Book Review: Faith Unraveled: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask Questions by Rachel Held Evans

Rachel Held Evans had been on my radar since maybe the late 2000s due to her being a feminist Christian writer who was respected by literary and Christian online acquaintances of mine. Rachel is probably best known (even outside of Christian circles) as the woman who followed all the instructions of the Bible to the letter for a full year. I've been slowly buying her books when I come across them in thrift stores, etc. This one I bought on Book Outlet. (LMK if you wanna join; I get invite credits). 

Faith Unraveled: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask Questions is I think her first book; it was originally called Evolving in Monkey Town with the same subtitle. The Scopes monkey trial took place in Rachel's hometown in 1925 and acts as a neat metaphor for what the book is about: belief, doubt, politics, and fundamentalism. She wrote it after years of wrestling with her conservative evangelical Christian upbringing in the Bible belt and the doubt she experienced as an adult. Book summary: 

Eighty years after the Scopes Monkey Trial made a spectacle of Christian fundamentalism and brought national attention to her hometown, Rachel Held Evans faced a trial of her own when she began to have doubts about her faith.

In Faith Unraveled, Rachel recounts growing up in a culture obsessed with apologetics, struggling as her own faith unraveled one unexpected question at a time.

In order for her faith to survive, Rachel realizes, it must adapt to change and evolve. Using as an illustration her own spiritual journey from certainty to doubt to faith, Evans challenges you to disentangle your faith from false fundamentals and to trust in a God who is big enough to handle your tough questions.

In a changing cultural environment where new ideas seem to threaten the safety and security of the faith, Faith Unraveled is a fearlessly honest story of survival.

This book wasn't exactly fun to read, but I did enjoy reading it. It's refreshing to read a Christian writer who doesn't flinch away from the problem of pain and the other big questions, who isn't content with just accepting the traditional pat answers. When many Christians are asked the difficult questions, they are far too likely to, like Aziraphale in the beginning of Good Omens, say "it's ineffable" and refuse to think about it. I liked how Rachel described fundamentalism: as having the same beliefs, but held so tightly that one's fingernails gouge marks in one's palm. Consequently, they are afraid of change, and will do anything to keep the status quo, including turning to politics to hold on to power. 

Rachel, a pastor's daughter, went to Christian schools and college where she and her classmates were taught to be Christian apologists and debaters, concerned more with winning souls and dunking on nonbelievers than they were about determining what they really believed and if they believed it. Rachel's crisis of faith was relatable, and I felt for her. She also includes some short chapters about other people she knows and their approaches to faith and belief. This book doesn't have a neat ending, but then life and belief don't. This book is all the more poignant because Rachel passed away a couple of years ago. She was only a few years older than me.

Score: 4 out of 5 stars
Read in: May 7-8
From: Book Outlet
Status:  keep for now

Cover notes: I like the cover, although the monkey won't make sense until you read the first chapter about the Scopes monkey trial.

Trigger warnings for this book: described beheading, murder, domestic abuse mention, misogyny mentions, abortion mentions, religious abuse, bombing mentions, US war in the Middle East mentions, hypothetical torture mentions  (hell), fundamentalism, Christian-centrism, Islamophobia, that view of Christianity/Jesus as the only pathway to salvation, related topics

Book Review: Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz

Uncharacteristically, I bought this book at full price from the McNally-Jackson branch inside the LaGuardia airport before flying out of New York (I had been visiting my sister and her family). Yes characteristically, I did not read it right away as planned, and it sat around in my house and various bookshelves before I finally read it at the end of April. Back of book summary:

Postcolonial Love Poem is an anthem of desire against erasure. Natalie Diaz’s brilliant second collection demands that every body carried in its pages—bodies of language, land, rivers, suffering brothers, enemies, and lovers—be touched and held as beloveds. Through these poems, the wounds inflicted by America onto an indigenous people are allowed to bloom pleasure and tenderness: “Let me call my anxiety, desire, then. / Let me call it, a garden.” In this new lyrical landscape, the bodies of indigenous, Latinx, black, and brown women are simultaneously the body politic and the body ecstatic. In claiming this autonomy of desire, language is pushed to its dark edges, the astonishing dunefields and forests where pleasure and love are both grief and joy, violence and sensuality.

Diaz defies the conditions from which she writes, a nation whose creation predicated the diminishment and ultimate erasure of bodies like hers and the people she loves: “I am doing my best to not become a museum / of myself. I am doing my best to breathe in and out. // I am begging: Let me be lonely but not invisible.” Postcolonial Love Poem unravels notions of American goodness and creates something more powerful than hope—in it, a future is built, future being a matrix of the choices we make now, and in these poems, Diaz chooses love.

This book won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, and wow I can see why. I had already read a couple of the poems that had been shared on tumblr, and I loved her writing. She's so so good: passionate and angry and grieving and heartfelt and poetic and in love; a master of her craft. This is a short book, but I had to put it away for a couple of days instead of reading it in one sitting because it's so intense. It will stay with me for a long time. In a classic "oh, Michelle" I don't know what I expected given the title way, I was somewhat surprised by the sheer amount of explicit poems about e*ting a woman 0ut in the most poetic, beautiful language. Every couple of poems it was like, oh another one, godspeed Natalie. Although this does raise a point I've read before: we always expect women's poetry to be purely autobiographical, while allowing men to be seen as artists who write whatever they want and are respected. It may very well be that these poems aren't all strictly autobiographical. They all feel deeply personal, though, regardless of whether or not they actually happened in real life. 

Anyway, I loved this and recommend it highly, although of course the poems are often difficult to read (some topics covered include missing & murdered indigenous women, water protestors, America's anti-indigenous history and mentality, etc.). Themes I kept seeing: green, bulls/horns, the land/desert, rivers/water...

Score: 5 out of 5 stars
Read in: April 28-May 2
From: McNally-Jackson, LaGuardia airport branch
Status: keep

Cover notes: The cover features Natalie Diaz herself. She appears to be obscuring her face with her hand, but if you keep looking you'll see one of her eyes peeking out, locked directly on the viewer. Both obscured/hidden and watching. She appears to be wearing indigenous jewelry. I think the cover goes well with the tone of the poetry.

Trigger warnings for this book: missing & murdered indigenous women mentions, suicide mention, drugs and alcohol abuse mentions, anti-indigenous racism (systemic and internalized), violence mentions, police brutality (including towards elders), mental illness mentions, explicit poetic sex act descriptions

Book Review: Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey

I'm pretty sure I heard about this book through bookstagram, and immediately put it on my mental TBR list. I will read any book about librarians, and this one sounded really cool. Synopsis:

“That girl’s got more wrong notions than a barn owl’s got mean looks.”

Esther is a stowaway. She’s hidden herself away in the Librarian’s book wagon in an attempt to escape the marriage her father has arranged for her—a marriage to the man who was previously engaged to her best friend. Her best friend who she was in love with. Her best friend who was just executed for possession of resistance propaganda.

The future American Southwest is full of bandits, fascists, and queer librarian spies on horseback trying to do the right thing.

I didn't really read the synopsis, or if I had I'd forgotten the details, so I was surprised a few chapters in when Esther mentioned cars as a past thing. From the writing and worldbuilding, it felt like a historical fiction book set in the wild west in the 1800s. People ride on horseback and use horse-drawn wagons; gender roles and ways of talking sound like they were in the 1800s, and people are executed by hanging. The cars thing, and other references Esther internally makes to propaganda films, show that this is a dystopian book set in the future. It's clear the Librarians are the only women allowed to move around independently, distributing Approved Materials to entertain, educate and enlighten the populace (and secretly distribute forbidden materials and goods as part of the resistance against the fascist US). Not all of them are women, either; one Librarian is nonbinary, like Sarah Gailey themself. 

This book is rather suspenseful due to the outside danger as well as inner: Esther's self-doubt and internalized homophobia. Due to the highly conservative heteronormative culture, she thought there was something wrong with her and her best/girlfriend, and that they were outliers. When she meets the group of awesome queer Librarians, she feels at home despite the danger and decides to join them. While I would have liked to learn more about the library (both Approved and not) and its operations, there was still plenty that just sucked me in. There are exciting fights with gangs on horseback, spy stuff, a love interest for Esther, etc. I highly recommend this book if you like Westerns and antifascist queer themes. My only real complaint is that I wanted it to be like 3 times longer! I wanted to keep following Esther and the Librarians as she truly became one of them. I think this is a novella; Google will only give me word count guidelines so I'm going to assume you just define what a novella is with your heart.

Score: 4.5 out of 5 stars
Read in: April 27
From: Book Outlet
Status: keep

Cover notes: Perfect Western font. I didn't realize initially that the black design on the left side of the cover is actually the Librarians and their horses and camps, sideways!

Trigger warnings for this book: murder, shooting deaths, corpses, execution by hanging, guns, homophobia, domestic violence mentions, domestic abuse mentions, physical abuse mentions, implied transphobia, internalized homophobia, fascism and censorship, sexism, misogyny, disassociation due to shock, government corruption and neglect, water shortage and thirst