Insomnia, Marina Benjamin
Insomnia is a short collection of the thoughts one woman has when she should be sleeping, but can’t. They are as diverse as they are random, with references spanning from Sylvia Plath and Charlotte Perkins Gilman to Roberto Bolaño and Mary Oliver. However, her efforts to make a philosophical and/or theoretical argument relating insomnia to… anything really, fall short without a doubt, mainly because a number of the famous people (and by people I mean MEN) she references are problematic, and I long for the day when their being mentioned in other works is seen as problematic as well. Repeated references to authors such as Nabokov (a well-known sexual predator) and Picasso (a sexist who tried, and almost succeeded, to ruin his ex-wife’s life because she wanted a divorce), among others, as well as her use of slavery as a modern day comparison for our lives (“we…become slaves ourselves, to the clock, the market, the railroad”) only serve to distract from whatever point it is that she is trying to make. I was going to start this review by talking about how I should really stop reading memoirs, because I almost never find them to be fulfilling, but calling these pages full of paragraphs unlinked to one another (and with doubles spaces between each one!) a memoir would be giving it too much credit.
Conjure Women, Afia Atakora
One of my very good friends has been pushing me to read Conjure Women for quite some time (possibly years at this point) and I finally settled in and read it, and let me say, it did not disappoint. I am not normally super interested in Civil War era literature, but this book was…different. Any book that focuses on retelling literally anything from the point of view of a woman piques my interest, so I should I have known I would enjoy this book despite it being set in the years just before, during, and after the Civil War. Mae Belle and her daughter Rue are both known as healing women, and Atakora tells their stories going back and forth in time to show how their lives have been interweaved with the white family who owned them. After her mother’s death, Rue is left on her own to guide her newly freed community members while trying to keep them safe from the newly burgeoning KKK. Then a child born with a mysterious skin tone and eyes threatens to upend all the work she has done and the mutual trust she shares with the community, and she must find a way to save them all, from themselves or whatever is coming for them, she is not sure. But save them she must.