Patsy has a lot of layers and depth but at the same time feels forced. I wish Dennis-Benn would let her characters play out by themselves instead of burdening them down with so many details.

The plot is laid out beautifully, generations of familial stories interwoven in a tapestry of shared shame and love, how the two threads are sometimes inseparable and lie together like silent conspirators. I wish the writing was more prosaic, it felt almost stilted, like a puppeteer clumsily maneuvering his subject's jaws.

I liked the generational aspect of this, how hunger breeds in families and grows stronger with each coming daughter, hunger for control, hunger to fill the emptiness left by the men in their lives. I wish the situation with Uncle Joe was better resolved.

Not unlike scrambled eggs, Woodson plays with notions of time, gender roles, sexuality, and old folks tales. What's particularly strong is the sense of tradition, of how the twin towers burning is like the Tulsa fires, of the way stories repeat themselves, of lovers who are friends and friends who are lovers, of the myriad complexities of womanhood. Take Iris for example. She is a woman who leaves her child, unable to feel maternal love, forever seeking in others the acceptance she can't feel for herself. Woodson mines the depths of human ethos to create a tapestry as familial as it is intricate.

Divided into mental health policy history and autobiography, Ron Powers provides a startlingly in depth review of mental health care in the public eye of America. On the one hand, growing up around mental health illnesses in friends, family and myself, I can understand Powers’ emotionally strung experience. It is really hard to be unbiased when it comes to mental health, and I appreciate that he did not make any such pretense. Getting a deeper look into the history of public policy around mental health was also enlightening. However, I do not know if I can honestly agree with Power’s end game: a reestablishment of asylums for the mentally ill.