My Feisty Bookish Week 051726

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:17][music] >> Hey BookTube, it's Kim at Middle of the Book March and this is my bookish week for Sunday, May 17th.

[00:00:27]Uh and the only reason I knew quickly that it was May 17th was Saturday, May 16th was the is the 2-year anniversary of my first uh divorce meeting with our lawyers.

[00:00:41]Yeah.

[00:00:42]It's all good. It's all good. Uh two It's almost been 2 years and the only thing I'm going to say is after a very, very long time, it was the best decision I ever made.

[00:00:53]That's all of it there is about that.

[00:00:56]Last week, I finished one book. Now, if anybody from my book group is watching and you don't want to get spoiled as to how I feel about this book, then please fast forward or watch another video.

[00:01:09]Yeah Last week, I finished Yesterday's by Carol Clare Burke.

[00:01:15]I believe yes, Carol Clare Burke.

[00:01:17]Um I am going to give you one word and I'm going to expand on that. My one word review is no.

[00:01:27]Just no. No.

[00:01:29]Um this book is a buzz in the book world right now. It's already been picked up by Anne Hathaway for a movie. I think it's a movie.

[00:01:38]The book had barely come out and she had picked it up allegedly.

[00:01:43]And it's it's the world is all a buzz um all a flutter about this book. So, what is Yesterday's about? It is about a um kind of a family influencer on Instagram, um, a a tradwife influencer. And tradwife is the big trendy term going out in the media right now, out in our culture. And this woman is a tradwife influencer.

[00:02:11]Um, I'm going to be honest. In the first 50 or so pages of the book, I was invested.

[00:02:16]It it it captured my attention from the very beginning. And um, this woman, Natalie, is a tradwife influencer. And from the very beginning of the book, we see her kind of filming her life, filming her family.

[00:02:31]Uh, she and her husband live on a ranch with a crap ton of land in Idaho. I think it's in Idaho. And they have like seven or eight kids.

[00:02:41]Um, they're kind of like homesteading.

[00:02:43]So, everything is made from scratch.

[00:02:44]There's no electronics.

[00:02:46]Uh, they have animals on this farm and they do farmers' markets and organic foods and and all of the all of the trendy, all of the stereotypical tradwife stuff that, if you don't know what tradwife means, please go and look on online. Uh, but it basically means traditional wife homemaking, that type of thing. Um, many many tradwives that are in our current culture are fundamentalist Christian people.

[00:03:14]Um, so yeah, that's the basic premise. So, in the very beginning of the book, we kind of see her behind the scenes, we see the filming, we see the family life. Once the cameras are off, we then see the reality. We see the producers and the electronics that are filming and the the nannies, the multiple nannies for these children, the high-tech kitchen gadgets, uh, the the actual food where a lot of it is bought at the store and we see the reality of what this woman portrays online. And it's not it's not always pretty. It is it gets pretty ugly. So, at first I was invested. This was interesting to me.

[00:03:54]Um not like a completely 100% I was fascinated because the term tradwife is trendy. Uh Instagram is trendy. I'm going to say that. It One day it won't be. Um the the concept of all organic, making your own food, having a bunch of kids kind of trendy when you think of think about that tradwife world, tradwife world. Yeah, I said that right. The kind of the homesteading people.

[00:04:21]Um this book is extremely trendy and will date itself very quickly. That's probably in my opinion its biggest drawback.

[00:04:31]But for now it it's pretty timely. It's interesting. It had me a little bit in the very beginning, but and this is not a bad thing. This is not, you know, something that should turn you off. I know this is going to turn off a lot of readers, but the main character Natalie is absolutely hateful and reprehensible. And it's kind of fun.

[00:04:51]It's kind of For me, I don't have to love a character, a main character in a book. This is kind of fun when you're reading about this unreliable woman and she is I have to dismiss a message here.

[00:05:04]She is um just mean and two-faced and fake and passive-aggressive.

[00:05:13]Uh she just doesn't love her her family as much as she portrays on on film, online. So, she's a crappy person and it gets worse and worse and worse the further on we go.

[00:05:27]Um it the chapters interchange between her present life as an influencer. I hate that [ __ ] word. I hate that term. Such a made-up word. I hate it.

[00:05:36]So, we we interchange between her current life as an influencer filming her family for the the internet and her past is how far how her family life, her childhood.

[00:05:48]um how she got to college, how she met her husband, how they decided to do all this, her husband's family. So, interspersed we get those snippets of what her previous life was life life was like and what led up to her being a full-time tradwife influencer.

[00:06:04]>> [snorts] >> The The pretty picture starts to crumble. It It starts to unravel. Um but, we go on and on with this story and it She gets worse and she gets worse and we hear more lies and more um uh untruths about her past. We We learn more about her husband who is a crappy person in a different way and so on and so on and so on. And then and then there is a major twist probably about 2/3 of the way through the book.

[00:06:35]Early on Not early on, but I'm not This is This is out there in the media, but um eventually kind She wakes up one day and all of a sudden she has been thrown into the 1850s or 1800s and she is literally a pioneer woman on a farm/ranch with with no modern conveniences. She wakes up and she's got a pioneer dress on and she's got a bunch of kids and everything is done manually and her husband is working on the with with the animals in the barn and there's a bunch of They have sons and they have daughters and she has no idea how she got here. She is um terrified and in shock.

[00:07:16]And we're like, "What is this? Is this an alternate reality? Is this a nightmare? What What happened? Is this a time travel novel?" Um and so it's like, "What What did I just read? What How did we devolve into she's now in the 1800s and her life is completely different and she's no longer on camera?" Um She's She's outside one day and she's walking through the this land. It's kind of sparse and barren, and she steps on something and in the dirt is a piece of a microphone that somebody would have worn on their lapel if you're filming for social media.

[00:07:53]And it's like, how did that get there if she's in the 1800s?

[00:07:58]What does she do with it? She picks it up, she looks at it, and she puts it in her pocket.

[00:08:02]And that's all we hear about that.

[00:08:06]What what's happening? What what is happening? And then the the last part of the book, I'm not going to spoil what what actually occurs, but it is it is a major stupid plot device.

[00:08:20]Stupid. Those two words I could use to describe this book. No and stupid.

[00:08:27]It's like she's the reader the writer is expecting us as readers to just go with it, to just blow past the ridiculousness of this whole situation.

[00:08:39]To blow past everything that occurred up until that point, which was a fairly decent story. I was getting behind it, getting behind it, and all of a sudden that twist happened and I'm like, what the hell?

[00:08:50]What the freaking hell did I just read?

[00:08:53]What is she trying to do with this stupid plot twist? And it was just ridiculousness.

[00:09:00]Uh there was a certain wrap-up at the end of the book. It's like, oh crap, this is just gone totally gone downhill.

[00:09:07]And stupid is the main word I can think of for this book. This is going to be completely dated in about a month. Uh this is not a book that will move forward in time and will last for people to grab it and reread it. I just thought it was bad. Unfortunately, it's a debut novel and you know, I I want to give her some credit. I do want to give her some credit. But she basically glommed on to a major social trend uh phenomenon, something of that sort.

[00:09:40]And it's crazy that this book came out in such a timely way.

[00:09:45]A tip.

[00:09:46]If you're interested, go online and look up the Ballerina Ranch.

[00:09:51]And then and re- read about that before you pick up the book.

[00:09:55]Or vice versa, either way would work.

[00:09:57]But it will give you chills as to how similar this is. And this is not a figment of this author's imagination.

[00:10:06]This is a reality for this family. And there are several other families like this. But go and look up the Ballerina Ranch, Ballerina Farm, whatever it's called. Um you will be shocked.

[00:10:16]That's it. There There we go.

[00:10:18]So um interesting thing, I DNF'd a crap ton of books this week, this past week. I think they were mostly on audio.

[00:10:27]But let me um get back here to my settings on my uh Kindle and I will tell you which books exactly those are. And I don't think any of these are horrible books, but I didn't get along with them well at all, clearly if I DNF'd them.

[00:10:44]There was one book that I um got from the library in order to read it for Mental Health May.

[00:10:51]And this isn't going to I'm going not going to be able to show you a picture, but I will um put the pictures up here.

[00:10:58]This book was called The Center Cannot Hold by Elyn R. Saks. She uh is a trained psychologist. And also has schizophrenia. I picked this up for Mental Health May.

[00:11:09]Wanted to read about her diet her her life, her diagnosis, and how she got so far in her life and became a doctor. Um I read it on audio, listened to it on audio, and I think I got halfway through. I think I got halfway through, and it was just like it was extremely repetitive. Uh it's not fiction, it's a memoir. Extremely repetitive. Um she saw this doctor, she went to she had this breakdown, she saw this doctor, she had that breakdown, she changed doctors. She was in the hospital a few times. All very valid points of reference for a woman with who's has a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Actually, she did not get that diagnosis in the whole portion I was reading. This This was set kind of in the '70s.

[00:11:53]Um so there was a lot of diagnosis she did get, a lot of medication she was put on, but she didn't get cured. Not cured. She didn't get diagnosed in the section that I was reading. And it was just the same thing over and over and over and over again.

[00:12:07]It's like I wanted the the narrative, this nonfiction narrative, to move forward. I didn't love the narrator. I didn't think it matched the tone of her story, her memoir.

[00:12:19]Um so I kind of gave up on that one. I don't think it's a horrible book. I don't think any of these are like horrible books.

[00:12:26]Uh the next one is The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah.

[00:12:30]>> [snorts] >> I have had so many people say you must read The Nightingale. And this is a beloved book. This is a beloved book by Kristin Hannah. I am not a Kristin Hannah fan. I've read one of her books to completion. I've DNF'd two others.

[00:12:44]Maybe three. And I thought so many people love this book, including several friends of mine, that I thought I would try it on audio.

[00:12:52]Um and I did. And it just didn't work on audio for me. I actually thought, you know what? I think I might read that in print. So I've got it on hold. I got the ebook on hold with the library. And I'm going to try it that way. So it wasn't horrible.

[00:13:07]Um wasn't horrible. The next one is another memoir, Homeschooled by Stefan Merrill Block, read by the author. This is his story about his mother pulling him out of typical school and and quote-unquote homeschooling him, but there wasn't a lot of homeschooling going on and his mother very clearly had some sort of um mental challenges that moved her to pull her son out of school.

[00:13:37]He was clearly the favorite out of her two sons. Her her methods were very weird and um non-traditional even though she gave multiple justifications as to why she pulled him out of school. Um and the the premise was really interesting to me and I was enjoying listening to him. However, I got 25% through the book and I'm like nothing has happened. He's been pulled out of school. He's got a weird relationship with his mother. What next? What's going to happen?

[00:14:09]Nothing. Nothing happened and there was it there was very clearly some weird thing going on with the mom that moved her to pull him out of school and I I just wanted to I wanted to hear more of his story but that's not what occurred.

[00:14:23]It's not what occurred but sorry.

[00:14:26]So, what am I currently reading? I am currently reading three books.

[00:14:32]Um I continue to read A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving for the Meany in May read-along with a a group of us.

[00:14:40]Um this is a beloved book. I read it many years ago. Still love it. I'm about a third of the maybe a little more than a third of the way through. Still love it. I am a huge John Irving fan and just it's been a joy to read this book.

[00:14:56]I am also listening to Cher the memoir volume one. I'm loving this one. Okay, celebrity memoirs I don't usually read in print but they are fantastic to listen to on audio especially if the celebrity narrates it herself and Cher does narrate it but she shares the narration with another woman because Cher has severe dyslexia and she will read small portions of the chapters and I love listening to her voice. And then a good friend of hers in entertainment takes over the the majority of the narration. And I have to say she sounds very much like Cher's voice. You can clearly tell a difference and she sounds younger, but it's like this is great.

[00:15:39]I'm loving listening to this. So, I'm having a lot of fun with that. What a life. She's still in her childhood and it's like what a freaking life. I mean, everything that she endured.

[00:15:49]The other one I started reading a thriller. Had to go to the car dealership and get some service done on my car. I was there for 2 and 1/2 hours, blah, blah, blah. So, I picked up a quick read. It's a thriller Cold Cold Heart by Tami Hoag. This is the first book from this author that I'm picking up. She's a pretty prolific thriller writer.

[00:16:07]This is about the very beginning the prologue of the book. There is a woman bound on the floor of a van and the [clears throat] man who has been torturing and keeping kidnapping her for I don't know how long, weeks, is planning on killing her and he's driving her to wherever. She doesn't know. He is a serial killer and at the very beginning of the book she ends up being able to loosen her ties in the back of the van. This man is talking to himself, kind of singing to himself. He probably can't really hear her moving around back there. She ends up finding a screwdriver in a toolbox that she is able to get to. She can remove her ties and she ends up sinking that screwdriver into his temple and killing him. Causing a car wreck in the process. That is in the prologue. And so, the next chapter one we read of she's now in the hospital. She doesn't know why. She doesn't know what happened to her. So, so far it's like it's a thriller, so it's very thrilling.

[00:17:08]>> [laughter] >> That's all I have to say. It's really it's really actually disturbing material, but it's a it's a fast-paced thriller. Not so fast-paced actually, but it is interesting and we're starting She's starting to piece together snips of what happened to her.

[00:17:24]That is it for my reading week. Let me know in the comments below what you think and I will see you all in the next video. Bye, everybody.