3 New Buzzworthy Books About Fighting for Love, Equality, and Happiness at Home
by Jennifer Ridgway
As we enter the end of the year — a season filled with holiday parties, gift buying, end-of-semester school assignments, last-minute work projects, and holiday travel — it’s especially difficult to carve out time for ourselves and comb through all the great new book releases. I’ve done the work for you, selecting three new grown-up reads that I think will be worth your time … even when you can only spare a few minutes!
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Love Warrior
Confession #1: I just finished this book and am still processing it. Confession #2: My plan was to write about a different book for you — a very deserving, entertaining, well-written book — but after finishing Love Warrior, I knew this was one I had to recommend.
Glennon Doyle Melton is a powerhouse: She’s the writer behind the blockbuster site Momastery, the bestselling author of Carry On, Warrior, and the founder and president of Together Rising, a nonprofit that aims to serve the needs of women and children worldwide. In her new memoir, she tells the story of hitting rock bottom twice — once when she was an alcoholic and suffered from an eating disorder, and then again after her husband confessed to infidelity — and what it took for her to claw her way back and stay true to herself, no easy feat. Some have classified Love Warrior as a marriage book — and it does indeed focus on a crisis in her marriage, among other things — yet it is so much more. It's about being vulnerable, finding and speaking your truth, and discovering and nurturing who you truly are.
Confession #3: I only recently started reading Momastery — but what struck me, after reading both the memoir and the blog, is that Love Warrior has the same feeling of authenticity as Melton’s blog posts. It’s so raw and vulnerable that I sometimes couldn’t believe that someone would put herself, her whole self, out there for the public to see. There were moments in the memoir when Melton came off as frigid or unlikeable — but those moments made me wonder: How much of my own inner self would seem that way if I were truly honest?
One of my favorite parts of the book comes at the end: As her youngest daughter is pretending to be sexy, her other daughter says, “Inappropriate, Amma! Sexy IS inappropriate, isn’t it, Mom?” Watching her daughters’ interaction, Melton considers her own lifelong struggles with eating disorders, self-acceptance, and figuring out what it means to be a woman today, and wants to respond in a way that doesn’t suggest sex is wrong, but also doesn’t encourage a media-driven view of women. What she ends up saying (which I will leave to you to read) is so thoughtful and beautiful, I wanted to cut the pages out to save for both my daughter and my son to read.
Love Warrior is a moving memoir about facing your struggles and rising above them, about learning to listen to your inner voice and letting her speak out.
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Rad Women Worldwide: Artists and Athletes, Pirates and Punks, and Other Revolutionaries Who Shaped History
Available from:When I was growing up, history classes really did seem to be “his story” classes, filled with inspiring men who changed the world. However, there are just as many women (and girls) who’ve had a hand in moving our world forward — and Kate Schatz’s new book, a follow-up to Rad American Women A-Z, is all about celebrating these revolutionary females.
Rad Women Worldwide tells the stories of 40 women throughout history and around the globe — from Enheduanna, born in 2285 B.C., to contemporary women such as Malala Yousafzai. While some of the women will be familiar to most, there are plenty who have been swept aside. Take for example the aforementioned Enheduanna, who many people don’t know was the world’s oldest known author; she was also a Princess and a High Priestess, the first known woman to hold the position. Or Junko Tabei, who became the first woman to reach the South Summit of Mount Everest in 1975 and, later, the first woman to climb the “Seven Summits.” There’s also Sophia Magdalena Scholl, a woman who, along with her brother and friends, put her criticism of the Nazis in writing, one of the first times anyone dared to put anything negative in print from inside Germany, and was ultimately executed for her act of protest.
Though the biographies are appropriate for tweens and teens, they’re especially great for parents with limited time. Each one is quite short and easily read in five to ten minutes. The stories are really inspiring, not just for showing what amazing contributions women have made, but also for demonstrating what a difference a single person or small group of people can make. For those who want to read about even more rad women, Schatz includes a list of 250 additional names in the back of the book.
An artist who goes by “Frida Kahlo,” a member of a group of anonymous feminist artists called Guerilla Girl (also included in the book!), put it best when she said: “How can you really tell the story of a culture when you don’t include all the voices within the culture? Otherwise it’s just the story and history of power.”
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Listen: Five Simple Tools to Meet Your Everyday Parenting Challenges
Patty Wipfler is the founder of Hand-in-Hand Parenting, an organization focused on building the parent-child connection through authoritative parenting, or parenting with a lot of love and warmth but also reasonable limits and expectations. In Listen, her first book, co-written with Tosha Schore, she lays out five tools to help parents through the many challenges, big and small, that we face on a daily (sometimes hourly!) basis. The title of the book plays on a few of the ideas and philosophies of the book: by listening to our hearts as parents, truly listening to our children through their struggles, and creating listening partnerships with other parents, we can become better parents and help our children become emotionally intelligent, resilient, compassionate adults.
There is much to love about this book. While the book might seem long at first glance, the authors understand that parents are busy and don’t expect you to read it in one go — they actually propose which sections to read according to the amount of time you have. One of the issues I sometimes have when reading a parenting book is wondering how I can apply the advice to my own specific circumstances, but with over 100 varied examples of real parents and caregivers using the recommended tools, I was able to immediately apply them to challenges with my twins. The bottom line philosophy: The key to parenting is strengthening the bond with your child while maintaining moderate and appropriate limits. And, the authors’ tone of voice is nonjudgmental and supportive, which is important to me, as I don’t like feeling lectured to when I'm reading a parenting book.
What exactly are the five tools? I will be brief, just to whet your appetite. The first is all about “Special Time,” or creating a set, regular amount of one-on-one time with your child during which you allow them to lead what the two of you do. “Staylistening,” the second tool, is basically what it sounds like: Staying with your child when they’re upset and listening all the way through. “Setting Limits” is something that’s already familiar to most parents — setting limits that are age-appropriate and respectful to help our children develop healthily. “Playlistening” is focused on fostering your child’s confidence through natural laughter and fun. And, the last tool, “Listening Partnerships,” is all about you and learning to form partnerships with other adults, which allows you to tackle the stress that is a natural byproduct of parenting.
All in all, Listen is a practical book with five concrete tools that are easy to use in any parenting challenge.
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Read something else lately that you absolutely loved? Let us know in the comments below.