Alison Kinney (Author of Hood)

Alison rated a book it was amazing Tell Me Everything You Don't Remember: The Stroke That Changed My Life by Christine Hyung-Oak Lee (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
It was really strange and wonderful to read Christine Hyung-Oak Lee's TELL ME EVERYTHING YOU DON'T REMEMBER while undergoing a neurological event of my own. The first 50 pages or so made me feel dizzier and more nauseated! But that was OK, because: 1. ...more
Aug 23, 2026 12:06PM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Tell Me Everything You Don't Remember by Christine Hyung-Oak Lee. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Tell Me Everything You Don't Remember by Christine Hyung-Oak Lee <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Alison rated a book it was amazing Everybody Needs Something by Melanie Pappadis Faranello (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
I was so glad to read Melanie Pappadis Faranello's debut fiction collection EVERYBODY NEEDS SOMETHING. The stories are so finely wrought, so full of insight, and they turn purposefully ordinary folks and places into microcosms of sorrow and wonder. So ...more
Aug 17, 2026 11:06AM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Everybody Needs Something by Melanie Pappadis Faranello. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Everybody Needs Something by Melanie Pappadis Faranello <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Alison rated a book it was amazing The Translator's Daughter: A Memoir by Grace Loh Prasad (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
There’s no better way to introduce THE TRANSLATOR’S DAUGHTER, the debut memoir from Grace Loh Prasad, than her own words: “As the daughter of a translator and a child of diaspora, I’m often at a loss for words, stumbling over the edges and gaps where ...more
Aug 16, 2026 11:03AM · like · see review
Alison rated a book it was amazing How It Happens by Joyce E Young	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
I'm so delighted with Young's lovely debut collection, HOW IT HAPPENS, whose poems begin in a Brooklyn I recognize through friends' stories of growing up here ("Fulton Street Saturday Afternoon," "Stoops") and travel through cities, experiences, love ...more
Aug 10, 2026 01:07PM · like · see review
Alison rated a book it was amazing Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Díaz	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
What do I love best, poems of love, or poems of outrage and resistance? What's the difference to me, really? I was thinking that while reading Natalie Diaz's POSTCOLONIAL LOVE POEM. In "Manhattan Is a Lenape Word," the lines: "Somewhere far from New Y ...more
Aug 10, 2026 01:07PM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Díaz. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Díaz <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Alison rated a book it was amazing The Eighth Moon: A Memoir of Belonging and Rebellion by Jennifer Kabat (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Jennifer Kabat's marvelous THE EIGHTH MOON is the gorgeously written and structured first volume in a memoir diptych about home, land, and belonging in the Catskills that reads like a cross between two of my favorite books, Sebald's THE RINGS OF SATU ...more
Aug 03, 2026 10:20AM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of The Eighth Moon by Jennifer Kabat. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — The Eighth Moon by Jennifer Kabat <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Alison rated a book it was amazing Love at First Prompt: AI and the Future of Intimacy by Bridget Todd	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
I felt bitterly disappointed that I was too sick to have my book talk with Bridget Todd in Washington, DC, where we were going to discuss the resonances between my book and her new, wonderful audiobook, LOVE AT FIRST PROMPT: AI AND THE FUTURE OF INTI ...more
Jul 28, 2026 11:30AM · like · see review
Alison rated a book it was amazing Call Her Freedom by Tara Dorabji (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
CALL HER FREEDOM follows decades of Aisha's life in a fictional village in a country resembling Kashmir. For me, the strongest character was the land itself: embattled, occupied--and green and flourishing, whether it's standard crops, the controversi ...more
Jul 28, 2026 11:29AM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Call Her Freedom by Tara Dorabji. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Call Her Freedom by Tara Dorabji <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Alison rated a book it was amazing Birds of Los Angeles by Wendy S. Walters	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Wendy Walters is one of the all-time great writers of our century, and I was thrilled to find and read a copy of her BIRDS OF LOS ANGELES. I'm now too sick to write the mini-review I'd wanted to write, but every line of the poems made me consciously t ...more
Jul 18, 2026 09:05AM · like · see review
Alison rated a book it was amazing How We See the Gray: A Novel by Rachel León (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Latest in #BookJoy: Rachel León's debut novel, HOW WE SEE THE GRAY, is a warm, empathetic community drama, a multi-perspective narrative sharing the stories of overlapping groups in Rockford, IL, centered around children and adults in the foster care ...more
Jun 11, 2026 07:42AM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of How We See the Gray by Rachel León. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — How We See the Gray by Rachel León <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">

Alison rated a book it was amazing

Tell Me Everything You Don't Remember by Christine Hyung-Oak Lee

Tell Me Everything You Don't Remember: The Stroke That Changed My Life
by Christine Hyung-Oak Lee (Goodreads Author)

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It was really strange and wonderful to read Christine Hyung-Oak Lee's TELL ME EVERYTHING YOU DON'T REMEMBER while undergoing a neurological event of my own. The first 50 pages or so made me feel dizzier and more nauseated! But that was OK, because:
1. It was really strange and wonderful to read Christine Hyung-Oak Lee's TELL ME EVERYTHING YOU DON'T REMEMBER while undergoing a neurological event of my own. The first 50 pages or so made me feel dizzier and more nauseated! But that was OK, because:
1. Ecco REALLY should reissue this memoir, and maybe without the subtitle, because while telling us everything about having an unexpected youthful stroke, it says so much that's broadly relevant about the traumas and the opportunities of being forced to build and rebuild one's own body, life, and concept of self. And as memoir, it amazingly challenges and reinvents what we think we understand about memoir and memory, in the most visceral, injured, and regenerative ways possible.
2. It's wonderfully written: lyrical, perceptive, sharply funny, and very honest about illness, self-esteem, brutal encounters with failure and loss, and the frustratingly slow nonlinearity of healing: "Recovery is harder to write, because of this uneven arc. How to let the reader know how it feels to navigate terrain while providing a forward-moving story? How to be frustrated, and not make the reader frustrated—and to glean lessons learned and portray a kind of resilience without glorifying yourself? It is different from the sickness, which is something that happens, a flood of descriptions and confusion and a definite downward slide—initial affliction is a more exciting and cohesive narrative. Recovery is a day in, day out onslaught of alternating perseverance and self-pitying tears. Was today better than yesterday? Sometimes it was not. Was this week better than last week? Sometimes it was not. Was this month better than last month? Probably. Wake up each morning and ask, “Is this good enough?” Because you know that this might very well be the full extent of recovery. Recovery is repetitive. Keep doing the same things over and over again. Fail all the time, react to the failure, learn from it, feel from it, move on. Do it again. Fail some of the time, react to the failure, learn from the failure, feel the failure, and then recognize the successes, react, learn, feel, move on. Each time, different reactions, different lessons learned, different emotions, and then moving on. Go to occupational therapy. Write words. Go to therapy again. Write a small sentence. Go to therapy again. Write a longer sentence. Wake up. Wake up." OMG yes.
3. I read this after regaining the ability to read books. I felt completely riveted--and was willing to feel sicker afterwards for the pleasure of immersion in the pages. Lee writes of their own health, but the writing rings true for me in so many ways (like when she describes feeling *better* during an MRI: "It was peaceful inside the tube. I had been craving a small space. The world had been too big since my stroke."). I imagine that other people enduring other forms of catastrophic and/or chronic illness will also feel affinities. "If I pushed myself too hard—say, went to a department store and then went to lunch with a friend in a noisy restaurant, I would be near collapse with disorientation and fatigue. In fact, I would have to sleep and rest the next day, too. Those were times that felt like two steps forward, three steps back. It still is that way. If I am at a high-decibel restaurant and I am already tired and I’m with people I don’t know, I want to clap my hands over my ears and close my eyes and stop talking. This is not the way I used to be."
I pulled so many gorgeous quotes from this book and won't share them all: instead, you can just read it. And we'll hope it gets reissued, because this was exactly the book I needed right now, but it's also the book that so many of us need, even if we haven't been ill, to live better in a world where so many live with these realities every day. This is a book that teaches us about what recovery should and shouldn't be, but also, to share the singular vision of an artist who learned beautiful things the hard way, and very much their own way. Thank you! ...more

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Everybody Needs Something
by Melanie Pappadis Faranello (Goodreads Author)

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I was so glad to read Melanie Pappadis Faranello's debut fiction collection EVERYBODY NEEDS SOMETHING. The stories are so finely wrought, so full of insight, and they turn purposefully ordinary folks and places into microcosms of sorrow and wonder.
So I was so glad to read Melanie Pappadis Faranello's debut fiction collection EVERYBODY NEEDS SOMETHING. The stories are so finely wrought, so full of insight, and they turn purposefully ordinary folks and places into microcosms of sorrow and wonder.
Some of the characters are children, but I'd like to give a special thumbs-up to the gorgeous middle-agedness of most of the stories: "Jack surveyed his organs, the ones he knew by name anyway. Go on, he said to each one as though demanding away a stray having wandered onto his property. Stubborn, lost, looking for love. Go on, go, find a new body to work for, do the one thing you were designed to do, and do it well."
Mourning for children--those you were, those you've had--who are grown and lost is a major theme, alongside the quest to define what it means to be, or not to be, "fine" amidst it all. Here's a couple mourning their missing daughter and visiting her "simple clubhouse. A hideaway. A place to be a child, to make believe, to read magazines, and later to kiss boys, to smoke and drink. A bunker in the sky. Just a quarter mile from homebase. What fools they were to make this pilgrimage today. Their daughter on that motorcycle, hair whipping across her face, pursed lips, in the corner of the photo, a gray shirtsleeve belonging to the prehistoric dinosaur who was riding their daughter away, driving her away down some windy rocky road."
Then, "As they headed back through the woods, a different silence descended. They stepped over damp logs and matted leaves, unwinding their way through this territory they knew so well, crossing the half mile of land that if one kept going would extend toward route 99, and even further, right into the parking lot of the Kreugers that went up last spring, and beyond that across the Butler’s farm, which had been ravaged last summer from the drought, Bob Butler never fully recovering from the toll it took, but word was it also had something to do with little Robbie going off to Afghanistan and coming home six months later only to be shipped off again, and beyond that the Elmwood subdivision where some of the bible folks lived, and even further to some windy road with a wall of boulders where their only daughter was riding away, but that was a place they didn’t know and Dawn stopped her thoughts from going there. But this here—that elm, and the fallen oak, and the poison ivy crawling around that rotted stump, and the patch of clover around the bend, they knew this stretch of woods as well as the dogs who’d learned their way since they were pups. But none of that made Martin’s strange reticence any better. His silence unsettled her." It leads to my favorite, most astonishing conclusion in the collection, such love, mystery, and healing. And a masterclass in world-building.
The collection reminds me of why I first fell in love with short stories, but with a different and renewed appreciation and excitement: they're stories for the reader and writer I am NOW. Thank you! ...more

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The Translator's Daughter by Grace Loh Prasad

The Translator's Daughter: A Memoir
by Grace Loh Prasad (Goodreads Author)

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There’s no better way to introduce THE TRANSLATOR’S DAUGHTER, the debut memoir from Grace Loh Prasad, than her own words:
“As the daughter of a translator and a child of diaspora, I’m often at a loss for words, stumbling over the edges and gaps where There’s no better way to introduce THE TRANSLATOR’S DAUGHTER, the debut memoir from Grace Loh Prasad, than her own words:
“As the daughter of a translator and a child of diaspora, I’m often at a loss for words, stumbling over the edges and gaps where we switch from one system to another, where we lack a perfect translation or direct equivalent. I would give you an example, but I can’t find one I am satisfied with. I am terrified of getting it wrong. I have written and rewritten this paragraph over and over because the hardest thing to write about is what you don’t know. How do I explain that living in two cultures is both abundance and loss at the same time? How do I describe the things I miss from another place and time when I don’t have words for them?”
The book begins with a nightmarishly Kafkaesque story of being caught in the limbo of international airport border control when the narrator has—in a way that’s simultaneously nervewracking, hilarious, and exasperating—failed not only to show up on the right night, but also to bring an unexpired passport: “I’ve never spent time in Taiwan when I wasn’t with my parents. They always mediate and translate for me. Without them, I lose the context I’ve always depended on for my visits. They’re the only way I can connect with anything here—my relatives, the language and customs, the insider’s knowledge of the city. The little bit of independence that I have—walking around Sanhsia or taking the bus alone to certain parts of Taipei—is based on observation, repetition, and the growing usage of English signs. But I still can’t order my own food in a restaurant, let alone deal with a hostile bureaucracy without assistance. I never imagined I might have to learn to navigate Taiwan on my own. What would I do if my parents weren’t here to bail me out? How would I communicate? Who would I call for help?”
This is a book about the trauma of disconnection, diaspora, and many, many kinds of loss. It moves between the literalizing of the metaphor of being caught between languages and worlds and the even further extension of that metaphor through the personal grief for and losses (over years, and in many ways) of the narrator's parents. It explores so many of the ways in which grief can be, in addition to all the sadness and other expected feelings, an unsolvable conundrum, a confrontation with one's own inadequacies, and an opportunity for bracingly honest exploration of failure. It's also a real vivification, and memorial, of what communication can look like within the protection of a loving family.

"All my life, my dad's voice was enough for both of us. He was the one who always spoke for me, translated for me, eased my passage across borders, provided the bridge I needed without my having to ask. As the translator's daughter, I was safe, I was accounted for, I never had to worry about being stranded. But what happens when the translator can no longer speak?"

Well: then a book like this might happen. It's a beautifully written book, not a word out of place, and it provides an answer to that question that perhaps only an appreciative reader can perceive. Thank you, Grace! ...more

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How It Happens
by Joyce E Young

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I'm so delighted with Young's lovely debut collection, HOW IT HAPPENS, whose poems begin in a Brooklyn I recognize through friends' stories of growing up here ("Fulton Street Saturday Afternoon," "Stoops") and travel through cities, experiences, love ...more

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Postcolonial Love Poem
by Natalie Díaz

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What do I love best, poems of love, or poems of outrage and resistance? What's the difference to me, really? I was thinking that while reading Natalie Diaz's POSTCOLONIAL LOVE POEM. In "Manhattan Is a Lenape Word," the lines:
"Somewhere far from New Y ...more

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The Eighth Moon: A Memoir of Belonging and Rebellion
by Jennifer Kabat (Goodreads Author)

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Jennifer Kabat's marvelous THE EIGHTH MOON is the gorgeously written and structured first volume in a memoir diptych about home, land, and belonging in the Catskills that reads like a cross between two of my favorite books, Sebald's THE RINGS OF SATU Jennifer Kabat's marvelous THE EIGHTH MOON is the gorgeously written and structured first volume in a memoir diptych about home, land, and belonging in the Catskills that reads like a cross between two of my favorite books, Sebald's THE RINGS OF SATURN and Jean Craighead George's MY SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN (which Kabat's also written about!). It's full of politics, ecology, and the delicate work of building homes and friendships, against the Catskills' long histories of tenant farming, the NYC water system, and, prominently, the relationship between the 1839-1845 Anti-Rent War and contemporary politics, through anti-capitalism, socialism, collectivism, and rural/urban connections, echoing Benjamin on fragments of the past and "the spark of hope":
"Progress undermines radical histories. They always fail as if there are winners and losers and those pasts are over. As if those movements are not present here all along.
To reconsider time is to write against this. Without linear time, those revolutions are alive. They all offer propositions that are unfinished and here for us to take up. They cut across these years, and we can gather them together."
It's a great personal, familial, and cultural history of belonging, on all levels: Kabat writes that lichens "are a cooperative ecosystem, fungi and algae joined as one, spreading on rocks and trees. On Clum's apple trees they spiral out in a circle called a green shield. The partners, the algae and fungi, each work together to gain water and nutrients from the atmosphere, from rain and dust.... The word lichen comes from the Greek, to lick. I think again, I bought the soil. I eat the soil through these lichen as the organism connects rocks and earth. It connects me to the ground here....
And the soil remembers. Dig into it with a spade, you see roots tangled under the surface. It's limned with delicate fine filaments. My heart breaks, tearing into them. The ground takes years to recover. Soils hold the history of a place, and around Clum's foundations nettles and gooseberries grow. By the barn's grand stone walls, jack-in-the-pulpits spread."
As a POC who grew up in a conservative small town, I'd have liked more contradictions in the talk about property ownership in a gentrifying region and the desire for belonging amongst Trump voters; maybe these get discussed more in the second volume. But overall this is one of the most beautifully written, satisfying books I've read in the past several years. Thank you! ...more

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Love at First Prompt: AI and the Future of Intimacy
by Bridget Todd

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I felt bitterly disappointed that I was too sick to have my book talk with Bridget Todd in Washington, DC, where we were going to discuss the resonances between my book and her new, wonderful audiobook, LOVE AT FIRST PROMPT: AI AND THE FUTURE OF INTI I felt bitterly disappointed that I was too sick to have my book talk with Bridget Todd in Washington, DC, where we were going to discuss the resonances between my book and her new, wonderful audiobook, LOVE AT FIRST PROMPT: AI AND THE FUTURE OF INTIMACY (which I luckily got to read as an advance text copy: some of you know that auditory processing is a problem for me). It’s a fantastically readable, well written book that explores intimacies and conversations between people and AI chatbots, a subject that a lot of people approach with disapproval, fascination, voyeurism—or identification and shame—in order to explore something truly important: “The real question isn’t whether it’s weird or sad or pathetic to talk to a chatbot. The real question is, who profits from our intimacy and what are they doing with it?”
The book explores with strong empathy, humor, and critical acuity what intimacy, vulnerability, and loneliness look like in a nation with a broken mental healthcare system, when exploited by corporations. “It’s almost as if the stresses, uncertainties, and general shortcomings of the American healthcare system have created a need that is perfectly filled by a tool like AI.... It’s the slow normalization of reliance on an extractive system.”
I knew about Bridget’s work from the IRL Podcast, and once again, these are exactly the framings I want for thinking about AI. “We’re asking whether it’s healthy for individuals to develop relationships with AI. We should be asking whether it’s ethical for companies to engineer emotional dependency and then profit from it. We’re worried about whether people are replacing human connection. We should be demanding to know what companies are doing with the intimate data we share in our moments of vulnerability.” Karen Hao in an interview asks, “Does this particular AI tool or practice or artifact shift power in ways that consolidate it in the hands of the few, or in ways that distribute it in the hands of the many?” Todd asks: “Does it fortify democracy or erode it? Does it treat us as humans deserving of care, or as resources to be extracted?”
This is was such a great read. Happy launch to Bridget and thanks! ...more

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Call Her Freedom
by Tara Dorabji (Goodreads Author)

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CALL HER FREEDOM follows decades of Aisha's life in a fictional village in a country resembling Kashmir. For me, the strongest character was the land itself: embattled, occupied--and green and flourishing, whether it's standard crops, the controversi CALL HER FREEDOM follows decades of Aisha's life in a fictional village in a country resembling Kashmir. For me, the strongest character was the land itself: embattled, occupied--and green and flourishing, whether it's standard crops, the controversial and radiant poppy fields, byways full of medicinal herbs, children's walks to and from school, and mountain picnic grounds (perilously close to checkpoints). The evergreen maples are characters. The herbs are characters. Fittingly, in a place where the land is home, health, history, and the grounds for and the object of colonization, occupation, and war.
My favorite passages were actually exile passages in the city, where Aisha and her family meet people at home in their own worlds:
"Aisha removed her mask and washed her face in the water. Washed all the tears away. Four splashes of water, and she prayed to the east in the direction of the rising sun; she prayed for herself—that she would be healed. Clear water in the bucket. The chaiwallah nodded, appearing undisturbed that she had just bathed in his water."
And,
'“Why didn’t you ever marry, Maasi?”
“I figured I’d have to do twice as much cooking and twice as much laundry, unless we had children, and if we did, then think how much more there would be to cook and clean.”
Farooq studied her. “Why the bookstore?"
“It’s so easy to snap our internet. One day to the next, we are used to this now. But it takes much longer to go house to house, burning our books. I’m too old now to write my own book, Farooq. But these are the memories, the fragments of truth. You will find your way. Or maybe it will be your wife.”
“What do you mean?”
“If you do her laundry, maybe she will have time to write the book. That would be something new. Something different. Something, how do you say? Not so boring.”'
In a book about building, protecting, and losing home, it's not surprising that these passages occur in moments of strangers' welcome.
Thank you for the welcome into the novel! ...more

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Birds of Los Angeles
by Wendy S. Walters

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Wendy Walters is one of the all-time great writers of our century, and I was thrilled to find and read a copy of her BIRDS OF LOS ANGELES.
I'm now too sick to write the mini-review I'd wanted to write, but every line of the poems made me consciously t ...more

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How We See the Gray: A Novel
by Rachel León (Goodreads Author)

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Latest in #BookJoy: Rachel León's debut novel, HOW WE SEE THE GRAY, is a warm, empathetic community drama, a multi-perspective narrative sharing the stories of overlapping groups in Rockford, IL, centered around children and adults in the foster care Latest in #BookJoy: Rachel León's debut novel, HOW WE SEE THE GRAY, is a warm, empathetic community drama, a multi-perspective narrative sharing the stories of overlapping groups in Rockford, IL, centered around children and adults in the foster care system: families (biological and chosen), carers, employees--and people who belong to more than one group. It's about people who struggle to be happy, compassionate, effective, surviving, and loving inside and outside families and groupings that have often, catastrophically, let them down. Sometimes it feels like a sitcom; sometimes like a bit of a thriller; sometimes like a Russian novel! (I love all these genres!) Throughout, León's practice of sharing and resharing stories, questioning hegemonic narratives, and introducing doubts reinforces their aesthetic and ethical practice of sitting within, and through, all those gray moments in our personal lives, relationships, and work (emphasis on the work!), where choices are hard, determining what's right or wrong is harder, and the consequences can be hardest of all. It's this ethical urgency that really makes the work of empathy, understanding, and committing to try again so compelling. It's also wonderfully written, constructed (it feels effortlessly dramatic), and a great read. (I'll add that, as an adoptee who takes offense to almost everything written by outsiders about The System, León's insider knowledge and experience AND their empathy and imagination were welcome.)
A passage I loved: "We don’t claim to be storytellers, but we specialize in stories. Our job involves collecting them, watching them unfold, and interfering to change their course. Then we write court reports outlining the events and let the judge decide where things go from there. Because we look from every angle, we believe we know the truth. Easy to forget we only see what people show us (or get caught doing). We can forget that truth isn’t absolute; it ebbs and flows like the river that runs through our beautiful, flawed city." ...more

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	Hood by Alison Kinney (Goodreads Author), Ian Bogost (Series Editor), Alison Kinney (Goodreads Author) 3.93 avg rating — 121 ratings — published 2016 — 7 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Avidly Reads Opera 4.25 avg rating — 20 ratings — 3 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	United States of Rejection: A Story of Love, Hate, and Hope (Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction) really liked it 4.00 avg rating — 3 ratings — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

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