Book Reviews: September 2025
Before I migrated to Ghost from Pika, I started writing little reviews of books I'd read in a given month. Long before I wrote on Pika, I had book reviews published in a popular North American birding magazine. They were wildly praised by my editor, but I suspect a lot of that might have been indulging a pretentious and underpaid upstart who did a lot of skimming.
Long before I wrote book reviews for a popular North American birding magazine, I prided myself on creating book reports on tomes above many of my peers' reading levels. I was a pretentious middle schooler, too.
In the interest of generating blog content and solidifying my feelings about what I read, the practice is getting picked back up here, now. With help from StoryGraph (blithely adopted after jumping Goodreads' traitorous ship), because heck if I can remember what I consumed yesterday, never mind audiobook loans from some weeks ago.
It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle by Mark Wolynn
One day I'll find it in my heart to forgive the person that recommended this read. I've got generations of under-addressed family trauma. It's almost certain that most people do. Of the laundry list of self-help books I've consumed to try to better understand and navigate my thick streaks of fucked-uppery, this book might be the worst.
My second mistake (the first being reading it at all) was believing that the cute and minimalist DNA strand graphic on the cover indicated that this would be a Science Book. Not so. It starts with a personal anecdote that starts you out doubting the author's character, then it mentions some mouse studies, and then it's a barrage of extremely convenient and unverifiable client stories about coincidences between how a person is behaving and what a distant relative, or a stranger who complicated the life of a distant relative, once experienced.
Maybe there's something to that, but the DNA strand graphic doesn't deliver.
Why would an uncle freezing to death cause a nephew born after his passing to feel inexplicably cold and doom-ridden when the boy hits the same age his non-parent kin met an untimely demise? Is it to do with a surviving sibling's grief and imagination getting bound up somehow in a zygote? Hard to say! Wolynn certainly doesn't!
He does do a troubling amount of mother blaming, though. I didn't mean to subject myself to Freudian hog slop.
The only redeeming factor is that it gives the reader a bit of inspiration for undertaking deep/shadow work. One can examine how issues in one's life might echo those of one's ancestors.
No need to spend several hours of reading to obtain those small nuggets, though.
1.5 out of 5 stars.
The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry
I needed a palate cleaner after all that psychobabble.
This was a diverting read, but fraught with unlikable characters with minimal depth, playing out science-minded pageantry in Victorian England. There's a heroine everyone's in love with for uncertain reasons, bumbling men that are hard to keep straight, an autistic-coded boy who might be the only likeable player despite his many quirks the author painstakingly lays out, and basically a satin bowerbird in the form of a silly tuberculosis patient. There's also, I'm pretty sure but am too disinclined to waste a Libby hold to confirm, a statutory rape scene that didn't need to be included at all. At all.
And a mysterious snake monster derived from real-life local lore. And some goats referenced entirely too often.
(Good lord, they made a series of it.)
Still, it was a palate cleanser. A lighter romp to close out a summer of burnout and three quarters of existential ennui.
3.75 out of 5 stars is the rating I gave on StoryGraph at the time of completion. I'm feeling less generous about it now.
The Book of Hedge Druidry: A Complete Guide for the Solitary Seeker by Joanna van der Hoeven
No complaints about this volume, although it wasn't entirely clear what was druidic, what was witchcraft, and what was general paganism. It might be the case that, being fully immersed in that triadic intersection at the moment, all three modalities are just top of mind all the time, and reading a book one could assume to be about the topic in the title built an expectation of prescriptive praxis, and maybe one felt jarred when that was not quite so. But that's how it is in the hedges. Loosey goosey and perfectly free. Prescriptive nothin'.
It served as good background noise in audiobook form, and presented some ideas and tidbits for my psyche to gnaw on. Certainly a decent work for someone on a similar path to consume and integrate.
4 out of 5 stars.
And that's it for September! I'm currently at four books read for October, and look forward to sharing my pretentious little reviews on all of them next month.
Meanwhile, happy pre-winter cozy-time nest-building.