missrosymaplemoth's reviews
183 reviews

Wow. I rarely like a sequel more than the original. But, just wow!

I loved Patina’s story. The narrator was fabulous and made the story for me. I appreciated the dialogue around race, adoption and parentification. I felt for Patina and related to her a lot. I even teared up at the very end.

My first 5-star read of 2023. 

I read this for APL’s April book club. The mystery pulled me in, but the writing style left a lot to be desired. It is unrealistic and pulled me out of the narrative when characters often used flowery language and spoke in long, poetic passages about things ranging from dramatic to even mundane. I am definitely not the target audience, I will admit; all of the characters are over 35. I still enjoyed this book but I am not incentivized to read the sequel.

I have health issues and just the intro triggered a lot of health anxiety. I respect this woman on her journey but I can’t read this book further.

What a great read! I listened to the audiobook and was thoroughly entertained by the reader. A powerful story about a boy who has experienced trauma trying to cope with that (and childhood in general) and come out stronger. I related to Ghost’s experience with bullying. I loved the character of Coach. I can’t wait to read the rest of the series.

I switched to the audiobook on page 262. I was having a weird week and could not bring myself to read the rest with my eyes so I read with my ears. :) I just listened to my first audiobook in several years as well so I thought of this option.

I loved this book and I’m glad to have read it. The writing style was pleasant, although the pace was often slow which I think contributed to my inability to continue in print. That is my only “complaint.”

I enjoyed learning about some events from Michelle Obama’s perspective, about her childhood and the circumstances in which she grew up. It was nice to hear her narrate the audiobook, as I thought it brought an personal touch and elevated the listening experience.

I listened to this and it was my first ever Playaway experience. I enjoyed listening.

This was a great book. I got some insight into biracial identity while also heavily relating to Isabella’s family dynamic and experience with divorced parents. I did think the pacing was odd at times and the end felt rushed, as well as several things I wish were talking about on a deeper level. I still enjoyed this book and it talked about a lot of issues I hadn’t before read at the middle grade level. I would recommend this book.

Such a sweet book. I didn’t realize it was in verse until I opened it up. The cover and title alone were enough to get me to read it. I loved the story. I love otters!!

P37 For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.
P39 For there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt - of examining what those ideas feel like being lived on Sunday morning at 7 A.M., after brunch, during wild love, making war, giving birth, mourning our dead while we suffer the old longings, battle the old warnings and fears of being silent and impotent and alone, while we taste new possibilities and strengths.
P51 The supposition that one sex needs the other's acquiescence in order to exist prevents both from moving together as self-defined persons toward a common goal.
P57 This is one reason why the erotic is so feared, and so often relegated to the bedroom alone, when it is recognized at all. For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.
P67 To imply, however, that all
women suffer the same oppression simply because we are women is to lose sight of the many varied tools of patriarchy. It is to ignore how those tools are used by women without awareness against each other.
P70 The oppression of women knows no ethnic nor racial bound-
aries, true, but that does not mean it is identical within those differences. Nor do the reservoirs of our ancient power know these boundaries. To deal with one without even alluding to the other is to distort our commonality as well as our difference.
P73 All our children are outriders for a queendom not yet assured.
P78 As a Black woman, I find it necessary to withdraw into all-black groups at times for exactly the same reasons - differences
in stages of development and differences in levels of interaction. Frequently, when speaking with men and white women, I am reminded of how difficult and time-consuming it is to have to reinvent the pencil every time you want to send a message.
P104 But documentation does not help one perceive. At best it only analyzes the perception. At worst, it provides a screen by which to avoid concentrating on the core revelation, following it down to how it feels. Again, knowledge and understanding. They can function in concert, but they don't replace each other.
P112 As women, we have been taught either to ignore our differences, or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change. Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.
P115 Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people.
P115 Too often, we pour the energy needed for recognizing and exploring difference into pretending
those differences are insurmountable barriers, or that they do not exist at all.
P120 Rape is on the increase, reported and unreported, and rape is not aggressive sexuality, it is sexualized aggression.
P123 The future of our earth may depend upon the ability of all women to identify and develop new definitions of power and new patterns of relating across difference. The old definitions have not served us, nor the earth that supports us. The old patterns, no matter how cleverly rearranged to imitate progress, still condemn us to cosmetically altered repetitions of the same old exchanges, the same old guilt, hatred, recrimination, lamentation, and suspicion.
P130 It is not the anger of other women that will destroy us but our refusals to stand still, to listen to its rhythms, to learn within it, to move beyond the manner of presentation to the substance, to tap that anger as an important source of empowerment.
P132-133 I am not free while
any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own. And I am not free as long as one person of Color remains chained. Nor is anyone of you.
P Four hundred years of survival as an endangered species has taught most of us that if we intend to live, we had better become fast learners. Malcolm knew this. We do not have to live the same mistakes
over again if we can look at them, learn from them, and build upon them.
P142 You do not have to be me in order for us to fight alongside each other. I do not have to be you to recognize that our wars are the same. What we must do is commit ourselves to some future that can include each other and to work toward that future with the particular strengths of our individual identities. And in order to do this, we must allow each other our differences at the same time as we recognize our sameness.

This book was very interesting and informative. A lot of the information is basic, but a lot of people could really benefit from reading this. I’m an over-thinker but even I realized I need to think again more! I was especially touched towards the end where he talks about rethinking our educational and career paths. The pandemic and lack of support and direction otherwise caused me to feel like I wasted 2.5 years of my life. Now I’m on a great path, and who knows if I would be here if it hadn’t been initially derailed?

My favorite quotes:

P25 My favorite bias is the ‘I’m not biased’ bias, in which people believe they’re more objective than others. It turns out that smart people are more likely to fall into this trap. The brighter you are, the harder it can be to see your own limitations. Being good at thinking can make you worse at rethinking.
P57 I think they can teach us something about how to be more graceful and accepting in moment when we discover our beliefs might not be true. The goal is not to be wrong more often. It's to recognize that we're all wrong more often than we'd like to admit, and the more we deny it, the deeper the hole we dig for ourselves.
P61 It looked a lot to me like the joy of being wrong-his eyes twinkled as if he was having fun. He said that in his eighty-five years, no one had pointed that out before, but yes, he genuinely enjoys discovering that he was wrong, because it means he is now less wrong than before.
P73 What forecasters do in tournaments is good practice in life. When you form an opinion, ask yourself what would have to happen to prove it false. Then keep track of your views so you can see when you were right, when you were wrong, and how your thinking has evolved.
P74 When we find out we might be wrong, a standard defense is "Im
entitled to my opinion." I'd like to modify that: yes, we're entitled to hold opinions inside our own heads. If we choose to express them out loud though, I think it's our responsibility to ground them in logic and facts, share our reasoning with others, and change our minds when better evidence emerges.
P116 "Let's agree to disagree" shouldn't end a discussion. It should start a new conversation, with a focus on understanding and learning rather than arguing and persuading. (Another fun one on the same page: “You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it think.”)
P140 As a general rule, it's those with greater power who need to do more of the rethinking, both because they're more likely to privilege their own perspectives and because their perspectives are more likely to go unquestioned. In most cases, the oppressed and marginalized have already done a great deal of contortion to fit in.
P257 Rethink your actions, not just your surroundings. Chasing happiness can chase it away. Trading one set of circumstances for another isn't always enough. Joy can wax and wane, but meaning is more likely to last. Building a sense of purpose often starts with taking actions to enhance your learning or your contribution to others.

A really cute book. I read a lot of the regular print series in middle school, and when I saw this at the library I knew I needed that happy nostalgia. A really sweet story and nice illustrations, although simple. This book has a nice message and I would recommend it to any middle schooler.