meghan rose allen

I hate it when I read a book and I then struggle to say much about it. So let me try and force a bunch of words out for no other reason than I got this book for free in exchange for a review, and so I will keep my promise and review it.

So I read To The Promised Land, spurred on by a comment from a university course I took many years ago: Most people know Martin Luther King Jr. from his anti-segregation work and his I Have A Dream speech (and looky looky — I reviewed a book about that speech a few years ago) from 1963. He was assassinated in 1968. So there’s five years where, for the most part, the popular narrative stops. Why? Because he spent a lot of those five years advocating not just for civil-rights for African Americans, but also advocating for the poor, against classicism, and working with unions. And while voting rights and desegregation was one thing, working for economic equality was a whole other kettle of fish.

And so, I got To The Promised Land because of that university professor many years ago and because To The Promised Land has a sub (under?) title: Martin Luther King and the Fight for Economic Justice. Okay. So I was going to learn about those missing five years.

So I did. I read To The Promised Land (in April, and now it’s June). I made precisely zero notes on my kobo. I highlighted nothing. I read it and I remember basically nothing. My fault for being disengaged with the process or the book’s fault for informing without captivating me with language or story-telling or whatever it was that didn’t have the words worm their way deep into my brain? But this is the second book in a row about someone working to make the world better that I’ve read to which my response has been a precisely mid-range, not-even-angry-about-it, meh.

Martin Luther King Jr. tried to make the world better for all Americans, then they shot him, and that makes me sad. Later I read a book about him. There was a sanitation strike in the book. He still got shot. I am still sad, but I do know that my being sad is not really what this is all about. Still sad though. Still a big blank space in my brain where this book should have gone. Sorry.

To The Promised Land by Michael K. Honey went on sale April 3, 2018.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Ahhhh, to be young and freshly in love, without all the grunt work that comes with the middle age slog. Comics that’ll make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, but, ultimately, after putting the book down, it’s a pretty fleeting feeling. But, for those few moments of warmth down in my cockles, it was worth a Netgalley request.

Little Moments of Love by Catana Chetwynd went on sale May 15, 2018.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Urggghghhghifadjghgh. I hate it when books are important but just not well written. The memoir parts are cloying and simplistic, the details about when and where Watt-Cloutier became in charge of what are dull, and the real meat of the argument, when she actually talks about policy, especially Indigenous resource extraction in the Arctic, where she really shines, is pushed away to the back. She says it again and again: her goal is to put a human face on climate change in the Arctic, and so, obviously, in a book about her, she (along with some family members) is the human face, but it ends up being a “and then this happened and then this happened” until she gets to her arguments in the end. Interspersing different arguments with human faces maybe would have kept my attention more.

I know you’re not enjoying that book Geoff says to me. Because it’s the fourth night you are reading it.

On one hand, you should read it because you should learn about the Arctic and climate change and bad things happening (which always gives me anxiety and makes me feel helpless because I feel helpless with all this), but on the other hand, it’s kind of like lumpy oatmeal, so eat it ‘cuz it’s good for you but there’s probably a more palatable style that the oatmeal could have been presented in.

The Right To Be Cold by Sheila Watt-Cloutier went on sale (in the US, it’s been out awhile here in Canada) May 1, 2018.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

This is an odd book. The illustrations — digital collages by Isabelle Cardinal — are quirky, and while not necessarily the wrong choice for a book about Auschwitz, over power the story, which starts abruptly and rather cliched (waking up), and then finishes just as abruptly. This isn’t Holocaust 101 For Kids — we aren’t given a primer on Nazis or concentration camps or the Second World War. And that’s the saddest thing about this book — my daughter is privileged enough that she would need a Holocaust 101 before reading this book to understand it. Imagine if you don’t have to do that, to introduce that narrative to a child because the existence of it (or similar events like what happened in Rwanda, Cambodia, the former Yugoslavia, etc.) is omnipresent in her and her family’s history. That makes me so sad, even if I found the book so uneven.

The Promise by Pnina Bat Zvi and Margie Wolfe went on sale April 18, 2018.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.