corrigan's Reviews (451)

At some points absolutely riveting and at some points a bit of a slog through details and names and places and items. There is definitely one thing everyone should take away from this story, though: Listen to indigenous people, ya doofuses.

I'm not necessarily the target audience of this book since I'm not white, but I wanted to check it out anyway. I'd seen friends doing the challenge on her Instagram, so I had a sense of what this was. I'd highly recommend this for the white liberal who's ready and willing to take a hard and uncomfortable look in the mirror. People who read American Dirt and didn't think about why this white author is on the bestseller list for telling a brown story when there are plenty of brown people whose books are overlooked. People who think they're helping by buying Toms or donating their clothes to kids in Africa without realizing they're crushing economies in their white saviorism. People who call themselves allied out loud. People who think being an ally deserves recognition. All those folks who have felt like good white people, but are willing to go deeper and question all that, and bust through the defensiveness that inevitably will rise... they should read this. It is not for folks who are more likely to double down on racism if things aren't presented to them in a nice enough tone. She's not pulling punches here. If your reaction to being told hard truths about yourself is to run the other direction, you're not ready.

And for BIPOC, this book is validating. It's just nice to hear someone name your struggles out loud. I felt some of this stuff in my boooones.

This book just doesn't play to what I consider to be Larson's strengths. When I read his books, I expect to delve into something I haven't heard about before, or only know about on a surface level. I expect him to add depth to whatever knowledge I have, and add context I wouldn't have otherwise understood. In general, he does this by weaving together two stories that seem either unrelated or only tangentially related, and then showing how intricately connected things actually are. The Splendid and the Vile doesn't do any of this. World War II is well trodden ground, and he doesn't add anything unfamiliar to the scholarship here. Churchill is not exactly an enigmatic figure either, and I don't feel I learned a whole lot more about him from this book then I could have elsewhere. I will say that I would happily read an entire book about his garbage son's wife Pamela. She was the most interesting part of the book. Overall, a forgettable read.

Reading in the acknowledgments that this was a MFA thesis project made the whole thing make more sense. It's a good thesis project. On its own? It's got some great twists and turns and is a pretty fun read, but suffers from copying Gypsy Rose's story too closely. The first hundred pages or so, I found myself bored and rolling my eyes thinking, yes, I know. I've seen the doc and the show and read the article. Get on with the story. Once it DOES get on with it, it's pretty riveting.