Joy Reads Books

Category: Joy Farrell

Women, Property, and Power: How They Were Her Property Challenges Passive White Innocence in American Slavery
A review of They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South

White women were willing, able and enthusiastic participants in the institution of slavery. They were central to its proliferation and economic prosperity.

There is something in the mindset of some people that racist actions and beliefs exist out there. It’s in a distant past, and the structures and systems we know now have no ties to it and there was never a role for white women in something so unseemly. The white women of the time were positioned as an ornamental audience on the periphery of American slavery, safely ensconced away in their palatial and stately homes. I recently read Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South, and it is a striking and meticulous study of the very active role white women played in the institution of slavery. It is a damning series of blows against the “passive ornament” argument and states an uncomfortable truth, white women were willing, able and enthusiastic participants in the institution of slavery. They were central to its proliferation and economic prosperity.

White women used Black bodies to secure their financial independence.

In They Were Her Property, Jones-Rogers carefully articulates her argument, supported by intense archival rigor, no surprise as the book is based on her revised dissertation. Engaging and rich with personal narratives, she constructs a compelling backdrop to the broad array of legal documents used to support her argument, including probate inventories, deeds, letters, depositions, and newspapers. Jones-Rogers tracks the legal and everyday practices through which white women enthusiastically exercised control over enslaved people, made decisions about labor and punishment, bought and sold human beings, and used enslaved labor to generate independent wealth. This is an important statement – white women used Black bodies to secure their financial independence.

Jones-Rogers makes clear judgments about white women’s acts and participation in slavery that are grounded in evidence, rather than a rant. The passage of time and portraits of plantation mistresses wilting in the heat have long been used to romanticise these domestic venues, to the point they are now used as wedding venues. Jones-Rogers are presented as they were – the stage for exploitation. Passages that were once a lament for a time lost, portraits of plantation mistresses wilting in the heat, domestic interiors and genteel rituals are seen anew as the stage for gross economic exploitation.

The examination of using enslaved people as gifts to mark notable life events like a birth, coming of age, or a wedding is a powerful thread through the book that is both uncomfortable and necessary for readers to encounter. By gifting a person into the structure of the family, it reinforces the role of family as a working framework for slavery and normalises it within everyday, interpersonal relationships. The young white girls under the tutelage of mothers, aunts, and grandmothers, learned to command the labour and daily activities of enslaved people, to train Black bodies for profitable work for which only they would reap the benefits. In this way, they secured their economic and social security. Readers are forced to confront the banality of their brutality and the components of a system that brutally commodified human life.

The cultivated image of white femininity, its emphasis on wan beauty, domesticity, gentility and moral superiority fit seamlessly into the greater slave society, cementing a hierarchy of feminist representations and presented as antithetical to the extreme violence and lack of humanity that exists in the institution of slavery. The girls and ladies are so pretty and dainty, they couldn’t possibly own people, their image asks us to believe.

This book is an important read – politically, personally, and ethically. History is not a closed box, shut away with painful secrets that would never see the light of day again if we hope and pray enough. It is no secret the world (and the United States in particular) is at a point in time when the old dinosaurs of hatred are attempting a last grasp at power. White women are once again complicit, as usual. It’s hard to miss how the Trump administration wields its women, with their similarly puffed cheekbones, plastic sex appeal and amorality.

Jones-Rogers deftly presents an unflinching and unflattering examination into white women’s role in slavery and dismantles the genteel image her descendants have relied upon ever since (here’s looking at you, Carolyn Donham Bryant, Betsy DeVos, and Bari Weiss). This dramatic reshaping of white women’s role in slavery has consequences for the conversations we are having today and the ferocious dismantling of the American government we are seeing.

Recommended Reading Level

They Were Her Property is a college-level to general adult–level text. It is grounded in rigorous historical scholarship and written with academic precision, but at the same time, Jones-Rogers’ prose is lyrical and accessible to a public audience.

I listened to the audiobook version, narrated by Allyson Johnson.

On a practical level – Jones-Rogers’ work is accessible without sacrificing any of her research. It will be unsettling. Slavery is always disturbing.

Recommended to readers invested in decolonizing their previous learning, gender studies, American history and women’s history. Jones-Roger’s’ research is part of a larger scholarly reorientation that demands we consider how our past and present collide under racial capitalism.
Women, Property, and Power: How They Were Her Property Challenges Passive White Innocence in American Slavery

Glowing By the Light of “Frail Little Embers”: A Literary Review of new Short Story Collection

Hitlers Furies: Women Unleashed in the Reich

Gauzy dust-filled horror: Review of The Atropine Tree

Review of a Poet’s Memoir: Looking at Women, Looking at War by Victoria Amelina
Check out my Review of Tales of Koehler Hollow, it is the family story of Amy, a formerly enslaved woman who built a home in freedom for her family.
November 3, 2025
Glowing By the Light of “Frail Little Embers”: A Literary Review of new Short Story Collection

It was a delight to read “Frail Little Embers” by Fjia Callaghan, this collection of short stories is a sweet and tender package of magical realism. There is tea, handmade candy, visits to the sea, folklore both light and dark, and subtle tension woven through each story. Her passion for using myth and folklore “to creat stories that give people hope in times of darkness”, as stated on her bio, is evident in this collection.

“Running with Wolves” is a gentle retelling of Red Riding Hood when the roads are closer to the woods and Red has a smartphone. The beauty of a short story is the way in which it can tell us a lifetime of sorrows and joys in one small passage of time and we experience this repeatedly through the collection.

Callaghan plays around with form, such as in “September Sunsets” and passages of evocative and whispery poetry. It works in this story but I’m unsure how necessary it is within the context of the entire collection. At the same time, the structure of the story is in sharp contrast to the many ways Emily misunderstands everyone around her, from her daughter to the man who brings her firewood.

There are certain lines throughout this short story collection that are devastating in their lyrical beauty, “I curled up in a ball of smoke and shadow and ached for all the things I didn’t understand” (Callaghan, 141) from the Edge of Morning made me pause while reading. This was my favourite in the entire “Frail Little Embers” collection, it showcases Callaghan’s form and the way her writing is like a song.

At twenty-one stories, I think it’s fairly long for a short story collection. Some stories, like “The Fleeting Ones” read like a character sketch with limited plot but a lot of foreshadowing that could have been fleshed out in a meaningful way. There’s potential to fill in the spaces and if anything, there’s more than one collection here if the time had been spent to find them. This could be coming from a selfish place as I look forward to reading more from Fjia Callaghan.

Recommended to readers who enjoy whimsy and delight, magical realism, folklore, myth, and magic.

“Frail Little Embers” was published on 8 April 2025 by Neem Tree Press, thanks to them for making the title available on Netgalley for review!

Did you know I’ve started publishing my own short fiction? You can find it over at Under the Poplar Tree on Substack. Be sure to subscribe, I publish a new short story every other Thursday.

April 1, 2025
Hitlers Furies: Women Unleashed in the Reich

A review of Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields

As long as political ideologies seek to control the body and social lives of women, the personal will be political.

I sometimes think it’s a trite and outdated phrase and then Roe v. Wade is turned over in the US and Nova Scotia announces an epidemic of intimate partner violence, and I’m reminded that in fact, no, the personal, the body, it is still political because men think it ought to be. Women have never asked for powerful men to make our bodies the site of moral imperatives and political objectives, to wield our bodies as the softer weapons of war.

There is this idea that Nazism and Fascism uniquely appeals to men (there’s more Elon Musks than Laura Loomers in the world), and as a result, women were absent from the most terrible scenes of the crime (their domain children, kitchen, church), however we’ll learn how it was distorted and violent, all of it unbearably normalized, in Wendy Lower’s “Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields”.

Originally published in 2013, Lower’s book is the result of twenty years of painstaking research into archives (notably in the post-Soviet Eastern Front), witness statements, and investigative work. It is chilling in the amount of everyday death and brutality Lower has catalogued and the straightforward way in which she has presented it all. Some critics at the time noted she did not include accounts of professional killers, like those in the Reich Security Main Office or SS, as mentioned in the linked Guardian article. I can appreciate the sentiment, but I think it’s even more sinister to consider the unending ‘normal’ and brutal ways regular women were part of the regime – secretaries shuffling files that sent hundreds to the death squads, after work ‘shopping’ for a new pretty dress in the discards of victims from the gas chambers. I am a regular woman, living a fairly regular life. Most of us are ordinary people, living ordinary lives and relying on the system and world around us to keep functioning as we expect. Their system slowly sped its way into destruction, those in power made substantial legal changes that eroded the entire known word and as we experienced through the pandemic, people still had laundry and a job and meals to make. The every day necessaries continue to exist. That’s a more unsettling and universal story.

Wendy Lower first introduces the reader to what she calls the “lost generation”. Born in the tumult of Weimar Germany, with its blossoming civil rights, devastating economic and political turmoil and untold amounts of violence. There was as much promise, like Magnus Hirschfield’s Institute for Sexual Science and the women’s suffrage movement, as there was economic collapse and despair.

This generation of women, disillusioned and morally lost according to Lower were perfectly primed to be swept into the National Socialist movement. The first two chapters of “Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields” describes this environment and the perverse opportunity offered by the Nazis on the Eastern Front (as teachers, nurses and socials workers extolling Nazi “virtues”), notably once they’d made it impossible for women to find work they wanted.

The next three chapters describe the lives of six women sent to the Eastern Front and Lower ultimately divides the women between three categories: Witness, Accomplices, and Perpetrators. The most egregious actions were obviously taken by the perpetrators.

There is something to be said for the women like Annette and Ingelene Ivens who were “exceptional after the war” (Lower, 89) for the ways they spoke publicly what they saw. They didn’t hide away their involvement in family chests and seek to hide behind their femininity, like so many of the perpetrators. They didn’t go to the Stasi after the war ended and trade secrets for their freedom.

In the final chapter, “What Happened to Them?”, the answer is not much. White women, even women whose only power is the whiteness of their skin and their gender, have never been adequately punished for their murderous participation in things like the Third Reich or the murder of Emmett Till. The Guardian review accuses Lower of overselling her material, we know women can be violent and abusive, but we’re beyond it, and maybe that was the case in 2013, in the heady years of Obama, post-Sex in the City and Bridget Jones. But in 2024, 45% of white women voted for Trump. In his first days in office, he stripped away Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs that ensured employment for women and people of colour. Keep this in mind when you read chapter one of “Hitler’s Furies”. We’ve been seeing the rise of tradwife content which presents an idealized image of the mother who sacrifices all for the family. This idealized image, like that of Johanna Atvater in her crisp white apron, is a smokescreen. They don’t evolve much and only have one playbook.

Recommended to readers interested in women’s history, social history, World War II, German History and Fascism.

I borrowed “Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields” from my local library.

My recent reviews of women’s war experience can be found here: Devastating Minutiae in the Palestinian Experience: A Literary Review of Minor Detail

Review of a Poet’s Memoir: Looking at Women, Looking at War by Victoria Amelina

Did you know I’ve started publishing my own short fiction? You can find it over at Under the Poplar Tree on Substack. Be sure to subscribe, I publish a new short story every other Thursday.

March 4, 2025
Gauzy dust-filled horror: Review of The Atropine Tree

Aldane Manor is an ancient home of low-beamed ceilings, crumbling walls, poison gardens, and deadly secrets.

The Atropine Tree by Bram Stoker award-winning writer Sarah Read is a delightful romp into the absurdity of gothic horror. A medium sister, one who talks to ghosts – not size medium, poison herb gardens, centuries of ghosts and strangely uneven floors, and herb-laden fires stoked too high all lend themselves to creating a heady, gauzy feeling that immerses the reader. Gothic horror is meant to be over the top, absorbing in its terror and in Read’s very capable hands, The Atropine Tree is incredibly engrossing. I lost an entire afternoon to the world of Aldane House.

It is overwrought in the very best ways, richly detailed as I could easily picture Nelda’s dramatically stained lips and teeth and feel the deep luxury of the carpets in her room. I don’t think I breathed when her room became crowded and overstuffed and heated, much like Alrick.

Fiction like The Atropine Treeis the very best of escapist reading, and even though no one could possibly take that many herbal pastilles and antidotes, it’s immensely entertaining and Read’s writing is so richly detailed and engrossing, it is like having a movie play in your mind while reading.

The story is like something out of the other side of the Dickens looking glass, with its usurper heir and street urchins languishing in the workhouse.

Highly recommend to anyone looking to escape into an absorbing, dust-filled horror, lovers of truly beautiful prose and anyone who simply likes to read because Read is a very talented wordsmith. The genre of horror shouldn’t dissuade any readers from picking up a copy of The Atropine Tree, it was so enjoyable to read.

Many thanks to Bad Hand Books for sending a copy my way! Check out their website to order your own copy and check out some of their other titles. Check out my review of Bad Hand’s short story collection, Long Division.

Did you know I also write short fiction over at Substack? Check out Under the Poplar Tree if you like my writing and want to read more of it.

February 24, 2025
Review of a Poet’s Memoir: Looking at Women, Looking at War by Victoria Amelina

“What weapons do we choose to pursue justice in the hardest times?

Victoria Amelina, Looking at Women, Looking at War

The memoir “Looking at Women, Looking at War” is one writer’s journey to answer this question in the face of occupation and war. Victoria Amelina, children’s literature author and mother to a young son was confronted with this question on February 24, 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine and her world was upended. The resulting memoir is her experience as a war crimes researcher and writer reconciling with her own identity and the “forever endangered Ukrainian culture”.

An honest and intimate chronicle of her own experience, it is also of other extraordinary women in the resistance. Women like Evgenia, a prominent lawyer who were colourful clothing to court, but now carries a gun at the frontline. Oleksandra, her friend and mentor, who documented tens of thousands of war crimes and won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, though not one of her hundreds of cases went to The Hague in the seven years prior. The finer details like this sucked the air out of my lungs while reading. This book offers brilliant insight into the experience of women in and at war, but it is also contemporary evidence of Russia’s criminal attack on Ukraine. It is undeniable yet it continues.

War is absurd and relentless and evil, a continuing slog of noise and death. Victoria Amelina captures the unspeakable despair and moments of joy that are the experience of war. It is an assault on the senses and in juxtaposition she writes of feeling disconnected and worn out. Body tired from the trauma and grief. Oleksandra tells her to take time and put cream on her face but to really feel it before she does anything else. How often do we do something similar? This sensory experience is a return to another time and a centring moment before she returns to recording war crimes and atrocities.

This book could so easily be a litany of awful events pieced together, but it is instead a raw and lyrically beautiful account of a woman making her way in a world of war, attempting to create a path for justice. The awful things are alluded to but Amelina is a writer of grace and compassion, the reader can understand the allusions to violence and sexual assault without needing the details.

The manuscript is unfinished. Victoria Amelina’s life was cut short by a Russian missile attack and she died on 1 July 2023. There are sentences left undone because of her death. Fragmented notes tell of awful Russian actions, like the small bit of a master’s work that could be seen on a FaceBook photo, posted by the Russian soldier who stole it Half of a sentence tells us about the death of a man miraculously rescued in another chapter. I had to stop reading and watch the crows in my favourite tree for a while after that. There is no ledger of fairness in war.

Amelina reveals the bleak despair wrought by the violence of war and the fear of being close to death so that we can understand the small ways people are trying to retain their humanity in the face of war. The bag of walnuts a mother gives to Victoria after their interview. The reader is brought into the group of artists trying to save a snag beetle found on the sidewalk,their attempt to save an inconsequential life after the gut punch of learning about Volodomyr Vakulenko’s abduction by Russian forces. His death is a terrible thread woven through the novel and each time we are reminded that Amelina was writing about friends and colleagues. She is not simply an outside observer in this conflict.

Reading this makes me consider what I would do if my country came under attack and I had to face the reality of war crimes and terror. Would I be brave and charge into the war zone to document the horrors done by the enemy? Would I find a sturdy basement and plead with my neighbours to find shelter with me? I should hope so, and I think we can hold on to what Victoria Amelina says here: “No choice made by those who want true justice is easy, and for most of us, the outcome of our battle is still unknown.” (p.10)

Victoria Amelina’s roots as a storyteller can be found “Looking at Women, Looking at War”, evident as she set out to chronicle the lives of extraordinary women. In writing about the people in the embattled Donetsk region, we’re invited into her inner world and what made her courage necessary. Such is the cost of resistance.

Recommended to readers who enjoy history and women’s literature. The memoir requires patience, broken sentences will never be fit together, we won’t ever have answers as to what she intended in some sections. The tragedy of war exists in these gaps. “Looking at Women, Looking at War” will be be published 18 February 2025 and available at all fine retailers and booksellers after that date.

For further reading, check out Hunting for Vakulenko to read more about the poet and his abduction and murder by Russian forces. A murdered writer, his secret diary from the Guardian provides further context about Vakulenko.

February 11, 2025
Tensions grow “Into the Fall”: A Review of New Psychological Thriller

My interest was initially piqued by Tamara L. Miller’s “Into the Fall” because she’s Canadian, and there’s something to be said for supporting local talent but this did not disappoint and is in no way Can-Con filler! Miller’s debut novel is a tightly woven tale that she expertly and finely unravels until the very end. Based out of Ottawa, Miller is the President of Ottawa Independent writers and her website can be found at by Tamara Miller.

“Into the Fall” is a suspenseful psychological thriller about a family broken apart overnight by the disappearance of husband and father, Matthew in the wilds of northern Ontario. The family has traveled north of Ottawa into a part of the country that is undeniably beautiful, but also incredibly dangerous. We are constantly reminded of this by Officer Rob Boychuk, a veteran of the force and though reserved with our title character, he consistently shows Sarah and her children kindness. I laughed out loud at the name of Boychuk’s partner – Chantal Dubé, Miller couldn’t have possibly used a more French-Canadian name and in a world of books written by Americans, it was like a secret joke for the Canadians (truth be told, I think I know a Boychuk. Canada is small).

In a former life, Miller was a policy writer and it is evident in the complexity of this story and the background she is able to create for each character. The world she builds for each scene and interaction is complete and well-thought; we feel the growing tension and begrudging respect between Boychuk and Sarah with each subsequent meeting.

Entertaining and well written, “Into the Fall” is an elevated thriller, perfect for readers looking for a complex story that draws you in and holds you captive until the end. “Into the Fall” hits bookstores 21 January 2025. Thanks to the publisher for providing an advance copy to Netgalley.

January 20, 2025
Devastating Minutiae in the Palestinian Experience: A Literary Review of Minor Detail

Recently, while combing the Libby archive, I came across the audiobook of “Minor Detail” by Palestinian author Adania Shibli, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette. “Minor Detail” immerses the reader into the summer of 1949, one year after the horrific Nakba where around 700, 000 Palestinians were displaced. In this already violent and oppressive environment, Israeli soldiers encounter a Bedouin encampment and proceed to kill the group of unarmed Arabs, except for one scared girl. The soldiers eventually kill this young woman and bury her in the sand of the Negev desert. Years later, in a present-day similar to our own, a young woman in Ramallah comes across a newspaper article about this terrible history and attempts to learn more about the crime, notable to her because it was committed exactly twenty-five days to the day she was born. This incredible fiction novel is a devastating look into the banal minutiae of life under oppression.

The novel is divided into two equal parts. Part one is the narrative viewpoint of an Israeli army officer who has been sent with his men to lead patrols of the desert to ensure it is free of the nomadic Arabs who lived there. The soldiers find the Bedouin encampment and kill all the unarmed people and their camels, the oppressive heat and details of the blood seeping into the sand evoking a deep seeded, visceral discomfort with state sanctioned imperialism. It is from this encampment the soldiers take the unnamed Bedouin girl they will murder.

Shibli very effectively builds tension and discomfort by constantly revisiting the exacting details of the officer’s infected spider bite on his leg, the measured ways he cleans his body each time he returns to his tent, the care he takes in dressing the wound and ridding his space of any other spiders. He is fastidious in cleansing away rot, within himself, his own troops and the desert. Shibli’s writing is very tightly wound in this section, the close heat and dank smells seem to rise up around the reader.

The second section of “Minor Detail” follows a young, unnamed Palestinian woman after she encounters a newspaper article about the 1949 murder. She is drawn to the story and feels compelled to learn more about the crime and the victim. There’s a longish section where she muses about her own narcissism that is a bit much in its melodrama, reminiscent of a teenager’s navel gazing, but I think the overwrought language has more to do with translation than Shibli’s writing. There’s another passage that overuses the word “leaped”, to the point of distraction but again, some nuance and lyricism can be lost in translation. The rest of the writing is evocative and lyrical, in spite of the violence and cruelty that is sometimes depicted.

Our narrator is forced to navigate a land under occupation as Palestinians can only make their way around Israel in very controlled and contrived circumstances. In this way we see how the barren landscape, once it was cleared of nomadic Arabs, has been built up to be a very tightly institutionalized space. The chaotic violence of the Bedouin girl’s murder has given way to cities and countries in controlled zones with permits that are enforced with ruthless zeal. We experience the shifting borders of these controlled zones with the narrator as she switches between multiple maps in an attempt to plot a course through a land once hers but now marred by institutions that bar her entry.

Shibli’s writing is subtle and poetic, with a magnetic pull into overbearing heat and tension. We know the violence takes place and we know it is brutal, but Shibli deftly carries the reader around and past the acute action of violence and into its aftermath. In this way, she is evoking that sultry heat of a sun-baked desert that throws up mirages and disorients the experience.

The sexual assault and murder of the young Bedouin woman in 1949 is a true story, one small unbearable story in a terrible war. A devastating microcosm of the whole. This is the true, horrible beauty of Adania Shibli’s “Minor Detail”, each observation carefully and tenderly drawn out. Regardless of politics, recommend to readers interested in fine literature, perspective changes in fiction, women’s experience in writing.

December 16, 2024
Cocktail Book Review: Lisa Alward’s Masterful Storytelling is a Must-Read

I found Lisa Alward’s “Cocktail” on a visit to Fredericton this past summer. We visited Westminster Books, as well as the phenomenal Lord Beaverbrook Gallery a few blocks away. Published in 2023 by Ontario-based Biblioasis, “Cocktail” was Longlisted for the 2024 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction and appeared on the Globe and Mail’s “Sixty-Two Books to Read this Fall”. This collection of twelve short stories was an absolute boozy and nostalgic delight to read.

The collection delves into the complex inner lives of relationships, and deftly encapsulates searing and poignant moments in time. Alward effectively infuses each story with rich detail and simmering emotion. Spanning the decadent 1960s to the present, the characters are middle class and sometimes willingly obtuse in navigating their space, but such is the beauty of life. We are welcomed into a world where people see the world through a lens awash in dimmed sepia tones and shag carpeting.

“Hawthorne Yellow” is an intricately woven tale in which we feel the humid tension building between a house painter, a young couple and the things an old house can hide. Such is Alward’s ability and precision in capturing the emotion in a short period of time.

The characters face the regular upheavals that come with having relationships, and the way desire can be more of a haunting as in the title story, “Cocktail”.

Lisa Alward’s “Cocktail” has earned well-deserved critical acclaim. The characters and sense of them lingers long after reading the collection.

Recommended to lovers of short fiction, readers who enjoy emotionally detailed and rich literary fiction. Written from a feminist perspective, “Cocktail” explores themes of love, loss, redemption, female anger, social expectations and concepts of motherhood. Available at all fine retailers, but most especially at a local independent seller.

December 2, 2024
Medieval Thoughts on Gender: Review of Eleanor Janega’s “The Once and Future Sex”

I’ve wanted to read “The Once and Future Sex: Going Medieval on Women’s Roles in Society” for quite a while and I’m glad I did! I It’s a fun and historically exacting romp by historian and broadcaster, Eleanor Janega.

In it, she explores the multiple roles of women in society and the ever changing perceptions of beauty and women’s bodies, labour and intellect. Dr. Janega dispels the idea that time is on a linear course from the “dark ages” and illiteracy to enlightenment, space travel and human rights.

Being a human is messy business and I’m more likely to ascribe to the notion of societal values existing on a sort-of pendulum that swings back and forth, bringing us forward towards equity and justice a little more with every swing. Even when it feels that we’re moving backwards, there’s always something fighting to keep us from going too far back. “The Once and Future Sex” explores that swing over the last 1000 years and the changes it has made throughout history in Western Europe.

This is an approachable history book, presented in a very straightforward way for the average adult reader. In the appropriately named chapter one, “Back to Basics”, Janega goes over ancient human history and the great ol’ boys who created our now familiar concepts of science, knowledge, and existence. Notably, Aristotle and Plato who knew nothing about women nor did they want to, which is why everyone believed in brain semen and floating wombs for so long. They and their ilk were responsible for many treatises, diatribes and general asshattery about women and their nature, the essence of being a woman (as if the essentialism wasn’t enough),and one though-line of it all is that women are somehow inferior.

Medieval thinkers used the ancient scholars as their baseline to understand women and as Janega points out, “when it comes to sex differences, the ideas of a core group had an outside influence on medieval thought.” How disastrously familiar as we see our neighbours to the south become beholden to the whims of evangelical Christians bent on manhandling the healthcare system with superstition and fear. In this way, our society continues to hold on to the motherhood requirement in order for women to be considered a proper woman. The value of class and wealth continues to be displayed on women’s bodies but instead of small apple breasts and a soft belly (the medieval ideal), women are to bear children then show no sign of it,with a tight stomach and perky, ample breasts. How a woman spends her time and money is reflected on the body.

We’re able to make choices about our bodies and our lives, obviously in comparison to medieval women, but I think we continue to carry the burden of a society built on taking that choice away.

An engaging read, Dr. Janega is the type of historian who is able to bring all the nuance, quirks, and weird bits of history alive. She dispels multiple myths about the medieval time period, those poor folks didn’t have germ theory and they were trying their best. She gives careful consideration and represents all classes of society. Lower and middle class women are most often found in legal records, not everyone was a fancy gal in King Henry’s court.

I listened to the audiobook version, narrated by Samara Naeymi and she is great at conveying Janega’s writte nemphasis and wit. Dr. Janega has an irreverent sense of humour. Her irreverent voice is well on display in the Once and Future Sex (especially if you’re family with her History Hit podcast, Gone Medieval).

A note about use of binary language – such is the nature of discussing sexism throughout history. This is not to say that queer, intersex and gender non-conforming folks didn’t exist, but if they barely understood cis women, today’s discussion on gender identity would send the average medieval person into some knots.

Recommended Reading

Definitely recommended to fans of history, gender studies and anyone looking to dunk on Plato, feminism, medieval history, or the experience of being a woman.

Best suited for adult readers at or above college reading level.

November 21, 2024
A Call to Honesty and Love: Review of Trans Memoir “Calling My Deadname Home”

Literary review of a memoir of a transgender man’s journey to find love and acceptance.

Dr. Avi Ben-Zeev’s memoir, “Calling My Deadname Home”, is an extraordinary and heart wrenching journey through time to reconnect and let go of his former, female self, Talia. Growing up in a working-class family in Israel, Dr. Ben-Zeev only just finished high school, yet now holds a PhD in Cognitive Psychology, an expert in stereotype threat and implicit bias, he is a writer and professor.

This is a beautiful, heart wrenching gift of a book. There are books that enter our life and lodge themselves directly into our heart with their brevity, love, and honesty. This was one of them.

“Calling My Deadname Home” is told in three parts – early transition, later transition, and Talia’s story. There is a sense that Talia was in constant flight from the imprisonment of her self and her past and only when Avi reconciles this sense of imprisonment and the sacrifice that Talia is safely freed.

At no point will Avi or Talia sacrifice their authenticity, the driving force within themselves to act in what seems to be a just way. We see this in Talia’s determination to avoid her mandatory service in the IDF.

Their journey is one that shows us we are not just one aspect of our personality, one traumatic event, or one action we regret. We are all of these things and none of them at the same time as there’s always an opportunity for forgiveness and love. “Calling My Deadname Home” is as unflinchingly honest as its writer as he moves in the world. There are themes of self-loathing, particularly in regard to the sexual assaults of young Talia and the lasting traumas.

A beautiful, heart wrenching gift of a book.

Avi writes with such honesty that Talia’s loss of self and pain is palpable on the page.

There is sex, some of it kinky, and I feel like straight vanilla folks will view the sex as “graphic” simply because the bodies doing it are not cisgender. There’s no need to clutch any pearls and they’re in fact written a lot better than most sex you encounter in current books and most importantly, it’s between consenting adults.

Definitely recommend to readers interested in gender studies, trans experience, and the non-Western experience. There are a lot of books in the world about cis white dude’s experience, “Calling My Deadname Home” is the brutally honest opposite of that and I’m better for having read it. We should all listen to more voice’s like Avi’s.

“Calling My Deadname Home” will be published 14 November 2024 by Muswell Press. Thanks to the publisher for providing early review copies to NetGalley.

A view of the Sunshine Coast, where I was visiting when I read this spectacular memoir.

November 6, 2024