Melinda's Reviews

At the age of 30, Jedidiah Jenkins decided to “happen to life” instead of letting life happen to him and embarked on an 18-month bike trip from Oregon to Patagonia. The resulting book is both a delightful adventure and a thoughtfuljourney into his own soul. Travel frees him to make unencumbered relationships with his past, his spirituality, his identity, his family, and his sense of self in ways that leave me feeling alive, inspired, and ready to pack my own bags. - Melinda

Wyomia Tyus, a record-setting track and field Olympian (1964 and 1968), should be as well-known as Tommie Smith and John Carlos for her political activism or as Wilma Rudolph for her athletic prowess, but we are still challenged with broadening representation beyond iconic representatives. Now is the time to add Tyus to the pantheon of great Black women athletes and citizens, and this is the book, her enjoyable accounting of a remarkable life. - Melinda

Williams has been a wildlife biologist in Montana for the past 25 years, so one expects a wealth of information on the elusive mountain lions he tracks and studies. What comes as a welcome surprise in this gorgeous, photo-laden book, however, is the personality-rich narrative and the breadth of experience. As one of the only large predators whose population is actually growing, these great cats have much to teach us—both how they live and how we can live with them. Williams is a delightful teacher. - Melinda

Where is your hearth? What do you return to over and over, to ground yourself, to center your community? What happens when your hearth is lost or is endangered? What can we carry with us? This inspiring anthology explores these questions through pieces by Terry Tempest Williams, Pico Iyer, Luís Alberto Urrea, Chigozie Obioma, Sebastião Salgado, and more—each bringing their own truths to the table, to warm at the fire. What is created is sacred, hopeful, and communal, at a time we need it most. - Melinda

Tanya Tagaq is a musical artist in more ways than one. As a world-renowned Inuit throat singer, she has already stunned the world with her powerful songs and lyrics, but now in her first memoir, an explosive combination of narrative, poetry, myth, truth, and ferocity, she weaves the story of a young girl who comes of age in a small Arctic town, bound by boredom and violence, natural wonder and the spirit world. Life is a beautiful and terrifying thing, and Split Tooth contains all of it. - Melinda

Nicole Chung’s clear and introspective memoir brings new light to the search for identity and navigating both the past and the future when surrounded by the complexity of those who love you. As a transracial adoptee, the incongruity of growing up happy yet uncomfortably different leads her to search out the truth about her birth parents when she is on the brink of becoming a parent herself. This unique, difficult, and often surprising journey considers what one needs most in the world to belong. - Melinda

Krug’s graphic memoir packs a powerful historical punch. As a German born two generations after the Holocaust, she struggles with her country’s atrocious past and the ambiguity of her family’s own involvement. Through vivid text and graphics, historical photos and documents, layering memory and story with poignancy, she seeks the truth and delves deep into her family’s history. Krug does the hard work to bring the personal past back to life and ask how one shapes one’s identity and finds one’s sense of home in its midst. Beautifully done in every way. - Melinda

Gary Young’s prose poems feel like forgotten soulmates. Seemingly unassuming sentences, day-to-day observations, build upon each other, and then in an expert turn, enlightenment takes sudden, luminous flight. Each poem sits with me long after I’ve read it once, twice, more. His new collection, That’s What I Thought, comes out this fall, and I am so looking forward to dipping in and finding new companions. - Melinda

I want to live my life through the lens of Limón’s poetry. Rooted in the very earth her fingers dig into, she writes her world like a garden full of living things that she carefully observes, naming each plant, each bird, each grief and trial and love. Moving from family issues to social ones, wanting life and watching death, her poems challenge us to see, to feel, and to soldier on: “Look, we are not unspectacular things. / We’ve come this far, survived this much. What / would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?” - Melinda           

Friends, this is it. This is the book we’ve been waiting for. And now I can’t get it out of my head, and the pit of my stomach, and my aching heart. It is that good, that gorgeous, that brutal, surreal, tender, enlightening, bitingly funny, and unbelievably truthful. And it’s short stories, so I urge you to savor them one at a time, if you can. Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is here, and I say not a moment too soon. - Melinda