Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me by Mariko Tamaki and Rosemary Valero-O’Connell (First Second, 2019)
★★★☆☆
I’m here for all the queer representation in this book! And for the wholesome message about reclaiming one’s own boundaries against toxic relationships. The illustrations are stunning, and I absolutely think this kind of story needs to be on YA shelves. So why only three stars?
First, I’m mad because I felt the character of Doodle was mistreated. This character had very little agency of her own and functioned mostly as (increasingly one-sided) support for Freddy. What little agency Doodle does have goes toward an action that’s intended to lash out at Freddy. It backfires, putting her in dire need of Freddy’s reciprocal support—which she receives, at long last—but the fact that Doodle primarily exists to a) want Freddy’s friendship/love, and b) get it, makes their relationship at the end (romantic or otherwise) feel at best too clean and at worst kind of coercive. It’s even worse because there is some suggestion that Doodle is ace or has difficulty with intimacy, and that orientation is utterly forgotten. I get that it’s not Doodle’s story, but this disappointed me and seriously undercut my enjoyment of the happy ending.
Second, I would have liked to see any communication from Freddy to Laura Dean about the feelings she was going through. There was only one scene even remotely like that, and it was one-sided: Dean pronounced that they would always come back to each other because they “got each other,” while Freddy answered in monosyllables. Freddy absolutely should have broken up with Dean, but I really wished—acknowledging that love and breakups are both hard and dramatic, as Anna Vice states—there had been a slightly more complex treatment of needs and boundaries, and at the very least even one instance of Freddy talking to Laura about her feelings.
Despite my peeves, I can acknowledge that the story depicts teenage love in all its messiness, and that no one in the story is a rational actor. I certainly felt all my feelings right along with Freddy: the deep insecurity of seeing your partner happy with someone else is something I’ve endured, and recently. I appreciated all the many forms love takes in this book, and the nod to polyamory. Overall, I’ll be elated to see more books like this join the YA canon.
—
The Big Book of Bisexual Trials and Errors by Elizabeth Beier (Northwest Press, 2017)
★★★★☆
As someone else who, like the author, began to embrace bisexuality only after leaving a long-term/monogamous/heterosexual relationship, I related hard to this graphic memoir about a woman in search of her first female partner. Still, I was surprised by the range of emotional beats the author was able to achieve: sometimes tender, sometimes cutting, sometimes laugh-out-loud hilarious—sometimes all at once. It’s clear that Beier has a lot of love for the younger self she depicts, even with that person’s own middling self-worth and unvarnished foibles. I was glad to see hyper-local queer stories and history woven into the larger narrative as well.
—
Home Remedies by Xuan Juliana Wang (Hogarth, 2019)
★★★★☆
I didn’t expect to enjoy and be affected by the (occasional) plotlessness of the stories in this collection as much as I did. One of my favorites was “Days of Being Mild,” a look into the lives of a group of twenty-something transplants to Beijing:
Our goal is to burn white hot, to prove that the Chinese, too, can be decadent and reckless. We are not good at math or saving money but we are very good at being young.
But I was even more moved by “Grandmaster Tu Eats Glass” (“White Tiger of the West” in some editions?), about a young boy who transforms himself into a Qigong grandmaster bent on capturing the attention and pockets of an American audience. The tenderness with which Wang describes an ultimately pitiful event in that story hit too close to home.
Four stars. A very strong debut.
—
Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas (Knopf, 2018)
★★★☆☆
I finished this book last month, but it’s kept me chewing on what I have to say about it. Generally, I think the argument is legitimate: “elites have spread the idea that people must be helped, but only in market-friendly ways that do not upset fundamental power equations.” But the argument is also huge, entailing a historical and sociological analysis going back to Carnegie, the Enlightenment, even as early as feudalism. And while Giridharadas attempts that analysis, and connects his political philosophy to his present-day critiques with incisive prose, there are a few places where he falters for too scant a scaffolding.
The book profiles several elites who interrogate and/or rationalize whether they’re having a positive impact on social problems (read: systemic injustices). After introducing us to the broad principles of the market-based thinking that characterizes their work, dubbed (perhaps over-simplistically) “MarketWorld,” Giridharadas goes on to examine how these elites are underserving the people they’re purporting to help.
This exercise is largely anecdotal, to mixed effect. For example, he uses Amy Cuddy’s popular TED Talk on body language to depict how elites reframe questions of “inequality”—e.g., sexism in the workplace—into more palatable, blameless questions of “poverty“—e.g., women feeling chronically less powerful. I found this a compelling and non-obvious case study. In a later chapter, though, he summarizes Purdue Pharma’s use of market-based arguments to evade regulation of OxyContin. While this argument is likewise compelling, not least for being evidence-based, it’s also hard to argue with the harm caused by the opioid epidemic.
Similarly, Giridharadas tends to use generalities as connective tissue. His claim about how “a baron wishing to withhold benefits from workers might reframe that desire as a prediction about a future in which every human being is a solo entrepreneur” landed, even a little too hard for my liking. But a comment elsewhere that the Internet “is dominated by an economics of monopoly, extraction, and surveillance (...) exploit[ing] and exacerbat[ing] existing inequalities in society” is as good as obvious.
And when his strokes get too broad, they become reductive:
A king presides over a multitude of truths. But a rebel, who takes no responsibility for the whole, is free to pursue his singular truth. That is the whole point of being a rebel. It is not in the rebel’s job description to worry about others who might have needs that are different from his.
Or:
In a world of true gender equality, might not the beauty industry shrink?
This isn’t the only way Giridharadas undermines himself. In another section, he argues that consultants who bring a technocratic, metrics-focused mindset to global problems are simply continuing “the colonial, imperial arrogance of the enlightened white man”—which I don’t even disagree with—but as to this, or to its more universal expression in Audre Lorde’s phrase “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” Giridharadas’s proposed alternative seems to be: do social science?
There’s a similarly tepid politics, in which he argues the status quo is not cool—i.e., “to do a modest bit of good while doing nothing about the larger system” is to “[chew] on the fruit of an injustice”—but he also reprimands anarchists for promoting a mode that “becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others” (Jo Freeman; and indeed, another place where I agree). I was glad to see this chastisement, since anarchy seems to be fashionable these days, but again, Giridharadas’s solution is: do democracy?
Maybe I’m one of the MarketWorlders he decries for seeking bite-sized, actionable solutions. Certainly I have more in common than not with the idealistic McKinseyite he depicts in the first chapter. But could he not have featured more people who are successfully doing the things he champions, or really any of the voices he says are less heard? It seemed at least 20% of the book could have been cut for how repeatedly it rehashed why and how rich people (Giridharadas’s admitted fellows) are part of the problem. As a Goodreads reviewer put it: “way more about just how oblivious and ignorant the upper class really is than I ever wanted or needed to know.”
Still, I’d call this book a must-read for anyone in the social impact/social entrepreneurship space (as I was for a hot minute). The premise is sound, even if, once you look past the lucid writing, the execution leaves something to be desired.