Reviews with TLC

I received The Ninth Clan by Paul S. Ross as a gift from an acquaintance. I'll admit I took my sweet time starting it but once I did I was thoroughly intrigued. Ross had me wondering what was going to happen next and that's rare for me. The Ninth Clan never hesitated to challenge the characters populating it or to give them difficult decisions to make. There were moments when I was surprised at how deeply I felt the characters' pain. While there were parts that challenged me to suspend my disbelief, the characters kept me engaged. Ross explores belief systems and their effects on the world in an interesting and thought-provoking manner. The Ninth Clan takes a journey that encompasses history, religion, psychology, politics, power, greed, and humanity from multiples angles.

Seven Hands Seven Hearts: Prose and Poetry by Elizabeth Woody surprised me by pulling me in to the poems and the prose time and again. At times I felt like a voyeur gazing into a place I didn't belong but felt drawn to. Woody uses her history, her ancestral heritage, and modernity to paint a picture of a society within a society that pulled at my heart in ways I didn't expect. Seven Hands Seven Hearts pushed me to rethink my place in the world and way the world around me works. Looking into the past to understand the present and even project into a possible future, Seven Hands Seven Hearts unapologetically explores the differences and the similarities of the peoples who inhabit the world in which we all exist.

When a friend asked me to Think Twice: A Learner's Guide to Improved Emotional Intelligence by Michael Cornwall shortly after it was released, I was excited to read a new take on it because I'd read quite a bit about emotional intelligence before. I ordered it right away and then left it on my to-be-read shelf until recently. I finally picked it up and started reading. I wish I hadn't. From the gaslighting linguistic style to the manipulation of the elements of emotional intelligence to the overuse of bold and italic fonts, I struggled to finish it. In fact, I almost quit reading it several times. I kept reading out of a sense of obligation to my friend because I hoped Cornwall would pull it together in a way that made sense.  The overall message of Think Twice seems to be that whatever emotion one has is wrong (think twice) and that one doesn't have the right to set boundaries because how one reacts to other people is the problem no matter what. Think Twice seems ...

Beyond the River: The Untold Story of the Heroes of the Underground Railroad by Ann Hagedorn explores the role of the people of Ripley, Ohio in the Underground Railroad. Hagedorn brings the Ohio River, Ripley and the surrounding area, the people on both sides of the river, and the war between abolitionists and slave owners/slave catchers to life in a way that immersed me in an area I thought I knew well. I grew up on the Kentucky side of the Ohio River but close enough to Ripley to have heard stories growing up that always intrigued me but seemed slightly surreal. Hagedorn's well researched book transported me right back to the 1800s and the people fighting slavery. I kept thinking about how humans always want to romanticize their cruelty, but Beyond the River cuts through the efforts to romanticize history straight to the dirty truth. Hagedorn doesn't try to make the struggle look admirable. She doesn't even paint the heroes as infallible as so often happens in the tel...

The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats is a collection that at times lifted my spirits, at times frustrated me, and at times saddened me. Yeats is sometimes clear and straightforward in his writing and other times oblique. I read a few poems each night and sometimes found myself rereading one or the other either because I loved the wording or because the wording felt awkward to me. The poems sometimes reminded me that writing done in a time and place is tied to that time and place and might not always hold up over time. Many of Yeats poems still hold meaning and are even transcendent of time and place but not all. And that's okay. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats tells a story of the connections and detachments we experience in life through language that manages to be both lyrical and grounded.