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Monsters: a reckoning
‘This figure I see in the foreground, this me. How monstrous am I? What does it mean to be a monster? From Latin monstrum, meaning an abomination … grotesque, hideous, ugly, ghastly, gruesome, horrible …
‘I was born as part of a monstrous structure — the grotesque, hideous, ugly, ghastly, gruesome, horrible relations of power that constituted colonial Britain. A structure that shaped me, that shapes the very language that I speak and use and love. I am the daughter of an empire that declared itself the natural order of the world.’
From award-winning writer and critic Alison Croggon, Monsters is a hybrid of memoir and essay that takes as its point of departure the painful breakdown of a relationship between two sisters. It explores how our attitudes are shaped by the persisting myths that underpin colonialism and patriarchy, how the structures we are raised within splinter and distort the possibilities of our lives and the lives of others. Monsters asks how we maintain the fictions that we create about ourselves, what we will sacrifice to maintain these fictions — and what we have to gain by confronting them.
‘I was born as part of a monstrous structure — the grotesque, hideous, ugly, ghastly, gruesome, horrible relations of power that constituted colonial Britain. A structure that shaped me, that shapes the very language that I speak and use and love. I am the daughter of an empire that declared itself the natural order of the world.’
From award-winning writer and critic Alison Croggon, Monsters is a hybrid of memoir and essay that takes as its point of departure the painful breakdown of a relationship between two sisters. It explores how our attitudes are shaped by the persisting myths that underpin colonialism and patriarchy, how the structures we are raised within splinter and distort the possibilities of our lives and the lives of others. Monsters asks how we maintain the fictions that we create about ourselves, what we will sacrifice to maintain these fictions — and what we have to gain by confronting them.
288 pages, Paperback
Published March 2, 2021
4 people are currently reading
206 people want to read
About the author
Alison Croggon
54 books1,729 followersAlison Croggon is the award winning author of the acclaimed fantasy series The Books of Pellinor. You can sign up to her monthly newsletter and receive a free Pellinor story at alisoncroggon.com
Her most recent book is Fleshers, the first in a dazzling new SF series co-written with her husband, acclaimed playwright Daniel Keene. Her latest Pellinor book, The Bone Queen, was a 2016 Aurealis Awards Best Young Adult Book finalist. Other fantasy titles include Black Spring (shortlisted for the Young People's Writing Award in the 2014 NSW Premier's Literary Awards) and The River and the Book, winner of the Wilderness Society's prize for Environmental Writing for Children.
She is a prize-winning poet and theatre critic,, and has released seven collections of poems. As a critic she was named Geraldine Pascall Critic of the Year in 2009. She also writes opera libretti, and the opera she co-wrote with Iain Grandage was Vocal/Choral Work of the Year in the 2015 Art Music Awards. Her libretto for Mayakovsky, score by Michael Smetanin, was shortlisted in the Drama Prize for the 2015 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards. She lives in Melbourne..
Her most recent book is Fleshers, the first in a dazzling new SF series co-written with her husband, acclaimed playwright Daniel Keene. Her latest Pellinor book, The Bone Queen, was a 2016 Aurealis Awards Best Young Adult Book finalist. Other fantasy titles include Black Spring (shortlisted for the Young People's Writing Award in the 2014 NSW Premier's Literary Awards) and The River and the Book, winner of the Wilderness Society's prize for Environmental Writing for Children.
She is a prize-winning poet and theatre critic,, and has released seven collections of poems. As a critic she was named Geraldine Pascall Critic of the Year in 2009. She also writes opera libretti, and the opera she co-wrote with Iain Grandage was Vocal/Choral Work of the Year in the 2015 Art Music Awards. Her libretto for Mayakovsky, score by Michael Smetanin, was shortlisted in the Drama Prize for the 2015 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards. She lives in Melbourne..
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
May 10, 2021
This book made me angry.
I'm a white British immigrant in Australia, trying to figure out how to live and write on stolen land. I also have a complicated family, as does my partner (in her case, including an estranged sibling). I believe that individual lives are embedded in social, historical, cultural, political, affective networks that shape our subjectivities and map out the channels along which our actions and their consequences flow (something like Hannah Arendt's 'web' of deeds and words, into which all humans are born and within which we speak and act). I share a very similar theoretical and political perspective with Croggon - to the point where I can sometimes recognize the exact scholarly text she's paraphrasing or summarizing without acknowledgement (eg when she talks about the abjection of the maternal body in 'body horror' movies, without mentioning Barbara Creed's work on the monstrous-feminine).
I didn't like the way Croggon positioned herself in relation to other thinkers, and/or the way she presented her research for this book. When she mentions the actual process of research, she always says 'I looked at the internet': Google (an advertising company which presents results in the way that is most financially advantageous for late capitalist colonialist patriarchy) and Wikipedia (which is pretty awesome in many ways but also the subject of some pretty well-known critiques for its whiteness and maleness) are her most-cited authorities. I couldn't figure out her pattern of citations - she seems to cite mostly historians, for factual accounts, and the work of theoreticians and activist-scholars that very clearly informs her thinking is just straightforwardly appropriated. She does cite a couple of feminists of colour, and I wondered whether she was making a political point in not citing white feminists, but no, there's a ton of white female historians cited, as well as, inexplicably, most of a chapter consisting of block-quotes from Nietzsche. Anyway, whenever she was talking about gender or race, she spoke from as if she was putting forward her own thoughts and interpretations, even when she... very much wasn't. Which put my back up.
The strand about her conflict with her sister, which is presented as the thread that runs through this book (which is otherwise, as the author's note reveals, a compilation of columns she wrote for Overland), doesn't take up much space and... look, all I am going to say about that is that I ended up very much on the side of Croggon's sister, even without getting any real information about what the conflicts were about. (The clincher for me was the section on p.168, where Croggon says that she has done everything she can think of to mend things with her sister. Everything! From 'try[ing] to show her how [her view of things] wasn't true', to 'that final attempt to get her to listen, to hear me, to see me'.)
I see on Goodreads that there are two possible subtitles for this book: 'a memoir' and 'a reckoning'. It's very much the latter. Croggon writes at length about sexism, racism, the history of the British empire, and her own family history, touching on the Australian genocide (among many other imperial atrocities). But all the time, her main interest is in perhaps the least interesting question of the thousands of questions that are urgently posed in the colony: what is the most morally correct subject position for a settler descendant of imperialists?
(I actually think this whole book is driven by the fact that Croggon obviously identifies very strongly with the victims of Empire, but is aware that this is something that has been robustly critiqued by writers of colour and Indigenous thinkers, and she absolutely can't bear the thought that she might be criticized. So she writes 'I can only write my own story, but how is this not the same story...? How is this not the story of the conquerors? There is no answer to this one. And yet... I too have been silenced', and 'I recognize the mechanisms and techniques of marginalisation [from the stories of queer, Black and/or poor people she reads] because so many of them have happened to me'. This is the only explanation I can think of for why the Rachel Dolezal case takes up so much space in the book - Croggon even 'wonder[s] if in writing this I am somehow doing the same thing Dolezal does. It's difficult to say conclusivly that I'm not... I am not in blackface, I am not that grotesque'. And then, seven pages later, she reproduces her first "directly autobiographical poem", in which she identifies herself almost totally with Frida Kahlo, and says that seeing Kahlo's work was "the first time I sensed that there might be a tradition in which I might not be a misfit, wrong-sexed: a tradition that permitted me." She doesn't draw the connection between Dolezal's sense of "fit" with the African-American tradition, and her own self-insertion into Kahlo's Mexican feminism.)
Back to the 'moral reckoning' aspect of the book. Croggon worries endlessly that she's still centring the white self (which would be wrong), and talks about how she won't feel guilt (because it's wrong to feel guilt), and how maybe she is just being like the white writers she critiques (who are wrong), and how she is in fact in the right in the conflict with her sister (but it's wrong to feel that one is in the right, so she isn't going to come out and say she's in the right), and how the whole notion of rightness and wrongness is wrong, but we never, in 272 pages, get anywhere beyond a reckoning of rightness and wrongness - which is at the same time an obsession with how Croggon would look in the eyes of an imaginary judge:
That makes me angry, but it also makes me sad at the terrible waste of it all. As well as just, yes, responding to the problems of neocolonialism and genocide with yet another centring of white subjectivity, obsessed with the question of self-justification (albeit with some baroque twiddles of progressive thought: Croggon isn't justified because she believes in whiteness, but because she believes in examining whiteness), this book is a woman ruminating for 272 pages about how psychically intolerable it is to be in the position of not being right... and not even getting anywhere with that problem. Instead she writes as if the rumination itself is what will put her in the right. It's not surprising that the book ends with an apotropaic spell: the whole thing is a torturous attempt to avert judgement, blame, criticism, and save the 'good self' from the annihilating judgement of the Other.
I recognize it - it's one of the weak spots in my own psyche left from my own childhood - but that just makes me sadder and angrier. I wish Croggon had not just written out of this psychic snare, but about it.
I'm a white British immigrant in Australia, trying to figure out how to live and write on stolen land. I also have a complicated family, as does my partner (in her case, including an estranged sibling). I believe that individual lives are embedded in social, historical, cultural, political, affective networks that shape our subjectivities and map out the channels along which our actions and their consequences flow (something like Hannah Arendt's 'web' of deeds and words, into which all humans are born and within which we speak and act). I share a very similar theoretical and political perspective with Croggon - to the point where I can sometimes recognize the exact scholarly text she's paraphrasing or summarizing without acknowledgement (eg when she talks about the abjection of the maternal body in 'body horror' movies, without mentioning Barbara Creed's work on the monstrous-feminine).
I didn't like the way Croggon positioned herself in relation to other thinkers, and/or the way she presented her research for this book. When she mentions the actual process of research, she always says 'I looked at the internet': Google (an advertising company which presents results in the way that is most financially advantageous for late capitalist colonialist patriarchy) and Wikipedia (which is pretty awesome in many ways but also the subject of some pretty well-known critiques for its whiteness and maleness) are her most-cited authorities. I couldn't figure out her pattern of citations - she seems to cite mostly historians, for factual accounts, and the work of theoreticians and activist-scholars that very clearly informs her thinking is just straightforwardly appropriated. She does cite a couple of feminists of colour, and I wondered whether she was making a political point in not citing white feminists, but no, there's a ton of white female historians cited, as well as, inexplicably, most of a chapter consisting of block-quotes from Nietzsche. Anyway, whenever she was talking about gender or race, she spoke from as if she was putting forward her own thoughts and interpretations, even when she... very much wasn't. Which put my back up.
The strand about her conflict with her sister, which is presented as the thread that runs through this book (which is otherwise, as the author's note reveals, a compilation of columns she wrote for Overland), doesn't take up much space and... look, all I am going to say about that is that I ended up very much on the side of Croggon's sister, even without getting any real information about what the conflicts were about. (The clincher for me was the section on p.168, where Croggon says that she has done everything she can think of to mend things with her sister. Everything! From 'try[ing] to show her how [her view of things] wasn't true', to 'that final attempt to get her to listen, to hear me, to see me'.)
I see on Goodreads that there are two possible subtitles for this book: 'a memoir' and 'a reckoning'. It's very much the latter. Croggon writes at length about sexism, racism, the history of the British empire, and her own family history, touching on the Australian genocide (among many other imperial atrocities). But all the time, her main interest is in perhaps the least interesting question of the thousands of questions that are urgently posed in the colony: what is the most morally correct subject position for a settler descendant of imperialists?
(I actually think this whole book is driven by the fact that Croggon obviously identifies very strongly with the victims of Empire, but is aware that this is something that has been robustly critiqued by writers of colour and Indigenous thinkers, and she absolutely can't bear the thought that she might be criticized. So she writes 'I can only write my own story, but how is this not the same story...? How is this not the story of the conquerors? There is no answer to this one. And yet... I too have been silenced', and 'I recognize the mechanisms and techniques of marginalisation [from the stories of queer, Black and/or poor people she reads] because so many of them have happened to me'. This is the only explanation I can think of for why the Rachel Dolezal case takes up so much space in the book - Croggon even 'wonder[s] if in writing this I am somehow doing the same thing Dolezal does. It's difficult to say conclusivly that I'm not... I am not in blackface, I am not that grotesque'. And then, seven pages later, she reproduces her first "directly autobiographical poem", in which she identifies herself almost totally with Frida Kahlo, and says that seeing Kahlo's work was "the first time I sensed that there might be a tradition in which I might not be a misfit, wrong-sexed: a tradition that permitted me." She doesn't draw the connection between Dolezal's sense of "fit" with the African-American tradition, and her own self-insertion into Kahlo's Mexican feminism.)
Back to the 'moral reckoning' aspect of the book. Croggon worries endlessly that she's still centring the white self (which would be wrong), and talks about how she won't feel guilt (because it's wrong to feel guilt), and how maybe she is just being like the white writers she critiques (who are wrong), and how she is in fact in the right in the conflict with her sister (but it's wrong to feel that one is in the right, so she isn't going to come out and say she's in the right), and how the whole notion of rightness and wrongness is wrong, but we never, in 272 pages, get anywhere beyond a reckoning of rightness and wrongness - which is at the same time an obsession with how Croggon would look in the eyes of an imaginary judge:
Naturally, I can't help wondering if I am creating the same kind of spectacle as Orwell. I'm making a spectacle of my self.
That makes me angry, but it also makes me sad at the terrible waste of it all. As well as just, yes, responding to the problems of neocolonialism and genocide with yet another centring of white subjectivity, obsessed with the question of self-justification (albeit with some baroque twiddles of progressive thought: Croggon isn't justified because she believes in whiteness, but because she believes in examining whiteness), this book is a woman ruminating for 272 pages about how psychically intolerable it is to be in the position of not being right... and not even getting anywhere with that problem. Instead she writes as if the rumination itself is what will put her in the right. It's not surprising that the book ends with an apotropaic spell: the whole thing is a torturous attempt to avert judgement, blame, criticism, and save the 'good self' from the annihilating judgement of the Other.
I recognize it - it's one of the weak spots in my own psyche left from my own childhood - but that just makes me sadder and angrier. I wish Croggon had not just written out of this psychic snare, but about it.
Read
October 4, 2021A marvel of a book … Croggon spares no one, least of all herself, as she unearths colonial history and family complicity to scrutinise those demons that both torment and shape us. This is exactly the kind of book I have longed to see white authors write, and I love it for its refusal to provide easy answers to the dilemma at the heart of the modern human condition.
Ruby Hamad, author of White Tears/Brown Scars
Croggon is an autodidact and digs deepest into issues which interest her most. Her writing on femaleness and the patriarchy is excellent and follows her own feminist evolution … This is a unique blend of memoir and critical theory.
Bob Moore, Good Reading
Croggon’s background as a poet is tangible, and her language in Monsters is flavoursome … she is witty, self-reflective, raw.
Anna Westbrook , ArtsHub, starred review
What makes Monsters distinct, from opening bars to melancholy coda, is the nature of the pain it describes. Not the physical kind which holds at least the potential for relief, but the emotional distress emerging from a breakdown in the author’s relationship with one of her two younger sisters: a connection that has grown increasingly poisonous over time … Monsters becomes the effort to draw a global map of human hurt using the fractal experience of one woman’s domestic discord.
Geordie Williamson, The Weekend Australian
Monsters is a hybrid memoir about family, colonialism and how external forces invisibly shape us, by renowned critic and impressive brain Alison Croggon.
Jo Case, InDaily
Steady and acute self-scrutiny such as Croggon’s is necessary to a widening interrogation of privilege that underpins the illumination and refusal of racism and sexism and promised a historical pivot away from overt and covert violence … Monsters is full of gloriously expressed insights, such as the image of the internet as ‘a trauma machine, recording and reproducing millions of psychic wounds’ and, on the subject of #MeToo, the way an accumulation of incidents can contribute to a ‘deformation fo self’ … stylistically, the rhythms and sonic patterns of Croggon’s prose are a poet’s.
Felicity Plunkett, The Age
With Monsters, [Croggon] tackles one of contemporary literature’s most electric (and eclectic) forms — a kind of glorious literary mutant that braids socio-cultural contemplation and memoir; anchoring high-theory with visceral intimacy. She joins a sorority of glittering thinkers … whose work mimics what it feels like to stretch an idea out in your brain. True to type, Monsters is digressive, kaleidoscopic, and alive with questions.
Beejay Silcox, The Guardian
Sometimes it is in the gulf between what we value and how we act that we are truly revealed … Croggon cares deeply about this idea, of sitting with complexity … in every scorching appraisal of hierarchy and patriarchy, there is a central thought: there must be some explanation … For Croggon, the legacy of British colonialism is the notion that you can take someone’s story away from them. Monsters fights to reclaim the narrative.
Sarah Walker, Australian Book Review
In language at once fiery and elegant, [Croggon] reckons with the collective failures of her imperialist ancestors and the personal shame of their legacy. It’s a book I will return to often for its power and its truths.
Marina Benjamin, author of Insomnia
The searing opening spares no one, least of all Croggon as she details a toxic relationship with her sister … Woven in and out of all this are other ugly but very differently scaled relationships, from colonialism through which she details her own history, to the patriarchy and how it distorts the way we see even ourselves. Croggon is a talented writer, librettist, playwright and thinker, and her focus here is to understand and, in some ways, reconcile with all this dysfunction.
Penelope Debelle , SA Weekend, starred review
Monsters brings up interesting insights on trauma, power relations and the pathology of families.
Alastair Mabbott, The Herald
Young Adult author Croggon grapples with both personal and historical demons … [she] asks probing questions about self-perception and trauma … The monsters of the title are plentiful: throughout the essays she addresses her British colonialist ancestors, her abusive mother, the “traumatic tedium” of her relationship to her sister, and herself … Lyrically rendered, this reckoning will leave readers with plenty to think about.
Publishers Weekly
Ruby Hamad, author of White Tears/Brown Scars
Croggon is an autodidact and digs deepest into issues which interest her most. Her writing on femaleness and the patriarchy is excellent and follows her own feminist evolution … This is a unique blend of memoir and critical theory.
Bob Moore, Good Reading
Croggon’s background as a poet is tangible, and her language in Monsters is flavoursome … she is witty, self-reflective, raw.
Anna Westbrook , ArtsHub, starred review
What makes Monsters distinct, from opening bars to melancholy coda, is the nature of the pain it describes. Not the physical kind which holds at least the potential for relief, but the emotional distress emerging from a breakdown in the author’s relationship with one of her two younger sisters: a connection that has grown increasingly poisonous over time … Monsters becomes the effort to draw a global map of human hurt using the fractal experience of one woman’s domestic discord.
Geordie Williamson, The Weekend Australian
Monsters is a hybrid memoir about family, colonialism and how external forces invisibly shape us, by renowned critic and impressive brain Alison Croggon.
Jo Case, InDaily
Steady and acute self-scrutiny such as Croggon’s is necessary to a widening interrogation of privilege that underpins the illumination and refusal of racism and sexism and promised a historical pivot away from overt and covert violence … Monsters is full of gloriously expressed insights, such as the image of the internet as ‘a trauma machine, recording and reproducing millions of psychic wounds’ and, on the subject of #MeToo, the way an accumulation of incidents can contribute to a ‘deformation fo self’ … stylistically, the rhythms and sonic patterns of Croggon’s prose are a poet’s.
Felicity Plunkett, The Age
With Monsters, [Croggon] tackles one of contemporary literature’s most electric (and eclectic) forms — a kind of glorious literary mutant that braids socio-cultural contemplation and memoir; anchoring high-theory with visceral intimacy. She joins a sorority of glittering thinkers … whose work mimics what it feels like to stretch an idea out in your brain. True to type, Monsters is digressive, kaleidoscopic, and alive with questions.
Beejay Silcox, The Guardian
Sometimes it is in the gulf between what we value and how we act that we are truly revealed … Croggon cares deeply about this idea, of sitting with complexity … in every scorching appraisal of hierarchy and patriarchy, there is a central thought: there must be some explanation … For Croggon, the legacy of British colonialism is the notion that you can take someone’s story away from them. Monsters fights to reclaim the narrative.
Sarah Walker, Australian Book Review
In language at once fiery and elegant, [Croggon] reckons with the collective failures of her imperialist ancestors and the personal shame of their legacy. It’s a book I will return to often for its power and its truths.
Marina Benjamin, author of Insomnia
The searing opening spares no one, least of all Croggon as she details a toxic relationship with her sister … Woven in and out of all this are other ugly but very differently scaled relationships, from colonialism through which she details her own history, to the patriarchy and how it distorts the way we see even ourselves. Croggon is a talented writer, librettist, playwright and thinker, and her focus here is to understand and, in some ways, reconcile with all this dysfunction.
Penelope Debelle , SA Weekend, starred review
Monsters brings up interesting insights on trauma, power relations and the pathology of families.
Alastair Mabbott, The Herald
Young Adult author Croggon grapples with both personal and historical demons … [she] asks probing questions about self-perception and trauma … The monsters of the title are plentiful: throughout the essays she addresses her British colonialist ancestors, her abusive mother, the “traumatic tedium” of her relationship to her sister, and herself … Lyrically rendered, this reckoning will leave readers with plenty to think about.
Publishers Weekly
March 24, 2021
‘I can’t write this story in a straight line.’
A fractured relationship with a sister provides the starting point for this reflective narrative. From the individual (who am I, and where do I fit within the smaller world of family) through the present (including the privileges bestowed by place of birth and colour of skin) to the historical (the impact of British imperialism with its underlying racist and sexist behaviours). And, when these influences are considered and weighed, what of the future? Do we recognise the need to revisit (some at least) of our attitudes? Can we change?
In trying to understand her place in the world, Ms Croggon raises some serious and uncomfortable questions. We each occupy a life shaped by custom, culture, and history. Many of us accept, without question, both the constraints and privileges we are born into. In questioning this for herself, Ms Croggon invites the reader to do the same.
‘I need these narratives that give me a larger picture of who I am.’
I want to reread this book. As I shifted between memoir and essay, between the impact of a fractured relationship and the power structures of the British Empire, my thoughts kept straying to some of the related and painful contemporary issues in Australia.
Note: My thanks to NetGalley and Scribe UK for providing me with a free electronic copy of this book for review purposes.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
A fractured relationship with a sister provides the starting point for this reflective narrative. From the individual (who am I, and where do I fit within the smaller world of family) through the present (including the privileges bestowed by place of birth and colour of skin) to the historical (the impact of British imperialism with its underlying racist and sexist behaviours). And, when these influences are considered and weighed, what of the future? Do we recognise the need to revisit (some at least) of our attitudes? Can we change?
In trying to understand her place in the world, Ms Croggon raises some serious and uncomfortable questions. We each occupy a life shaped by custom, culture, and history. Many of us accept, without question, both the constraints and privileges we are born into. In questioning this for herself, Ms Croggon invites the reader to do the same.
‘I need these narratives that give me a larger picture of who I am.’
I want to reread this book. As I shifted between memoir and essay, between the impact of a fractured relationship and the power structures of the British Empire, my thoughts kept straying to some of the related and painful contemporary issues in Australia.
Note: My thanks to NetGalley and Scribe UK for providing me with a free electronic copy of this book for review purposes.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
July 2, 2021
This book, which is a collection of previously published articles, is sometimes titled Monsters: a memoir (rather than Monsters: a reckoning) which I think suits it better, as it is so subjective in the telling.
If it were fiction, I'd admire the depiction of the viscerally uncomfortable relationship between the narrator and her sister. As it's memoir, I feel sympathy for both of them.
The explorations of ideas of colonisation is interesting. My British ancestors also exploited people and resources in the countries that their empire swallowed up.
I think we need to do more than recount our wrong-doing; we descendants of empire need to make reparations.
If it were fiction, I'd admire the depiction of the viscerally uncomfortable relationship between the narrator and her sister. As it's memoir, I feel sympathy for both of them.
The explorations of ideas of colonisation is interesting. My British ancestors also exploited people and resources in the countries that their empire swallowed up.
I think we need to do more than recount our wrong-doing; we descendants of empire need to make reparations.
February 25, 2021
“I can only write my own story, but how is this not the same story that has been told, over and over again, at the expense of so many other stories? How is this not the story of the conquerors?”
I received an eARC of Monsters: a reckoning by Alison Croggon from Netgalley and Scribe UK - here is my personal review!
Monsters: a reckoning is a riveting mix of essay and memoir that attempts to understand ones place in the systems of white supremacy and colonialism that have dominated our world for so long. How much do these systems bleed into our every day lives? How do they impact our personal relationships? And how do we (white women, that is) face the system that created us in an effort to do better?
It’s worth mentioning, I think, that Alison Croggon is my absolute favorite author. I grew up on her fantasy series, donated money to her crowdfunding for self-publishing her co-written sci-fi series, and I learned how to not be absolutely intimidated by poetry thanks to her work.
Having read everything of Croggon’s I could get my hands on, Monsters still absolutely floored me. This book is self-reflection — both of Croggon’s damaged relationship with her sister and her desire to unlearn the racist and sexist behaviors that she was raised in. Croggon tackles this weighty duo with stunning writing and lots of research.
Honestly, I think my favorite thing about this book was Croggon’s honesty. From the get go you can tell that this book was written for herself, to help her understand her place in this world — and she’s hoping this journey can potentially impact others as well.
I don’t think that this book is for everyone, but I do think that white women who are trying to combat the white heteronormative patriarchal culture that has raised them could see themselves reflected in these pages. Even if they don’t want to.
A five star read from me for sure. I’m about to order my own copy now — I need a physical copy on my Croggon shelf.
I received an eARC of Monsters: a reckoning by Alison Croggon from Netgalley and Scribe UK - here is my personal review!
Monsters: a reckoning is a riveting mix of essay and memoir that attempts to understand ones place in the systems of white supremacy and colonialism that have dominated our world for so long. How much do these systems bleed into our every day lives? How do they impact our personal relationships? And how do we (white women, that is) face the system that created us in an effort to do better?
It’s worth mentioning, I think, that Alison Croggon is my absolute favorite author. I grew up on her fantasy series, donated money to her crowdfunding for self-publishing her co-written sci-fi series, and I learned how to not be absolutely intimidated by poetry thanks to her work.
Having read everything of Croggon’s I could get my hands on, Monsters still absolutely floored me. This book is self-reflection — both of Croggon’s damaged relationship with her sister and her desire to unlearn the racist and sexist behaviors that she was raised in. Croggon tackles this weighty duo with stunning writing and lots of research.
Honestly, I think my favorite thing about this book was Croggon’s honesty. From the get go you can tell that this book was written for herself, to help her understand her place in this world — and she’s hoping this journey can potentially impact others as well.
I don’t think that this book is for everyone, but I do think that white women who are trying to combat the white heteronormative patriarchal culture that has raised them could see themselves reflected in these pages. Even if they don’t want to.
A five star read from me for sure. I’m about to order my own copy now — I need a physical copy on my Croggon shelf.
Read
December 15, 2021A mix of memoir and critical theory in this deep dive investigation of one families history of colonialism and white supremacy.
MONSTERS is a driven narrative and tough to review. An important takeaway from this I think was that all us white people need to look back like Croggon has at our own families history with colonialism, and aknowledge how white privilege has shaped you, benefited you and how it impacts your relationships, especially with people of color. Realizing what white privilege is and how it affects people of color and their opportunities in this world is a good starting point for change. We are very much shaped by where we come from, our parents, our parents parents, and so on and so on. Being honest and critical about where we come from and the role that plays in our own lives is so important if we are going to create equality for the future.
Thank you so much to the publisher for sending me this book opinions are my own.
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MONSTERS is a driven narrative and tough to review. An important takeaway from this I think was that all us white people need to look back like Croggon has at our own families history with colonialism, and aknowledge how white privilege has shaped you, benefited you and how it impacts your relationships, especially with people of color. Realizing what white privilege is and how it affects people of color and their opportunities in this world is a good starting point for change. We are very much shaped by where we come from, our parents, our parents parents, and so on and so on. Being honest and critical about where we come from and the role that plays in our own lives is so important if we are going to create equality for the future.
Thank you so much to the publisher for sending me this book opinions are my own.
For more of my book content check out instagram.com/bookalong
December 23, 2021
Alison Croggon’s Monsters: A reckoning is a demanding but exhilarating read, demanding because it expresses some tough feelings, and exhilarating because of the mind behind it, the connections it makes and the questions it asks. Coincidentally, it has some synchronicities with my recent read, Sarah Krasnostein’s The believer. Both talk about “uncertainty”, and both conclude by talking about “love”, but beyond these two ideas are very different books.
Monsters is categorised on its back-cover as narrative nonfiction/memoir. However, it could also be described as an essay collection, albeit a linked-essay collection, because each individually-titled chapter seems to take up an issue – or return to an earlier issue – and riff on it, though riff is too frivolous a word for what Croggon does.
For my full review, please check my blog: https://whisperinggums.com/2021/12/23...
Monsters is categorised on its back-cover as narrative nonfiction/memoir. However, it could also be described as an essay collection, albeit a linked-essay collection, because each individually-titled chapter seems to take up an issue – or return to an earlier issue – and riff on it, though riff is too frivolous a word for what Croggon does.
For my full review, please check my blog: https://whisperinggums.com/2021/12/23...
March 26, 2022
What do we remember? How true are our memories? Alison Croggon examines these questions, and her own memories through the lens of her toxic relationship with her sister. There’s regret in this story, and longing for hopes lost.
At its heart, this is a story of the vagaries of love and of relationships: to kin, to land, to money, to history. It asks who and what are the monsters. It asks us to take a good look at them, and to understand the complex web that makes relationships and love so difficult.
I would recommend this book to anyone with a troubling relationship with a sibling or a parent; and also to those who don’t. We are all taken into this examination of self and society.
At its heart, this is a story of the vagaries of love and of relationships: to kin, to land, to money, to history. It asks who and what are the monsters. It asks us to take a good look at them, and to understand the complex web that makes relationships and love so difficult.
I would recommend this book to anyone with a troubling relationship with a sibling or a parent; and also to those who don’t. We are all taken into this examination of self and society.
April 10, 2022
A family that is torn apart by dysfunctional parents and life events that change relationships between sister is the core of the book. This book also looks at privilege and it how it seeps into every part of life. I have mixed feeling about this book, the parts about her family compelling yet incomplete. While she talks about privilege and being a woman and white I don't quite understand what this has to deal with her and her family. It seems to me she was holding back on a story that is painful and where she takes a lot of the blame, yet it seems that there is a lot of blame to go around
June 12, 2021
Monsters took me a minute to get into, but I found myself speeding through the pages before long. Written in what I am starting to think of as a new style, as though speaking more to the senses than the mind. Some points made perfect instant sense to me, recognition of something I've noticed before put into the right words. Some points bent my mind into seeing connections where I'd never before seen them. White woman struggling to awaken. A fascinating mind observing itself.
July 9, 2022
This book had about a 60% success rate for me with it's mini-essays-in-prose-format, but the ones that hit home, hit hard.
Croggon discussed racism, sexism, homophobia, colonialism, information literacy, poverty, eductaion, love, hate, despair, religion, spirituality, writing, history.
It seems like a lot, but there are continued themes through every chapter, and it ties all of it together very well.
Croggon discussed racism, sexism, homophobia, colonialism, information literacy, poverty, eductaion, love, hate, despair, religion, spirituality, writing, history.
It seems like a lot, but there are continued themes through every chapter, and it ties all of it together very well.
Read
February 19, 2022DNF.
April 20, 2022
Just hard to even get into this book. Not my cup of tea and not what I thought the book would be about.
I received this from LibraryThing Early Reviewer for an honest opinion.
I received this from LibraryThing Early Reviewer for an honest opinion.
April 30, 2022
Monsters: A Reckoning, by Alison Croggon, is very much an up and down read for me. Parts had me thinking and largely agreeing, while others simply made me tired of hearing her version of the dispute with her sister.
I found more of importance here than I did of annoyance, so I leave it with a generally positive feeling toward the book. It isn't easy facing the cracks in how we were presented the world when we were kids, the injustices and indifferences in our past (familial or cultural). I found a lot of her discussion of the larger issues, from colonialism to blatant racism, to be the best parts of the book for me.
I found the frame of the familial conflict to be less interesting and actually made my view of her a bit lower. I am not even going to discuss any kind of right or wrong, throughout most of the book the "dispute" was kept so vague that I just tuned out. I hate to use this word because it can be used in such a broad sense, but in this case I mean it in the way it is most commonly used in interpersonal interactions: Croggon comes off as whiny. Tone of voice, the "I tried everything but..." storytelling, I get the feeling I wouldn't like anyone in the family even if I find a lot of her questioning to be spot on.
I readily admit that how a reader "hears" a writer's voice is as much a creation of the reader as it is the author's actual voice, so I am trying to judge the book as a whole on the other elements as much or more than the voice. In a nonfiction book I am more comfortable doing this since part of what I want is information to help me to understand. I want to better understand not only what has happened to the author but I want to understand how to apply what I am reading to my own life and my own (familial and cultural) past. And I did get a lot to digest in that sense, thus the more positive overall review.
I would recommend this to readers who are open to questioning the past, even if the answers to those questions might be hard to accept. For those wanting to read a memoir(ish) book for enjoyment, well, I would suggest reading an excerpt and making sure you like the authorial voice. If you do, I think you will enjoy the content.
Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via LibraryThing Early Reviewers.
I found more of importance here than I did of annoyance, so I leave it with a generally positive feeling toward the book. It isn't easy facing the cracks in how we were presented the world when we were kids, the injustices and indifferences in our past (familial or cultural). I found a lot of her discussion of the larger issues, from colonialism to blatant racism, to be the best parts of the book for me.
I found the frame of the familial conflict to be less interesting and actually made my view of her a bit lower. I am not even going to discuss any kind of right or wrong, throughout most of the book the "dispute" was kept so vague that I just tuned out. I hate to use this word because it can be used in such a broad sense, but in this case I mean it in the way it is most commonly used in interpersonal interactions: Croggon comes off as whiny. Tone of voice, the "I tried everything but..." storytelling, I get the feeling I wouldn't like anyone in the family even if I find a lot of her questioning to be spot on.
I readily admit that how a reader "hears" a writer's voice is as much a creation of the reader as it is the author's actual voice, so I am trying to judge the book as a whole on the other elements as much or more than the voice. In a nonfiction book I am more comfortable doing this since part of what I want is information to help me to understand. I want to better understand not only what has happened to the author but I want to understand how to apply what I am reading to my own life and my own (familial and cultural) past. And I did get a lot to digest in that sense, thus the more positive overall review.
I would recommend this to readers who are open to questioning the past, even if the answers to those questions might be hard to accept. For those wanting to read a memoir(ish) book for enjoyment, well, I would suggest reading an excerpt and making sure you like the authorial voice. If you do, I think you will enjoy the content.
Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via LibraryThing Early Reviewers.
March 2, 2021
In Monsters, Alison Croggon takes a hard look at the hall of mirrors that creates and distorts truths, builds narratives and affects everything it reflects.
Starting from the fractured relationship with her sister, Croggon makes a series of connections in trying to make sense of how and where it all went wrong.
Part essay, part memoir, Monsters is a seamlessly crafted story that weaves through colonialism, patriarchy, racism, and several other power structures, and examines how they fundamentally affect us and our relationships. It is beautifully written by someone who has an incredible understanding of how language can be both constricting and freeing.
By taking an honest look at her life and the structures that influenced it – not to absolve herself from guilt nor to claim victimhood, but to deconstruct and expose narratives that we take from granted – Croggon provides an alternative to the predominant binary view that insists on neatly categorising everything by difference, inevitably creating winners and losers (in a way in which we all lose).
She may not have all the answers, and that not the point, but she is willing to create the necessary opening for the start of a very important conversation.
Starting from the fractured relationship with her sister, Croggon makes a series of connections in trying to make sense of how and where it all went wrong.
Part essay, part memoir, Monsters is a seamlessly crafted story that weaves through colonialism, patriarchy, racism, and several other power structures, and examines how they fundamentally affect us and our relationships. It is beautifully written by someone who has an incredible understanding of how language can be both constricting and freeing.
By taking an honest look at her life and the structures that influenced it – not to absolve herself from guilt nor to claim victimhood, but to deconstruct and expose narratives that we take from granted – Croggon provides an alternative to the predominant binary view that insists on neatly categorising everything by difference, inevitably creating winners and losers (in a way in which we all lose).
She may not have all the answers, and that not the point, but she is willing to create the necessary opening for the start of a very important conversation.
Read
November 16, 2021I got as far as page 23 in this e-book and therefore don’t feel justified in giving it a rating.
However, the opinion I formed from those 23 pages is that the author is a roiling mass of rage and hurt. As an archivist I find it difficult to take seriously information quoted from Google searches and Wikipedia entries. Does the author go on to do further research of peer reviewed publications or original resources? I don’t know. I didn’t feel compelled enough to find out.
As for the thing between her and her sister? What I read felt too intrusive yet not informative enough. It felt like the worst form of mud slinging. Did I want to find out more, did the sister get a chance to put her side? Again, no; I felt embarrassed for both of them that I was witness to such a public showing of a clearly private relationship breakdown.
I hope that writing and publishing this book was cathartic to the author. As a reader it left me feeling uneasy at the level of toxicity that seemed to thrum from the pages I read.
However, the opinion I formed from those 23 pages is that the author is a roiling mass of rage and hurt. As an archivist I find it difficult to take seriously information quoted from Google searches and Wikipedia entries. Does the author go on to do further research of peer reviewed publications or original resources? I don’t know. I didn’t feel compelled enough to find out.
As for the thing between her and her sister? What I read felt too intrusive yet not informative enough. It felt like the worst form of mud slinging. Did I want to find out more, did the sister get a chance to put her side? Again, no; I felt embarrassed for both of them that I was witness to such a public showing of a clearly private relationship breakdown.
I hope that writing and publishing this book was cathartic to the author. As a reader it left me feeling uneasy at the level of toxicity that seemed to thrum from the pages I read.
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