Book Reviews and Recommendations From November

This past November was a wild time to be alive–between the election and college applications I’m sure we all needed something positive, and our list of recommended books are a fitting mix of thought-provoking and bizarre. Each touches on important issues of our time in its own way, but one thing they all have in common is how they take the tension to the extreme. They are fascinating in that the extreme no longer feels inconceivable. 

1. Harmony by Carolyn Parkhurst

Harmony is a fictional story about the Hammonds, a family of four from Washington DC, including an autistic daughter named Tilly. The book switches between the perspectives of Mom Alexandra, her 11-year-old daughter Iris, and 13-year-old Tilly. Alexandra reaches out for help raising her daughters and they end up joining a group of families starting a family camp in New Hampshire for families with autistic, led by the charismatic child development expert Scott Bean. They leave everything behind to live at Camp Harmony. That’s when things start going bad, and then worse. I won’t tell you the end, but I will offer my first disclaimer: the ending can only be described as horrifying. It says a lot about what people will do for a sense of community. 

Parkhurst did a good job creating distinct voices for each of the three point-of-view characters, and she adjusted her style for the age differences between the mother and daughters. Harmony will keep you engaged, but I have to question the way it deals with autism. I’m not an expert, so I can’t say if her portrayal is accurate or not, but I really felt like something about it was lacking in attention. When I wasn’t reading the book, I spent a lot of time thinking about what could have been changed to improve it, so if you believe that a book that leaves you thinking is a good one, you’ll like Harmony. I’ve come to the conclusion that Parkhurst is a good writer, but not someone who should be writing about autism, or at least should do deeper research into the disability community. It doesn’t teach you anything new about it, or even anything commonly known. It’s not particularly useful representation in any way because while she manages to stay away from the narrative of disabled people as perfect angels and the most obvious autism tropes it also doesn’t strike me as anything that would make an autistic person feel seen in their struggles. So little of the book is from Tilly’s perspective, and her most redeeming quality is the fact that she’s the daughter or sister of the two other narrators who love her for that sake. Of course I’m not an expert on this, so I encourage you to go do some research into disability representation and activism yourself. From my own experience reading the book, you won’t really learn anything from the book itself, but you might learn from your own thoughts about it and the questions you will want answered. In fairness it was a gripping story and this was actually my second time reading it, so I’ll give the book a 3.5/5, and if you do decide to read it then go in prepared for a violent ending.

2. The History of Bees by Maja Lunde

This is a story about the way humanity depends on bees, told through the perspectives of three parents, whose lives and families’ lives depend on them. A mother in the near future who pollinates flowers for a meager living after bees have gone extinct, a father and bee farmer in modern times who is watching colony collapse disorder ravage his community, and a scientist in the Victorian era trying to develop a better version of the beehive with his daughter. The novel does a beautiful job linking the stories of the three characters and raising questions about the ethics of taming wild animals. Lunde is definitely an author I will be revisiting, though it occasionally felt like she had a clear idea for parts of the book, but needed to fill space here and there with some unnecessary additions to make it a full novel. I’ll give it a 4.5/5 and it’s definitely something to check out if you want to read about human impact on the environment, but you don’t love nonfiction or you feel overwhelmed by the vastness of the problems we face.

3. Educated by Tara Westover

Tara Westover never went to school. Educated is her true story of growing up in rural Idaho as the child of Mormon survivalists, with six siblings. Her father told the children that they would be the victims of an FBI siege like Ruby Ridge, and be killed for not enrolling in public school or having birth certificates. Hers was a family with a deep distrust in the government and all government systems and the children were brought up to believe that someday the world would end and they would be the only ones prepared. Westover wanted to go to college, to escape the worst parts of the isolated life they lived. She bought textbooks and secretly educated herself. When she eventually went to college her world opened up, which meant she had to consider where her family belonged in her new life. Educated is a memoir of Westover’s life in Idaho and how her relationships with her siblings and parents developed as she distanced herself from them. It’s an exploration of the effects an education can have, whether it’s absent, lacking in some aspect, or biased. Westover’s story is incredibly painful but also carries a lot of hope and never shies away from a difficult message. Her voice feels incredibly familiar, and I hope to see more from Westover in the future.If this is her only book then you’ll certainly find me reading it again. Her parents have disputed some of the book’s claims about mental illness and abuse in the family, but the book was thoroughly fact-checked (Alexander). Educated was a #1 New York Times Bestseller, and if you read it you’ll see why it deserves that spot. I highly recommend it, and I give it a 5/5

4. So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson

So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed is a nonfiction book about public humiliation and the way it has evolved through social media, especially Twitter. It was written in 2015, when “cancel culture” wasn’t a common term, but that would be a simpler way of putting it. Ronson, a journalist for The Guardian and the BBC, traveled around the world interviewing those who have been effectively “canceled” about the circumstances and the effects. He visited a group of people who paid to join a sort of therapy group in which they told their darkest secrets to each other aloud so that they could learn to therapeutically combat shame. He discusses the history of shame as a means of punishing criminals and the psychological concepts which allow for the practice to become vicious. He also touches on the difference between the experiences of white men on the internet and those of women and people of color. Ronson’s central idea here is that ruining someone’s life via Twitter might sound like fun, but we can’t mistake it for effecting real change in the world, and often the punishment is highly disproportionate to the crime. Somehow, this book about how shame and the internet rule our lives manages to be funny, and you might enjoy the absurd stories as much as the greater discussion that it sparks. There are many parts where I laughed out loud. This was the first Jon Ronson book I had read, but since then, he has become one of my favorite authors, and I cannot recommend any of his work highly enough. The Psychopath Test is another great one. If you are interested in hearing him before reading, then check out the TED talk he gave in 2015, which is a condensed version of some of the ideas he elaborates on in the book. I give this one a 5/5, though as I said, he’s one of my favorite authors, so I might be biased.