Ashley C. Ford

3.5 rounded up. This was beautifully written and funny and painful and interesting. Ford has a strong voice and she somehow managed to write about incredible trauma with clarity and introspection.

It felt incomplete though. I appreciate that the characters are revealed to us as the author experiences them, but they ended up flat and one-dimensional as a result. For example, it was mind blowing to me that she casually mentioned her mom was a correctional officer, a profession very often linked to brutality, without any connection to her mother’s volatility and abuse. I really wanted Ford to examine the motives of the women and men in her life. I was also left feeling frustrated by the passive conclusion. The confrontation and resolution I spent the whole book waiting for never came.… (meer)