The Flight: A Monthly Book Sampler
Rise has its own Bookshop.org storefront! Whenever possible, the links in The Flight will now send you there. Purchases made via those links support independent bookstores and allow Rise to earn a small amount of money. All money earned will be invested back into Rise’s mission to connect, equip and empower people to build a Church where women thrive.
Hello, friends! I’m thrilled to be joining Andrea in talking books with you all. In case we don’t know each other, my name is Holly Dowell and I’m a part of the Rise Board. I work as a full-time bookseller & social media manager for a small indie store in Brooklyn, NY. I have been an avid read my whole life and recommending books is one of my favorite things to do.
In order to give you an idea of my reading style, I thought I’d make my first Flight post a round up of some of my top recommendations from 2021 thus far. I’d love to hear more about you, too. What do you read? Are any of these on your radar?
Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy
This atmospheric and suspenseful novel centers on Franny Stone as she follows the last migration of Arctic terns south from Greenland in a near-future world where we are deeper into the climate crisis and only a handful of wild animal species remain. To do so, she talks her way onto one of the few remaining commercial fishing vessels and convinces them to track the terns as a last-ditch effort to find whatever fish are left in the sea. The setting is remarkably unsettling, conjuring an ambience of entirely-realistic destruction. McConaghy crafted an eerie and emotionally charged novel wrapped around an uneasy narrator. Franny’s past unspools slowly in flashbacks throughout the book, delivered like a slowly dispersing fog. Her unfettered, willful nature ties the years together as we learn about her unconventional marriage to Niall Lynch, a disarming professor passionate about conservation.
The Last Girl by Nadia Murad
It’s always hard to review a memoir, but this one particularly so. In The Last Girl, Nadia Murad recounts her experience of living through ISIS’s takeover of her Yazidi community, the mass execution of most of the men, and the enslavement of the women to be sabaya (sex slaves) for the militants. Murad’s writing is clear & deliberate, detailing her trauma in hopes of raising awareness & bringing justice to bear on ISIS for their war crimes. She reminisces on her youth, growing up poor but with a loving mother, large family, and a very tight-knit religious minority community. Against this backdrop, the ISIS takeover & genocide is utterly devastating to read.
Nowhere Girl by Cheryl Diamond
In this riveting memoir, Cheryl (a.k.a. Crystal a.k.a. Harbhajan) recounts her childhood growing up on the run, crisscrossing the globe with her family in order to evade Interpol. Her earliest memories are in the Himalayas at the age of four, when her family were practicing Sikhs. From there, they live in Australia, South Africa, Romania, Israel, Canada, and the U.S. Apart from globe-trotting & elite athletics (she trains at a high level for both swimming and gymnastics), Diamond’s childhood set the stage for an extremely dysfunctional adolescence thanks to her charming yet intensely controlling father. Not only was the family on the run, they were living by his set of rules and principles that set them even further apart from regular society. When Cheryl finally tries to shed her family’s history and obtain legal citizenship, the depth of her situation comes to light. Having an authentic New Zealand birth certificate proves useless as claiming her citizenship would amount to fraud since her parents signed it with their aliases. She is truly a girl with no base. Diamond is an excellent writer, evoking a strong sense of place in each setting as well as offering insightful commentary on her emotional state along the journey.
Infinite Country by Patricia Engel
Sparse and affecting, this novel follows one Colombian family from the earliest days of the parents’ relationship on through two decades of life. Through fateful yet ordinary decisions, the family is fractured between their native Bogotá and the U.S. Talia, the youngest daughter, lives in Colombia with her father while her mother and two siblings carry on life in New Jersey. The story is rich with ambient language and poignant observations. In just under two hundred pages, Engel encapsulates the human toll of a bordered world and the tensions inherent in loving across distance. I was struck by the way Engel crafted the story to be both coherent and disparate, descriptive yet lean. It was as though the book’s style reflected the family’s situation. Masterfully, the novel balances heartbreaking circumstance with remarkable resilience in a way that does not reduce any character to an inspirational story.
Site Fidelity by Claire Boyles
Site Fidelity is a short story collection, reflecting on environmentalism, our responsibilities to those around us, economic hardship, and resilience in the face of difficulty. A few of the stories have intertwining characters, and all have some tie to Colorado. A few stories stood out in particular: In “Alto Cumulus Standing Lenticulars,” Ruth yearns for her home in Colorado after moving to Nevada with her love and then feeling their lives disintegrate with the introduction of children and the hardness of the recession. In “Early Warning System,” Mano challenges the authority that is poisoning the town’s water through negligence. In “Sister Agnes Mary in the Spring of 2012,” Sister Agnes reflects on a life dedicated to service and what she is called to do when her pre-school is threatened by environmentally-irresponsible development. In “Natural Resource Management,” Leah must deal with the fallout of a flood while also handling the fallout of her husband’s arrest.
Boyles has a way of deftly developing atmosphere and characters, quickly drawing the reader in to the varied lives we get to peek into. No two stories were alike, yet each struck a human chord that offered something relatable and poignant.
Everyone In This Room Will Someday Be Dead by Emily Austin
Gilda, the protagonist, is a late-twenties lesbian atheist who is wildly anxious and awkward. After receiving a flier for mental health services, she ends up at a Catholic church, is mistaken for a job applicant, and is offered the position of secretary. Desperate for work, Gilda accepts, though doing so requires a significant amount of identity-masking. She also must learn some of the rhythms of her new setting, which provides its own source of comedy.
This is a very character-driven novel. Gilda’s worries and thoughts make up the majority of the content — and it’s so very good. What I loved most about it was how real the depictions of anxiety and depression are. I related deeply to her panicky moments as she thought about things like the vastness of the universe and the insanity of skeletons. Austin wrote Gilda’s inner monologues with deftness and humor and humanity all baked in. Kindhearted yet debilitated by both fear & apathy, Gilda makes for a maladroit heroine that must attempt to navigate the world alongside her emotional chaos.
The Radium Girls by Kate Moore
When radium was discovered by the Curies at the turn of the century, it became something of a global phenomenon, used for countless purposes and much-sought after. Due to its luminescent quality, it was used to make watch faces and aircraft dials glow in the dark. Enter: the radium girls. They used a technique called lip-pointing to make their brush tips as narrow as possible. This meant putting the paint in their mouths, repeatedly, for the duration of their employment. At first, the dangers of radium were unknown (by the general public), then minimized, then outright denied. Unfortunately, these women would come to carry the truth in their bodies, over time dying gruesomely in alarming numbers from a previously-unstudied type of poisoning.
The book moves at a steady clip, imbuing with humanity the girls whose lives were treated as disposable. We learn of their families and dreams before radium wrecked their bodies. Bravely, a number of them stood up to the industry and fought for new worker protections and updated workers comp approved conditions, even with terminal diagnoses. What made this story particularly gripping was how relatively recently this took place as well as the eerie arguments used to discredit science, echoing a lot of present-day rhetoric. And, as is always true with these types of book, these women embodied resilience even though, had everyone acted compassionately and humanely from the get-go, they wouldn’t have been called to such bravery.
The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw
The Secret Lives of Church Ladies is a collection of short stories that spotlights Black women of various ages as they push against prescribed narratives & wrestle with purpose, sexuality, and worth. I can’t say every story was for me, but I thoroughly enjoyed How to Make Love to a Physicist, Peach Cobbler, Snowfall, and Instructions for Married Christian Men. The stories are rich, artistically diverse, and deeply human. I was surprised (perhaps I shouldn’t have been, given the word ‘secrets’ in the title) by how heavily sex factored in nearly all the stories. It was never gratuitous or explicit, but it did play a much larger role than I had expected. Additionally, I had the impression that the collection would be more... fun? Honestly, for the most part I found it fairly bleak. That’s not to say it wasn’t tender and at times funny, but most stories left me feeling rather melancholy. Each woman featured faces some significant strain — emotionally, relationally, etc — and I would have loved at least one story to be robustly joyful (the closest is How To Make Love to a Physicist). Finally, there is ample mention of church life & culture, but I wouldn’t define any of the protagonists as “church ladies.” They are all church-lady-adjacent, but perhaps that was Philyaw’s chosen device: a window into the lives of church ladies from those who are in some way outside the fold.
Dear White Peacemakers by Osheta Moore
If you aren’t yet familiar with Osheta Moore, she is a pastor and activist based in the Twin Cities. Her antiracism work is rooted in the idea that we are participants in bringing to fruition the Beloved Community in which people are uniquely valued and collectively embodies shalom. It is from this posture that she offers this deeply grace-filled book, addressed specifically to White peacemakers who are navigating the waters of racial reconciliation. I am truly awed by Osheta’s commitment to her kingdom ethic. She embodies the idea of loving correction. Every chapter of this book is full of nuance, vulnerability, education, and guidance. Ultimately, she names to her Gospel inspiration: that Jesus regularly points to a “third way” when presented with a binary choice.
White Tears / Brown Scars by Ruby Hamad
White Tears / Brown Scars is a remarkable, essential work. Hamad writes with extraordinary clarity and thoughtfulness, exposing the persistent systemic oppression of women of color and the intentionally cultivated cultural disdain for anything that even remotely threatens white supremacy. She outlines white women’s unique role in this oppression and calls out the cultural narcissism required to keep alive such a complex communal delusion. This will easily make my top three antiracism recommendations & would pair well with Ijeoma Oluo’s Mediocre. Once you pick it up, prepare to be brought along on an exceptional, scholarly exploration of the roots and tools of white supremacy, how women of color are caricatured and silenced, and the extremely dangerous weaponization of White Womanhood. What makes this book especially extraordinary is the writing style. Hamad somehow delivers deep truths in a way that is both sober and passionate. She communicates the depth of pain caused and simultaneously presents logical arguments for the dismantling of the responsible systems. To be frank, I wanted to highlight the entire book.
The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot by Marianne Cronin
The Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot follows the friendship of the eponymous women who are both residents in the terminal ward of the Glasgow Princess Royal Hospital. Lenni is seventeen and Margot is eighty-three, making their collective lives span one hundred years. When the pair meet in a patient art class, they decide to share their stories with one another as they paint matching vignettes. I thought this book was so lovely. It's slow and soft, charming in a way that is unique to inter-generational relationships. The two help one another to process some of the harder bits of their past, but also help each other live fully in whatever time they've got left. Lenni and Margot get into light mischief and show each other deep respect as committed friends.
Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi
This affecting novel follows Gifty, an Alabaman daughter of Ghanaian immigrants, who is pursuing a PhD in neuroscience. Her passion stems in part from her brother's death as a teenager due to an overdose. The story is slow-moving, reflective, and tenderly poignant. Gifty spends much of her time attempting to find a bearable balance of her faith and her profession. She struggles with the questions that plague her — first as a girl in youth group, implacable by platitudes but desperately eager to be good, then as a scientist, guarded yet drawn to the beautiful, comforting mystery of belief. Part of what makes this book so good is that it is simultaneously simple and extraordinarily perceptive. There is no major driving plot. You know most of what will happen before it does. And yet, ultimately, Gyasi found a way to engrossingly bring us along on the introspective journey of an earnest, thoughtful, brilliant woman sorting through her pain and grasping at hope.
We Keep the Dead Close by Becky Cooper
Becky Cooper heard a bit of Harvard folklore one day when she was an undergrad: an anthropology PhD student had been murdered in her off-campus apartment in the ‘60s by a professor with whom she’d had an affair. The case was never solved. The story was passed among students in hushed tones for the fifty intervening years. Something about the tale struck a chord with Cooper, and she ended up sucked into an attempt to find answers about the murder of Jane Britton for the next ten years of her life. In this book, she investigates the myths and suspicions and gossip. She interviews nearly everyone connected to the case who was still alive. She even goes on an dig in Eastern Europe so she can experience a bit of Jane’s world. She lays out the lore behind each major suspect and simultaneously probes on her own hunches. Throughout, Cooper is interrogating her own biases as well as our cultural obsession with compelling narratives. The reflective nature of the book is remarkable and, in my opinion, an important step away from academic “objectivity” and an acknowledgment of our positionality in relation to our research.
Becoming Brave by Dr. Brenda Salter McNeil
“Esther serves as an example for how to bravely deal with political powers, judicial leaders, government officials, college administrators, CEOs, and denominational hierarchy as we pursue reconciliation and equity for all people.” In this thoughtful and equipping book, Dr. McNeil uses Esther’s story as a guiding example of individual engagement with injustice. She mixes in personal anecdotes, current events, and theological reflections to talk about the urgency of racial reconciliation (in the church and in broader American society) and how we would be remiss to not heed that call. At one point, when examining Esther’s famous line (“If I perish, I perish,” verse 4:16), Dr. McNeil observes: “She decided to join in God’s reparative work in the world, knowing full well that there were no promises that everything would turn out okay. And that’s exactly what we’re being asked to do.”
Growing up, Esther was by far my favorite Bible story. I did not realize going in that Becoming Brave was written with Esther as the backbone, and I was thrilled to get to revisit and re-examine this personally formative story. Dr. McNeil added so much nuance and context to the narrative that I am even more moved by it now. Part of me attributes my bent towards justice work to Esther’s presence as a staple in my childhood.