Reviews

This memoir covers many topics: disability, the differences between po and poor, strong Puerto Rican mothering, your ride-and-die gals, step-parenting, single motherhood, addiction, and the healing power of burlesque.

Owens’s journey explores how she handled universal struggles and finally found her voice to create an award-winning podcast and a relatable book that tackles relationships, love, food issues, the writing life, and finding one’s true calling. 

Essential Labor underscores the reality of an American society in which production and efficiency are king, with caregiving devalued on a massive scale.

For our Literary Mama crowd, this is a compelling narrative about how we come to define and understand mothers.

Those who love reading a good page-turner will find plenty to captivate their attention in The Night She Went Missing.

Mei wants to “live like a hero,” even at the cost of an identity that she’s surrendered before possession.

Kid Gloves is a graphic novel that deals with anxiety, depression, severe nausea, doctors who don’t listen, and loneliness.

Life is often a messy escapade, and we rarely have the luxury of dealing with one gut punch before the next one is there to knock us on our keisters again. Which just makes the title of the memoir, Knocked Down, all the more apt.

Though it is clear the book is set in a kind of vaguely dystopian world, with surveillance and expectations on steroids, it feels like a place we are doomed to end up if we don’t start dialing down the expectations forced upon  mothers.

It’s heartbreak and fear in the face of possible joy. For anyone who is facing fertility challenges, Blevins’s attempts to communicate these feelings is a gift. 

Each story in How Far I’ve Come is a gem, glittery with wit, polished with nuance, steeped in life’s inevitable, inescapable ironies.