lory_enterenchanted's Reviews (582)

Reviews and more on my blog: Entering the Enchanted Castle

Winton's novel immerses the reader in the lives of two very different families who become linked through inhabiting a common house. It's wonderful to see how their distrust and separation slowly melt, and the walls literally come down between them, while many aspect of human experience, in all its dirt and glory, are touched on. Winton's style is poetic, impressionistic, jumping about from character to character; it's not a book to read for the plot, but for getting into the heads of a number of people who will become as real to you as your own family. The middle section had me a bit bogged down at times, but I'm glad I stuck through to the end, which moved and touched me. 

Reviews and more on my blog: Entering the Enchanted Castle

Read for the umpteeth time to celebrate March Magics at We Be Reading and Reading the Theatre at Entering the Enchanted Castle. It qualifies for the latter because of a brief but chilling Punch and Judy scene (imagine the horror of being forced to play the role of one of those murderous puppets), and because the magic in the book is wonderfully performative -- enacted specifically through singing. I love the wizards' battle and its description of magic made manifest through choral singing, a magic I sorely miss during the pandemic lockdown. The warring families theme is a nod to Romeo and Juliet, but with a much happier ending. The child characters, as often in DWJ's books, need to discover their true powers and stop worrying about external expectations; it has some terrific cat characters as well. It's not as hilarious or twisty as some others, but I'm very fond of it and was so happy to escape to Caprona for a while.

Reviews and more on my blog: Entering the Enchanted Castle

My son was reading this and it made me want to re-read it too. A pleasure as always. My favorite part is when Cat takes back his magic -- a recurring motif in DWJ books, in which characters are frequently being magically exploited or used. When the seemingly weaker, but actually stronger young person reclaims their power and agency, it's an immensely satisfying moment.

Reviews and more on my blog: Entering the Enchanted Castle

I listened to this along with reading the less practical, more narrative complement, When Food Is Love. It covered the "Eating Guidelines" that Roth says will lead to one reaching one's "natural weight" if followed consistently. I was not so concerned about weight, but I think the guidelines can also apply to any kind of compulsive eating problem, such as in my case has contributed to lifelong digestive issues, migraines, and recently a gallbladder removal.

These are very common-sense directives (eat when you are hungry, stop when you have had enough, etc.) that are simple but not easy to follow if one has been embedded in a pattern of emotional, compulsive eating. But having already begun the process of breaking free of those patterns I found this advice helpful and supportive, along with the exercises that I chose to do out of the many Roth presents. 

Roth's message is that how we eat is bound up with how we live, and you can't change how you eat without making the commitment to change your life, ultimately to connecting to the more vibrant, more alive self that you really when you find the strength to counteract those addictive behaviors. This goes along with my own experience. I find the need to work from both sides, from the physical side changing habits and what I put into my body, and from the inner side, changing my attitude towards that external input and becoming more mindful. Inching along in both aspects has helped me to come to a more healthy place and the prospects look encouraging.

The guideline I find most difficult is "eat what your body wants." That's what I have a really hard time discerning! How do I know?!? I am not used to listening to my body, but if I take that as a goal, rather than ignoring and discounting my body as I've always done, I trust that what I need to know will eventually come to light. The guidelines do not form a rigid system of dictates like most diets, but a way to get to know one's individual needs better, and that will take time. 

A reminder I especially appreciated was to put aside distractions and really experience, taste, and enjoy my food, and along with that, give myself permission to experience all my feelings and acknowledge where I have non-physical, emotional hungers that are not being met. I need to stop using food to "swallow my feelings," to avoid unwanted feelings and cover them up with physical sensations, and also to stop trying to meet emotional needs with food, which will never truly satisfy because it is not a physical hunger I am feeling. When I can do this, and let food simply be food for my body, while I take a good honest look at my emotional hungers and how they can be met, things start to fall into place. 

It has been at times scary to admit the depth of that unmet emotional hunger but it's way better than trying to fill it up with food, which will never work and has only made me sick. So I am thankful to Roth for being a help along that path.

Reviews and more on my blog: Entering the Enchanted Castle

The subtitle is misleading, as the book is more about the biographers of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes than about SP and TH themselves. Read as a break from the latest bio that I've been reading -- Red Comet -- and makes me appreciate the balanced perspective of that book, the first full bio of Plath that I've read. But I'm not sure Malcolm makes any amazing, earth-shattering points; she merely highlights what we should already know when reading biographies (but maybe forget all too often), that the true facts of a human life can never be fully known. A reminder to treat all such stories with respect, and to remember that there are two sides of every conflict.

Reviews and more on my blog: Entering the Enchanted Castle

Reread this in 2022, three years after my first read. At that time it was an eye-opening introduction to the concept of covert male depression, something I had encountered in family members, colleagues, and even been seeing in action on the world stage without understanding what I was experiencing. The book is extremely helpful in identifying the dysfunction that plagues so many men and in articulating a path toward healing.

This path can only begin when an individual man himself decides to stop the cycle begun by relational trauma, and go a different way, a way of facing his condition rather than running from it and covering it up with addictive defenses. We can't legislate or force such a decision. But only if enough men make it -- as the inspiring stories in the book show that many men are capable of doing -- can our world survive, in my opinion. Among all the crises clamoring for our attention, this is THE central crisis. The others all stem from this one, especially from the addictive defenses with which men combat their depression. 

During this reread I really longed for some discussion of how covert depression also affects and presents in women. Women may be more prone to overt depression, which is a more obviously disturbing, but ironically probably less dangerous form of the disease -- because it has come out into the open and there is at least a chance of seeking help. However, women are also highly prone to covert depression as well, and I suffered from it for many years. 

Real describes depression as a disease of "carried emotions," emotions generally carried over from a dysfunctional parenting relationship, and I started to wonder about this in relation to the gender gap. Far from being a "women's disease," as it's often considered, depression may be in fact a men's disease that women frequently end up carrying for the men in their lives, covertly or overtly. Men have trouble naming, cognizing, and processing emotional experience, but they are not less emotionally needy than women -- if anything, they are more needy than women. Maybe their depression infects the women around them, who have more innate tools for dealing with emotional issues. And their presentation of overt depression may at least sometimes be a cry for help on the behalf of those who are too emotionally shut-down and repressed to do it themselves.

Unfortunately this often does not lead to the healing of the real, root problem, which is fundamentally one of failure to protect and nurture the fragile human core. Without awareness of what is going on, this failure gets transmitted unconsciously down the generations, and continues to compound and be strengthened. Those who present overt symptoms can end up scapegoated by others who don't want to fully confront the issues, while others with more covert symptoms are discouraged from revealing and releasing their pain. I feel as though that is what has happened in my family.

But I don't want to be one of the deniers any more. I really want to wake up now, and break the cycle of depression in my own family, and I appreciate books like this that are helping me. It is not about blaming anyone, but about uncovering unconscious patterns that have been controlling our behavior and harming everyone they touch. There is so much work to be done, but it is a source of hope to have a new orientation towards the problem.

Reviews and more on my blog: Entering the Enchanted Castle

I need someone to explain to me what happened in the middle here. Sorry for my ignorance, I know it's about the death squads of the Pinochet regime, but what exactly transpired? I especially don't understand why M's mother left her father. Was he implicated in some way in the death of her former lover? Confused.

Also, weird that people call this a charming book ... it's like a charmingly disguised bomb. The child-voice is brilliantly done, but more knowing than it seems on the surface. This is a book about sadness, death, and loss, not a quirky coming of age story.

Reviews and more on my blog: Entering the Enchanted Castle

A rare YA historical novel with a female protagonist that doesn't try to anachronistically empower her beyond the bounds of plausibility. That makes for a rather grim read here, because Elen lives in a very violent time and place (medieval Wales) and she's been through serious trauma. She is conflicted about what she had to do to survive, and yet she still can dare to care deeply for others and to value and fight for her own freedom. Elen stands for all women throughout history who have had to struggle against dehumanizing, disempowering forces; Coats does an admirable job of making her both realistically medieval and relevant to our current concerns. The story behind Elen's deceptively simple narration is thus quite morally complex and requires a mature reader to really comprehend it. Reminded me of Franny Billingsley.

Reviews and more on my blog: Entering the Enchanted Castle

Definitely an exciting page-turner of a book, and I appreciated all that I learned about the Ojibwe community in Sault St-Marie. However, at times the characters seemed too much mere mouthpieces for the author's teachings, especially Daunis - a fatal flaw in a main character. I wanted to like and relate to her, as one does with protagonists, and sometimes I could, but often I felt as though I were being lectured by her. Other characters were like caricatures of the impulses and practices Boulley wanted to criticize. Again, this does not make for a story that can take on a life of its own, but turns it into a kind of treatise in story form.

I liked that Daunis didn't have to end up with a boy at the end to be whole, even though this too was a kind of a heavy-handed Statement. Overall, mixed feelings--this was an important story to tell, but I wish it could have felt less weighed down with its own importance.

Reviews and more on my blog: Entering the Enchanted Castle

This book is desperately in need of a good editor. That would make it a lot shorter, because it's full of repetition, but also more concise and useful. 

The basic premise, which the author keeps repeating, is that our autonomic nervous system, that is responsible for all the unconscious processes that keep us alive as well as for our response to threat and stress, has been wrongly understood up until recently. Rather than two states of stress and relaxation, it can be active in three states: stress, shutdown, and social engagement. This new picture is related to a new understanding of the anatomy and physiology of the vagus nerve, an extremely important nerve that goes through the whole body. Contrary to longtime belief, it actually has two distinct pathways, dorsal (related to the shutdown state) and ventral (social engagement). When a person gets stuck in either the stress or shutdown state, stimulating the ventral vagus can help.

This bears exciting potential to help people who are suffering from all kinds of chronic conditions that may be actually rooted in dysfunction of the autonomic nervous system, that can very easily happen in our stressful and toxic world. Rosenberg claims to be able to improve the function of the ventral vagus nerve, and thus of the ANS, with simple exercises that anyone can do at home. His claims seem incredible, but I'm going to try them myself to see if they help prevent migraines. If that works, this is definitely something worth exploring!