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Book Review: Cat

Rating: 3.5 stars

Rebecca van Laer and her partner purchase a home and move in with their senior cats, Toby and Gus. Their loved ones see this as a step toward an inevitable future—first comes the house, then a dog, then a child. But what if they are just cat people?

Moving between memoir, philosophy, and pop culture, Cat is a playful and tender meditation on cats and their people. Van Laer considers cats’ role in her personal narrative, where they are mascots of laziness and lawlessness, and in cultural narratives, where they appear as feminine, anarchic, and maladapted, especially in comparison to dogs.

From the stereotype of the ‘crazy cat lady’ to the joy of cat memes to the grief of pet loss, van Laer demonstrates that the cat-person relationship is free of the discipline and dependence required by parenting (and dog-parenting), creating a less hierarchical intimacy that offers a different model for love.

I received a digital copy of this book through the publisher on NetGalley for an honest review. Cat is a philosophical nonfiction piece that switches between talking about the cats the author and her husband have in their lives and bringing up interesting philosophical thoughts regarding cats.

I found this short nonfiction book charming for the content within its pages, whenever Rebecca would talk about her cats. As a cat lover myself, I found her experience of raising cats relatable, as a lot of the struggles she experienced with having cats were similar to mine. For example, when she talked about when her one cat disappeared, only months later, she received a phone call from a stranger that they had found her cat, who was two hours away from where she currently lived at the time. That experience was relatable to me because our family had a similar experience with one of our cats, the one time when someone had posted on one of the neighborhood sites a picture asking about a cat, and it was one of ours.

I found these stories of her sharing her experiences of raising her cats enjoyable because they were relatable to me as a reader. Even the segment where she describes her grief in this book was relatable to me. Animals that have been a part of your life for so long, you see them as family, so it was difficult for me not to get emotional whenever she talked about the loss of one of her cats in her life. And I found these aspects of Cat enjoyable to read.

The aspects of this book that I didn’t quite enjoy were when Rebecca would talk about cats in a philosophical and cultural way. As in, the way in which cats are in society and are described. Not because I didn’t understand what I was reading or anything. Because I feel like it didn’t flow overall with Rebecca talking about her cats, or add anything to the narrative she was trying to create. Yes, I get her talking about the stereotypes of women who have cats but don’t have children, but I felt at times some of the topics she discussed with regard to cats had nothing to do with her and her husband’s situation regarding their cats. Then again, this was my first time reading a book that was one of many in the Object Lessons series, and maybe a lot of books in this series are structured in this way.

Cat was an enjoyable and charming read that I recommend to anyone like me who loves animals, especially cats, and is set to publish tomorrow, October 2, 2025, for anyone interested in giving this book a read.

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Book Review: I’m Glad My Mom Died

Rating: 4 stars

A heartbreaking and hilarious memoir by iCarly and Sam & Cat star Jennette McCurdy about her struggles as a former child actor—including eating disorders, addiction, and a complicated relationship with her overbearing mother—and how she retook control of her life.

Jennette McCurdy was six years old when she had her first acting audition. Her mother’s dream was for her only daughter to become a star, and Jennette would do anything to make her mother happy. So she went along with what Mom called “calorie restriction,” eating little and weighing herself five times a day. She endured extensive at-home makeovers while Mom chided, “Your eyelashes are invisible, okay? You think Dakota Fanning doesn’t tint hers?” She was even showered by Mom until age sixteen while sharing her diaries, email, and all her income.

In I’m Glad My Mom Died, Jennette recounts all this in unflinching detail—just as she chronicles what happens when the dream finally comes true. Cast in a new Nickelodeon series called iCarly, she is thrust into fame. Though Mom is ecstatic, emailing fan club moderators and getting on a first-name basis with the paparazzi (“Hi Gale!”), Jennette is riddled with anxiety, shame, and self-loathing, which manifest into eating disorders, addiction, and a series of unhealthy relationships. These issues only get worse when, soon after taking the lead in the iCarly spinoff Sam & Cat alongside Ariana Grande, her mother dies of cancer. Finally, after discovering therapy and quitting acting, Jennette embarks on recovery and decides for the first time in her life what she really wants.

Told with refreshing candor and dark humor, I’m Glad My Mom Died is an inspiring story of resilience, independence, and the joy of shampooing your own hair.

As someone who grew up watching iCarly and enjoyed the character Jennette McCurdy played as, I had no idea how much she was going through at that stage of her life. I imagined being a child star probably wasn’t easy, but the amount of pressure McCurdy faced from her mother at this stage of her development didn’t help. Her mother caused so many problems in her life that I don’t blame her for quitting acting and not wanting to be in the spotlight. Knowing her name from having watched iCarly as a child is one of the main reasons I decided to pick up her book and I’m so glad I did.    

In I’m Glad My Mom Died, Jennette McCurdy talks in detail about her experiences in auditioning for roles, her relationship with her mother and food. She doesn’t leave any details out regarding how much pressure her mother put on her to audition no matter how much she didn’t enjoy it and brought up the comments her mother made about her body and how her mother helped restrict her food intake, so she’d remain skinny.

While I can’t relate to everything she’s been through and have no insight into what it’s like being a child star, I unfortunately can empathize with her in that I know what it’s like dealing with an abusive parental figure. Not going to go into too many details, but when I was going through middle school and high school, my mom was in an emotionally, mentally, and verbally abusive marriage. So I unfortunately know what its like having a parental figure you look up to treating you the way McCurdy’s mother treated her and how that can affect your life even when you’re no longer dealing with that person. Because of that, I found I was able to relate to parts of her story when it came to her relationship with her mother, especially whenever her mother was mean to her because she wouldn’t do what her mother wanted her to do. I found that relatable because my mom’s ex-husband and I especially didn’t have a great relationship once they got married and he said all sorts of things about me too. So reading that McCurdy went through the same thing through her mother was rough, but also allowed me to find something in her story I could relate to, even if the parental figures in our lives said and did different things.  

I’m Glad My Mom Died is a tough but real read that I enjoyed because I enjoyed how real McCurdy is when detailing her childhood and all of her struggles in her life. Yes, a lot of what she’s talking about is rough to read, but it’s how she grew up. And you can plainly see how her mother’s influence played into the person she became as a young adult through the struggles she endures in her relationships as well as how she is when it comes to food. All of the struggles she has as a young adult are due to her mother’s influence in her life. I enjoyed getting to read her struggles because of how relatable they are and how blunt and real she is when sharing her perspective. I also appreciate that in her story, she still has work on herself to do. Not because I’m glad she’s still struggling but because I’m glad she’s honest about that she’s still working on herself. It’s nice to read that she’s aware of her issues and is working on them. It’s plain that there’s still more of her story that hasn’t been written yet, and that its due to the work she’s continuing to do on herself. Yes, it makes it seem like her book is half finished, but I feel like for her since she’s still living her life, there are some things that probably weren’t needed or that we as the reader don’t necessarily need to know. So I’m fine with not necessarily having a conclusion since its apparent to me that she still has things she’s working on.  

Overall, I’m glad I decided to read her story. Its relatable because she talks about tough topics that don’t get talked about nearly enough, and she doesn’t hesitate to talk about the good, bad, and ugly when it comes to how things were in her life. I also felt like I learned from her story since I don’t have the body image issues she has when it comes to food, and I have no idea what it was like being a child star when iCarly came out. So I felt like by hearing her perspective, I learned about what its like to struggle with an eating disorder as well as how difficult it is being a child star. Overall glad to have read I’m Glad My Mom Died and recommend it to anyone who watched McCurdy on iCarly or can relate to any aspect of her story in anyway.    

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Book Review: Stray: Memoir of a Runaway

Rating: 3.5 stars

Brutal and beautiful, Stray is the true story of a girl who runs away and finds herself.

After growing up in a dysfunctional and emotionally abusive home, Tanya Marquardt runs away on her sixteenth birthday. Her departure is an act of rebellion and survival—whatever she is heading toward has to be better than what she is leaving behind.

Struggling with her inner demons, Tanya must learn to take care of herself during two chaotic years in the working-class mill town of Port Alberni, followed by the early-nineties underground goth scene in Vancouver, British Columbia. She finds a chosen family in her fellow misfits, and the bond they form is fierce and unflinching.

Told with raw honesty and strength, Stray reveals Tanya’s fight to embrace the vulnerable, beguiling parts of herself and heal the wounds of her past as she forges her own path to a new life.

This memoir was overall an enjoyable read for me. What made this memoir enjoyable is the way Tanya opens about all the troubles she dealt with throughout her adolescence. She covers everything-from the abusive and emotional manipulation she experienced from her parents to her issues with alcohol addiction to cutting. I also found it relatable to any young girl having similar experiences and found I could relate to some of the struggles she was dealing with. Her memoir, however, isn’t for the faint of heart so if you have any triggers, her story more than likely isn’t for you. But if you decide to give it a read anyway, tread carefully.

I also found learning about the gothic scene through the eyes of an adolescent interesting. I knew absolutely nothing about it prior to reading her words, and she was able to paint a picture of what it was like being goth during her younger years in a way that made sense to me. And while I didn’t appreciate the amount of alcohol and cigarettes she seemed to consume, I found the party scenes with her friends very interesting. I found it was a good way for me as the reader to learn more about Tanya and her friends since there wasn’t much in the story to give me an inkling of their relationship to each other.

What bothered me about Stray: Memoir of a Runaway is how misleading the synopsis of this memoir is to the reader. Yes, Tanya runs away from her mother. However, she goes to live with friends from school, and her mom knows where she is the whole time she left. There is nothing about her situation that I would consider would make her a runaway and it doesn’t even play that much of a role in the overall plot of what Tanya goes through. She also eventually lives with her father, but only because in her memoir she says he lets her do what she wants while her mother doesn’t.

I was also bothered by the lack of transition regarding her life. She apparently overcomes all the problems most of the memoir mentions, but there’s nothing specific in the story itself that pinpoints what causes these changes in her life. I know in one part of Stray, she mentions to one of her teachers that she writes poetry and begins to go to that teacher’s classroom during lunch to share what she’s written. Otherwise, there’s nothing in her memoir at all that shows to me as a reader how she comes to be the person she is today, and how she overcomes all the challenges she’s had to deal with in life. And that bothers me because I feel like we learn more about her when she’s rebelling against her parents versus when she’s able to make the changes to her life that result in her becoming successful. It bothers me because I want to find out those details about her in her memoir and I didn’t get them.

However, I did enjoy reading Stray: Memoir of a Runaway. It captured my interest as a reader and was a nice first book to get back to since my unexpected reading hiatus. I recommend this book to readers who want to hear about someone’s personal struggles without words being minced and people who also want to learn more about the gothic aspects of the story that I knew nothing about going into this read.  

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Book Review: Shout

Shout Book Cover

Rating: 4 stars

A searing poetic memoir and call to action from the bestselling and award-winning author of Speak, Laurie Halse Anderson!

Bestselling author Laurie Halse Anderson is known for the unflinching way she writes about, and advocates for, survivors of sexual assault. Now, inspired by her fans and enraged by how little in our culture has changed since her groundbreaking novel Speak was first published twenty years ago, she has written a poetry memoir that is as vulnerable as it is rallying, as timely as it is timeless. In free verse, Anderson shares reflections, rants, and calls to action woven between deeply personal stories from her life that she’s never written about before. Searing and soul-searching, this important memoir is a denouncement of our society’s failures and a love letter to all the people with the courage to say #metoo and #timesup, whether aloud, online, or only in their own hearts. Shout speaks truth to power in a loud, clear voice– and once you hear it, it is impossible to ignore.

This book was so beautifully written that I enjoyed every minute I spent reading it. The overall writing style in this book reminds me so much of Ellen Hopkins’s young adult, contemporary, poetry prose. Like her works, Shout does a wonderful job of telling Laurie Halse Anderson’s story in poetic format. The difference being though that her story is a memoir, based on her own life experiences that she had during her adolescence.

For me, that made this book that much more beautiful. I found her story from teenager to young adult relatable as she talks about her experience with sexual assault and how that helped shape her into the adult she is now. Her poetry style flowed very well and was easy for me as a reader to follow along. As a result, I found myself wanting to continue reading her story to see how she handled her life experiences.

Another element of this memoir I enjoy is the honesty with which Anderson talks about sexual assault. Not only with regards to how it affected her own life but also how she’s seen her writing about it impact the lives of others. I don’t recall if I’ve mentioned this in any of my blog posts before or not, but her book Speak is one of my favorite books. The first time I read it, I knew it was an important book that I’d always have on my bookshelf and it’s a story I’ve read countless times. With Shout, I find myself feeling the same way because the story being told within its pages is just as important.

I appreciate that this book brings up important topics such as sexual assault and censorship when it comes to allowing children to read certain books. Both topics need to be addressed, especially in books. It saddens me to see so little has changed when it comes to these topics and I appreciate Anderson’s words bringing this truth to light and letting us know she wants to continue being a voice of change.

There is very little with this memoir I didn’t enjoy, except maybe certain poems didn’t flow very well. Or that I found when reading certain parts of the overall story didn’t feel quite as strong as others. I overall loved each of the sections in this book, but I sometimes found the writing worked well in one section over the other. Not to say that I didn’t enjoy the content, I just didn’t find that section quite as enjoyable to read as the other. It was interesting and caught my attention but didn’t speak to me quite as much.

Either way, I overall enjoyed reading Shout. To the point where I’m at a loss of words to describe my thoughts on this book. It’s a good book, full of content that gets straight to the point and leaves quite the punch. If you haven’t read it already, I highly recommend it, especially to those who love poetry/prose and memoirs. It’s also good for young adult readers and those who enjoy reading books that deal with difficult topics.

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Book Review: Shadow Mountain: A Memoir of Wolves, A Woman, and the Wild

Shadow Mountain Book Cover

Rating: 4 stars

After forming an intense bond with Natasha, a wolf cub she raised as part of her undergraduate research, Renée Askins was inspired to found the Wolf Fund. As head of this grassroots organization, she made it her goal to restore wolves to Yellowstone National Park, where they had been eradicated by man over seventy years before. Here, Askins recounts her courageous fifteen-year campaign, wrangling along the way with Western ranchers and their political allies in Washington, enduring death threats, and surviving the anguish of illegal wolf slayings to ensure that her dream of restoring Yellowstone’s ecological balance would one day be realized. Told in powerful, first-person narrative, Shadow Mountain is the awe-inspiring story of her mission and her impassioned meditation on our connection to the wild.

This book is an amazing read. This memoir weaves together an amazing story about a woman and her love of the wild. Through Askins’s eyes, the reader learns more about her upbringing and how she was introduced to wolves for the first time.

I enjoyed reading Shadow Mountain because Askins really brings to light subjects a lot of us don’t talk about. She talks about the wild by providing her own definition of it, but also realizes that we can’t stop an animal from being wild because it’s a part of their nature. Askins also talks a lot about her personal life by telling us stories about her dogs. But she connects these personal anecdotes to her work with the Wolf Fund and her understanding of how we contribute to the state of animal populations. I enjoyed seeing these type of discussions in her memoir because it continues bringing to light topics we don’t openly discuss, such as how we try and take the wild out of our pets and pet pageantry. Both of these things are something we ourselves sometimes do and don’t realize it. So it was nice to have someone openly talk about these topics.

I found this book enjoyable because I wanted to learn more about the subject matter. As someone whose favorite animals is wolves, I wanted to learn more about the author and how she contributed to Yellowstone. But I also wanted to know more about wolves and their behaviors around people. I wanted more understanding of what our society is doing to help bring wolves back into the wild and what we are doing to make sure they are safe. And I found the information Askins provided to be very helpful in getting a better understanding of her organization and how she contributed to the restoration of wolves in Yellowstone National Park. The information she provided in Shadow Mountain shows she did a lot of research while doing her work, which helped me a lot in better understanding her perspective and the way the world perceives wolves.

My favorite part of this memoir was reading about her relationship with Natasha. I enjoyed reading about that relationship because I feel like it gives readers a better understanding of wolves. I also feel like when Askins was talking about Natasha she would talk about the wolf pack hierarchy, which I always found interesting to read about. I find learning about wolves and how they perceive others to be useful information in getting a better understanding of them. I also found it interesting that Askins voices an opinion that I myself believe to be true, which is that we as humans tend to fear things we know very little about. She talks about these things and calls them the “other,” something which we tend to do quite a bit ourselves when talking about things we don’t agree with as a society. I agree that wolves tend to be talked about in this way because they are creatures people don’t understand. So instead of trying to understand them, people kill them because they are scared of them.

While I find Shadow Mountain to be a powerful memoir, there are times when I feel like Askins does too much telling in her memoir. Her overall message to the reader is beautiful. But sometimes I feel like she’s telling story after story to get her point across instead of providing the reader with facts as to why we should be working on restoring wolves into the wild. While I get that this issue is very close to her heart, having all of these stories in her memoir made it a little of a slow read for me at times. When those moments came, I would’ve preferred to have facts as to why restoring wolves is a good idea for the whole animal population. I feel like that would’ve helped get her point across and provide the reader with even more information and understanding.

Despite this aspect of her memoir, I really enjoyed reading Askins’s book. I feel like it really helped me understand the challenges she faced while restoring wolves to Yellowstone. I also enjoyed hearing about her upbringing because it allowed me to better understand why she involved herself in this restoration effort. I look forward to continue reading more books about wolf recovery efforts in the near future and recommend this to anyone else interested in learning more about wolf restoration to Yellowstone National Park.

 

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Book Review: Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurer’s Search for Wonder in the Natural World

Phenomenal Book

Rating: 4 stars

Heartfelt and awe inspiring, Leigh Ann Henion’s Phenomenal is a moving tale of physical grandeur and emotional transformation, a journey around the world that ultimately explores the depths of the human heart. A journalist and young mother, Henion combines her own conflicted but joyful experiences as a parent with a panoramic tour of the world’s most extraordinary natural wonders. Phenomenal begins in hardship: with Henion deeply shaken by the birth of her beloved son, shocked at the adversity a young mother faces with a newborn. The lack of sleep, the shrinking social circle, the health difficulties, all collide and force Henion to ask hard questions about our accepted wisdom on parenting and the lives of women. Convinced that the greatest key to happiness—both her own and that of her family—lies in periodically allowing herself to venture into the wider world beyond home, Henion sets out on a global trek to rekindle her sense of wonder.

Henion’s quest takes her far afield, but it swiftly teaches her that freedom is its own form of parenting, one that ultimately allows her to meet her son on his own terms: with a visceral understanding of the wonder he experiences every day at the fresh new world. Whether standing on the still-burning volcanoes of Hawai’i or in the fearsome lightning storms of Venezuela, in the vast animal movements of Tanzania or the elegant butterfly migrations of Mexico, Henion reveals in Phenomenal a world of sublimity and revelation.

Henion’s spiritual wanderlust puts her in the path of modern-day shamans, reindeer herders, and astrophysicists. She meets laypeople from all over the world, from all walks of life, each going to great lengths to chase migrations, auroras, eclipses, and other phenomena. These seekers trust their instincts, follow their passions, shape their days into the lives they most want to lead. And somewhere along the way, Leigh Ann Henion becomes one of them.

A breathtaking memoir, Phenomenal reveals unforgettable truths about motherhood, spirituality, and the beauty of nature.

Upon picking up this book, I discovered how much I really enjoyed reading it. I found this book to be a phenomenal read because it inspired in me a sense of wonder about the world around us. It brought to light how much of the world I have yet to see and how each of us in everyday life can find something to live in awe over. Hearing this incredible journey to see natural phenomena in our everyday world from the perspective of a journalist struggling to fit in her travels while still having time with her son really made me captivated to continue reading this memoir.

I found Phenomenal to be an enjoyable read for other reasons as well. I really enjoyed hearing about all of the different places Leigh Ann traveled to, from seeing the Northern Lights in Sweden to going to see a volcano eruption in Hawaii. I also enjoyed her conversations with people from different walks of life about their culture and their own beliefs and how she was able to reflect on all of those different conversations to try and make sense of the world we live in. I found Phenomenal to be a memoir that not only kept me thinking, but also inspired in me the need to travel and see the wonderful sights the world around us has to offer.

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