Ghost

I can see why people liked this one but it wasn't really for me. It was generally just an okay read for me but I'm not much for cozy vibes when it comes to books (very much into cozy vibes when it comes to the way I live though).

No rating, I wasn't the right audience.

Ok I have to preface my review with the caveat that I didn't realize who the author was before picking up this book and that I was very predisposed to agree with her given my habit of being critical and suspicious of psychology and psychiatry as industries thanks to both my personal and professional experiences. Even with that in mind it was an underwhelming read, to put it politely.

I have several pages of notes detailing minor issues I had with this book which I am far too lazy to organize in a proper review and this book is, frankly, not worth the effort since it's both lazy and disingenuous.

Shrier puts research (which she always bring up free of actual citations) on the same standing as anecdotes which often sound entirely made up in their excess. Even when I agreed with her (after all a lot of her takes validate certain aspects of my parenting style which I now have to question) I had to cringe at how poorly supported her opinions were. The few times she provides sources to support her assertions they range from dubious (why would The New Yorker be your source regarding the prevalence of teen suicide?) and questionable (let's not talk about considering Peterson as a valid source) to passable but uncited.

She seems to have a strange fixation on Israel and inserting the fact that someone is Jewish in the conversation even when seemingly irrelevant.

Even when she comes close to recognizing that hyper-individualism and the lack of community are a big part of why both parents and children seem to be so miserable, she remains determined to ignore what incentivizes these situations and why individualized action are unlikely to solve them. She also appears to be entirely oblivious to the many ways in which she affirms one thing and its opposite whenever convenient for her arguments.

Ultimately my conclusion regarding this book, in a move that will surprise exactly no one who knows me, is: Citation needed!

I have to say that I really vibe with Nettel's storytelling style. This story is generally not something I would have expected to enjoy based on the themes but I found myself just turning pages and going along for the ride. The characters were pretty relatable, and they came across as fully formed individuals.

There's a lot of potentially sensitive topics in there (still births, difficulties conceiving, abortion, child neglect, domestic abuse, ableism). I don't think these are treated without sensitivity but if you're sensitive to that stuff do approach with caution.

DNF adjacent finish. I was really into for about 20% of it between the 20 and 40% mark but after that I could hardly make myself care, too many characters none of which felt particularly interesting to me.

I finished it, technically, but in reality my attention was wandering so much that I don't think I'll remember much of anything so it wouldn't be fair of me to rate it.

It was ok. I would have liked it a lot more without the jumping back and forth in time, every time I started to really get into it we would jump to another point in the timeline and every time I lost a little bit of interest.