Relationships are Complicated

especially when someone has been in an abusive one.  When I am Through with You was really good.  It made me think a lot.  I am not sure if the narrator is a reliable one.  It left me with a lot of questions.  I gave it 4 stars, really would have given it 4.5 if I could have, but maybe 4.9 would be better.  I am not sure.  It did make me feel very uncomfortable.  And I think that I wrongly take it down from 5 for that. It was just pretty creepy....

Last Summer

We went to Utah.  It was grand.  Just grand.  Amazing and beautiful and beyond words....one of the coolest places we stayed was Cedar City.  We stayed in an airbnb and the woman who owned the place was super, incredible nice.  She told us a lot about the fundamentalist Mormons who lived around the town.  Apparently after the Warren Jeffs horror, the followers who remained relocated to CC. 
We also went to Salt Lake and visited the Salt Lake Temple.  Which is part of the LDS, not the FLDS, but it sparked a lot of interest in both groups. 
Last year on a podcast I can't remember I heard an interview with Tara Westover, talking about her upbringing and how she didn't have a social security number and so therefore, didn't exist until her aunt could sign an affidavit that she really did exit.  I can't for the life of me find it now, but since then she has published Educated and is telling her story other places. 
This book is more about mental illness and abusive families than faith.  And Westover says that right in the beginning.  What a story.  What a book.  What a brave woman. 
Her parents and some of her siblings have disowned her, this is their business here.  Really good book and I wish Ms. Westover the best.  She is a brave, brave and resilient woman. 

Saints and Sinners

Talk about a dysfunctional family.   Now THIS book is about a dysfunctional family, as compared to the ones that were chosen for the BOB.  The Patron Saint of Butterflies was a really good book.  Of particular note was the Catholic-esque flavor of this particular cult.  I have not read a cult book in which the cult was quasi-Catholic.  It made me cringe at how smart/awful/manipulative it was of the cult leader to hold up saints as ideals.  I can totally see how wanting to be like a saint (unless one digs deeper into their lives and discovers how they doubted and had failings, too) can keep people on the straight and narrow and obedient. 
I loved the grandma, of course.  And her description of a Big Mac, too!

Family Values

Thieving Weasels is proof that Jesus was so right when He redefined family!  Always makes me laugh, the "family values" Christians, who seem to forget that!  Billy Taylor is a new author for me and I want to read his adult book now.  This was just such a funny and fresh book!  I loved it!
I especially loved Skip's girlfriend's reaction to finding out about Skip's past.  I think that it was so not like every other book and just the real and best reaction.  I won't say more because it wouldn't be a big spoiler, but it would spoil that particular part.

Easy on the Eyes

My mother is in love with Sam Shephard.
She is in love with a lotta guys, actually.
And the ones she finds to be super handsome, like Sam Shepherd, she is just batty about them.
It began with Crimes of the Heart and then she was hopeless since Baby Boom.
We knew he was a playwrite.  And an award-winning one at that.  I guess I always thought that he was an actor first and then a playwrite.  But someone, it seems even cooler, more amazing that he was an award-winning playwrite before I even knew he did picture shows, as they say.
Buried Child won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1979.
This story is really powerful and moving and hard.  It is the story of a family pretty much falling apart because of a series of horrible, horrible choices.  Ones that will haunt and torture them until they die.  It is not a feel-good story.  It will stay with you, though, for sure.  And make you a lot happier about your own lot in life.