Category: Reviews

Book Review: Secrets of the Sprakkar by Eliza Reid.

Secrets of the Sprakkar: Iceland’s Extraordinary Women and How They Are Changing the World, by Eliza Reid. This book was a relatively light and easy read, in large part because it was hopeful about gender equality. Written in 2020 and released in 2022, the book covers a wide variety of topics around gender equality in Iceland, where the author was First Lady from 2016 to 2024.

Reid structures the book around “sprakkar” or extraordinary Icelandic women: mythical, historical, and women Reid knows from her time in Iceland. As an immigrant, she covers both good and bad points about Iceland’s small population (e.g., it turns like a speedboat, but everyone is related to everyone, which can lead to cronyism and nepotism and limited opportunities for immigrants and outsiders). It struck me that the modern women she interviewed were often ordinary but interesting: almost any woman in public life can be a sprakkar if you focus on her good works.

While the book is encouraging about Icelandic and European gender equality, it’s depressing to consider it in light of gender disparity in the US. Icelanders consider gender equity a moral right, where here we’re fighting a rearguard action against people who consider patriarchal hierarchy desirable and correct. Gestures and actions that seem simple in the Icelandic context would be highly controversial here. Certainly no recent American First Lady could write a book on extraordinary American women. While she might have connections to powerful businesswomen, celebrities, and sports heroines, the approach she would take to interviewing them would necessarily be different.

At the same time, Reid is aware of her own privilege and the downsides of Iceland for immigrant women, particularly women of color. Reid’s interviews with fellow immigrants bring these problems into focus, including spousal abuse in her own circles. And her chapter discussing Iceland’s work toward supporting women refugees was distressing to read.

The book answers questions I didn’t know I had and raises questions I couldn’t expect it to answer. The differences in size and culture between the US and Iceland mean their answers can’t transfer here, but they suggest how American institutions could support women and gender equity if they wanted. It would be inspiring if we hadn’t seen in recent weeks that so many American institutions neither care about nor want diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Book Review: We Are Not Like Them by Christine Pride and Jo Piazza

We Are Not Like Them: A Novel, by Christine Pride and Jo Piazza. I usually avoid women’s book club fiction, but this book’s structure and topic interested me. The two authors, a Black woman and a white woman, wrote alternating first-person chapters about the friendship between an up-and-coming Black journalist and the wife of a white Philadelphia policeman who shoots and kills an unarmed Black teenager. The story is ripped from the headlines, but the approach is from an unusual angle.

The details of the friendship feel real as written but the backstory from which it emerged feel contorted (did the white girl’s mom have to be a drug addict?) to touch all the social issues the writers seemed to want. As events involving money, lawyers, journalistic ethics, deaths, births, etc., spiral, the two women circle each other, bound by history and affection but separated by the pain of racism as it affects their experiences and expectations.

I’m not in the socioeconomic class of the white woman in this story and while I come closer to the experience of the Black woman (good schools, good career, etc.) I don’t think I could tell her story. The writing was solid and portrayed the interior of each of the women well, along with their relationships with their families and supporting cast. But I felt that stuffing so many topical issues into the single story decreased the realism and credibility of the story overall.

I took particular issue with the ending, which I can’t describe as happy so much as less sad and more hopeful than I expected. I felt that some of the relationships that survived should have broken, and that at least one of the relationships that broke should have remained intact. It was obvious to me what the authors intended but one crucial decision a character made seemed out of character: not wrong for their heart but surprising given who they were and everything we knew about them.

My discomfort with the ending might have more do to with my unfamiliarity with women’s book club fiction, or with the need to tie up all the threads that I felt were awkwardly woven into the story. I’d read another similar book by these two authors again, but I’d go in with slightly lower expectations.

Book Review: The Anti-Ableist Manifesto by Tiffany Yu

The Anti-Ableist Manifesto: Smashing Stereotypes, Forging Change, and Building a Disability-Inclusive World by Tiffany Yu. This was a solid read, but I felt old and sad while reading. Old because I’d never have dreamt of showing Yu’s boldness around my disabilities; sad because considering disability activism and accommodations during Trump II is depressing.

The structure of the book is solid: short chapters with bullet points and questions for reflection. I’ll need to reread it slowly to answer the chapter questions. Yu communicated her values and goals and the steps to achieve them clearly. At the same time, the book has a millennial vibe about disability accommodation: proactive, identity-based, and assuming good faith in dealing with employers, businesses, and government, an assumption I don’t share. Some of this comes up explicitly in her chapters on working with disabilities. Yu’s optimism about improving workplaces doesn’t jibe with my experience. Her experience with government in California is also different to what I’d expect in Texas.

Part of our difference is generational, but also I’m reading the book in 2025. It was published before the election, which not only changed federal government but also confirmed a cultural change hostile to DEIA. President Trump is openly eugenicist and HHS Secretary Kennedy plans to solve chronic illness and other health problems by “reparenting” patients in organic work farms. Within the context of the manifesto, it makes sense that Yu barely mentioned the eugenic discrimination in triage of COVID patients. Yet the widespread acceptance of discrimination against the disabled during COVID both parallels and foreshadows the open bigotry of the current Republican administration.

A book that addressed those issues wouldn’t be Yu’s manifesto, though I’d read a book by Yu that addresses continued advocacy and community with other marginalized groups in a 2025 context. All of her advice is good and similar to that I’ve read for and by other marginalized groups. It’s just going to be harder to follow now than it would have been when Yu wrote it.

Part of the discomfort I felt while reading Yu’s book was internalized ableism and the feeling that I don’t do enough advocacy for myself or around disability in general. I’m glad Yu got over those feelings. Her book points the way to a world where disability doesn’t evoke shame and anger because the conditions that lead to them have changed for the better or been eliminated completely.