Look, a review!

Novel Review: Steve the Penguin by Mahlena Rae Johnson, by by debrajohnson at She Likes to Read!.

Yesterday I was lucky enough to get my hands on a copy of a funny new novel entitled Steve the Penguin by Mahlena-Rae Johnson. I related to the book so well and found it so interesting that I did something that I haven’t done in quite a while; I finished the 189-page book in less than 24 hours! The heroine of Steve the Penguin is the likable, yet sarcastic 27-year-old single gal Bianca. Johnson manages to balance light-hearted comedy, romance, and social commentary in a refreshingly interesting way. Bianca’s thoughts on ethnicity, love, work, and sex mirror many of the things that people want to say, but, like Bianca, don’t always say aloud. Bianca is socially conscious yet socially insecure, full of ambition but at times full of self-doubt, and just like every other single twenty-something woman waiting for her Steve the Penguin to come along . . .

Thanks, debra!

Another review for me!

An Easter Penguin, by The Law Fairy at Your Mom goes to Law School.

. . . Mahlena captures the stress and self-doubt I think most of us feel at the prospect of facing people we haven't seen in years, and thereby facing a version of ourselves we haven't seen in years. Have we improved? Have we stagnated? Have we grown up? Have we gotten old? Have we abandoned our hopes? Have we fulfilled them? Bianca reflects on her years as an argumentative, unpopular teen and realizes that, for some reason, she now cares what these people think of her. She hopes to impress them -- and perhaps to erase some of the sting of the rejection she, like the vast majority of us, faced in high school.

The book's tone is informal and conversational, which makes it an easy read -- and much moreso if you're relatively "up" on pop culture. As is fitting for a book about a woman enmeshed in the entertainment industry, a healthy familiarity with that industry will add to the book's resonance, as the book is liberally sprinkled with pop culture references. In fact, the title itself is a pop culture reference -- or, rather, two pop culture references tied together...

Thank you, Law Fairy!

Review #2: Penguin Boogaloo

It's my second review! Apparently someone is "fun and feisty." Thanks, Stephanie!

Big Pimpin', by Stephanie at Stephanie's Soap Box.

In other news, while you all are enjoying the ubiquitous Presidential Primary coverage, I turn your attention to the Tin Man and the blond woman with a penchant for pantsuits:

It's my first review!

Steve The Penguin, by Veruca Salt at As humorous as your humerus.

How exciting!

Book Reviews and Nannies

From Jennifer Weiner's blog, Snark Spot:

So I’m having my own little Kanye West “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” moment over on the New York Times’ book blog...

...Things started on Tuesday TBR senior editor Dwight Garner posted a roundup of what other newspapers were reviewing: Michael Chabon, Woody Allen, your typical assortment of Living Dead White Men who the Times routinely covers to death and beyond, leavened with a review of Tina Brown’s take on the ten-years-dead Diana.

I posted a comment pointing out that it was interesting that the Times itself has reviewed all of those titles (in Chabon and Brown’s cases, twice), and wondered whether book review editors the world over got some kind of top-secret list as to which books to write about each week...

To find out what happened next, follow the thread here. You can read my comments on Jennifer's MySpace blog here. I was incensed, yet humorous. It sounds like something catherine would be interested in, since she "of course [she writes] romance novels."

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Next. From Salon via Racialicious: The other mothers, by Lynn Harris.

Separation anxiety, race and class, our very identities as women and parents: This is precisely the bumpy terrain that Lucy Kaylin explores in her new book, "The Perfect Stranger: The Truth About Mothers and Nannies." Said "truth" -- refreshingly -- is not, say, research twisted to assert that mothers who employ nannies have higher rates of self-hate, or that their children tend to grow up to be sociopaths. Kaylin's book -- her own nanny story, woven into interviews with other mothers and nannies, too -- shows that, actually, it's messier than that.

Kaylin's responses to the interview questions said more about her than I think she intended:

"I see what a cliché I've become, you know, when I come in the house with my hard shoes and dark clothes and I'm hugging my kid with one hand and working the BlackBerry with the other. You see yourself like that and it's awful; you're exactly the person you have long decried or felt superior to. A nanny can give you a really clear perspective on what it looks like to them...

...[My nanny Hy] is very frank, and if she thinks something's wrong she'll say it. And there was this one day when my husband and I were being so harried, doing that "two ships passing in the morning" thing, and she literally gave me a command: She said, "Kiss your husband." I was about to run out the door without doing so. And I thought it was great because she has a really macro sense of our operation. It's not just "I've got to make the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches this afternoon and make sure they have their bath by 6." She really cares about the health of the whole family. She cares about people getting kissed before they go out the door. She knows that it matters. And God bless her, it does matter."

Thank goodness Kaylin's nanny can function as her therapist and personal assistant, in addition to taking care of her kids. I wonder how her husband fits into the "operation." I'm not sure. In response to the question, "How do fathers feel about nannies?", Kaylin stated:

You'd think in this day and age that fathers would be as affected by the presence of a nanny as we are, that they would be as involved as we are in child rearing -- since we do have these great, well-adjusted feminist dads these days, wearing Snuglis and going to play dates -- but the reality is, the brunt of the childcare still falls to the mother. If something goes wrong with the kid, [people] are going to look to the choices the mother made to see what went wrong. And there's just no sense in which a father is hiring someone to be his proxy when he brings a nanny into the home. The nanny is a mother figure. So as a result, it's the mother who's overseeing the relationship and managing it.

Did Kaylin consult any fathers who may actually be the primary caregivers in their homes? Did she even ask her own husband how he felt about the nanny in their own home? Nope, she made a sweeping generalization without referring to any research at all.


My favorite part of the article was the comments. Some people were ticked off. An excerpt:

Add me to the "Who Fucking Cares?" Camp

I can't believe that there is an entire book industry dedicated to the minutia of motherhood. Every little aspect of being a mother/working mother/stay at home mother has been fetishized to a point beyond ridiculous. So now there is a book that dedicates at least 100 pages to dissecting how upper-middle class mothers FEEL about their nannies?

I don't care how these women, who have all the choices in the world, feel. What interests me more is how the illegal Mexican nanny who has had to leave her own children behind feels about being paid subsistence wages? Or how the working-poor mother feels about not being able to work at all because of the lack of daycare, period. Or how another working-poor mother feels about having to work nights at a corner store while her husband works days, and then having to haul yourself around all day after not sleeping. So to complain that you feel JEALOUS of your Nanny is whiny and self-indulgent.

Incidentally, I am working-mother who has more choices available to her than almost 90% of working Moms. I pay 45% of my take-home for childcare costs. I pay my childcare provider 25% more than the going rate to insure that she'll stick around, and because I really believe that my commitment to feminism and social and economic equality starts with me and my bank account. The endless navel gazing of upper-class women does little to alert our consciousness to the class implications of hiring other women to mind your children for subsistence wages.

Your thoughts?

Figuring It Out, by N.S.B.

Now that I have this newfound attention, I should do something positive with it. Hence, this post. All y'all that may have a problem with me and my debating style, please do not take your anger out on my friend and her book. I have actually read this book, so I am qualified to review it.

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“That’s what this project was and is – an attempt to expose that inner monologue. I hope that by my doing so, others like me will find a kind of companionship – in knowing that other people have thought the same things, and in knowing that people continue to struggle, because this is an individual’s struggle. For me, this was the hardest part because I felt like I was alone.”

Figuring It Out tells the true story of a young woman admitting to herself, and eventually to her friends—and her boyfriends—that she is a lesbian. The collection of journal entries spans 1997 to 2006, from N’s high school day to her post-college life. I knew the author before she came out, I still know her now, and I am proud of this, her first foray into the literary world. Figuring It Out is kind of like a full-length version of one of the stories in Am I Blue?, which I also own.

My favorite parts in the book were N’s interactions with her family, including her emotionally abusive father. There’s this one scene where he chastises her for using separate glasses for her orange juice and her water, instead of finishing the cup of orange juice, rinsing it out, and reusing it for her water. Crazy.

I also liked the chapter about her former addiction to Paxil. Although I did feel a bit guilty when she described a bad withdrawal trip she’d had, because it had been made worse by the alcohol in the Caribbean Rum Balls I had given her that Christmas. Oops.

Some of the passages did seem repetitive, probably because she felt the same thoughts at multiple times in her life. Also, I would have liked more of a narrative structure to link the passages, as well as what else was going on in her life at the time. It would have been interesting to see N’s tale of coming out in the context of her college experience and in her various workplaces.

Even though I’ve been straight since I was two—though I didn’t realize this until I was 14, when I found out there were other options—I really related to many aspects of Figuring It Out. I identified with N’s conscious introspection, her frustration with a society that doesn’t necessarily accept or understand who she is, her desire to find friends who get what she is going through, and her dreams of finding someone to love who will love her back.

By the by, I read most of this book during jury duty. It was a lovely way to spend my time as I made my (federally mandated) contribution to the American justice system. There could be a humorously ironic observation to be made about the fact that the American justice system does not give the LGBT community the same rights as us straights, but I’ll let you readers make that joke on your own.

I’m not assuming all of you are straight, either. And if you’re not, that’s yet another reason why you should support this book. But I'm still not watching Soul Plane.