Shit I Do in My Spare Time

He’s been scent-marking the baby instead of biting her out of jealousy, so progress!

I really wanted to like THE TROUBLE WITH WHITE WOMEN by Kyla Schuller, and it has several points in its favor: It’s short, it’s very readable, and it introduced me to or deepened my knowledge of several badass feminist women of color. However, I didn’t love it, and the ending actively pissed me off. Schuller actually used the effort to have the judge in the Brock Turner case recalled as an example of “white feminism.” Her point was that white feminism has focused its anti-sex crime efforts on longer sentences for offenders—sentences that disproportionately affect people of color. All that is true, but the rage over the Brock Turner case was largely about him being a rich white kid who skated on a sexual assault charge. It was a weird example to pick, since the entire point was that this judge let a white kid off for something a brown kid would have been buried for. Arguing that that would rebound on people of color isn’t insane, but it needs to be justified, and she spent like two pages on it and barely fleshed out her thinking. It’s also a little heartless to spend so little time on a horrific sex crime, and it left me with a bad taste in my mouth right at the very end of the book. So a 3/5.

My little baby is going to get the jab and I am SO STOKED.

Oh, and I know this is petty, but I hate when publishers do this: The subtitle is badly misleading. The family believes the Muse brothers were kidnapped, because that’s what the brothers always believed, but the documentary evidence points to something else having happened.

Help, I turned in two books and checked out another five. 🤣🤦‍♀️😭

Does anyone else use their local library as kind of their methadone when it comes to buying more books? The only problem is that I’ve gone twice in two weeks and now have two stacks this size. I’m a fast reader, but not this fast.  still, at least I didn’t pay for all of them!

My one complaint about this book is that the prose is beyond purple. It’s incredibly readable—I have an eleven-month-old and I still managed to knock this out in like three days—but the writing is so florid that it about matches Mrs Packard’s Victorian-era prose. I found it bearable because the story structure was good and the case itself was fascinating, but your mileage may vary.

Yasmin Benoit

Finished this book last night. It’s about an Argentine boarding school in the 1970s, but there’s a huge twist (which they advertise right in the back copy). It was pretty good, but the ending is deeply messed up and I think we’re supposed to find it happy? Idk, it gave me chills in a way I’m not sure was intentional. Still, a solid 7/10.

I finished this book a few days ago and it was really good: Extremely readable without shortchanging the topic. It’s about the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, and while it mostly centers on the most notorious example—the McMartin Preschool in California—it touches on a lot of other cases from around the country. It helps explain how and why parents and professionals came to believe incredibly outlandish accusations that were proven false in almost every instance. Spoiler: The answer is misogyny. Definitely a must-read for everyone interested in this topic.