2019 Reading Challenge Reviews - Books 25 & 26

For any new Sorority Blogger readers, I'm participating in the Pop Sugar Reading Challenge this year, and I love it. For more information on the challenge, check out my Overview post, or visit the Pop Sugar website.

Book 25: A Woman is No Man by Etaf Rum

I gave this book 5/5 stars on Goodreads.

The prompt I chose for this was "A book about a family."

I got this book as my book of the month, and finished it in a day. It's that good.

I was an Anthropology major in college, and I love learning about all cultures and their customs. So far this year, I've been lucky enough to read some books with cultural elements by authors who are members of the cultures they write about.

This book follows multiple generations of women from before they immigrated to America up to the current generation who was born in America, but still follow many of the cultural practices of their heritage. A Woman is No Man particularly touches on the proposal process and a woman's role in the home and society.

This book was particularly interesting to me, because a few years ago, someone I knew was going through the proposal process for her culture. She would sometimes share with me some of the experiences she was having meeting potential suitors, and the process of how she and her family would decide on how to proceed with each potential suitor.

While I was reading, I was interested to see similarities and differences between what she told me of her experiences and the experiences of the women in the book (she seemed to have a much bigger say in her experience than they did). It was also very interesting to me to hear/read multiple different experiences since I have never had a similar experience myself.

I think it's incredibly important to learn what you can about other people and their cultures and experiences as long as they are willing to share with you. This way we can hopefully all learn to better understand each other and respect each other.

I would recommend this book to everyone and anyone, especially if you are open to learning about other people who may have completely different experiences but maybe even a lot more similarities to you than you thought before opening your heart and mind to them.

Book 26: The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides

I gave this book 4/5 stars on Goodreads.

The prompt I chose for this was "A debut novel."

This was another Book of the Month pick for me.

When I first picked it up to start reading it, it didn't draw my attention the way I hoped. I think it was probably just not the right book for me to be reading at that time though, because when I picked it up to read again, I quickly didn't want to stop reading and needed to know what happened next.

The story follows a psychotherapist who begins working with Alicia Berenson, a patient who killed her husband and then refused to speak a single word since. Before the tragedy, Alicia was an artist and lived a seemingly happy life. Her lack of speech ends up turning her case into a mystery that continues for years as she has never told her side of the story. The psychotherapist believes that he will finally be the one to get Alicia to open up and speak again. As he tries to achieve breakthroughs with her treatment, he begins to go down a path that leads to the reader learning more about him and his motivations as well.

This book kept me on the edge of my seat wondering what the twist was going to be. I'm really impressed that what it wound up being, I didn't really see coming. As a thriller, I really enjoyed the story and twist; however, there were some things towards the end that left me wondering and I questioned if the story was really wrapped up (but maybe that was the point).

I would recommend this book to anyone who loves a good thriller.