Month: March 2019

Rock Needs River

~ rachelbenzine ~ 1 Comment

Review:

Vanessa McGrady was pretty sure she wanted to be a mom… eventually. Before she knew it, she was in her forties and realized that she was ready to have a baby. After miscarriages and infertility struggles, she decided she would be open to adoption. It took a two-year journey, but she describes the adoption of her daughter, Grace, as a miracle. And when Grace’s biological parents experienced homelessness, Vanessa invited them to stay with her. Rock Needs River is McGrady’s memoir about family, in biological and adoptive and non-traditional forms.

My husband and I are planning to adopt children one day, so I have been devouring all the books I can find for the last couple years about adoption. The concept of Rock Needs River caught my attention right away, and I couldn’t wait to read it. It was a very quick read – I read it on a flight from Minneapolis to Orlando. Although it focused more on McGrady’s life than I had originally thought from reading the description (with almost half describing Vanessa’s pre-adoption life, and the rest discussing her adoption journey and post-adoption life), I still enjoyed this book.

Favorite Passage:

I knew from all my adoption training and subsequent learning that the original separation wound is something that heals to various degrees in different people, but it is always there – I could never truly, entirely remove the scar Grace carries from growing inside one mother and being handed to another. But I spend every moment of every day wanting to be the biggest star in her life. The one who loves her the most. The one she loves the most. It is torture for me to imagine my life without her, or hers without me.
— Chapter Thirteen

What I Loved Most:

McGrady says that this book is a love letter to her daughter, chronicling the journey of Grace becoming part of her family. She shares the good parts of her and Grace’s relationships with Grace’s biological parents, as well as the tough parts of having an open adoption. At the conclusion of the book, McGrady is no longer in contact with Grace’s biological parents, but she says that she is open to reconnecting with them in the future. The relationship between adoptive parents and biological parents in an open adoption can be messy and hard and beautiful, and I appreciate McGrady not shying away from describing the tough moments as well as the great moments.

Read this book if you like:

Stories about non-traditional families, memoirs, learning about parenthood, understanding why people make the decisions they do

Book Details:

The Revenge of Magic

~ rachelbenzine ~ Leave a comment

Review:

Fort Fitzgerald just lost his dad to an attack by a mysterious, giant monster in Washington, DC. He’s overwhelmed with grief, and doesn’t know how he’s going to go on. But after a surprise visit from a mysterious school headmaster, he is invited to a new kind of boarding school run by the government… and there, he’ll learn a new set of skills that will help him protect the world from future attacks.

Thirteen years ago, a set of books were discovered that reintroduced magic into the world. Only children born after the Discovery Day are able to read the books and learn how to use the spells contained within. However, Fort soon realizes things aren’t all as they seem at his new school. Everyone seems to be hiding secrets, and Fort is determined to figure out if they know more about the attack that killed his dad than they are letting on.

This was a fun, quick read. James Riley has taken a departure from his traditional writing style (such as in his Story Thieves series), and I enjoyed this story even more than his past works. The Revenge of Magic is a solid middle-grade work that is sure to captivate readers. I’m looking forward to reading about the future escapades of Fort and his friends.

Favorite Passage:

“Have you ever looked at the spell words?” Fort asked, turning to look at Rachel, who was staring at the ceiling.
“Maybe I could make like a shield of fire,” she said, ignoring him. “That might stop a fireball. Or would it? Maybe the ball would just plow right through.”
Fort picked up the Healing book, then dropped it, letting it hit the pedestal with a bang. Rachel immediately looked at him upside down. “What did I say about hurting the books?” 
“Have you ever thought about what the spell words mean?” Fort said again. “I’m seeing the same word pop up in the first two spells. That has to mean something.”
– Chapter Twenty-Seven

What I Loved Most:

There are several different kinds of magic discussed in The Revenge of Magic, and I thought it was fun to learn about how each kind worked. Fort goes into the school hoping to specialize in Destructive magic, which he believes will be most useful in fighting the monsters that killed his dad. However, he’s put on the Healing magic track instead. There are also characters who use Clairvoyance magic and Telepathic magic. Whenever I read a book where characters are sorted into different houses/abilities/propensities/etc., I love imagining where I would excel, as well as where my close friends would be. I feel like I’d be great at Telepathic magic… but that might also just be wishful thinking.

Bonus thing that I loved: The protagonist (Fort) is a boy, but the three strongest students in the school (Jia, Rachel, and Sierra) are girls. I feel like most books tend to either feature strong boy characters or strong girl characters, and Riley has done a great job of creating strong characters of both genders.

Read this book if you like:

The early Harry Potter books, training periods (my favorite), adventure, and obviously… magic.

Book Details:

Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive

~ rachelbenzine ~ Leave a comment

Review:

“My daughter learned to walk in a homeless shelter.”

And so begins Stephanie Land’s chronicle of poverty in America. Land had dreams of being a writer, but an unexpected pregnancy prompted her to postpone her plans of college. Instead, she worked as a maid to support herself and her daughter, scrubbing toilets and washing countertops to provide for them. Maid is a story of a woman tenaciously attempting to work her way out of poverty. Land shares her experiences of navigating government assistance programs, trying to find safe childcare, and living in dismal housing conditions, all while making a less-than-livable wage.

I minored in economics while earning my undergraduate degree, so I did a fair amount of learning about government programs. However, it’s one thing to look at programs like Temporary Assistant to Needy Families (TANF) from a macroeconomic perspective; it’s quite another to hear the experience of someone who relies on it to be able to feed her daughter. Maid is a magnificent exploration of class in America, and I would recommend it to any adult who is willing to learn about the challenges faced by the lower class.

Favorite Passage:

As I pushed my cart away, my hands still shaking, the old man nodded towards my groceries and said, “You’re welcome!”
I grew infuriated. “You’re welcome for what?” I wanted to yell back at him. That he’d waited so impatiently, huffing and grumbling to his wife? It couldn’t have been that. It was that I was obviously poor, and shopping in the middle of the day, pointedly not at work. He didn’t know I had to take an afternoon off for the WIC appointment, missing $40 in wages, where they had to weigh both Mia and me. We left with a booklet of coupons that supplemented about the same as those lost wages, but not the disgruntled client whom I’d had to reschedule, who might, if I ever needed to reschedule again, go with a different cleaner, because my work was that disposable. But what he saw was that those coupons were paid for by government money, the money he’d personally contributed to with the taxes he’d paid. To him, he might as well have personally bought the fancy milk I insisted on, but I was obviously poor so I didn’t deserve it.

What I Loved Most:

Land doesn’t pull any punches in her writing. At one point, she tells the story of when her daughter (Mia) attended a birthday party. Mia came home and eagerly exclaimed that there were tons and tons of berries at the party, and Mia could eat all the berries she wanted. Stephanie reflects on how much she wishes she could regularly buy berries for her daughter, but the cost is far out of what she can afford. In our current culture, people who are on government assistance programs are often criticized for using food stamps to buy unhealthy food. Stories like this one help humanize the people who utilize government programs. It’s harder to criticize someone when you understand their story. In my opinion, Maid will go a far way toward increasing empathy and decreasing judgment of people who use government programs.

Read this book if you like:

Economics, the American dream, heart-wrenching stories of struggle, humanizing politics

Book Details: