“This is a paid review for BlogHer Book Club, but the opinions expressed are my own.”
reading with mamawolfe: Diary of a Submissive
Posted on October 19, 2012 by Jennifer Wolfe
loving fiercely | teaching audaciously | thinking deeply
Posted on October 19, 2012 by Jennifer Wolfe
“This is a paid review for BlogHer Book Club, but the opinions expressed are my own.”
Posted on September 20, 2012 by Jennifer Wolfe
Have you ever picked up a book, not knowing a thing about it, and then found yourself mesmerized? Have you found yourself astonished at the writer’s ability to know exactly what you are thinking? This was my experience with Brene Brown’s latest book, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead.
Having been a faithful reader of Dr. Brown’s blog, Ordinary Courage, I was familiar with Brene’s straight forward, insightful writing style. I knew I often connected with her posts, and found myself commenting often. It wasn’t until I came up for air after blazing through the first two chapters, “Scarcity: Looking Inside the Culture of ‘Never Enough’” and “Debunking the Vulnerabilty Myths” that I realized how aligned my heart and brain really were with hers.
Brene is not only a prolific writer, researcher and professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social work, she is also a wife and mother. For me, this just added to her genuineness and made her words golden. Basing her book and research on Roosevelt’s speech ‘The Man in the Arena’ of 1910, she establishes the position that to live “wholeheartedly”, one must “engage in our lives from a place of worthiness. It means cultivating the courage, compassion and connection to wake up in the morning and think, No matter what gets done and how much is left undone, I am enough. It’s going to bed at night thinking, Yes, I am imperfect and vulnerable and sometimes afraid, but that doesn’t change the truth that I am also brave and worthy of love and belonging.”
Daring Greatly is not a touchy-feely-I’m-going-to-fix-your-poor-pathetic-soul kind of book; in fact, that would go directly against Brene’s beliefs. She doesn’t assume to have all the answers, but what she does do is ground her theories in hard research and personal life experiences. That’s what made this book so real for me.
The first chapter on scarcity spoke right to me. “We all want to be brave,” she states in the introduction. In my forties, I’ve found this to be oh-so true. Past the stage of wondering how I could ever be ‘enough’ as a working mom, I realize now that bravery, in many forms, is how I grow as a mom and woman. Living life with a lens of scarcity, that we are never good enough, perfect enough, successful enough, or safe enough, gives us exactly what we wish for. Not enough. Like Brene, these are questions my husband and I have to confront all the time. How much do we stand up for what’s right, what we believe in, even when no one is watching. Brene says, “We’re called to ‘dare greatly’ every time we make choices that challenge the social climate of scarcity.” And that’s how we grow.
Throughout the book, Brene works through the concepts of vulnerability, shame, change, engagement, and wholehearted parenting. This last chapter, “Daring to Be the Adults We Want Our Children to Be”, brought all her concepts full circle. Motherhood is my most vulnerable position. It is much easier to take the easy route of parenting, to not confront what is hard or awkward. It is much simpler and more pleasant to look past how we wish our children would be, instead of push forward through the muck and towards what they could be. When I read her chapter, I realized this is my greatest challenge and my place of deepest bravery. If I want for my children as Brene does, to ‘live and love with their whole hearts”, then I must be courageous and model this.
At the end of her book, I found my eyes welling with tears as I read her “Wholehearted Parenting Manifesto” and the words, “Above all else, I want you to know that you are loved and lovable…I will not teach or love or show you anything perfectly, but I will let you see me, and I will always hold sacred the gift of seeing you. Truly, deeply, seeing you.” I realized that shared experience of motherhood connects us, that why I get up each day, push myself to grow, learn, and experience things that make me uneasy, is really for this. For my children to see me, their mother, and learn if I dare to live greatly, they can, too.
This is a paid review for Blog Her Book Club, but the opinions expressed are my own.
Posted on August 29, 2012 by Jennifer Wolfe
Do you ever wonder what it’s like to be dead? Where your body goes? What can you see? Feel? Hear? Who can sense you after you’re gone?
I think the author of Her Fearful Symmetry must have been pondering these questions long before writing this novel.
Audrey Niffenegger tried hard to give her readers a glimpse into the afterlife. I loved the idea, but I didn’t love the book.
I wanted to. I really wanted to fall into the characters, get swept away into the charming settings, and be captured by the complexities of the plot. I can’t say it never happened, it just didn’t happen enough to help this book live up to the reputation built after Niffenegger’s first book, The Time Traveler’s Wife.
Her Fearful Symmetry begins interestingly enough with a death. Great way to capture attention, but the problem became that I didn’t really care that the character, Elspeth, had died. She didn’t intrigue me, and I couldn’t figure out how her supposedly grieving partner could shift so abruptly upon meeting the twins, Julia and Valentina. Actually, I didn’t fall for those characters too much either. The only one I remotely connected in was Martin, whose OCD behaviors were oddly realistic and charmingly endearing.
Setting the story in London should have come with ultimate possibilities to develop a sense of place, but instead the locations simply served as that – flat locations for her characters to move in and out of. Even the Gothic graveyard and Highgate Cemetery suffered from Niffenegger’s lack of detail, and instead of adding to the tone of the story they were cast aside. It surprised me to learn that she acted as a tour guide there while writing the book.
After the initial death, the plot developed slowly. While I will admit the middle of the story had me much more eager to keep reading, it quickly fell into the ‘what are you thinking’ category when dialogue surrounding an important character’s decision abruptly ended with a terrifyingly ignorant and unrealistic decision. And it went downhill from there. I kept reading, but felt like I was riding in a car that the driver kept speeding up and then slamming on the brakes. The ending was a disappointment – not because I need to have everything neat and tidy, but because the ending didn’t make me think. I didn’t even want to figure out the possibilities, I just wanted it to end.
Niffenegger’s theme of ‘be careful what you wish for’ makes me wish I had listened to my gut and ended the summer with a more engaging book. Although she is a skilled writer, Her Fearful Symmetry lacked the appeal I was hoping for.
Posted on August 2, 2012 by Jennifer Wolfe
The Chaperone introduces us to Cora, a married mother of two sons, looking for a way to return some spark to her otherwise staid existence. When given the opportunity to chaperone Louise, a sultry, precocious teen bound for stardom, she eagerly accepts and travels to
With gratitude to Penguin and Riverhead Books for the review copy.
Posted on April 24, 2012 by Jennifer Wolfe
In 2011, The Golden Sky by EC Stilson became one of the hundred best-selling books about loss on Amazon! Wayman Publishing is now excited to announce the release of Bible Girl—the prequel to The Golden Sky. This is the amazing true story of a hilarious girl trying to find her way through the teen years. Bible Girl was just accepted into the Barnes & Noble catalog and will be .99 for a limited time HERE.
The book practically cried for me to spare its life, and for a moment I thought I’d rather burn in Hell than lose something my brother had given me in love. The pastor nudged me, though, and my heart turned to ice.
I thought of all those hours my brother had read to me. I thought of all that time he’d invested.
I couldn’t throw it into the fire; not the last book of the trilogy. That funny little dwarf stared at me from the cover. Then, I closed my eyes. I stepped so close to the flames they almost ate my skin. I tore the book in front of those kids. I put on quite a show throwing in a section at a time because I couldn’t stand sending the whole thing in at once. When the last pages went up in flame, and the dwarf on the cover curled with death, I dropped to my knees and cried. The kids all hooted and screamed in ecstasy, thinking I’d been freed, when the ropes of religion had just twisted tighter.
Elisa isn’t your regular nerd. She’s not the kind of person who quotes Monty Python, or has a periodic table tattooed on her butt. No she’s a different sort altogether. She carries a duct-taped Bible, wears bright-orange polyester pants, and dyes her hair with red Kool-Aid.
Although she tries slipping by apart from the crowds, it doesn’t help that her best friend happens to be the “Boarder,” one of the cutest and most popular boys in school.
It isn’t until Elisa realizes she’s surrounded by hypocrites that her foundation starts crumbling. She doesn’t know who to turn to. That’s when she meets a mysterious man. But maybe she shouldn’t trust him after all.
Will he help her, or make things even worse than they were before?