6 out of 5 stars
 
TL;DR:  The people who found this book poorly written must be very spoiled, I don't know.  They’re people who want things to have tidy endings or be perfectly linear in a way that trauma cannot be.  I found it to be masterfully crafted, tightly paced, a testament to “Show, not tell.”  I can’t recommend this book highly enough for anyone surviving a narcissistic parent, especially a borderline mother.  The honesty and insight in this book are unparalleled.  McCurdy’s dry-as-dust humor makes it easy to stay with her on this nightmare journey of abuse that staggers the imagination even as a reader.  It’s truly mind-warping to consider the layer upon layer of exploitation this author suffered, which makes her victory such a massive triumph for all of us who get it.  I would recommend a book called Understanding the Borderline Mother by Christine Ann Lawson to anyone who saw their own mother in Deb McCurdy, a classic waif/hermit.  The dynamics of a borderline family, right down to the passive-aggressive, absentee father, are all laid bare.  As I research the other child actors involved, and where things stand in the aftermath of this book’s publication, I see that Jennette’s voice is a cannon among squirtguns in more ways than one.  Go, girl.
 
***
 
As usual I'm the last one to read a mega-hyped book.  I’m from the 1960s.  So I didn’t know who Jennette McCurdy was.  But as soon as I saw the cover I knew I would read this book and that I would get this woman.  I was not prepared for how well-crafted it was, or for the stunning synchronicity between her life, her abuse, and my own.
 
So my review will be spoiler-tastic, since the book has been out for quite a while now and she blew my entire mind as a survivor.  Again I cannot recommend this book highly enough.
 
While reading this I was amazed at how well-edited it was.  Because one of the points McCurdy  makes in the book is that her education was one of the things that was stolen by her abusers.  All of that was secondary to “the show must go on.”  That’s obvious to me, because I had a similar caseload while my brain was developing.  Not only was nobody really giving me space to focus on school work, they were putting me through hellish paces, all of them.  So people like Jennette McCurdy and me, CPTSD survivors, when we can read and write good, I’m proud of us.
 
As an author myself, I was dazzled by the amazing job she did at showing and not telling.  While the pacing is super tight, and she moves from one scene right to the next with minimal exposition, everything that you need to understand the big picture is there.  She leaves plenty of blank space for you to fill in for yourself.  And I guess that’s what the less-traumatized people are annoyed by, why they’re saying it’s badly written. 
 
If you don’t have the lived experience of trauma, and you’re not able to fill in the negative space that she’s left, then you’ll find it disjointed.  If you need to have flowery language with everything spelled out, then her dry humor and minimal, hyperalert style won’t work for you. 
 
Because the narrative mimics what it’s like to live with the sort of OCD/ADHD one develops when your every thought revolves around placating and emotionally de-escalating your authority figures.  And that mindset makes you a perfect little good sport to get along great in Hollywood, as McCurdy explains perfectly in the book.
 
So people who’ve lived nice, privileged, comfortable little lives, yeah, probably don’t appreciate how it feels to live with CPTSD and be hyperalert, hypervigilant, and have this aroused nervous system that is reflected in McCurdy’s writing style.  It’s a cultural thing that child abuse survivors know instinctively, that we have to smile when it hurts.  We don’t get to spell everything all the way out.  We don’t get tidy endings.  We get abused by lunatics because they’re imbalanced.
 
McCurdy has an extremely light touch when discussing her abusers, in particularly The Creator, aka Dan Schneider.  It’s very clear that she doesn’t want to get sued into oblivion, and that there’s much more she could say.  I have not watched or researched anything about Nickelodeon until after reading this book. 
 
All of that, the petri dish of exploitation that is child acting, is beautifully laid bare in this book.  Jennette literally gets trafficked directly to a creeper with a foot fetish so that her family can get a new fridge.  The more you know about the atmosphere on iCarly – beyond the minimal discussion in this book – the more plain the child trafficking becomes.  Her mother had no sexual boundaries at all. Her dad works two jobs, one of them at Blockbuster Video, and Jennette becomes the primary breadwinner before puberty.  Nothing was okay about any of that, though it was all legal.
 
But the most striking thing of all for me personally was the plot twist I never saw coming, which paralleled a recent revelation in my own life:  that McCurdy’s father wasn’t her mother’s husband.  Nor were two of her brothers’. 
 
I only discovered that none of us were fathered by our dad in my late 50s, when I took a DNA test to try and connect with family back in Italy.  Come to find out we have no idea who my siblings’ fathers are, and none of them are her husband who died 30 years ago.
 
McCurdy’s father mostly gets a free pass in this book because the other villains are so obvious.  But based on my own recent experience, while reading this book, her desperate attempts to connect with him, her constant swings and misses, tore me apart.  Because there she was, living in pure confusion about why she could never get his attention, why she just couldn’t figure that guy out.  She just had to leave a blank there, like I did with my dad.
 
But then she also had to try and run interference when she knew things were horribly wrong in the marriage.  It was her job to keep mom de-escalated when she’d be accusing dad of the affair he definitely wasn’t having because he worked two minimum-wage jobs and didn’t have time.  But she also wasn’t sleeping with him, because she’d hoarded so much crap there was only enough space for one person to fit in the bed.
 
I’m not sure that even now Jennette understands that neither one of her parents was ever anything but an abuser, that there was nothing to love or be grateful about.  They both used her as animated toilet paper, basically, to soothe and satisfy their every little whim, all their days.  I guess her father is still alive, and shame on him.  She should be glad when he dies, too.  He never cared about her, because she wasn’t his blood.  Screw him.
 
Because really, he was an adult.  When he discovered his wife’s affair, it was his job to either deal with her and her mental illness, take ownership of the marriage, or leave it.  A guy Jennette just met takes that much responsibility for her, and she for him.  And they’re not even married.  Her dad could’ve done it. 
 
You don’t get to stay in the marriage and be a passive-aggressive asshole to the little girl, be her father in name only, as my dad did to me.  It’s confusing and destabilizing as all hell for the child.  And it leaves her wide open to The Creator, who insisted that people call him “daddy” on set.  Both parents set her up and drop-kicked her, while living off of her money.  Pure shame.
 
Basically when you have a borderline mother – as Jennette most certainly described – she insists on controlling everyone in the household.  The entire home revolves around whatever she wants, all the time.  That’s why it becomes a hoarder place with the hermit subtype.  Because mom needs you to unwrap presents a certain way so she can save that stuff.  Everybody has to do everything the way mom needs it done, even if it means they can’t be comfortable at all.
 
A borderline mother sees her children as literal outgrowths of herself, chattel property that exist to fulfill her wishes.  She sees nothing wrong with that.  She lives in a sort of constant emotional collapse, which requires the constant input of other people to sustain a solid front.  Then she can put on  whatever image she wants to project, to the people she deems important.
 
But there are always two sides, good-split and bad-split people.  Whenever mommy feels bad, somebody else needs to make it better.  And there’s hell to pay if they don’t.  Deb’s quickness to usurp her daughter’s life in every way, shape, and form is rampant throughout this entire book.  And I saw it with both of my parents.  I’m surprised her father manned up at all.  Because he was every bit as bad.  I’m not sure she’s seen it yet.  But I’m sure he was. Where there’s an overt, there’s a covert one playing their victim and living on their scraps.
 
My father was in a fake marriage that I don’t believe was ever consummated.  He did that because he was from an ethnic community that would not accept his homosexuality.  And he felt very passive-aggressive about the whole thing, and my mother’s humiliating him with his best friend in fathering me.  
 
So he treated me very much the way Jennette’s father treats her in this book.  And I never knew why, either.  I didn’t find out any of this until I was in my late 50s, both my dads are dead.  Jennette finds out while she’s quite young, God bless.
 
So there were just a million and one thoughts and feelings.  I could say so much about this book as a survivor and also as a writer.  I really give it every star.
 
Jennette obviously had a lot of help with the editing.  Because this book is so easy to read for how dreadful the events are.  The entire story is about how she never got a moment to herself, to process anything about her own childhood.  Every second of her life was constantly calibrated to mommy mommy mommy.  People are freaking out about the title like she’s some dirty animal for writing that.  And the title is the litmus test.  It’s all you need to know.  Because Jennette wasn’t allowed to catch her first breath until mommy died.  Some of us understand immediately.
 
I was relieved when she came right out and got it, how bad mommy really was, by the end of the book.  Because the thing with this kind of trauma, CPTSD, is that they keep you so busy chasing your tail that you don’t have time to notice how traumatized you are.  You can only live by, for, and through them.
 
So she had to have a developmental editor helping her make this story flow as smoothly and beautifully as it did, MWAH.  Trauma doesn’t pour straight onto the page so neat and clean, no.  Especially not when you’re home-schooled by a madwoman at a pedo foot-fetish ranch (allegedly) between coochie inspections.  This is a super easy read for how tough the material is.  Because she uses dry humor, wit, insight, and honesty.
 
But yeah, back to her dad.  In paramedic school they taught us about “distracting injuries.”  That’s when somebody doesn’t notice the bits of glass embedded in their forehead because one of their leg bones is jutted out at an angle.  I hope she’s cut contact with her dad.
 
And I would hate to read Justin’s memoir, God help him.  Reading this book helped me gain some perspective on the deal my mother offered to my sister, what a wretched form of abuse it was to be her golden child.  Every family’s dynamics are different.  It’s obvious how and why Jennette’s mother latched onto her versus the boys. 
 
I’m from a different ethnic community than the other kids and stick out like a thumb.  My father is the affair that broke up the marriage.  So I’m the one everybody hated.  That was Justin in the McCurdy family.  Justin was made to shower with his sister while she got her boobs and snooch “examined for cancer” by their mom.  Her mom was doing home pap smears in the shower with 15-year-old Justin made to be there.
 
When Jennette wants to keep mommy alive the way one might clap for Tinkerbelle, she tells her how thin she is.  Because that’s what mommy wants to see in her magical mirror, the one she pushed out and has been polishing polishing polishing every day for so long.
 
And then there’s Dustin, the one who mommy’s so ashamed of.  But there he is.  And every time mommy feels ashamed, or angry, or something’s out of her control, it’s his fault.  That’s why she needs him.  And if he tries to leave, or get better, or have things not always be his fault, there will be hell to pay.  I’ve realized that my mom’s siblings all really resent her, but they keep her in the family.  So she expects me to be the hated one and stay in her family, too – no thanks.  I wondered while reading this if Deb expected that of Dustin.  And now I understand exactly why the checked out “dad” allowed it.
 
Jennette didn’t talk about dad’s passive-aggressive treachery.  She didn’t talk about the Creator in a whole lot of detail.  She didn’t mention a lot of things where I was able to fill in the blanks for myself, especially after I spent an hour on the internet.  Now I know who Amanda Bynes is.  I can imagine which of the kids took the checks they were offered.  And I can see that Jennette McCurdy is a lighthouse of resilience.  I couldn’t be more happy or proud of her for writing this book.
 
I want to also thank her for drawing enough reviews on this outstanding book that I could see the same voices that hated my book for the same reasons.  I’m glad to be hated by them, and also that Jennette’s mom died.

 

Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
3.5 Stars

TL;DR

Another thought-provoking, character-driven literary fiction read from Silvia Moreno-Garcia.  My go-to author always surprises me with many tidbits of Mexican culture, people and places that come alive – this time in more ways than one.  Again there is a dual protagonist in search of an elusive third character who is seen mostly in the negative until the end.  There’s an excellent discussion of PTSD and CPTSD, codependent relationships and boundaries.  Nazi occultism, racism and colonization in Mexico, gender and sexuality, and other social issues are examined.  The underlying theme, though, is about overcoming fear to find true power in authenticity and grounding.  

I remain agnostic on the actual ending of the book, between the protags.  I’m okay with it either way.  Not my decision to make.

Ultimately I can't give it a higher rating because I kept getting pulled out of the story by exposition, repetition, and things that felt too conveniently written.

***

I look forward to reading whatever Silvia Moreno-Garcia writes.  I eagerly read this one as soon as it became available (to me), shortly after finishing Velvet Was the Night, which is now an all-time favorite.  I’m glad I bought that one in hard copy.  The author seems to have almost lifted that successful narrative framework and reused it in Silver Nitrate, overlaying a somewhat jumbled magical system over it with confusing results.  The two stories track directly, right down to the true identity of the ancillary character's elusive rich relative.

While  Silver Nitrate also resonated deeply with me, and gave me quite a lot to think about, I really struggled with it.  Up until the 70% mark I thought this would be the first time this outstanding author would write a dud.  And I wouldn’t be mad.  Because it’s still a better book of literary fiction than most people will ever write.  But it did feel repetitive and often stretching disbelief.  This author does magical realism much better, I think, than hocus pocus.  The Beautiful Ones struck the perfect note IMO.

All of that overly complicated occult stuff is just mumbo jumbo for self-loathing people who wish they were special.  That’s why Nazis were into it. This is a book about weirdos trying to do spells in order to temporarily override natural processes.  I find all of that truly odd.

What I really did not expect was the thorough and accurate portrayals of both PTSD and CPTSD in Tristan and Montsterrat, respectively.  

I find the other characters in Moreno-Garcia’s books consistently relatable, or I wouldn’t bother reading them.  But this was the first time I found one of her characters personally identifiable:  Montserrat.  She has a very consistently authentic CPTSD personality type in which I immediately recognized myself.  I felt extraordinarily seen in an unexpected way as a person living with mental illness.  That meant a lot to me.

As a person living with PTSD and CPTSD since I was 7 years old, I was very pleasantly surprised by the rep of the two MCs in this book.  Living with both conditions since childhood, and as an author myself, that aspect of the book was a breath of fresh air and caught me quite by surprise.    I would recommend something that I have found to be very close to the “spell magic” attempted herein, every bit as powerful and profound as that stuff (which I do not believe in and wasn't scared of) appears to be.  I have created magic in my life by writing as described below.

But instead of whatever strange goals these cultists have, the goal you can achieve here is being happy and feeling good in your life:  The A-B-C worksheet.  https://www.apa.org/ptsd-guideline/treatments/cognitive-processing-therapist.pdf  It’s on Page 62 of that pdf.  Page 61 has a helpful diagram.  

You might think of it as the Abracadabra worksheet, because real magic is super simple in my experience. You take a few minutes, half an hour tops, to be honest with yourself and rewrite your trauma.  Nothing about manifesting devil dogs or spinning lightning webs, only the emotional stuff and whatever you already saw when you went through the looking glass in your trauma.  

Once you work through that, there’s less desire for the weirdness.  You take the part of your life that feels stuck in your body, that’s wrecking your head, and you rewrite it with the words of your choice, just as Montserrat instinctively know to do in Silver Nitrate.  And the power magically appears in your body as soon as you write it.

Know how she learned that?  Because she grew up disabled and latchkey, like me. When there’s nowhere to go but through the darkness, you push to where you want to be.  After you’re already there, you don’t reach for the devil’s hand and follow.

While this book is ostensibly about two people who are into movies for different reasons (one an introverted sound technician, the other a vain, egocentric actor) who discover a racist cult using a film to cast spells, it’s definitely not a thriller.  It’s another book of literary fiction, like the other ones this author writes.  It’s about people and society, feelings.  It's about queer people from the wrong side of the tracks, who bond as children.

So those who are looking for a fast pace, or want it to be about the plot, will probably be disappointed.  Even for me as a literary reader there was maybe some extra dallying in the valley this time.  I was at the 70 percent mark thinking if there weren't so much synchronicity to my own life I would DNF.  And I quite enjoy the side trips.

All of her characters are relatable and draw me into the story.

However there were a few things that kept drawing me out of Silver Nitrate.  I wasn't bothered by the minutiae of her fandom OCD, because that's par for the course with that character's CPTSD personality.  The hocus pocus didn't scare me, the exposition was too convenient, the narrative seemed too formulaic from Velvet..  There's an info dump in a letter that seriously killed the boner in my brain.  I was surprised her editor left it in.  I was bouncing back and forth between feeling validated by the PTSD/CPSTD characters and annoyed.  It was jarring.  Also there's a running idea about clairvoyance involving sharp headaches that runs directly contrary to personal experience, and that's strongly reinforced throughout.  Not only does that contradict my personal experience, it's not what others have described to me in similar situations.  And I've seen my share of the dead people, so IDK.  The part where there's a silence you can't explain, or a fuller darkness, that sort of thing, yes.  But the information coming with pain, opposite.  And that's emphasized.

Trouble befalls Tristan and Abel, and not Montserrat, once they start dabbling in the dark things.  She doesn’t suffer in her life, because Montserrat doesn’t suffer from the same shortcomings that all of the others do:  self-loathing, and thus greed to take what someone else has/is.  

Montserrat is the only really honest one, happy with who she is and what she does.  She is the only one who wants nothing for herself, only for her sister.  She doesn’t do her work in the sound booth for money.  She’s placating her OCD, scratching that itch that I personally know all too well.  It’s part of CPTSD.  It started in early childhood and has never stopped.  But she’s otherwise grounded within herself in a way that the others aren’t.

**SPOILER** So when she rejects the deal Ewers offers her at the end, to become recognized as a hotshot editor, it isn’t that she’s some wizard superhero or whatever.  It’s that she can see that it’s all a lie.  It’s very simple.  He has nothing to offer in real life, and he never did.  How could she possibly trust him?  What is he without her anyway?  What does she need him for, when she’s never relied on anyone but herself, even as a child?  This is very evident to an old lady surviving with CPTSD.

Alcoholic, neglectful parents often have latchkey children who parent themselves.  When you spend enough time working real hard, all by yourself, and not getting rewarded – like Montserrat and I have – they can’t take that away from you.  You can’t cheat an honest survivor, basically.  It’s the same reason the elderly shaman gives Ewers a hard bounce when she feels/sees his two murders.  There was an automatic rightness to that tiny bit of the book that kept me reading on when I really wasn’t liking it overall. **END SPOILER**

I don’t generally read books with magic systems that need to be cleverly revealed.  I never read things with dragons, where people have names with ravens in them.  All of that starts feeling pretentious and pulling me out of the story right quick.  It feels like it’s for people who don’t like who they are, wish they were special instead of honing their specialties.

But this is a very skilled author.  And she deftly addresses the idea that a lot of occultism is for phonies and grifters preying on people who either (a) believe they were born special, or (b) will pay to become special.  That’s why it appeals to the colonizer mentality.  And the usual suspects are in the house:  Guido List, Aleister Crowley, and all the wannabes.  As Montserrat observes, they’re like magpies, these people, thieves at heart.

One thing I thought was funny was the references to Atlantis.  Atlantis is presumed to be both Aryan and thus infallible in this story.  My understanding of it is the opposite, that it was Aztlan, more of an Aztec offshoot civilization in the first place.  I’m not disagreeing with the author’s premise, that it’s a common Eurocentric conceit to believe that Atlantis was Greek/European. and aliens must have intervened in any complex indigenous technology.  There’s a reason the Spaniards destroyed all of the ancient Mayan codices pronto, before anybody else could make sense of them.

But also, if the Atlanteans were such infallible wizards, where are they now, tough guy?  LOL  Right?  I’m not saying they didn’t have highly advanced technology.  Only that they knew enough to destroy themselves.  

Also, there are still Mayans now.  They still speak Mayan languages, in Mayan villages.  Just not like back in the day. And they absolutely had advanced technologies that our current hotshot scientists still can't explain, like the sound phenomena at ball courts and temples.   We don't even know what-all they had back then, or what other cultures existed exactly.  There could be a whole "hidden in plain sight" thing, just saying.

The Atlanteans weren't super sorcerers because they were just people, like everybody else.  Because that’s how life works.  Because nobody is any different than anybody else, and they never were.  No one civilization is inherently greater or worse than any other, except in the eye of the beholder.  It’s all pretense, delusion, and stray emotion.  Moreno-Garcia makes that point very well in the book.

Despite being a big, pink weirdo, I’ve been honored with invitations to different indigenous events including pipe ceremonies and a sweat lodge.  Different things have happened.  I’ve seen and experienced things that I couldn’t understand or explain even if it were allowed, which a lot of the time it isn’t.  

There was never one second that I didn’t know for sure I had every resource I needed from the Earth.  The only fear I ever experienced was that which was already inside of me, what I brought to the table in the first place.  I saw and experienced things every bit as magical and amazing as referenced in this book, but nothing vaguely terrifying or “evil.”  It's a completely different concept.

Indigenous Mexicans know how to do their ofrendas.  If the Navajo need to smudge, they already know when and how to do it.  Nobody else needs to worry about any of this weird stuff mentioned in the book.  Such things are not real, which is why this book failed to scare me a la <i>Harry Potter</i>.  

What’s real would actually blow your mind.  But you’d have to give up the wizard fantasies to find out.  You’ll never be invited to learn while on this self-hatred tip.  People only need to learn these weird, complicated parlor tricks because they don't feel good enough.  And there are much easier ways to feel better about your life, like the A-B-C worksheet I posted above.  

I'm still not sorry I read this book.  But it's not her best.  Read this one if you're a movie buff.  It was cool to learn about chaneques.

I have access to a decent-sized informal lending library these days.  There are a lot of Harlequin romances, a lot of John LeCarre, and many books where police dogs save the day.  I can't quite bring myself to read His Holiday Prayer -- which I'm sure is amazing.

But you just never know what you might find.  I'm an old, broke, pensioner who can't resist free reading materials.  I love the randomness of books I would never otherwise have read.  It's a dorky kind of pleasure, but it works for me.

I snagged:

Sew Deadly by Elizabeth Lynn Casey
Knit Two by Kate Jacobs
Sybil Exposed  by Debbie Nathan
Hausfrau by Jill Alexander Essbaum
The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy

I also grabbed Schoolhouse Brides, Teachers of Yesterday Fulfill Dreams of Love in Four Novellas, although it stands a strong chance of getting DNFd.

The most exciting of these books is this copy of The Scarlet Pimpernel, which is leather bound, does not appear to have ever been read before, and includes a little pamphlet that explains in-depth about the story and provides additional vocabulary.  An amazing little treasure.

I have two Silvia Moreno-Garcia books to read at the moment, Signal to Noise and Silver Nitrate.  But I look forward to reading the randomness.  Simple pleasures for simple minds.

***SPOILER ALERT***

I started reading this on audiobook a year ago from the library and was forced to stop about 1/3 of the way in.  But it was totally stuck in my head even as I read many others.  I waited until I could give it my proper time and attention, and start from the beginning in paperback.  And I'm so glad I did.  

This book has been out for a while and is well-discussed already.  So I'm going full spoiler with my review.  Because Silvia Moreno-Garcia is one of my favorite authors, and this is one of my favorite books.  

This book follows a dual protagonist format, with both neighbor Maite and thug Elvis looking for a young woman named Leonora who has suddenly gone missing after taking some politically charged photographs.  For me, the characters are what really make this book amazing.  Maite is a mental-health disaster sort of like Linda from Joanna Cannon's A Tidy Ending, another favorite book -- not someone I'd like to spend a lot of time with, but really fun to read about.  I know people like Maite.  We all do.

Maite is anxious and bored, and lives in a fantasy world of comics and the lies she tells her coworker, Diana, about fake lovers.  Elvis is somewhat less delusional, but is forced to leave a lot of blanks in what he knows about his boss El Mago (The Magician) due to the nature of his job on a goon squad.  He does have dreams and aspirations of one day living the way El Mago does, in stark contrast with what he knows of his own life -- just as Maite feels about her body and her prospects as a single woman.

Maite and Elvis have the opposite of insta-love, where characters have love at first sight and it makes the book super boring.  This entire book is the slow burn of how perfect these two lonely, unmoored people are for each other.  They don't even meet until the end of the book, how amazing is that?  What a skilled writer.  

Neither of them has any meaningful family connections -- in a country and culture where that means everything.  Neither of them believes in anything, although Elvis is an enforcer on a right-wing goon squad.  They both have very similar low self-esteem about their overall life prospects and romantic worth.  They have the same connoisseur taste in music and books.  And they both need to find Leonora for different reasons.  They've both been used and discarded in love, she by Cristobalito, who dumped her for someone better in bed, and he first by an older American who used him as a sex worker, then by the beautiful Cristina, who recruited guys for a cult.

I'm focusing on this because of the negative reviews where people are saying "there's nobody to like in this book."  And that's nonsense.  You know what book has nobody likeable and is horrible to read?  The Paris Apartment by Lucy Foley.  Everyone is horrible in that book, including the guy who got murdered for supposedly trying to help rescue the trafficked women.  Even the little dog, Benoit, is a traitor.  There's nobody to like in The Paris Apartment partly because the protagonist, Jess, is a petty thief.  Petty thief Maite is a million times more likeable.  And the hilarious Maite has a character arc, unlike the entitled, not-funny Jess.

Maite and Elvis are both very gray characters.  But first of all Leonora, the one driving the entire plot, is entirely likeable.  It's fair to call her quite a heroine, although it's also fair for Maite to totally hate her and the reader to empathize with Maite.  

But Leonora is a beautiful and very popular upper-class girl who supports the poor even at the risk of her own life and personal wealth, going against her wealthy uncle who supports her financially, finances a pack of thugs, and can and will send them to kill her.  She dates lower-class boys who work in print shops, because she's not a super snob.  Her one and only failing in this book is trusting Emilio, dumping Ruben for the rich, handsome boy who betrays her in the end.  But if you can't find anybody to like in this book, you didn't notice Leonora, who was a very good kid.  People needed to be very, very afraid to speak up in that time and place.  And Leonora did it as best she could.

Also Maite is actually likeable, and Elvis is even more so.  Maite has a tremendous character arc in this book.  She literally saves the cat, for one thing, right?  She doesn't even like cats, or Leonora.  But she continues feeding the cat at her own expense the whole time.  Fortunately this cat doesn't poop or she'd have to clean that up too.  But she's buying food for this animal the whole time, and in the end she's riding the bus.  So she doesn't even get reimbursed after all that.  She doesn't even get her car back.

But by the end, she's softened and opened her heart to Ruben -- who at first she treated like garbage because of his class and his looks.  But once she saw what an actual piece of crap Emilio was, for me that was an excellent bit of growing up on Maite's part.  Just cashing the reality check on who would be the better boyfriend, Emilio or Ruben, was massive.  Getting beaten up brought Maite crashing down to Earth 1.

I can't help but think people who thought there was nobody to like in this book must have taken a very surface-level read of it.  Because although I may not want either Maite or Elvis in my life, I really did want them to get together.  I felt like they would be better people together than either of them could be alone.  Because she never had anybody that actually liked or got her before.  Elvis was somebody who had seen both her and Leonora, <i>and chose her over Leonora</i>.  Because they needed each other.  Nobody really needed Elvis before.  He saved her life, just like in her comic books.  ::mwah::

Also the part about who El Mago was, that was not a plot twist for me.  The twist was that he didn't actually know where Leonora was, hadn't personally been the one to disappear her.  I figured out about the uncle/El Mago and Emliio being smoochers. I got that Emilio was trash as soon as he came looking for the camera.  I got that her uncle was El Mago when Elvis went to Mago's house and saw the picture with the two little girls.

The subtext, where Elvis is one of the people who's being crapped on the hardest by El Mago, Emilio, and the other powers that be, and that he legitimately found himself with very few other options at the time, seems to escape a lot of people.  Maybe they haven't been to Mexico.  Maybe they imagine Tepito is like any small town in America that sucks and is hard to get out of.  They can't imagine what "dirt poor" is to a guy like Elvis.  They haven't seen 7-year-old kids walking around Mexico alone selling gum at midnight.  I'm not saying what Elvis did was good or okay.  I'm saying he was itching for something better on every page of the book.  He was never comfortable with it.  And there was no transparency.  He did a good job of finding a way out for himself IMHO.

So I totally loved this book, no surprise there.  Exceptional writing once again.  I think the reviews that found the plot twists at the end shocking are kind of funny.  I saw pretty much all of that coming, except for Maite handling it as well as she did.  I'm a bit disappointed that we didn't get as much of the interaction between Maite and Elvis.  Because I think the two of them would really change each other for the better.

I'm reading a lot of non-fiction lately pertaining to personal projects.  But one thing I did want to share was about I Will Teach You To Be Rich.  I do think it's worth reading, especially if you chronically don't have enough money.  Unfortunately I can only give it * * *

I would like to give this book a higher rating. A pensioner with very low debt and a hobby that could become a passive income stream, I'm clearly not Sethi's target audience. But this book did contain the exact perspective and information that I needed.

What I got from this book was a few very key pieces of advice:


* How to shop for bank accounts and credit cards
* When, how, and why to use credit cards
* How to set up my banking system
* A strategy for how to pay off my debt


I was doing all of that wrong before. So this book was very useful for me. I immediately went through my bank statement and found several recurring charges that I was able to cut off.

I appreciate Sethi's approach of cutting out money that you waste on things you don't enjoy, like annual charges on credit cards when other cards won't charge you that. BOOM. That's $100 you can spend on something you enjoy that year. Do the work properly once, and then don't spend all your time chasing after money. Spend your time and money living your life. YES.

Because he also teaches you to parlay your winnings by also making sure you're maxing out your rewards from those same credit cards. So you spend less in the first place and get more back overall. And he encourages you to pamper yourself in the ways that are meaningful to you. On that point, he and I have a Vulcan mind meld that will never include Dave Ramsey.

Possibly the most valuable part of the book for me, aside from the instruction on how to choose a bank account/credit card, and the strategic use of credit cards, was the education on investments. Now I feel very confident about getting myself an IRA and a 401(k). I understand what I need to do, how and why to do it. All of that is beautifully demystified.

The reason I needed that information, and why I needed this book at all, is the same reason I need to drop one star on the review. Because I had trash parents who didn't teach me any of this. They were immature, financially irresponsible people who lived their entire lives without regard for my future. They truly DGAF about my outcome in a way that I'm sure Ramit Sethi can't imagine.

Sethi explains at the beginning of the book that all of this was drilled into his head by his parents from such a young age that he can't imagine seeing or doing things any other way. And unfortunately, he allows his disdain for his target audience to show through in some very petty ways. For example, if you don't eat every tiny scrap of meat off of a chicken wing, Ramit Sethi hates you. He not only hates you, he judges you for being poor because you don't want to eat gristle. And he's comfortable leaving that in the book.

Which brings me to the other star that I had to deduct, on a library book that I found so helpful in revamping my financial life. It's in desperate need of an editor.

Clearly Ramit Sethi doesn't need the money from this book. He's sharing what he knows out of his passion for the material. He may feel like he's doing us all a big favor, I don't know. I did appreciate reading the material, for what it's worth.

But it would have been 100% more valuable for me with an editor on board. I get that this book was written for millennials. There is a certain built-in audience mismatch. But some of it is pure laziness. The book often feels chaotic, repetitive, and disorganized.

Sethi will make a good point or explain something. Then there will be extended quotes from random people about whatever, going on and on. I had to skip past so much filler that it became very distracting.

That's the main reason I won't purchase a copy of this book, even used. I will get another copy from the library, and create my own personal workbook with it. You really only need to look at a few pages, go over a few core concepts. Beyond that, it will be easier to simply DIY a framework for making it your own. At least that was my case, because my situation is very different than what Sethi described. I both am and am not his target audience.

I am his target audience in that I needed the financial literacy that his parents gifted him, the silver spoon he was born with and I have to craft for myself while old and disabled. And I'm also not at all who he's talking to. I read this book with very low debt, a decent pension, and a plan in progress to significantly upgrade my income. Sethi never imagines such a person in this narrative.

For me as an author, I think it's weird to be openly disdainful of your audience, as Sethi is on several occasions, saying how much he hates people with poor money habits. It's also kind of trash to write a book about how rich you are and not hire an editor because you're so amazing you can just phone it in for the poors.

I continue to be jealous of Silvia Moreno-Garcia.  She's firmly a go-to author for me, because I love everything she writes  This short story is no exception.  I read it straight through.

The Lover is a Grimm's fairy tale-type short story, with a modern or updated feel.

What I appreciate most about Moreno-Garcia is that her stories are nuanced.   She's an excellent writer, and moves from one genre to another with accomplishment. The relationships between the characters have layers to them.  She doesn't dally with overdescribing people and things. But she gives you enough information about the themes and the things that matter.  Just ::mwah::

The Lovers is about a scapegoated girl, Judith, who lives with her widowed sister, Alice.  The family dynamic, where one sister is valued and given everything, and the other is treated like her servant, was very recognizable for me personally.

But that situation -- which would be more than enough to fill a short story on its own -- is only the backdrop for the core conflict, which is a love triangle in the form of Nathan, a handsome hunter who comes to their village one day and marries Alice.

I don't like to do spoiler-y book reviews.  So I will simply add that this is another slam dunk from a favorite author.  If you liked The Beautiful Ones you will surely like this one.  Suspenseful, well-written, interesting, and with a satisfying ending.

A Welcome Reunion is a short story that I was able to read for free as part of a subscription package that I get.  It's 81 pages, more of a novella maybe.  I'm not going to rate it with stars or put this rating on any of the public sites because I have mixed feelings about the content.

I would call this a psychological mystery/thriller.  It's about a family who adopted an abused child after the father, a doctor, took care of her when she was rescued.

It's sort of loosely based on the story of a Ukrainian girl who had a huge, public falling-out with her American adoptive parents.  There was a lot of contention about whether she was actually an adult with a medical condition that made her appear much younger.  Both sides claimed extreme abuse.

But in this story, the girl is extremely antisocial.  She leaves the home after some extremely violent episodes on both sides.  The adoptive child, Janie, has changed her name to Hope.  She's been released from a detention facility because she's turned 18.  She's written a book and is doing a publicity tour.

The story involves the former social worker and the adoptive parents acclimating to the fact that she's back in the world now, with a new name and a new narrative that the rest of the world is buying into, where the adoptive parents are the villains and she's a sympathetic victim.  Because both the parents and the social worker know the truth:  that Janie/Hope is  a vicious sociopath.

In the process of keeping tabs on Janie/Hope, there are some twists and turns.  I won't spoil the story in case you want to read it.  But in the end, this is a vigilante/revenge fantasy.

So here's why I can't really recommend this book.  Because on an emotional level, it makes you feel okay about just killing Janie/Hope.  She's such a bad person that she just has to be killed, and that's fine.  I'm not good with that message, sorry.  Can't recommend.

I realize that's maybe hypocritical of me.  Because I admit that if the roles had been reversed in my own home, if I had been the mother and Susan my daughter, I'd probably have had Joe Kalady killed by my father's relatives.  But maybe I'd just have called in the favors to ensure he'd never get out of prison.  Vito Marzullo could have arranged that.  But I still can't recommend this book's message at the end of the day.

While the writing was good, everything about the story was great except for this one thing, it will make me hesitate to read anything else by this author. 

I write true crime for survivors.  And I feel like it's important to walk a healthy line.

The Locked Door is another mystery/thriller that I very much enjoyed.  While it's not a perfect book, I appreciated the way it was crafted.

Certain things about the story itself remind me of A Tidy Ending by Joanna Cannon, which is one of my all-time favorites.  The Locked Door is no such masterpiece.  But it's a perfectly good example of what it's meant to be.  And for that, I quite like it.

It's the story of a woman, a surgeon, whose father was a serial killer called The Handyman because he'd cut his victims' hands off and keep them.

There is a lot of suspense in different ways, some of it red herrings.  There is a twist at the end that I didn't see coming.

McFadden is also a physician, so there is some medical verisimilitude that I appreciated. 

Mostly, though, I love Freida McFadden for simply staying in her lane as a writer, for doing what she's trying to do, and nothing else, right?  It's harder than it sounds until you've tried it. 

She didn't try to hammer you with all the scenic whatever of San Jose or Oregon.  She didn't go in depth on the medical aspect.  She simply wrote the book she was trying to write, told one story at a time, bang, zoom, just the facts, ma'am.  She gives you what you need to appreciate the story, no more, and no less.  Well played.

Contrast this with The Paris Apartment, by Lucy Foley.  I was so incredibly annoyed by that book I'll never read anything of hers again.  I read The Locked Door in two sittings.  It took me almost two weeks to read The Paris Apartment.

• I hated all of the phony, stuck-up characters in Paris Apartment.  None of them actually seemed like real people, except for the very two-dimensional ones like the snooty French lady with the little dog, who looks like all of those ladies in New York and Chicago, too.  Whereas all of the people in Locked Door seem realistic and almost all reasonably likeable.  I hated both the skeezer protag and her annoying Ken-doll brother in Paris Apartment.
  
  
• The red herrings in Locked Door are all on a main theme, and attributable to the psychological suspense.  In Paris Apartment, they're moronic, unrelated elements like the fact that there are protests/riots/raves going on, which is why people are dressed weirdly in the streets.  But she makes you figure that out.  There is no supernatural element to the story in PA, it's just a very old, large, European house with a bunch of alcoholic, secretive weirdos living in it.  Foley simply adds in all this other stuff for background ambience to make it all moody.  Blech.  Because  I also hated all of the characters, and then she got super preachy at the end in a way that made me want to throw my tablet at the wall.  Maybe if that had actually been a supernatural book with at least one likable person, but no.  Even the dog was a jerk.  It made me somehow not want to visit Paris.
  

But Freida McFadden hit the mark, at least for me, by writing a very effective, plain-and-simple mystery thriller with believable characters, a logical story, and a satisfying ending.  There wasn't much atmospheric description.  But the pace and flow were right on the money to keep me engaged throughout.  So she will be a go-to author for me when I'm in the market for this sort of book.

I really loved this book.  A true page turner, I read it all in one sitting.  

Lourey started it out with some information about real-life murders in the St. Cloud, Minnesota area from the 1970s  And the whole thing had such a ring of truth that although it's fiction, I felt like it crossed over into my genre, true crime for survivors.

Because within the story there's so much truth about the way things were for girls like me and my murdered friend high-school, Wendy Huggy.  Things were so different back then, I don't know if people who grew up in later decades can imagine.  CPS wasn't invented until 1974, for example.  But people really just left kids to their own devices back then, even young, preadolescents.  And we got preyed upon, and nobody cared.

There's so much synchronicity to my own life in this story, including one of the parents becoming a hoarder after their marriage is destroyed by an affair.  One of the children gets attacked by one of the parents as a result, too.  All of that is very complicated and was very real for me, too.

I also really loved this author's writing style.  She really has a way with words and can turn a phrase.  I found each of the characters very realistic and well-fleshed-out.  

The plot twists weren't all that twisty.  I was able to figure them out.  But that's okay; it means the foreshadowing was well-done.  The suspense was believable.  The whole book made sense in a good way.  It's a very tough book, especially if you lived through that era as I did.

I very much enjoyed the resolution for the mothers.  Not sure how realistic that is, but I would love it if that's the way things worked out.  And I'm afraid things really almost never go that way for the protagonist, either, that she takes that cold and clear a look at her father.  But it did my heart some good to have the book work out that way.

All together I really loved this book.  I found it very credible, speaking as someone who was from not-too-distant a time and place.  The writing was excellent.  Compelling story with as happy an ending as you can have under the circumstances.  And the resolution wasn't a cheap shot, either.  It made sense and held people accountable.