I received a free copy of this book in exchange for a fair review.
 
I would normally return a book rather than leave a one-star review.  Due to the important issues raised, and the fact that it falls directly into my personal wheelhouse, I feel that I must fill in some of the blanks that this author has left in the text.  I was trafficked by a babysitter in 1972.  My friend Wendy Huggy was kidnapped in 1982 at 16.  Her case is still open.  
 
Let me be clear:  I don’t want anyone falsely imprisoned for any reason.  I’m not a fan of the state as a bad actor or the prison-industrial complex.  I’m against the death penalty.
 
I believe book reviews exist to let readers know whether a book is for them.  And I aim to do that.  I kept asking myself, who is this book for? 
 
I believe this book is for (white) people (men) who enjoy true crime, and have never personally experienced either violent crime or the criminal “justice” system.  Unfortunately Professor Rickard left out some vitally important points.  I must rebut/fill in the gaps. 
 
TL/DR:  I write “true crime for survivors.”  My goal is overall harm reduction for all communities.  While Professor Rickard does address some of the racial injustice of wrongful convictions and police/prosecutorial misconduct against African-Americans in particular, even that issue is only partially addressed.  The way these mechanisms simultaneously abuse victims, and the true crime genre pits those two communities against each other as if justice were mutually exclusive, is not discussed anywhere.  The phrase “mass incarceration” doesn’t occur until the midpoint, and I thought it might not appear at all.  She does eventually discuss the prison-industrial complex.  I’m glad if the genre is humanizing defendants.  But there is zero/negative empathy for rape victims in this book.  It is absolutely not recommended for survivors of sexual assault.  Sexual violence is treated as an abstract concept herein.  The male gaze is never alluded to, much less the violent male gaze – the reason for this entire genre’s existence IMO.  Victims are dumped on and violence against women is discussed in callous – not necessarily clinical, but aloof – ways throughout.  This book argues that true crime is progressive despite the obvious ethical flaws in the form (the details of your rape/murder are public domain) because theoretically it's addressing the flawed system, albeit one case at a time, for-profit, and in an amateur way, with no thought to collateral damage, victim impact, or ancillary toxic narratives.  DIY infotainment has evolved to enlighten the bourgeoisie to the systemic injustices that sometimes affect one of their own, in a way that constantly retraumatizes survivors via trial by Reddit.  This book argues that it’s a good thing.  I don’t believe anyone has justice until everyone does.  I felt simultaneously invisible, exploited, and scapegoated while reading this. 
 
***
 
Professor Rickard notes in passing that the true crime genre – melodramatizing and semi-fictionalizing white sexual violence – was invented to distract from lynching (and she doesn’t mention it, but also the pogroms against Native America).  The truth was much more pernicious and divisive than simply that.  White rape was often the pretense for lynching.
 
African-America was truly terrorized with false narratives about white rape for many years.  These were frequently put forward by Confederate women who had not been raped themselves, like the first woman senator who called for 1,000 lynchings a week to prevent rape (of white women). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebecca_Latimer_Felton  In reality most sexual violence is committed within the same race. 
 
14-year-old Junius Stinney was like a human sacrifice to the state, being gruesomely executed for the murder of a white toddler that was almost certainly committed by an adult white man, at any rate not by him.
 
Over many years, a big media spectacle was made of punishing Black men for rape/murders that were either committed by white men (Junius Stinney) or didn’t happen at all (the pre-emptive lynchings of Rebecca Felton or the murder of Emmett Till).  This also allowed actual white rapists to go largely unexamined by the media/unpunished by the law, along with lynching, the Trail of Tears, and all of the other bad things they did. 
 
When Marjorie Taylor Greene (a Confederate, not a rape survivor) says that Fani Willis should focus on prosecuting “rapists” instead of Donald Trump, she’s dog-whistling “Black men” to her constituents.  And she underscores my point by referencing the p-grabber. 
 
Professor Rickard mentions, in passing, that because true crime focuses on crimes against (white) women, it gives the false impression that women are more often victims of violence than men. 
 
It also gives the false impression that white women are grossly overserved at the trough of justice here in the incarceration nation.  White rape victims become the locus of the public’s anger about the injustices toward African-America, because of the above-mentioned history, combined with the media’s obsessive focus on one or two cases to the exclusion of all others and our prison-industrial complex.  It’s infuriating for people to be ignored and targeted simultaneously.  Prison is the new slavery.
 
The professor doubles down on this pitting of white rape survivors against African-Americans throughout this book, as though justice is an either-or proposition for those communities.  That, for me, is the worst and most harmful lie of the genre.  I believe nobody has justice until everybody does.  White women don’t get help or justice either, as I will demonstrate below.  White men giveth and white men taketh away.  They own both the prison-industrial complex and the media.  https://www.forbes.com/sites/katevinton/2016/06/01/these-15-billionaires-own-americas-news-media-companies/?sh=24b37ea8660a  And they do most of the raping of white women.  Convenient.
 
In “true crime” the media created a simulacrum of a conversation about the sexual violence that was also going on in-house, in which none of the above could ever be properly addressed, for the benefit and amusement of the people perpetrating and unaffected by it all – the target audience of this book.  True crime is America’s psychosocial Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
 
All of that is described in this book as necessary for the storytelling, as if telling stories that dehumanizing way was necessary at all.  Why isn’t sexual violence reported like all other crime?  Why is it “true crime” and not “crime reporting”? 
 
Professor Rickard refers to “crime porn” on one occasion.  But to my eyes the whole genre is usually low-key rape and murder porn.  That’s very obvious to me.  This whole genre caters to the violent (white) male gaze and always has.  That concept is never remotely approached.  It’s about the male gaze.   The violent male gaze.  Mystery solved. 
 
I’d like to thank Kathryn Schulz for asking readers to consider “what it means when a private investigative project – bound by no rules of procedure, answerable to nothing but ratings, shaped only by the ethics and aptitude of its makers – comes to serve as our court of last resort.”
 
Professor Rickard mentioned 48 Hours as an exploitative show.  While it is – the whole genre is, including this book – one of the detectives working on Wendy’s kidnapping used that show to try (unsuccessfully) to move her case forward.  Wendy had so little social support that the only people they could find at the time were advocates of her abusive mother, who repeated her dishonest, self-exculpating narratives.  The Playboy bunny coworker they interviewed had never met Wendy.
 
So as I see it the door swings both ways.  As painful as that episode was for me, I appreciate that the detective took a shot on Wendy’s behalf.  The sad reality is that without any media attention we often get no help at all.  Wendy’s Scooby gang message board is pure agita for me.
 
So I understand the anger and frustration that people of color feel about this, how dreadful it is to never see their cases featured.  FYI the detectives don’t always answer my calls or emails.  There’s one cold-case detective working on every missing person in Pasco County since the beginning of time.  We need the media.  And they’re vampires. 
 
Not only did the media choose not to report on lynchings, decriminalize them by apathy, but they assisted in weaponizing sexual violence and demonizing African-Americans with their own cohort’s (WASP men) misconduct in many different ways that this book doesn’t allude to.  It was much more insidious and divisive than one would suspect from The New True. 
 
The Daniel Holtzclaw prosecution felt like, for me, an unimaginably great victory for my cohort. https://youtu.be/vF-AfFqrIcI  However the women from OKC Artists for Justice define it specifically as racial/police violence against Black people.  I’ve heard them (and others)  say explicitly that police rape can’t and doesn’t happen to white women. 
 
See the many Holtzclaws of Louisville and their white survivors.  One of them was on the Breonna Taylor raid.  None of them got punished anywhere near as harshly as Holtzclaw.  They all got wrist massages, and their survivors got treated like suspects.  Holtzclaw got 450 years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HERShPhJwPg&t=1702s 
 
The OKCAfJ ladies also said that if Holtzclaw’s victims were white the bond would’ve been much higher because of how much more society values white women.  They don’t cite a source for that.  Even a high-quality news outlet like Democracy Now! dabbles in those pervasive myths, which I will fact-check below.
 
Professor Rickard cites the state as a bad actor in 77% of wrongful convictions.  She explains how plea bargaining is often used to coerce people of few resources into going to prison for crimes they didn’t commit.  This is the most-obvious case against it especially with respect to African-America and the prison-industrial complex.  The professor explores that well in the book. 
 
However plea bargaining also lets people whom the state favors off the hook for rapes they absolutely did commit.  One obvious example of that would be Jeffrey Epstein’s extreme sweetheart deal with Alex Acosta.  But plea bargaining is also how an on-duty cop can repeatedly rape a white teenage fast-food employee, get probation-only, and it’s disappeared by the local media. 
 
The local media completely whitewashed Officer Timothy Barber’s sex crimes.  He plea bargained (pled down) and got probation-only for an ongoing coercive sexual relationship with a 16-year-old (almost certainly white) fast-food worker.  He was on camera CK’ing her at the drive-through in his patrol vehicle, hence the public nudity.  See how the media made her public property via plea bargaining – it’s “an inappropriate relationship”:
 
https://www.abc57.com/news/timothy-barber-enters-plea-agreement
 
“ST. JOSEPH COUNTY, Ind. – Timothy Barber, the South Bend Police officer accused of having an inappropriate relationship with a 16-year-old, has entered a plea agreement.
Barber pleaded guilty to child seduction and official misconduct.…
In October 2021, Barber was charged with two counts of child seduction, one count of public indecency, two counts of official misconduct, and one count of public nudity.”
versus what’s in the probable cause affidavit here:  https://www.wndu.com/2021/10/19/south-bend-police-officer-charged-after-being-accused-inappropriate-relationship-with-16-year-old/
 
“VICTIM 1 stated that she did not know what to do. VICTIM 1 disclosed that she felt like BARBER was obsessed with her by constantly coming into her workplace to see her while he was in full police uniform. VICTIM 1 disclosed that she felt like she had to have sexual intercourse with BARBER and felt intimidated by BARBER because he was a “cop.””
 
And see that he got probation-only here:  https://www.southbendtribune.com/story/news/2022/09/09/south-bend-cop-sentenced-to-probation-sex-crime-minor-plea-deal/65461702007/
 
This woman felt like she had no choice but accept her attacker’s sweet plea deal.  He was allowed to quit.  The headline is her settlement, which was her only recourse.  They talk a lot about the money.
https://www.wdrb.com/in-depth/city-of-louisville-pays-settlement-to-woman-groped-in-gas-station-by-on-duty-police/article_b8285c6a-6ccf-11ed-a2b9-bf3d98783a3b.html
 
Gas-station workers get rocked.
https://katv.com/news/local/victim-of-stalking-by-former-arkansas-state-police-trooper-tells-her-story
 
Check out serial rapist Officer Pablo Cano’s sweet plea bargain.  https://www.wkms.org/criminal-justice/2023-06-19/women-who-accused-former-louisville-police-officer-of-sexual-abuse-settle-lawsuit-for-275k  Note that post-conviction the women are still described as “accusers.”  Cano joked about being a sex offender in staff meetings.  After pleading down he didn’t have to serve the full sentence.
 
This affluenza bro raped four different white teenagers on four separate occasions and got probation only.  https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/18/nyregion/christopher-belter-rape-sentence.html 
 
Maybe judges should earn less, so that we could appoint more of them to the bench and try more cases.  Because if they’re so clogged and overburdened that they must rely on plea bargaining to everyone’s detriment but the elites, then we apparently need more judges. 
 
The media and plea bargaining work together to whitewash rape in much the same way they did lynching and the pogroms against Native America, simultaneously.  America has always had rape culture and nothing in this book challenges it.
 
Domestic violence is also much higher than average in police households. https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/09/police-officers-who-hit-their-wives-or-girlfriends/380329/ 
 
Despite how it sounds on your favorite podcast, the criminal “justice” system ignores us even in cases of serial attackers.  America has for decades had a “rape kit backlog” of hundreds of thousands of rapes that were reported and not investigated.  The #1 reason for the backlog is victim-blaming by the police – the magic eraser of police work.  It’s estimated that up to 63% of sexual assaults aren’t reported for this reason. 
 
https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/untested-evidence-sexual-assault-cases
 
The press is still complicit and a constant bad actor against rape survivors.  A great example of that, and demonstration of white America's deep rape culture and constant readiness to blame victims, was the Steubenville High School case.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steubenville_High_School_rape_case  After the white CNN anchors lamented two of the boys being punished, the town was angry at the teenage survivor – who never had any intention of prosecuting – for ruining their football team.
 
So despite how it certainly does appear on Dr. Phil, America does not have our backs.  The police DGAF when women get raped, even if they’re white.  Unless there’s somebody they want to railroad, they often don’t even have a protocol for following up on it.  Your rape kit goes in the circular file.
 
Professor Rickard states in passing that men experience more violence than women.  That is true in most, not all, years.
 
https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/criminal-victimization-2020-supplemental-statistical-tables
 
Statistically men also commit about 80 percent of reported violence.  Much of the violence men experience is attributable to opt-in lifestyles like gang membership.  She left that statistic about “men experiencing more violence than women” without any further qualification or discussion. 
 
https://globalnews.ca/news/6536184/gender-based-violence-men-women/
 
That portion of the book where she goes on and on about how unfair trials are in terms of demonizing and marginalizing defendants leaves me cold as a survivor.  I’ve spent my whole life having to hide, and being punished for, the crimes committed against me. 
 
And welcome to America.  Trials have always been a big wanky melodrama in service of a punishment fetish.  Remember Salem? Anglo-Saxon Protestants love to “hang ‘em high.” 
 
Going to trial is a dehumanizing and traumatic morality play, where BOTH SIDES are subjected to a blitz of ad hominem attacks and the petty personal biases of twelve random Americans.  Ask yourself whether Officer Andrew Mitchell was twice acquitted of killing Donna Castleberry because America loves lethal force, rape culture, or both.  https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/courts/2023/04/18/former-columbus-police-officer-found-not-guilty-of-murder/70126251007/
 
The victim gets demonized in court, too, after being assaulted.  Don’t get me started.  Then you or your family may have to live through trial by Reddit forever, if some podcaster with no qualifications whatsoever decides to monetize the violence against you.  Because end-stage capitalism eats that mess up, as the professor finally acknowledges 85% into the book. 
 
Then this professor will have the audacity to judge your grief process, expecting everyone to have the zero boundaries of Katie Kitchens or be tsk-tsked as a racist goon.  That was truly the most-offensive part of this book, where the Scooby gang gets to sit munching popcorn, armchair-quarterbacking those of us who have been rendered public property on how we’re handling being trampled.
 
False reporters are rare, and not all of those even get prosecuted.  As Professor Rickard notes, a whopping 77% of the time the state is a villain.  The rest of that can be attributed to the fact that it’s all a big goofy battle of the experts where they’re emotionally yanking people around as well-described in the book, and the truth is in the eye of the beholder – which isn’t fair to anyone.  But the public largely blames false (all) reporters for wrongful convictions.
 
“Research shows that rates of false reporting are frequently inflated, in part because of inconsistent definitions and protocols, or a weak understanding of sexual assault. Misconceptions about false reporting rates have direct, negative consequences and can contribute to why many victims don’t report sexual assaults (Lisak et al., 2010).”  https://www.nsvrc.org/sites/default/files/Publications_NSVRC_Overview_False-Reporting.pdf
 
As Professor Rickard notes, there is now a strong connotation between advocating for especially white rape survivors, and conservative, racist policies in America.  Unfortunately she also participated in demonizing us as right-wing thugs in large ways and small throughout this book.
 
So that was one of the best moves white guys ever did for themselves, scapegoating Black men for their own sex crimes, pitting their two favorite scapegoats against each other for fun and profit. 
 
The Central Park Five and West Memphis 3 are the most-compelling arguments in this book, at least for me, because I remember those personally.  I remember how horribly dishonest and shameful all of that was.  Old-school NYPD had stop-and-frisk and Amadou Diallo.  They were vile.  The media and police were partners in crime.  As an Italian-American I guffaw at Rudy Giuliani currently facing RICO charges. 
 
While they’re throwing five teenagers in prison who had nothing to do with anything, meanwhile some maniac is running around doing who knows what.  The survivor also got shafted, not only the boys, because they made no attempt to solve her case.  Rape culture and the prison-industrial complex (both owned by the same guy) win every time.  https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/fci-dublin-womens-prison-sexual-abuse-class-action-lawsuit-filed-bureau-of-prisons/
 
The woman who was attacked in Central Park was still in a coma for years after the boys were in prison.  She had nothing to do with victimizing them.  It was strictly the NYPD and prosecutors who lied on them and used the magic eraser of police work.  The media was a co-conspirator in framing them. 
 
That particular truth, where white men giveth and white men taketh away, is not addressed in this book.  In The New True it seems like white women have justice parity, even when it’s clear throughout that we’re rendered “public property.” 
 
Then a murdered child gets blamed for this abusive system by the mayor of Atlanta, and the author leaves the comment without analysis or further comment, doubling down on that victim-blaming. 
 
Once men have robbed you of your agency with rape and/or murder, then everyone gets to use you in their agendas and project their schemata upon you however they want.  That’s capitalism.  Someone must be exploited for the benefit of someone else.
 
“We love her.  We love her enough to kill her over and over and over again.”  I’d rather have butthole cancer than true crime/white America’s “love.”
 
When Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms of Atlanta asks us to compare the murdered Atlanta children to JonBenet Ramsey, demanding to know why they didn’t get the same attention from the FBI as the Lindbergh baby, Professor Rickard doesn’t answer those questions. 
 
What I imagine the mayor wants for those Atlanta victims is something I would also like for them.  But it’s something JonBenet didn’t get, either. 
 
The police completely bungled and phoned-in JonBenet’s investigation.  They let the press run all over the place and trample evidence.  Multiple pedophiles have falsely confessed to killing her for the attention.  Everyone and their brother continues to make money on JonBenet.  Her family has had to sue people for defamation.  And people focus their hatred on her because of the attention she got for being raped and tortured to death on Christmas.  And her case is still not solved.  That’s what she wants for the Atlanta victims?  Why?  (I learned the word “cathexis” from this book, thanks.)
 
Meanwhile, every time they put up a memorial for Emmett Till, somebody blasts it full of bullets.  Why can’t America really just quit with all of the above?  Find some other way to express its feelings, and people manage their agendas, other than projecting them onto children who have already been murdered?  Nothing in The New True even hints at wanting that kind of harm reduction.  I wish people could cut back on the violence and exploitation altogether.  I wish we weren’t green screens, public property because we got violated.  I wish we were all full-time, permanent human beings.
 
Also, may I suggest that if Mayor Lance Bottoms wanted to restart the investigation, maybe she should’ve found out who’s in charge of the Atlanta Police Department and put some pressure on that person?   Should JonBenet Ramsey have climbed out of her grave and made a task force with the FBI?
 
Flying ace Charles Lindbergh was the Anglo-Saxon Protestant son of a congressman.  He also invented some cardiac device.  He was wealthy and famous, which is why his son was kidnapped in the first place.  He had a high degree of personal accomplishment and military connections from his work as a military pilot on top of the extreme privilege he was born with.  That’s why the FBI jumped through hoops for him. 
 
Very few Americans would get the kind of help Lindbergh got – including JonBenet Ramsey.  She, despite also being a rich, beautiful, silver spoon WASP, got blown off by the police, exploited by the media, and treated like a clown by the public.  The police focused on her family and ignored other evidence, as described over and over in The New True. 
 
And Lindbergh didn’t get his son back alive.  So I’m not sure why the mayor felt the need to punch down at that poor baby, either.  If, God forbid, someone would attempt to kidnap a child from her home, I believe the FBI would put in the same resources as they did to successfully protect Governor Gretchen Whitmer.  But they don’t do that for every white child, either.  They didn’t for JonBenet.  The mayor must watch too much Dr. Phil.
 
I’m also disappointed that more resources weren’t put into investigating the Atlanta murders, because clearly there were multiple people doing those crimes.  I agree about the Saunders brothers as likely suspects with the fire/police/sanitation uniforms.  My goal is harm reduction.  I don’t like any scenario where the state uses a magic eraser of police work allowing violent perpetrators to go unchecked. 
 
To leave this review on a happier note, this book does some things well.  She does a good job explaining about the prison-industrial complex, but I truly thought she’d never get there and was getting annoyed thinking she wouldn’t.  The phrase “mass incarceration” doesn’t appear until the halfway point, and “prison-industrial complex” not until 80%. I thought she’d never say “end-stage capitalism.”  
 
I agree with the professor that coercive confessions are a real problem and she did a good job of showing that.  The chapter where she goes over Brendan Dassey’s confession is the probably most-valuable aspect of the book, along with the explanation of what’s wrong with the Alford plea. 
 
I’m glad that everything is videotaped now.  If there’s a gap in your interrogation tape, your lawyer should be able to drive a truck through it.  I can only imagine how bad it was back in the day.  https://www.themarshallproject.org/records/551-jon-burge
 
For a refreshing counterpoint, I would recommend watching Alek Minassian’s interrogation, which happened in Canada.  There’s a 180-degree difference in the approach.  In Canada your rights are, “Everything you say will be reviewed by a judge,” rather than, “can be used against you in a court of law.”  And we have six times the incarceration rate of Canada, go figure.
 
Side note: Daniel Holtzclaw’s interrogation by Detective Kim Davis was also brilliant.  I was convinced of his guilt from the interrogation alone.  I sometimes rewatch it when I feel blue. Check it out, good times.
 
I’m sorry I can’t rate this book higher, because she did a good job explaining how awful the state can be as a bad actor, and how pervasive and destructive that is for African-Americans.  I’m not sure the target audience of this book is aware of that.

I would actually give this book 3.5 stars, very much like Before the Coffee Gets Cold. The two are very comparable books. Both books are contemporary and cozy feeling fantasies with a bit of magical realism. They both challenge the reader to think about life and relationships in a bigger way. Both books follow multiple storylines that all come together. And both would make better movies than books, I think.

On Earth As It Is On Television is a charming book, lighthearted in tone. It's very often funny, especially if you live in modern America. The author takes a swipe at many of our modern archetypes, like the militia coworker of one of our protagonists, Blaine.

Blaine is one of the people whose lives are greatly impacted when aliens unmistakably come to Earth one day, causing extreme, global panic. But then they disappear as suddenly and mysteriously as they came. What was that all about? That's really the best thing about this book, that particular premise. And I don't think the author did as much with that as she could have.

After the aliens left, people went back to their (almost) normal routines. But would the aliens come back? What had happened? And why?

The characters in this book are almost all likeable -- a huge plus for me. Strangely, although I love children in real life, the two characters I couldn't stomach at all were Blaine's children.

They were a big part of the lower rating for me: everything about the children's interaction was so annoyingly twee. And there was far too much of it. There was so much written description of all the little baby talk they do around the cat. I just found them incredibly tedious all the way around.

The other problem, the much bigger problem, was the pacing. I felt like the book was repetitive and dragged in many spots. I kept putting it down and having to force myself to pick it back up. I found myself grinding my teeth while skimming over everything about Blaine's family.

Another real problem with the pacing, aside from it feeling like it took too long for the plot points to move forward, was that the same character development points seemed to be made over and over. The author has a good way with words. She has some charming turns of phrase. But it felt like she left in some pet sentences because they were nicely written, and it made the book too cumbersome overall.

It's a nice book for dallying in the valley, if you're not so plot-driven and are just there to enjoy some interesting turns of phrase and observations about American pop culture.

This book is a definitive resource for me as a survivor of a borderline mother. And I know it is for many others as well. I knew the basic material within the book even before reading it, because I had followed and participated in so much discussion about it in online support groups.

The four categories of borderline mother in this book are clearly defined and easy to understand. All of this, as I have said, is thoroughly discussed not only in the many existing reviews, but in many survivor communities. This book has taken on a life of its own among those of us who truly need this information. I'm giving it five stars because it's a go-to resource, a life saver.

What I wanted to add with this review, is that I found reading this book a little frustrating at times. Christine Ann Lawson is a clinician. So she gives some medical explanations, which generalize and create what feel like loopholes, excuses, or potential rationalizations, maybe.

For example she explains medically why borderlines have a poor memory, and thus you can't get a straight story from them. But in my experience, my mother often simply lies for the many reasons also explained in the book. She may very well know the truth and simply choose not to tell it because it's unflattering to herself. The forgetsies are super convenient for her.

One of the big discussions within the narcissism/borderline personality disorder community is whether such people are capable of doing any better or not, whether they can help their bad behavior.

In my observation this condition, like narcissism, is a choice, a series of choices that people make constantly. It becomes a clinical diagnosis when they're socially supported in constantly making these toxic choices, are not forced to work with the rest of us here on Earth 1. Low integrity doesn't happen all at once, it's a chronic degradation.

Unfortunately both of those conditions involve deception, manipulation, low empathy, willingness to exploit others, and you can see how it's not healthy for me, as a survivor, to give them the benefit of the doubt.

I've seen that my mother actually does know she's been lying her face off the whole time. She does it as long as she believes she'll get away with it, and doesn't stop a moment sooner. Once you take away all of her choices, she magically owns up to her crap. But only as much as she's forced to admit. She clings to her fantasy version of reality for dear life, and tries to drag everyone else in with her. In my personal, non-clinical opinion, tough love is the best/only thing you can do for these people. Make them cash the reality checks early and often.

So even though the clinicians who don't live with these people every day give them more benefit of the doubt than I'm willing to, this book was absolutely indispensable for me. Because it helped me really understand that my mother isn't evil. She's pitiful. She's really mentally ill, completely wrecked in the head. She was able to fool a lot of people for a long time. But this wonderful book really helped me understand the disgusting choices she made every day for decades, why she made them. I can't relate to the emptiness inside of her, or truly understand it. But it's at least described in this book. It makes my mother make sense.

If nothing else, simply being able to open up a book and see the unhappy patterns of your family laid out plain should make people feel a lot better. Your borderline mother tells you you're crazy, that you feel bad because you're interpreting everything wrong. Every paragraph of this book recalibrates you from the inside, which is truly golden, priceless.

We all know a Linda, even if we don't notice her. But the world is full of people like the protagonist of A Tidy Ending, Linda Hammett.

Linda is a middle-aged, unhappily married woman suffering from various mental-health issues. She works at a thrift shop. Her husband is a slob, and she's a bit of a neat freak. But there's so much more to it than that.

I immediately loved this book and am giving it five stars. For one thing, it's hilariously, laugh-out-loud funny. And I say that as someone who is permanently disabled by my own mental-health issues. Linda is in much bigger trouble than I, and for whatever reason I did enjoy being able to relate to her even while realizing she was off the deep end.

And Linda truly is off her rocker. She has such an incredibly negative self-image, is so manipulative and bizarre in the way she approaches her life and other people, that it's really a tragic story in many ways. But it's also thoroughly enjoyable to read, because of the excellent writing of Joanna Cannon and the humor throughout.

In the course of the book we learn a lot about Linda's childhood in Wales, why she is so down on herself and envious of others. Linda very much wishes she were someone else. I won't put any spoilers into the review, but I found the way she resolves that situation was both satisfying and hilarious.

Joanna Cannon is a mental-health professional, and it really shows throughout the book. There is so much insight into the strange things that people think and do. Again, it was really a bit disconcerting to be fully aware of how insane Linda is, while also noting that she had some pithy observations that I quite agreed with.

I'm still thinking about this book a week after having read it, and will surely read it again. Having read it left me more mindful of, for example, the man who shouts, "HI LADY!" every time I walk through the lobby of my apartment. He's another Linda, isn't he? Would it kill me to befriend him?

I read this quite a while ago and am sorry I didn't review it sooner.

But I find myself thinking about it still.  The characters were very real.  Silvia Moreno Garcia became a favorite author right away, within the first few paragraphs of this wonderful novel of manners.

It's described on Goodreads as "a sweeping romance with a dash of magic."

I don't generally read romance.  But I wanted to relax for a change, lighten up, see what the rest of the world is on to.  And I'm so glad I did. 

The heroine, Nina, was entirely relatable.  As was the hero, Hector.  I loved them both.  Even the villain, Valerie -- as easy as it was to hate her -- was relatable.  I could really appreciate her point of view all the way through right up until the end.  Which, for me, is absolutely what I want in this sort of a book, where the main conflict is a love triangle.

The prose was just ::chef's kiss::

I was immediately drawn in. The very casual magical realism, where both Nina and Hector are telekinetic for unknown reasons, flowed naturally along in the vein of Gabriel Garcia Marquez at his finest.

The conclusion was very, very satisfying, especially in the person of Nina's wealthy cousin Gaetan, who, up until the end, was only a cameo.

I truly loved this book and wished I could immediately read it again.  Moreno Garcia became a new favorite author, and I don't even read romance.

My only complaint is that I didn't write it. 

My Goodreads review

We all know a Linda, even if we don't notice her.  But the world is full of people like the protagonist of A Tidy Ending, Linda Hammett.  

Linda is a middle-aged, unhappily married woman suffering from various mental-health issues.  She works at a thrift shop.  Her husband is a slob, and she's a bit of a neat freak.  But there's so much more to it than that.

I immediately loved this book and am giving it five stars.  For one thing, it's hilariously, laugh-out-loud funny.  And I say that as someone who is permanently disabled by my own mental-health issues.  Linda is in much bigger trouble than I, and for whatever reason I did enjoy being able to relate to her even while realizing she was off the deep end.

And Linda truly is off her rocker.  She has such an incredibly negative self-image, is so manipulative and bizarre in the way she approaches her life and other people, that it's really a tragic story in many ways.  But it's also thoroughly enjoyable to read, because of the excellent writing of Joanna Cannon and the humor throughout.

In the course of the book we learn a lot about Linda's childhood in Wales, why she is so down on herself and envious of others.  Linda very much wishes she were someone else.  I won't put any spoilers into the review, but I found the way she resolves that situation both satisfying and hilarious.

Joanna Cannon is a mental-health professional, and it really shows throughout the book.  There is so much insight into the strange things that people think and do.  Again, it was really a bit disconcerting to be fully aware of how insane Linda is, while also noting that she had some pithy observations that I quite agreed with.

I'm still thinking about this book a week after having read it, and will surely read it again.  Having read it left me more mindful of, for example, the man who shouts, "HI LADY!" every time I walk through the lobby of my apartment.  He's another Linda, isn't he?  Would it kill me to befriend him?

My review on Goodreads

I wanted to give this book a higher rating, because the idea at the core was so compelling.

The central concept -- that you can't dwell too long in the past without losing your ability to take action in the present -- is strong. And it's well-examined here by way of various relationships that take place partly in a coffeeshop with one magical seat. Anyone can sit there, when it's temporarily vacated by the ghost who occupies it, and go back in time for a short while. But if they linger too long, they'll become the resident ghost.

The book then follows a variety of people who wait for their opportunities to time-travel, even though one of the rules is that you can't change the present by going back in time. It's a lovely book in terms of food for thought.

It's clear the that author is a playwright. For one thing, the structure of the stories themselves make that obvious. The various couples whose relationships are explored enter and exit the cafe much as actors would on a stage. Each is given a distinct section of the book, feeling very much like a play where the lights would go down and back up.

Characterization is primarily done by describing what clothing each individual is wearing, again giving the impression of a play, in which much of the fleshing out of the character would be done by an actor. This detracted somewhat from the overall reading experience for me. But I do think it would make a phenomenal play or movie, because again I think the author's ideas were excellent.

The other thing that sort of ruined this book for me as a reader was that I think it needed re-editing after translation. There's a very serious "tell, not show" problem in the writing, where information is unceremoniously barfed onto the page in a very disappointing way for me as a reader.

I'm not going to put spoilers into this review. But for me, the couple dealing with Alzheimer's was the most poignant. Unfortunately, one of the most meaningful moments in the book was just plopped onto the page, the emotional reveal dumped out, all magic explained matter-of-factly, and then reiterated in case it wasn't spoiled enough the first time :( The disappointment was doubled down, gah.

I suspect this is an issue of a translator being hired to translate a fully-edited book, and not doing the work of an editor who crafts novels into sharp prose. It was probably well-edited in Japanese and then translated. But it hurt me as a writer and reader, to have such a nice book de-crafted in this way.

If this work is ever treated with a movie adaptation I will definitely check it out.