A review by book_dragon29
If Women Rose Rooted: A Life-changing Journey to Authenticity and Belonging by Sharon Blackie

Did not finish book. Stopped at 26%.


I picked up this book for a book club, and it looked like I would enjoy it. I went in with an open mind hoping to learn about old myths and how we can learn from them now. 

This was far from the reality. I read about 178 pages in before needing to stop. I had some concerns, 
  • the writing is so militant, so inflexible, that it’s like the author is shouting at you. If you don’t accept her thoughts, you’re part of the patriarchy problem. If you don’t up sticks and go live in the wilderness you’re lying to yourself. It is presented as the ONLY way to have any kind of relationship or awakening with your spiritual wild woman side. My own experiences are different from this, and I felt excluded and depressed reading it.
  • She massively hates on corporate women. I am a corporate woman, I’m an engineer, which I do because I want to see the world a better place and I do not think women should be left out of shaping our world. I am also a self confessed wild woman, I love the planet, the wilderness and I see the two able to coexist and actually codependent on each other. For her to tear apart my life choices, insinuate that you cannot care about the planet and your wild calling by being in a corporate world was difficult for me to read and felt I had to justify my life decisions to someone I haven’t even met - classic mark of the patriarchy and its powers of guilt by the way.
  • I would have appreciated quoting some sources. I can’t tell here what is actual myth or what is her opinion or creative license of the myth. Also she doesn’t go into some in detail at all - at one point going ‘we all know the Arthurian legend about the wasteland’ - do we? I don’t, that’s why I’m reading this book… if you want a better more well researched and referenced book regarding myths from Britain I’d recommend Wild: Tales from Early Medieval Britain by Amy Jeffs as she has come at it from a much more academic view that suited me more. 
  • The book is feels very actively anti men. I’m in the new feminism of ‘we need to bring EVERYONE along with us’. This did not suit me. It’s up to women to save the world from global warming according to this - great as if we don’t have enough to do. Are we not going to get the dudes on board as well? Who according to this book made this mess in the first place? No we are just going to clear up after them and not involve them at all. Dismissive of wild men and their love of the planet too. Men are not aliens, they are of and love this planet too, they can participate in trying to save it.
  • This book is full of trigger warnings type things - sexual assault and rape that are just brought up with no warning and I’m not sure add anything. Call me a snowflake but I’d have liked some warning or these things brought up for good reason and used to form better points. I don’t want to say more on this because I do not want to dismiss the experiences of the women she brings up whilst trying to critique *how* the author uses it and brings it up. 
  • In reading, I started to get the uncomfortable feeling that if I googled what the author thought about trans rights I’d be disappointed. Again back to this kind of militant THIS IS THE ONLY WAY style paired with all men everywhere all the time are the devil incarnate and very defined binary gender roles view, I started to get the vibe that perhaps she is from a much older generation of feminism and I’d start to get TERFy thoughts if I probed. I did not probe for the time being but a picture and a feeling grew in my head. 

I went back to my book club at 178 pages in, ready to say ‘this is not for me and it’s actually making me feel really shit about myself’ only to find that all the other women in the group loved it. It’s life changing! It’s amazing! I feel so empowered! - bummer. I do not feel empowered, and I think there are some pretty narrow minded views about women’s choices and different experiences in here. Alas. I said I disagreed, we all went on with our lives. 

A few weeks after this, hating to DNF on books I picked it up again. I read another 50 or so pages. I found more things I didn’t like 
  • Back to the artistic license (?) with myths. In the selkie story, I noticed some old school description of women (wowww so beautiful!) and not addressing that this guy basically kidnapped and coerced her. Now if it was a feminist retelling I’d expect some more disgusted language around the man and his actions, shining a light on what it is. This was not there. So then is it that the author is telling the myth how it was told originally in which case I’d expect this language and approach? Are we then going to pick apart how this is wrong? No, apparently we are going to use this as a metaphor for all women everywhere, and insinuate that any woman in todays world is just like this mythical creature who has been kidnapped, had their belongings stolen, their body violated, and forcibly married to a stranger. Oh but the fisherman in the story was handsome and all the other women in the village wanted to marry him so she was ok with it for at least seven years. Are you kidding me? It’s 2023. 
  • The next morning I did indeed Google the authors record on trans rights. Her new book Hagitude apparently spells it out quite clearly that my suspicious were correct. Disappointed but not surprised, the foundations were there in even just the first ~200 pages of this book without explicitly mentioning it. 

That Google search has lead me to write this review and take a good long look at myself asking,
‘Why are you reading something that makes you feel the opposite of empowered, demonises your life choices, presents such a narrow minded world view, seems ill researched and presented with a lot of bias paired with unawareness of that bias, who’s author is surfing a completely different wave of feminism to you?’ 
Yeah, good question. 

DNF p228 of 823 on kobo e-reader 
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