Book Review: Lily and Dunkin

                                                                                   BOOK INFORMATION:                                                                  

Author Donna Gephart crafts a dual narrative about two remarkable young people: Lily, a transgender girl, and Dunkin, a boy dealing with bipolar disorder.

Sometimes our hearts see things our eyes can’t.

Lily Jo McGrother, born Timothy McGrother, is a girl. But being a girl is not so easy when you look like a boy. Especially when you’re in the eighth grade.

Dunkin Dorfman, birth name Norbert Dorfman, is dealing with bipolar disorder and has just moved from the New Jersey town he’s called home for the past thirteen years. This would be hard enough, but the fact that he is also hiding from a painful secret makes it even worse.

One summer morning, Lily Jo McGrother meets Dunkin Dorfman, and their lives forever change. 




                                                                        MY THOUGHTS ON THE BOOK                                                              

I really enjoyed this book. It was incredibly beautifully written. It is a story of a friendship between two young eighth graders. They are dealing with some pretty hard things. I think that the author Donna Gephart really is brave tackling some serious issues. This book has topics that cover gender identity, bipolar disorder, abuse, suicide, grief, and sexuality with a grace that I haven't seen before. 

The thing I loved the most was that there were so many strong characters that feel so real. I was very invested in their story. I found it really interesting that the author kept it real with having both Dunkin and Lily's family's being mixed about how they supported them. They were mostly strong and very supportive but there are certain family members that have issues or hold on to dated ideas about gender and sexuality. That is something we see in America. I am glad it wasn't just glazed over as a perfect situation. I enjoyed that even though they were not as supportive they were at least protective and loving. That was really beautiful.

This book as so many beautiful themes as I had said before. The themes of friendship, family, grief, bullying, transgender, and bipolar disorder were my favorite. As someone who struggles with bipolar disorder, I wasn't super excited about how the disorder was presented. There were some obvious stereotypical symptoms that aren't always the case in every person. I didn't like the idea of continuing bad stereotypes. I can't speak to the transgender representation because I am not transgender. 

Ultimately I thought this was a five-star read. I loved the creativity included in this book. I loved how engrossing it was. I loved the characters and the side plots. I loved how the writing made the book feel alive. I loved the appeal the book could have to teens and middle-grade readers. It is a must-read. I am glad I picked it up from the library. 

Review: Guided Meditations For Self-Healing *mini review*

                                                                                   BOOK INFORMATION:                                                                  

Meditations to Activate Your Capacity for Healing
Meditation brings you into a deep communion with your own body and heart, but what happens when you are sick or in pain? With Guided Meditations for Self-Healing, Jack Kornfield guides you through meditations created specifically to ease physical and emotional suffering, and activate a powerful capacity for restoring yourself to wholeness.

Join this leading meditation teacher and psychologist for three essential practices that tap the healing power of attention:

Healing Presence how to use the earth itself as your foundation to support you in self-diagnosis and restoration

The Healing Temple guided visualization to your inner sanctuary, encountering the great healer, and receiving the necessary gifts for true recovery and blessing

The Healing Power of Love directing the luminous spirit of lovingkindness to all the places in your body and spirit that are in need

We are conditioned to approach healing as an act of control, in which we judge what is wrong with us and impose a change. The way of awareness teaches us how to turn toward that which is injured in us with a caring and fearless attention, so we may open the door to true healing at every level of our being.

With Guided Meditations for Self-Healing, Jack Kornfield brings you three potent practices to bring compassionate energy where it is needed in your body, psyche, and spirit, and to awaken the master healer within you.

Course objectives: 


Utilize meditation to activate your capacity for healing.

Demonstrate "Healing Presence" how to use the earth itself as your foundation to support you in self-diagnosis and restoration.

Practice "The Healing Temple" guided visualization to your inner sanctuary, encountering the great healer, and receiving the necessary symbols and messages for healing

Discuss "The Healing Power of Love" directing the luminous spirit of lovingkindness to all the places in your body and spirit that are in need.

                                                                        MY THOUGHTS ON THE BOOK                                                              

 A bit of honesty here, I am in threapy called Dialitical Behavioral thereapy which focuses mainly on mindfuless and meditation. So I thought maybe this book might help me really reach a meditative state. I also listened to the audio book. 

The thought of healing from my tramua caught my eye when browsing through my libraries overdrive system. I really want to feel better about what I went through and move past it, not forget it. So I turned this on and my first thought was "the narration isn't great. guy sounds like a creep but I enjoy the message"

Overall I think it helped me alot. I got past the narrator and really was able to listen and take in the guided meditations. The healing power of love was my favorite part of this meditation. I really took that lesson home with me. I am ever thankful for this book. Also it took me about 4 hours to read and listen to this book, I broke it into 30 min chunks over the course of 8 days. 

Book Review: Voluntary Madness: Lost and Found in the Mental Healthcare System

Book info

From the author of The New York Times bestseller Self- Made Man, a captivating expose of depression and mental illness in America 

Revelatory, deeply personal, and utterly relevant, Voluntary Madness is a controversial work that unveils the state of mental healthcare in the United States from the inside out. At the conclusion of her celebrated first book--Self-Made Man, in which she soent eighteen months disguised as a man-Norah Vincent found herself emotionally drained and severely depressed.

Determined but uncertain about maintaining her own equilibrium, she boldly committed herself to three different facilities-a big-city hospital, a private clinic in the Midwest, and finally an upscale retreat in the South. Voluntary Madnessis the chronicle of Vincent's journey through the world of the mentally ill as she struggles to find her own health and happiness. 

Links To Purchase: Amazon // Barnes & Noble // Book Depository



 

My Thoughts About This Book:

"You don't see things how they are. You see them as you are."

I have struggled with how to review this hard, complex, eye-opening expose. I will admit that at times this book was hard to stomach. This book gives a shocking and deeply personal account of mental illness. That couldn't be any more relevant to current times. Mental health care in the United States has always been lacking but this book will show you just how bad it really can be for people struggling to cope with mental illness. Vincent words seem to flow freely onto the pages of this book. They are emotional and at times raw. You feel as if you are living and experiencing everything right along with her.

This book is far from perfect. This book is biased, which is not different any other memoir out there. The author shares her disdain and dislike of mental health institutions from the very bringing. She writes about how she doesn't accept the terms of which mental illness is currently defined. Which is fine but what gives you that authority, do you have a degree of some kind in psychology? No, she has no formal education or background to make such a blanket statement. I understand her dislike for how people are treated but psychology is a science and has proof behind it. I guess I wouldn't have had such an issue with this statement if she had presented some sort of solution, but she doesn't.

I also want to point out something this author seems to miss. That is that mental health professionals are not doing this to harm people. They are working with deeply tragic stories, issues, low success, and incredibly difficult stressors. They have to navigate the same messed up system that patients do. Often times the system ties their hands on issues or makes their job incredibly difficult. At times I felt that the author was extremely harsh and incredibly disrespectful. I think she could have presented their side with even a small level of understanding, instead of the incredible hostility she displayed. Mental health workers are not superhuman they are just like us.


Ultimately this is a quick read and rather interesting. This is somewhat disturbing and often angering.  If you can get past her biases or even her annoying attitude, you might learn something more about the mental health issues in this country.

About The Author:

Vincent was a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies from its 2001 inception to 2003. She has also had columns at Salon.com, The Advocate, the Los Angeles Times, and the Village Voice. 

Her essays, columns and reviews have also appeared in The New Republic, The New York Times, The New York Post, The Washington Post and many more regional newspapers around the country.

Vincent is a freelance journalist and in 2003 she took a leave from writing her nationally syndicated political opinion columns in order to write her New York Times bestselling book Self-Made Man, the story of a woman living, working and dating in drag as a man.

She holds a bachelor's degree in Philosophy from Williams College. She currently resides in New York City.


Book Review: Girl, Interrupted ·

Hey, lovely readers, I am deciding to start a new series that really focuses on mental health. This can be fiction or non-fiction but it must be a positive outlook. There is way to much bad attitude about mental health. So this is going to. be a subarctic series potentially but I will get a better grasp of my schedule this weekend.  Read more posts from this series here. ( if not linked that means I have only done one of these in this series. 

When thinking about how to write this review it took me several hours to find the right words. This book really gave me a good look into personality disorders and how it can majorly mess up relationships. This book will leave you speechless. I regularly had to put down this book and cry for this women at times. She seemed so nice and being haunted by these demons really didn't every stop. 

Mental health hospitals are now picnic. It has always amazed me how we believe people can get better in those conditions. This was an interesting book because I had mixed feeling about it. I sort of liked the message but also disliked a lot of the practices by psychiatrists, but I have to remember this is an older. In 1967 most people thought mentally ill people should just be locked up. This young woman's story is quite inspiring though. They used progressive methods to help gain her sanity back. 

There was one line in this book that sparked some debate in my head. That line was, "“Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act?" Is mental illness just a person who doesn't wear a mask in front of people to hide or being secretive. Unfortunately, a lot of people in psych hospitals are on so many drugs they hand the cognitive function of a potato, that's a criticism of the system, not patient. 

I think keeping those things in mind, the main woman in this story Kaysen is so refreshing and interesting. I like that book was written from her perspective versus her therapist or psychologist giving a rather brief overview.  I also like that she had enough self-awareness to really get treatment. She knew she was losing her mid. That is something you don't see every day. 

I also love the real message in this book.They also weren't overly optimistic that they could actually help her. That personality disorders can't just go away. You do learn how to live and overcome them but every day is a battle.  For that, I believe all mentally ill people are very strong. 

When we first learn about Kaysen we realize that she's never matched up with societies views. She always had sort of strange obsessions and ideas about things. Through the book, we learn that there are a lot of red flags people missed.  She was obsessed with her body and at times seemed to lose her grip on reality vs. delusions. 

This book is very interesting and fast paced. Girl, Interrupted gets ups set over my lunch break. It was a harrowing tale of finding your self through the madness. This book has got to be the most brutally honest memoir I have read. She lets you in on the good, the bad, and the down right ugly. I think this book is also good because I feel like right now society has made mental illness cooler, so there are a lot of people clogging up the system that they desperately need. 

There are so many beautiful quotes in this book I loved. Below is a sampling of my current favorites: 

I told her once I wasn’t good at anything. She told me survival is a talent.

"They had a special language: regression, acting out, hostility, withdrawal, indulging in behavior. This last phrase could be attached to any activity and make it sound suspicious: indulging in eating behavior, talking behavior, writing behavior. In the outside world, people ate and talked and wrote, but nothing we did was simple."


“When you’re sad you need to hear your sorrow structured into sound."

I purchased this book from thrift books, I am really glad I did. I had picked up Girl, Interrupted about two years a go and it's been on my TBR for ages. I am glad to have finally gotten to it. I can't believe I  waited so long. 

What is a book that's been on your TBR pile for ages? Post your answers in the comment section below! 

Goodreads Description: 

In 1967, after a session with a psychiatrist she'd never seen before, eighteen-year-old Susanna Kaysen was put in a taxi and sent to McLean Hospital. She spent most of the next two years on the ward for teenage girls in a psychiatric hospital as renowned for its famous clientele -- Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, James Taylor, and Ray Charles -- as for its progressive methods of treating those who could afford its sanctuary.

Kaysen's memoir encompasses horror and razor-edged perception while providing vivid portraits of her fellow patients and their keepers. It is a brilliant evocation of a "parallel universe" set within the kaleidoscopically shifting landscape of the late sixties. Girl, Interrupted is a clear-sighted, unflinching document that gives lasting and specific dimension to our definitions of sane and insane, mental illness and recovery.(less)

Book Tour: Secrets a true story of addiction

                                                                  Book Information:                                                              

Everyone has a secret or two, a part of their life they would rather not share with the rest of the world.

But for Jonathan Daugherty, his secret was so life-altering and relationship-ending that he fought to keep it hidden at all costs. And it did cost him. His secret kept him from contentment, peace, and the possibility of being known and loved for who he truly is. That’s what any secret addiction can do—but in particular a sex addiction.

After his wife finally discovered his secret, their marriage appeared to be over. In Secrets, Jonathan honestly and courageously shares his story of addiction to pornography and how he lost everything to it.

But that’s not how the story ends. While Jonathan struggled, someone else was at work—his heavenly Father. At the lowest possible moment of his life, God stepped in and brought him hope and healing. This is a story of both loss and redemption that gives hope to anyone who has ever experienced the power and struggle of addiction and its life-destroying effects.

Addiction doesn’t have the final say over Jonathan’s life or in his marriage. The God who finds the lost, heals the sick, and brings life from death has the last, victorious word.

—A courageous, honest and open account of life as a sex addict and how sex addiction destroys marriages.
—A life-affirming and personal story of recovery and redemption that will inspire readers.
—Offers hope to all who struggle with pornography and sex addiction.
—Each chapter includes a “Living in the Light” section designed to equip and help readers find freedom from addiction.
—Suitable as a study for support groups of addicts and those who care about them.

Learn more and purchase a copy.

                                                My Thoughts About The Book:                                                              

"Everyone has a secret or two areas of their life they would rather not share with the general public."

Secrets is a small book that is packed with a bunch. It is a cross between a conversation and a self help book. It could be considered a devotional of sorts as well, I suppose. It seems as the author is having a conversation with you. It is a small thin book to help start a conversation about the hard stuff in life. The brokenness, the trouble, the things no one wants to talk about. He makes it deeply personal by telling us the readers how his brokenness overtook his life. Although at the end of each profound memory, he gives the read hope. He does this by sharing why his feelings were wrong and how living without secrets can be accomplished.

I have never struggled with a sexual addiction, or had an issue with pornography. Although I have seen how this can ruin lives, destroy marriage, and leave carnage in its wake. The author is so courageous and unapologetic in his writing. Rarely in the world, and in christian self help books do we someone so completely and candidly reveal they aren't perfect, that they can give advice because they have struggled, the have recovered, and they have healed. I admire his courage to really speak the truth. 

I personally feel like this book is a must read for anyone struggling with addiction whether sexual or some other kind. I feel like pastors and counselor need to have this on their shelves.

Disclaimer: I received this book from Litfuse in exchange for my honest and unbiased review. All thoughts are my own and do not reflect that. 

                                                  Author Information:                                                              

Jonathan Daugherty is the founder of Be Broken Ministries, and founder of Gateway to Freedom workshop for men. He also hosts the weekly radio broadcast, Pure Sex Radio, and is in demand nationally as a speaker on sexual purity and men s issues. He has appeared on multiple radio and television media, both local and national. He has authored "Grace-Based Recovery," "The 4 Pillars of Purity," and other works. Jonathan lives with his wife and three children in San Antonio, Texas.