I don’t know how to review this book, except I started it in anticipatory loss and it didn’t hit home until after — flipping back through it, after my loss, this quote slapped me.
There was a quote about crossing the river that was also very good, but that’s on my instagram and I’m too lazy to track it down now.
‘Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be. It was not what I felt when my parents died: my father died a few days short of his eighty-fifth birthday and my mother a month short of her ninety-first, both after some years of increasing debility. What I felt in each instance was sadness, loneliness (the loneliness of the abandoned child of whatever age), regret for time gone by, for things unsaid, for my inability to share or even in any real way to acknowledge, at the end, the pain and helplessness and physical humiliation they each endured. I understood the inevitability of each of their deaths. I had been expecting (fearing, dreading, anticipating) those deaths all my life. They remained, when they did occur, distanced, at a remove from the ongoing dailiness of my life…
My father was dead, my mother was dead, I would need for a while to watch for mines, but I would still get up in the morning and send out with laundry…
Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life. Virtually everyone who has ever experienced grief mentions this phenomenon of “waves.”’
This book is really more of a memoir that covers topics that other books like Bitch Doctrine and Trick Mirror handle a bit more skillfully. Even though myth is the lens it attempts to use, it barely looks through it. Myth is the excuse, not the reason this book exists. Most topics were a bit fleeting and would have better fit in blog posts or articles.
DNF. This felt more like a middle grade novel that had their MC aged up to market better? I have no doubt that a young teen would like this book more, but I was having a tough time believing that she was 17. I did appreciate the supportive, healthy family dynamic, though there was a bit of awkwardness when addressing the indigeneity of her cousin’s Hispanic wife, who very well might have been of indigenous North American decent but was bluntly described as not “Native” (pg 57). It wasn’t handled very well, in my opinion, and came off as policing indignity but I’m guessing the history between the Apache and Mexicans is why it was brought up in the first place. I also found it hard to believe that, with so many “supernatural things” being overt and undeniable in this version of the universe that we would still have places like Texas. I don’t think that, for instance, if it were impossible to deny such supernatural aspects like ghosts and the Fae (from Europe) and vampires that Christianity would have had such an impact that it did across the globe or that, therefore, colonialism would have still happened. I don’t think the world would be so similar as it was represented in this book. I found that hard to reconcile. But what I did love was her ghost dog, Kirby. That will rip your heart out.
I think I want to say that I think this book is what praxis without ethics looks like. He didn’t know what or why he was doing what he did at first. Maybe he did come to an answer, but did that make it right? Pretty sure many disturbed (is that the word I’m looking for? Troubled?) people have come to similar awakenings, after realizing why they did something after years of not being able to rationalize their behavior. Parts were so beautiful it brought me to tears, but ultimately the ending felt like he, a white man, was using indigenous meat-eating practices as just one more way to justify his own killing and eating, which, in my view, will never justify his eating and killing of animals for meat when he has other options and traditions available to him. That isn’t kinship. It’s him romanticizing the relations of one people with a species. His conclusions did not satisfy me. So, no, I don’t think he’s trying to understand why humans are still drawn to meat-eating. It’s not a question that needs to be asked any more than why do humans cause war or suffering or do evil. The answers are too varied and of course his conclusion fed into what he was already doing. What is the point on meditating on what is, if you also fail to imagine something better?
“The only way to really stop life from changing is to kill it.”
This book convinced me that embalming is ridiculous except for rare occasions so please burn me as is. 🚫⚰🚫
🧹🧹🧹When I requested this book I thought it was literally going to be a travel guide that recommended sites and that it would have pictures. Instead, it’s more of a travel log of someone going to places while giving historical context to witches. I learned more about saints than witches, honestly, and the author made that line blend more for me. I have a greater appreciation for Joan of Arc, for one. Here’s some quotes I liked.
Panda (Duh) 