Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn

Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas D. Kristof

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Kristof has long been one of my favorite columnists at the NYT, and many chapters in this book are expansions of editorials he's written for them over the years. Kristof's view of the world and how to make it better isn't knee-jerk liberalism. He offers solutions that are practical and even, at times, gritty. He points the finger of blame at governments and cultures, but cautions against top-down imposition of solutions from the West. Instead, he tells the stories of the women he's encountered and makes it impossible to discount the problem as too large to address. The reader is filled with hope, because every 10.00 donated or invested by the reader could go to help THAT woman improve her lot, and as a result, her country, and in turn the world. This is the manual, the handbook, for the Girl Effect, and they couldn't ask for a better one.

Highly recommended.

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Fallen by Lauren Kate

Fallen by Lauren Kate

My rating: 1 of 5 stars
I've been reading more YA since I have been in law school. It's digestible, undemanding, and lately has had a lot of promising titles in genre fiction. I have avoided the monster of the genre, since there's a lot about Twilight I know beforehand that I'll find objectionable. I had hoped that Fallen would be different.

But it's really not.

This was my first YA romance, and I found it really disturbing. The main character is flat, dimensionless--probably so that young women readers can project themselves onto her more completely. She's just a placeholder for both the author and the reader to get a little wish-fulfillment fix, since Luce can be just like ~anyone~ since she's not at all REAL. The love interests are a little more real, but that ends up being a bad thing. Luce is obsessed with one of them, to the point that even though he's a raging jerk to her she LOVES him from about page 100 on. For no reason. Though they've had no positive interactions. If literature teaches us how to act, and I believe that it does, then this book is teaching every young woman who reads it that social abuse is a marker that someone is your SOULMATE. UGH.

The idea was generally good. The execution leaves a lot to be desired. I suspect I won't pick up book two, even if it has a really gorgeous cover...

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