When he stumbles across the girl next door naked and dead on her Victorian tiles, he starts to unravel the one equation that’s eluded him: that of his own life. And so it is that with the most unlikely of assistants – a transsexual Cupid with a penchant for drugs – he embarks on a quest to find the truth about love, death, family and how, ultimately, you make your numbers happy.
I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.
My Review: Try this on for size:
Even murder cops get bored. They're as keen as the rest of us to go home and watch television. It's not the gunslingers who solve crime but the pedants and the bores, my old man explained. "The evidence is is always there, son. Most cases are solved by a pig-headed copper going back one last time.
There is one more thing he told me, my cop father. Because it acts as an alibi, and because they get a kick out of seeing the pain and grief they've caused, killers often attend the funerals of their victims.
This is A Confederacy of Dunces plus equations, divided by Ignatius J. Reilly's nasty attitude towards others, times neurodivergent Othering plus fatphobia. There are a lot of characters. They speak, or think, in short bursts. There's a transgender woman playing matchmaker...and called a transsexual. Well, to be fair, this came out in 2012 and that was okay then.
But it just is not doing it for me at all. I am releasing the tree book into the Little Free Library as of now.
The trade paper edition is $17.95 at the non-affiliate Amazon link.
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