What I’ve Been Reading

I was less pulled into A Heart in a Body in the World than I wanted to be, partly because it was just difficult to read about a young woman (very nearly literally) flagellating herself with guilt and long-distance running for…something undefined. I was impressed by the delicate rendering of a young woman, under intense pressure (internal and external) to be nice, tolerating toxic masculinity, trying to preform the impossible dance of being endlessly kind to an intense young man who can’t hear her no, who doesn’t notice her boundaries, who doesn’t care about her needs. Yes, this is a book that has true and important things to say about the dreadful, debilitating power of “nice” and what it does to girls who grow up learning that they must take care of everyone but themselves.

In the end, though, the book felt as if it was about these ideas rather than about Annabelle. (And the rhetorical device of leaving readers dangling–what did The Taker do? Who’s Seth Montgomery? What’s actually waiting for Annabelle in Washington, D.C.?) can be effective but it can also be overused. This time it was overused.