'Sunrise on the Reaping' (The Hunger Games, #0.5) by Suzanne Collins

 

This book is like a Rorschach test for fans ...

— Either Suzanne Collins wrote a second prequel book in 'The Hunger Games' universe as an easy franchise cash-grab (and yes, a movie adaptation of 'Sunrise on the Reaping' is in the works) OR, Suzanne Collins has been paying attention ever since Donald Trump lost the 2020 election and chucked a January 6 insurrectionist hissy-fit, and has been mapping the writing-on-the-wall as America teeters towards fascism, with another prescient instalment of her YA Dystopian series that was originally inspired by the invasion of Iraq and America's insatiable love for reality television.

— Either books are inherently political and 'The Hunger Games' is a really clever argument in support of "just war" theory (an ethical framework to determine when it is permissible to go to war) and one of the most political-est books young people can read, OR books are pure entertainment and 'The Hunger Games' is just good schlocky fun, and anyway it's a rip-off of the 2000 Japanese movie 'Battle Royale' based on the 1999 novel of the same name by Koushun Takami that pipped 'The Hunger Games' (2008 publication) by 9-years.

— Either this prequel is illustrating a fine point that revolutions are not born, they're made. Or to quote the musical Hamilton; “Legacy. What is a legacy? It's planting seeds in a garden you never get to see," and though we saw the spark of the mockingjay by following Katniss' story and being given passing understanding of District 13 and how many people were involved in the rebellion and how long they'd been scheming ... 'Sunrise on the Reaping' is really delving into showing readers just how the foundations were laid, how rebels are pushed and moulded by violence. OR this was all just nostalgia-bait and fan-service, a literary 'Weekend at Bernie's' making ghoulish marionettes out of dearly beloved and deceased secondary characters from the series.

— Either Suzanne Collins repeatedly shows her hand and political views and it's not by coincidence how foresighted this book feels, or the entire series for that matter ... case-in-point; this book coming out as Israel has again resumed killing Palestinians in collective-punishment and to enact their larger ethnic-cleansing project (FYI: Israel’s war on Gaza is deliberately targeting children – new UN report ... oh, and total coinky-dink; Netanyahu’s testimony in corruption trial postponed due to Gaza war) OR ... no, that's not the case? Israel is not The Capitol. Netanyahu is no autocrat like Snow (Netanyahu is waging war on Gaza and on us – his ‘enemies within’. It’s the path to autocracy), "if we burn, you burn with us" can in no way be applied to politics of the Middle East and American geopolitics ... just, no?

Well, look, books are political - they have been since Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1440 and made knowledge dissemination, y'know, a thing ... the fact that I'm a woman who was taught to read is in and of itself - a miracle of the modern-age, and if books weren't political then the Church would have kept them hoarded (and by golly they tried!) and for monks-eyes-only. This book is political, but to what extent is up to the individual.

I, personally, can't shake the fact that Suzanne Collins' near-mythological genesis story of this tale ties into American and allied aggression in Iraq, and the "just war" theory echoes everywhere in this day and age ... does Yemen have a right to defend itself? Do Palestinians? "We seek nothing but the elementary right implanted in every man: the right if you are attacked, to defend yourself," written on a mural in East Belfast, harkens back to The Troubles and now. And in Australia the Irish hip hop trio from West Belfast, Kneecap, just toured and teamed up with Indigenous artist Aretha Brown to "Defy the Occupation."

I also can't help but note the gift of silence that Suzanne Collins gives readers (then, and now) with each release. She doesn't do events, not even for releases - and not even for this one. She's no J.K. Rowling clawing for relevancy and trashing her reputation with fascistic and bigoted public rhetoric. There's no awkward Kafkaesque discovery of her religious underpinnings to the tale à la Stephenie Meyer's mormonism in 'Twilight'. The most Collins has said of a political nature is a repeat of her famous "flipping between the channels of war and reality-TV," and a fairly deep-dive interview with her long-time editor David Levithan in that 2018 New York Times article. We don't know if she's anti-Zionist or not. We don't know if she voted for Trump, or Harris - or at all. She let's the work speak for itself, knowing full well it is the aforementioned Rorschach test for readers. And I think that's challenging, and a little bit wonderful in this day and age.

For me, I loved this book. I think Collins threaded a very fine needle, keeping Haymitch Abernathy's end in sight as she wrote his genesis and that of the rebellion. I gasped, I bawled my eyes out, I got suckered into liking characters I knew were doomed to death ... I felt losses I'd already experienced, anew. This is a master-storyteller, not necessarily through astonishingly clever and good writing but pretty darn good pacing, plotting and characterisation. Yes; some of that plot became a little mechanically mediocre and convenient towards the end (last 50 or so pages, went a little wonky - understandable as she approaches an inevitability all readers were braced for) ...

I do think that if anything the truth of this book’s genesis maybe lies in a little of both worlds of commercialisation and politics. I see a lot of ‘Star Wars: Rogue One’ to this story, the 2016 blockbuster prequel to the original ‘Star Wars’ universe that explains how the rebels got their hands on the plans of the Death Star in order to target its in-built vulnerabilities.

Interestingly a big focus in that story, is on a young woman who is a reluctant fence-sitter at first but eventually comes around to the idea of rebellion. In fact, one of the most famous lines from the film is; "Rebellions are built on hope." 

Interestingly and just as with ‘Sunrise on the Reaping’, ‘Rogue One’ isn’t a kittens-and-rainbows happy-ending. It can’t be, because of what we know about what is to come in this universe and the story we’ve already been told. Schrödinger's cat is dead, so to speak, and we know that.

Much like Collins, it’s also a film that plays and pays fan-service, delightedly so.

It’s not surprising that ‘Rogue One’ is my favourite of the new Star Wars stories, and that I loved ‘Sunrise on the Reaping.’ Maybe for the same reasons, I loved them both; when you’re writing stories supporting just war theory and how messy revolutions can be, it’s not a bad thing to put a little sting in the tail and make them hurt, a little.

But I loved this. It resonated and moved me, and that's the Rorschach test that matters.

4/5

'The Insect Crisis: The Fall of the Tiny Empires That Run the World' by Oliver Milman

 

From the BLURB: 

How would we live if insects no longer existed? 

When is the last time you were stung by a wasp? Or were followed by a cloud of midges? Or saw a butterfly? All these normal occurrences are becoming much rarer. A groundswell of research suggests insect numbers are in serious decline all over the world - in some places by over 90%. 

The Insect Crisis explores this hidden emergency, arguing that its consequences could even rival climate change. We rely on insect pollination for the bulk of our agriculture, they are a prime food source for birds and fish, and they are a key strut holding up life on Earth, especially our own. 

In a compelling and entertaining investigation spanning the globe, Milman speaks to the scientists and entomologists studying this catastrophe and asks why these extraordinary creatures are disappearing. Part warning, part celebration of the incredible variety of insects, this book highlights why we need to wake up to this impending environmental disaster.

***

The Insect Crisis: The Fall of the Tiny Empires that Run the World by Oliver Milman is a nonfiction book that published in March 2022, and I listened to the audiobook narrated by Liam Gerrard.

An absolutely phenomenal read, about 'the plight of things that scuttle at our feet and hover in our gardens.'

I knew there was an insect crisis, but I didn't know how bad it was until this book. The one you hear the most about is the bee, and largely because its extinction affects human's access to honey and pretty pollinated flowers - and this is discussed in the book. The same way that the extinction of large and cute mammals (from polar-bears to pandas, koalas, and the world's last male northern white rhino that died in 2018) get good PR because there's a tangible face to put to their crisis ... insects and entomology struggle to rally support for their crisis that would have far greater and actual devastating impacts on humanity. Milman argues, the loss of the white rino - while tragic - doesn't have an impact on the daily-life of humans the same way that loss of many insect species would ... "You get rid of flies? You get rid of chocolate," said Erica McAlister, a senior curator at the Natural History Museum in London. Flies pollinate carrots, peppers, mangoes, many fruit trees and - chocolate. And they are hardier against cold-climates than bees.

Throughout the book Milman argues and highlights this crisis that is at once happening and devastating, and hard to quantify. "Counting the books while the library burns," is how he puts it - since there are anywhere from 5 to 10 million insect species in the world; impossible to study and catalogue, and therefore - unknowable when they die off ... he gives the example of the 2019 bushfires in Australia, where "billions of invertebrates were lost, with some models suggesting potentially trillions."

He does a brilliant job of quantifying the unquantifiable, like; a scientist in the jungles of Brazil who used to hang a white sheet in the rainforest and backlight it with a torch to show how many insects gathered (this is "manual collecting") and in the 70s these photos would show the sheet so blackened with many insects you couldn't even tell they were hanging on a backdrop ... but now? The sheet is clearly visible, only spotty with insects. The same way another citizen scientist used to drive his car down a certain stretch of road at night, and then photograph the insects splattered on the windshield; this manual collecting also harkens back to the "back in my day," crowd who can remember family road-trips that involved frequent pit-stops to clear the windshield of bugs ... not anymore.

Milman also does a good job of explaining the culprits to this crisis - humans, always humans. Monsanto and mono-farming culture (one entomologist suggests eliminating farms and just bolstering home gardens would do more for the environment and replenishing insects; and he's not wrong ... farms could help reverse damage they're doing by planting a border of wild flowers around all of their fields but - they won't, because most farms are corporate entities now, growing unsustainably for corporate greed.) Monsanto is a plight on humanity and the damage they've done is irreversible, alongside the greed and corruption within governments that allow them to run roughshod over the environment and the health of human-beings (Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil reversing laws against certain pesticide use has been catastrophic ... imagine what Trump is reversing too.)

And - what is lost when we lose insects? Their fine webbing of biodiversity, and tugging to break one thread will have a devastating domino-effect (just consider how many birds and mammals rely on insects for food-source) ... but more than that; imagine children growing up in a world, where they've never seen a butterfly (the monarch butterfly is expected to be on the brink in the next 30-years, it's happening and there's no stopping it).

'The tragedy will be how impoverished we will become, environmentally, spiritually, morally.' Or as entomologist David Wagner puts it; 'Our children will have a diminished world. That's what we are giving them.' Already in Australia, my nephews don't know what a Christmas beetle is; though they used to live in our households and gardens in the hotter months ... I used to find and rescue so many ladybugs as a child, carrying them to leaves on the tip of my finger - now, I can't remember the last time I saw one.

A diminished world indeed.

The audiobook is also *fabulous* - narrated by Liam Gerrard, who does a plethora of accents for all the entomologists quoted from all over the world (Australian, American, Brazilian, Chines ...) it really gave the book a feeling of; chorus of calamity.

5/5

'Memorial Days' by Geraldine Brooks

 

From the BLURB: 

Many cultural and religious traditions expect those who are grieving to step away from the world. In contemporary life, we are more often met with red tape and to-do lists. This is exactly what happened to Geraldine Brooks when her partner of more than three decades, Tony Horwitz - just sixty years old and, to her knowledge, vigorous and healthy - collapsed and died on a Washington, DC street.

After spending their early years together in conflict zones as foreign correspondents, and living in Sydney, Geraldine and Tony settled down to raise two boys on Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts. The life they built was one of meaningful work, good humour, and tenderness, as they spent their days writing and their evenings cooking family dinners or watching the sun set with friends. But all of this came to an abrupt end when, on the US Memorial Day public holiday of 2019, Geraldine received the phone call we all dread. The demands were immediate and many. Without space to grieve, the sudden loss became a yawning gulf.

Three years later, she booked a flight to remote Flinders Island off the coast of Tasmania with the intention of finally giving herself the time to mourn. In a shack on the island's pristine, rugged coast she often went days without seeing another person. There, she pondered the various ways in which cultures grieve, and what rituals of her own might help to rebuild a life around the void of Tony's death.

I have loved Geraldine Brooks for the longest time. 'The Year of Wonders' is one of my favourite books (read the summer I graduated high school, so I also can't think of that story without if being a demarcation of my life too). I read everything she writes with a hunger and particular pride in her being Australian ... 'Memorial Days,' about events following the sudden death of her husband (author, journalist and historian Tony Horwitz) and the grief she needed to meet on Flinders Island in Tasmania some years later, is no different.

This is also a book about creativity - since both Brooks and her husband were writers. In musing on his death, Brooks is also wondering at the person (the artist) she would have been, had she not followed her husband to America and instead stayed in Tasmania, to become a fully Australian writer (Brooks' work has instead been marked by interesting tales she's seemingly collected in her travels; the plague village of Eyam in England for 'Wonders', and FanFiction borne from Louisa May Alcott's very New England 'Little Women' in her Pulitzer Prize-winning 'March). 'Memorial Days' is a tale of a few deaths in this way; 'Sliding Doors' wonderings at who she would have been, and the death of an idea to write about Jane Franklin (a British explorer to Tasmania ... I admit a curiosity about this story, but also a thorough disgust when Brooks reveals things she did to an adopted daughter.)

In this respect, I was reminded of another memoir by an Australian writer about the death of her playwright husband; the extraordinary 'Love, Death & Other Scenes' by Nova Weetman which came out last year, and I also *adored* (and ugly-cried my way through). The deaths are markedly different; Tony Horwitz dropped suddenly on the street from a cardiac event, in the middle of his book-tour. Playwright Aidan Fennessy died a long and painful death from cancer at the heigh of Covid in Melbourne lockdown. But both of these books also examine the audacities of bureaucracy in death; for Brooks it's navigating a callous and needlessly cruel American healthcare (and health insurance) system. For Nova Weetman, it was the aforementioned Covid adding layers of delay and complication to their memorials and grieving. In both I found connection to the writings of Caitlin Doughty, an American mortician and author who is a passionate advocate for things like green burial, but also for a more personal relationship with death and dying that the West seems uniquely inadequate at - for the ways medical and healthcare systems insist on distance and sanitising what should be a deeply personal and close experience, should loved ones require it.

Brooks' writing goes down like a robust glass of red in the reading ... her descriptions of the Flinders Island landscape are particularly delicious, cast against her unstable tripping towards some kind of marker for the other side of grief.

I was so deeply moved by this, as many will be, for thinking of people I've lost in my own life too - and how true Brooks' recommendations are, to aid the chores of death (little things like people making lists of all they do; what their passwords are, where the number for the plumber is kept, etc.) She is correct that death and dying bind all of us, and so I think everyone will find something to hurt or heal in this remarkable book.

And much like Brooks, I find it cruelly ironic that America is entering into this new wave of Trumpism fascism and Tony Horwitz - a journalist uniquely situated to report and comment on it! - isn't here to do so. I really do want to go and read his books 'Confederates in the Attic' and 'Spying on the South' now, and I think that's a gift Brooks has also given to readers and his legacy.

5/5

'The Silver Metal Lover' by Tanith Lee

 

From the BLURB: 

For sixteen-year-old Jane, life is a mystery she despairs of ever mastering. She and her friends are the idle, pampered children of the privileged class, living in luxury on an Earth remade by natural disaster. Until Jane's life is changed forever by a chance encounter with a robot minstrel with auburn hair and silver skin, whose songs ignite in her a desperate and inexplicable passion. Jane is certain that Silver is more than just a machine built to please. And she will give up everything to prove it. So she escapes into the city's violent, decaying slums to embrace a love bordering on madness. Or is it something more Has Jane glimpsed in Silver something no one else has dared to see - not even the robot or his creators A love so perfect it must be destroyed, for no human could ever compete

I don't quite know how I stumbled across this book (first published in 1981) I think I was led here by wanting to read more science-fiction with romantic elements (to try and read more sci-fi generally) coupled with a reminder of the hilariously prophetic old article from The Sun REVEALED: Women will be having more sex with ROBOTS than men by 2025 and also thinking about AI encroachment on artistic spaces.

Enter; Tanith Lee (whom I'd never read before) and 'The Silver Metal Lover' about a 16-year-old girl narrating the story of how she fell in love with the humanoid musician robot S.I.L.V.E.R. (which stands for 'Silver Ionized Locomotive Verisimulated Electronic Robot').

I really loved this, even as it broke my heart. And for a novel written in 1981 it made so many prescient points, particularly about the wisdom of letting young people have "artificial" relationships in lieu of real experiences (not that I think Tanith Lee villainises this most modern of ways to experience love, mind you! She makes a lot of swipes at other artifices we encourage in society to do with beauty-standards, and it makes you question where the line on "real" really lands).

There's also just some *amazing* lines in here. And again, for a pre-smart phone and social media 1981 novel a line like; “… she pours her life like champagne through your video phone.” seriously slays!

While reading this, it also struck me that a parallel for AI and robots that Lee was exploring here was the tale of Djinn and genies - subservient to human masters, human-but-not, inciting paranoia for trickster behaviour ... and humans constantly questioning their autonomy and the ethics of ordering them around. Brilliant!

This is still an 80's not-quite-YA-but-YA-according-to-the-80's novel so it's sometimes a little too flourish-y. Purple prose-y? The protagonist - Jane - is sometimes soooooo over-the-top and soap-opera dramatic, it felt like a very 80's perspective that teens are a little bratty and tragic and hormonal. To the point of high annoyance, which is unfortunate.

But overall I thought this was a very beautiful sci-fi fairytale, and it did exactly what I hoped it would which was get me thinking about the aspects of modernity and society I'd like to further explore in more science-fiction narratives.

4/5

'Small Things Like These' by Claire Keegan

 

Claire Keegan's 'Small Things Like These' is a powerful novel of 110-pages, about to be stretched into a movie adaptation starring Cillian Murphy.

I got this book for myself in lockdown - some time in 2021 - but didn't crack it open until today, to help pull myself out of a reading slump and concentration-shortage. Keegan helped me on both fronts; but she also sharpened my senses reading this one, giving me a bone-deep pleasure that comes from a perfect book that nuzzles itself into your side, at just the right time.

Ostensibly this is the story of an Irish coalman in his early 40s in 1985, as Christmas day approaches and he catches himself pondering deep thoughts and idly imagining a different life for himself ... amidst memories of his long-dead teenage mother, his unknown father, and the world of men that await his five young daughters.

Whilst this is happening, he goes to the Convent on three separate occasions to deliver coal, and encounters "fallen women" - girls - who beg him for escape. His wife warns him to stay on the right side of people, and a local businesswoman reminds him that "they" - the Church - have a hand in everything.

And yet. Furlong keeps thinking about them, and his own life - how different it would have been, had his mother ended up in a place like that with him, or without.

As they carried on along and met more people Furlong did and did not know, he found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another? Was it possible to carry on along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?

This is Keegan writing about the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland, and the long arm of Roman Catholic orders ... though; for all of Furlong's deepening thoughts about the point and purpose of life, and what it takes to be a good person, you can read many a substitute in Keegan's novel, for the abuse of women.

Keegan's is at once a scathing critique of the vast network of church-and-state institutions that perpetuated violence and brutality in Ireland, and even without going into the mechanics, she makes clear how the Catholic church kept a colonial hand in Ireland's formation. But this story is also a meditation on what we do with our time; how we spend a life.

Before long, he caught a hold of himself and concluded that nothing ever did happen again; to each was given days and chances which wouldn't come back around. And wasn't it sweet to be where you were and let it remind you of the past for once, despite the upset, instead of always looking on into the mechanics of the days and the trouble ahead, which might never come.

Furlong is contrasted against his wife; a woman who grew up with both her parents and wants to keep a similar order in her own world now, and for their own five girls in the future. Furlong's musings about what goes on at the convent, and the girls he has encountered there, turn her into a Lady Macbeth-type, bemoaning a damned spot of thought.

'Where does thinking get us?' she said. 'All thinking does is bring you down.' She was touching the little pearly buttons on her nightdress, agitated. 'If you want to get on in life, there's things you have to ignore, so you can keep on.'

That Furlong is a colaman conjures the Dickensian character of Ebenezer Scrooge, who permits his clerk - Bob Cratchit - one coal for a fire. Furlong's persistent memories too, of a childhood raised in a stately home where his teenage mother was servant but also permitted to raise her child out of wedlock, have a touch of the 1946 classic 'It's a Wonderful Life' for how George Bailey looks backwards and forwards on his life and all its turning points. Nothing Keegan does is by accident; her sentences are sharp, the thoughts cutting, and her decision to set this as a Christmas tale is especially clever ... after all; what better time of year to contemplate the good and bad of people, to reach for our higher-selves?

This novel was extraordinary. Keegan does more with a mere 110-pages than some authors will in their lifetime, and you cannot help but feel you are in the presence of greatness with every page-turn.

5/5

'Slow Dance' by Rainbow Rowell

 

Received from the publisher is return for an honest review 

From the BLURB: 

Everybody thought Shiloh and Cary would end up together – everybody but Shiloh and Cary.

‘Slow Dance’ follows these star-crossed best friends from their inseparable teen years on the wrong side of the tracks to their far-flung adulthoods – through her marriage and motherhood and his time in the Navy – as they try to work out what they’re actually supposed to be to each other.

🪩

I was up until midnight finishing this; laughing, crying, and just having the best reading experience. I have always loved Rainbow Rowell’s adult fiction - ‘Attachments’ has been my No. 1 fave … but ‘Slow Dance’ maybe just knocked it down to No. 2.

I remember in ‘Attachments’ there was a lot of love for the 1977 movie ‘The Goodbye Girl’ - which is arguably all about another chance of romance when you think you’re down and out and nobody could possibly want you any more … and I feel like ‘Slow Dance’ is a bit of a homage to that time in life. Where so few romance novels choose to expand; Rainbow Rowell dares to tread. 

For anyone who just discovered David Nicholl’s ‘One Day’ via the new adaptation (and now you need to mend what he beautifully broke) - Slow Dance will be right up your alley. Swap out University of Edinburgh for Omaha, Nebraska - and meet Cary & Shiloh bouncing between 1991 and 2006. Where so few romance novels choose to expand on the missed loves and those that remained unrequited for so long, Rainbow Rowell bursts open this idea of approaching your mid-30s and being full of regret and “what if’s?” and choosing to explore new (old) love anyway.

And she does it with her usual Rainbow Rowell sparkling repartee and dialogue … and the most impressive ability to make characters you’ve just met feel so beloved and lived-in.

I adored ‘Slow Dance’ … it is a slow burn - that’s kinda the whole point and plot - and I feel like some people won’t appreciate how lovely it is to have a book like this. It has the hard edges of life amongst a really tender romance. But I thought it was spectacular. One of my favourite reads from Rowell and for the year.

‘Do you think that makes us strangers?’
‘No,’ Shiloh said. ‘But also, yes? Like - cells get replaced in the human body every seven years so that’s two full iterations since 1992. You don’t have any cells left that remember me.’
‘I’m pretty sure my cells remember you, Shiloh.’

5/5 

'The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper' by Hallie Rubenhold

 

From the BLURB: 

Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary-Jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met.

They came from Fleet Street, Knightsbridge, Wolverhampton, Sweden and Wales. They wrote ballads, ran coffee houses, lived on country estates, they breathed ink-dust from printing presses and escaped people-traffickers. 

What they had in common was the year of their murders: 1888. 

Their murderer was never identified, but the name created for him by the press has become far more famous than any of these five women. 

Now, in this devastating narrative of five lives, historian Hallie Rubenhold finally sets the record straight, and gives these women back their stories. 

⦾

The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold, read on audiobook by Louise Brealey. 

“Poor women were expendable …”

I listened to the audiobook of this, via my library's BorrowBox app - even though I've also owned the B-format paperback since about 2020, I could just never bring myself (or my heart) to pick it  up and read it of my own volition, but on audiobook I tore through it. And under the talent of Brealey's narration, who could bring out various regional accents to really help things along - it was superb. 

This was such a tough listen but I’m really really glad that I finished this book and I found it to be an extraordinary non-fiction work and by far one of the best non-fiction books I’ve read in a long time. 

I was completely upended, however to discover that this book has pissed off so many people and specifically “Ripperologists” to the point that Hallie Rubenhold has been horribly abused and harassed because she did to research into the canonical five victims of Jack the Ripper - and put fourth credible evidence that not all of them were prostitutes as the sick lore of this madman murdering spree dictated for so long. 

Her book is a gracious and human examination of what it meant to be a woman in the 1880s and the impossible position that they were put in to either be Madonna or whore. She digs into the Victorian mindset of the time that insisted that their murders had to somehow be prescriptive to the wider public and so they were painted as Scarlet women. Their stories absolutely broke my heart and patterns did emerge in all of them — domestic violence, alcoholism (if only to have some alleviation from the drudgery of being a woman at the time) …  the way people were kept impoverished and women in particular who had to bear the burden of childbirth and child rearing. Lack of education being the lightning rod overarching issue for so many people of this time. Just an incredible historical examination of everything never said about these women that I found to be so touching and crucial.

As I was reading, I was repeatedly struck by the realisation of how true it is now - just as it was in 1888 - that all it takes is a bad bout of luck, illness or injury for any one of us to experience houselessness and our fate to be completely undone. I thought that about each of these women at so many points in their life as Hallie unpicked them for us ... and my god, did my heart go out to them - across space and time. 

The very final chapter in the book is the Author listing all of the items found on four of the victims upon their death; in one of their pockets was one red mitten — and that visual is just touching and heartbreaking, as was the entire book.

5/5