ebookadventures

Love in Color: Mythical Tales from Around the World, Retold by Bolu Babalola
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Reason for DNFing = I really wanted to love this book. "Mythical tales retold" will always hook me in - particularly when they are tales that haven't been retold before (there are only so many Greek myth retellings one can read..). However, I just struggled to get into it. Babalola can certainly write and her characters have a lot more nuance to them than the stereotypical romance characters. Maybe that's the issue. You just get interested in one set of characters and then the story ends. That's probably why I usually don't read short stories. I'm telling myself I'll come back to it to "dip in and dip out" of, but I probably won't. That just isn't how I read.

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This Is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I enjoyed this story of Claude and his family coming to terms with the fact that Claude may really be Poppy. I think Frankel, although edges towards sentimentality at times, does a fair job of weighing up the difficulties of raising a transgender child. How, regardless of how loving and accepting you are as parents, the transition from one gender to another is complicated - that the transition may not be linear. The book is another reminder that, given all that Claude/Poppy has to deal with, no one in their right mind would choose to be transgender. This is something you are and have to find your way as best you can.

Importantly, Frankel herself has a transgender daughter. I don't think this type of story should be told unless you have direct experience. Though this book is very much a parent's perspective not that of a transgender child - and Frankel, in her author's note, makes clear that this is not her daughter's story.

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Pages

Sunday, 1 August 2021

Saturday, 10 July 2021

Sunday, 25 April 2021

Sunday, 11 April 2021

Monday, 15 March 2021

Tuesday, 2 March 2021

Sunday, 21 February 2021

Saturday, 13 February 2021

Monday, 18 January 2021

Saturday, 16 January 2021

Saturday, 21 November 2020

Saturday, 14 November 2020

Sunday, 1 November 2020

Saturday, 17 October 2020

Sunday, 11 October 2020

Tuesday, 6 October 2020

Friday, 25 September 2020

Sunday, 30 August 2020

Thursday, 20 August 2020