Reviews tagging 'Chronic illness'

Becoming Dangerous: Witchy Femmes, Queer Conjurers, and Magical Rebels by Katie West, Kristen J Sollee, Jasmine Elliot

3 reviews

corsetedfeminist's review against another edition

challenging informative inspiring reflective fast-paced

4.0

I saw this book on Libby and just grabbed it, not knowing anything about it or the authors, but I enjoyed it. It’s not so much a detailed discussion of how to do magic, as much as a celebration of magic as an act of every day life and as an act of protest- some of the chapters simply discuss the magic of everyday life for a lot of femmes, like skincare and getting your nails done, and some of the chapters discuss the magic in reclaiming marginalized identities- be that queerness, disability, or race. The current flowing throughout the book is that of flipping off cis men, reclaiming who we are in an anti-racist, anti-capitalist, queer fashion, finding that freedom to be ourselves

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Ableism, Body shaming, Chronic illness, Emotional abuse, Homophobia, Misogyny, Racism, Rape, Sexism, Sexual assault, Sexual harassment, Colonisation, and Injury/Injury detail

boopointeshoes's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional hopeful inspiring reflective fast-paced

4.0

I liked most of the stories, but there were two or three that just weren’t for me.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Ableism, Addiction, Alcoholism, Animal death, Child abuse, Chronic illness, Cursing, Death, Domestic abuse, Emotional abuse, Fatphobia, Genocide, Mental illness, Misogyny, Panic attacks/disorders, Physical abuse, Racism, Rape, Self harm, Sexism, Sexual assault, Sexual content, Sexual violence, Suicidal thoughts, Transphobia, Violence, Suicide attempt, Alcohol, Sexual harassment, Dysphoria, and Classism

lilkstew's review

slow-paced

2.75

Meh. This book was fine. The premise is super cool, but I felt that the essays fell flat. Some of them were real knock-outs (particularly "Garden," "Buzzcut Season," "The Future Is Coming for You," and "Ritualizing My Humanity"), but so many others were not that great. Many were dull. Several were trite. 

A lot of the essays felt repetitive, which isn't unheard of for an essay collection, but it felt poorly edited. After the seventh nearly identical essay on beauty, I was bored. The essays also contradicted each other to a strange degree. Again, this isn't uncommon for essay collections; after all, many different authors contributed. It's good to show multiple perspectives and counterpoints, but it didn't really work with this collection. Let's take the subject of beauty for example. A bunch of essays talked about beauty, but they all used the same talking points. One essay would talk about how beauty isn't empowering, the next would claim that beauty is empowering, and then the cycle would repeat. The essays didn't bring up a lot of new points; the main points of an essay on empowering beauty would be the counterpoints of the essay about beauty not being empowering. The essays lost freshness and bite and insight; they were predictable.

The editors did a great job explaining and including content warnings, though.

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Ableism, Addiction, Adult/minor relationship, Alcoholism, Animal death, Body shaming, Bullying, Cancer, Child abuse, Chronic illness, Cursing, Death, Domestic abuse, Drug use, Emotional abuse, Fatphobia, Gun violence, Hate crime, Homophobia, Mental illness, Misogyny, Pedophilia, Physical abuse, Racism, Rape, Sexism, Sexual assault, Sexual content, Sexual violence, Transphobia, Violence, Blood, Antisemitism, Islamophobia, Medical content, Religious bigotry, Medical trauma, and Murder