Woman Zone CT - Book Reviews

WELCOME TO THE WOMAN ZONE BOOK REVIEW PAGE.
This is where members of the WZ Book Club get to share their thoughts on titles seen on the shelves of our Women’s Library. All reviews are unsolicited and only those attending the WZBC may borrow and review books.
The Woman Zone Book Club meets on the 2nd Saturday of every month between 2pm and 4pm at The Women’s Library, ground floor, Artscape. All are welcome.

We welcome your reviews of women-authored books. Send between 200-500 words and cover pic if possible to info@womanzonect.co.za or hipzone@mweb and we will post it here!

Fertility SOS

9/18/2022

Author: Daminda Senekal-Griessel
Publisher: Reach
Reviewer: Nancy Richards
It’s said, the most environmentally friendly thing you can do is to not have children. But try telling that to a woman who has been trying for years, even one year, to get pregnant.
Unless you’ve been there, you will find it hard to understand the anguish of infertility. Of not being able to have a baby when you want to, when you are ready to. It can feel like a

conspiracy. Everyone you know, all your contemporaries are expecting or have babies. And every woman on the street, even those who probably don’t want or can’t afford another child, seem to be in the family way. It’s just not fair. But it is a reality.
‘Infertility affects millions of couples globally.’ Daminda says in her book. It doesn’t help you to know that, but generally knowledge does help.
‘I also had a difficult journey to motherhood’ she continues, ‘doctors kept telling me there was no reason I could not fall pregnant naturally, yet I didn’t. The fact that I never had a reason, a condition to blame for my infertility, drove me insane.’ But it’s also what led her to finding out more, to founding a fertility consulting and coaching business, and writing this book
She admits that all the information in the book can be overwhelming – she also says up front that it is not intended to diagnose or take the place of medical advice. But there are things you can do and what she offers here is an eight-pillar guide – the first and key pillar being The Power of knowledge. Followed by The role of your immune system; Hormones gone haywire: take control of PCOS; Banish chronic inflammation; Take action; It’s all in the preparation; What’s up with the man and Your future.
There’s way too much info to isolate the one thing that may be affecting you – but one that is affecting the fertility of many these days is PCOS or polycystic ovary syndrome. In the last 20 years the incidence has risen by over 30%. The four most common types are: insulin-resistant; birth-control pill induced; inflammatory and hidden, with the most common causes being hereditary; surplus insulin and low-grade inflammation.
There’s much on the subjects of ph levels, medication, cells, supplements, blood groups, antioxidants, diet and exercise. As well as, on that sensitive area, understanding and countering male infertility. It does after all take two to tango. But most importantly there is much advice on how YOU can be proactive, not least by building your support team. At the back is a Resource Library with tracking charts – but especially encouraging on the first and last pages are the words DON’T GIVE UP.

Hold The Line

9/17/2022

Author: Kim Stephens
Publisher: Tracey McDonald
Reviewer: Nancy Richards
Like many, I learnt a lot over the pandemic period. About vaccination queues and denialists, about politics-in-the-time-of-panic, relationships, life, love and everything else, including the beastly virus itself. But mostly about myself. I was not alone. In her book Hold The Line, Kim Stephens appears to have been similarly educated. Identified on the back cover thus: 'After three children, two

divorces, a gradual sexual awakening, Kim found herself at 40 something virtually unemployed, with all the time in the world to write, sip gin and study a general response to one of the world’s most draconian lockdowns’. I don’t know where she got the gin in those dark, dry days, but Kim sure knows how to write. Her book is a chuckle, a weep, utterly relatable and an education in itself, on so many levels.
So what is it all about – and how did it begin? Well, first part – it’s a series of facebook posts written between April 2020 and April 2022 and interspersed with what are called ‘observations’ or reflections on, for eg: Truth, Cele, Marriage, Body Issues, Running etc etc. Second part – it began, sort of, in January 2016 with a facebook post that went viral called Dear Mr President, I think it’s time you go for a run. It suggested that if CR hit the streets he might see the country for exactly what it is. The piece was republished, to much acclaim, in Brent Lindeque’s Good Things Guy as Brent himself reveals in his foreword.
It was her own running that triggered the Dear Mr President post, and in the dedicated chapter she says declares that ‘it changed every element of me.’ Like some people put the kettle on in moments of stress, Kim ran.
In a subsequent irresistible fb post, dated May 2020, she puts South Africans into 10 categories and in another chapter, South Africa and Power, she says ‘I love this country with all my heart but sometimes it’s an unfathomable shit show.’ So you see where she’s at in terms of social commentary.
But she gets more personal. In a chapter called Can we skip to the good part, she says ‘My very available parents have been with me for so many life traumas, celebrations and realisations…but… I wish I had been able to anchor my truth sooner. I’ve been through many journeys of therapy…and in my most recent I was diagnosed as having ADHD.’ She describes her first teenage pregnancy and goes on to describe how she met a beautiful, strong warm-hearted woman with a six-year old daughter’ and eventually found ‘absolute peace in my gayness’. These are open and honest reflections.
Towards the end of the book she shares some of her life learnings, earned the hard way, not least coping with pregnancy just prior to writing matric. Also, ‘You can be straight as Bok de Blerk on national braai day, and still be chilled about gay people having the right to get married.’
Finally she thanks everyone who has supported and loved her through it all. But the lesson I learned from Kim’s writing is that as a parent you must accept the fact that you can open doors for your kids, but they will choose which ones they want to go through, and how. But also that whatever kindness, hardness, wisdom, truth or lie you put in is most often what will come out – and it seems to me that while that Kim may well have had a lot of privilege in her life (which she owns to several times), she has also had a great deal of love, care and role models that have given her the freedom to share and to be.
Very finally, this book may represent a moment in time in our country, and in one woman’s life, but it has some enduring insight.

Mad Woman

8/26/2022

Author: Louisa Treger
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Reviewer: Gail Gilbride
Mad Woman is a fascinating novel about the pioneering Elizabeth Cochran, first female investigative journalist to break through the male dominated arena.
Nellie Bly sets out from Pittsburgh, where she’d already written some controversial articles for the local paper, and heads for New York and The World to pursue her dream of becoming a serious reporter.
Life in the city is incredibly tough… but so is Nellie. Her money has dried up and time is running out. She comes up with an

outrageous idea: to pretend madness and have herself committed to the asylum on Blackwell's Island. Once inside, she will stay undercover, experience the institution's conditions first hand and write a story no one else could ever come up with.
The asylum door does indeed swing shut behind Nellie and Louisa Treger steps up her pace at this point in the story. She draws us in to the daily horrors her character endures. The author’s scrupulous research and mesmerising style of writing, bring the ordeal to life and I found myself plunged into the cruellest institution imaginable.
Cold, isolated and starving, Nellie’s days of terror reawaken the traumatic events of her childhood, which she explores with the one compassionate doctor allocated to her.
Nellie entered the horrendous asylum of her own free will - but will her new employers really rescue her as they’ve promised?
An extraordinary portrait of a woman way ahead of her time, Mad Woman is the story of a quest for the truth that changed the world. It is a tale that simply had to be told and Treger does it with sensitivity and tremendous skill.
Would I recommend Mad Woman? Absolutely and without reservation.

The Faraway Nearby

8/16/2022

Author: Rebecca Solnit
Publisher: Granta
Reviewer: Nadia Kamies
I knew before I came to the end of this book that it would be one of those that I would reread and treasure. Solnit weaves together diverse threads of her own love, life and loss, with fairytales, travel and stories about explorers, revolutionaries and writers, like Mary Shelley, Che Guevarra and the Marquis de Sade.
One summer she receives three boxes of apricots from her mother’s tree, from the home she used to live in. As her mother descends into Alzheimer’s her life is slowly

unravelling – she becomes more and more confused, gets lost, locks herself out of her house – and Solnit and her brothers have to pack their mother up and move her into a seniors’ home. The apricots become a metaphor that runs throughout the book – for abundance but also for a kind of inheritance from her mother that she has to sift through, discard what is rotten, or bottle, can and preserve.
Alongside the apricots, is a trip to Iceland that she goes on as she learnt as a young woman, “never to turn down an adventure without a really good reason” and the story takes off in another direction.
Ultimately, this is a book about writing and storytelling. “Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them”, she says, and to be without a story is to be well and truly lost. We ourselves are stories and in the strongest stories we see ourselves and our connection to others through story and empathy, she adds. Ironically, her mother is losing the stories that she lived by and it changes their relationship that was always fraught with difficulties.
Solnit writes with empathy and compassion about her relationship with her mother. The book is both deeply personal and philosophical. I was interested to see the book is classified as memoir/anti-memoir. An anti-memoir is less about the author and more about the reader and this book resonated with me on many levels.

My Journey to the Top of the World

7/23/2022

Title: My Journey to the Top of the World
Author: Saray Khumalo
Publisher: Penguin Random House
Reviewer: Nancy Richards
There was a point at which I could relate to Saray Khumalo’s story. It’s when, on an early climbing expedition, she wonders why she is doing this. Half way up a precipitous slope on day one of my first ever hike, I wondered the same thing. I also understood what she meant when she said she regretted packing a solid fruit cake for a friend’s birthday when they reached the top.

On my trip, a fellow hiker carried not only a pot of proving dough to cook later on the fire, but a wooden bread board on which to slice the finished loaf. (If you’ve never hiked with a backpack, the folly of this will be lost on you, but just think weight.) For Saray, on her Journey to The Top of the World, there was no opportunity for doubts, regrets or to turn back, but the learning curve for both her, and this reader, was steep, sheer and breath taking, literally.
At the end of her book she lists some of the lessons she learnt ‘along the way’. How clear is the view from hindsight! But I learned something on pretty much every page, starting with the Prologue. A serious head injury, a broken limb, plastic surgery and a coma filled with hallucinations following a biking accident need not deter you from running a marathon within three months. Nor from cancelling any plans for climbing Everest. Sorry if this is a spoiler – but it is on page 1.
In the first few chapters she whistles through childhood in Zambia and Zaire, a strong start on a career path, through marriage and motherhood. The nub of the book however, is not about climbing corporate ladders, but mountains. ‘When I returned from Kilimanjaro, I knew that this was just the start of my mountaineering journey’. Her sights were set on the Seven Summits, the highest mountains in each of the seven continents. A straightforward goal – but like litter on Everest, the path was strewn with obstacles. Amongst the big ones, coma apart, were avalanche, earthquake and frost bite. But I’ll leave you to read the nightmare details of those for yourself.
Among the more minutely shared lessons I learned were that: ‘Sherpa’ is not a job but a Tibetan tribe and that members are traditionally named after the day of the week on which they’re born. That they are not necessarily all docile beings who accompany down-padded and dogged, high-profile, high-income internationals uncomplainingly up dizzy and dangerous heights. They have rights, feelings and foibles too and should not be underestimated, nor undermined. That there is such a profession as an ice-doctor, and that climbers should heed their wisdom closely. That egos, and raw personality traits, tend to ‘come out to play’ on mountains and that the vitality of even the most super-fit, machine of a climber is vulnerable to what an unpredictable mountain might mete out. That ‘lama’ simply means monk and their blessings are to be valued. That the blue, white, yellow, red and green colours of Tibetan prayer flags represent sky, air, earth, fire and water – and that the elements, like climate and temperature, are also to be respected.
That if you wear a K-Way jacket on a mountain, you mark yourself as South African. That sponsors are not just altruists, they expect much of you – and if you are as committed as Saray is, you expect much of yourself – and what you are able to achieve for others as well as your own goals.
Although I learned a great deal more about the precarious world of ascents and descents, peaks and pitfalls, let me just say finally I discovered that third time is not always lucky and that as the first black woman to summit Everest, the hurdles Saray faced were way many more than the obvious. Very finally an invaluable lesson, I think, for anyone on a journey worth undertaking is the imperative to write down your thoughts and feelings as you go, like Saray must have done, because as with childbirth you will surely otherwise forget.

Goodnight Golda

7/14/2022

Author: Batya Bricker
Illustrations: Ilana Stein
Reviewer: Miriam Schiff
This book was written to give girls and young women perspective of all the things they can aspire to be, be it scientist, doctor, politician, teacher, fashionista, freedom fighter, mother, business or a role that hasn't been invented yet.

It features characters from biblical times to today – women who had pluck, who swam against the current, who wanted to save others from suffering or right political wrongs. All these women searched for and found something special only they could give to the world. It wasn’t easy or comfortable or without heartache, but they did it anyway.
The book is laid out with each woman and an illustration on two pages and is written in language that will appeal to preteen children, much like a storyteller would do.
There are chapters on so many strong-willed women. To name a few: Golda Meir, first woman Prime Minister of Israel (hence the title Goodnight Golda); Vera Cooper Rubin, American astrophysicist who discovered dark matter in space; Helen Suzman, the only woman in the South African Parliament fighting for the rights and justice a of all South Africans; Hedy Lamarr, film star and inventor – eventually known as the Mother of WiFi. Gertrude Elion, Nobel prizewinner for Medicine who started out as a biochemist working in a factory testing the sourness of pickles and went on to develop drugs for leukaemia including one that makes transplant surgery possible today.
Amazing and inspirational and, while all these women were Jewish, their stories are a testament to achievement, no matter where you come from or what your faith.

One Step Too Far

7/14/2022

Author: Lisa Gardner
Publisher: Century
Reviewer: Beryl Eichenberger
Missing persons – we hear about them every day -so many and so few return alive. Missing in so many situations; walking down the road, at a mall or on a hiking expedition. Mysteries - , many that are never solved and try as they might, hard pressed authorities are understaffed to take on the mammoth task of searching. When someone goes missing in the mountains very often it is up to volunteer search parties to take up the slack. I am full of respect for those who tackle the mighty outdoors, as a hiker or as a rescuer. Hunting for answers is never an easy task.

‘ My name is Frankie Elkin and finding missing people is what I do. When the police have given up, when the public no longer remembers, when the media has never bothered to care, I start looking. For no money, no recognition, and most of the time, no help.’ This is the protagonist of Lisa Gardner’s new novel ‘One step too far’ and we are about to embark on a journey of terrifying reality.
Frankie, middle aged white woman, recovering alcoholic, loner, has once again earmarked a missing person and she’s making plans to join the search team. She has a talent for finding missing persons – it makes her put one step in front of the other on any given day. Her success rate is impressive (even if they were mostly bodies) but it is her empathy for the families of these people that spurs her to search ‘cold’ cases.
Timothy O’ Day is one such case. Five years since he was lost in the mountains after his bachelor party camping trip. There is no closure in this case and his father and three of his friends who were with him on the fateful night , Scott, Neil and Miguel, are once again heading to the mountains for yet another annual foray. With canine searcher Daisy, her handler Luciana, local expert Nemeth and volunteer Bigfoot Bob, dad Martin O’Day has gathered an experienced team for this final search. And the very inexperienced Frankie joins it. The resulting journey is well – hang on to your hat - chilling, visceral and gut-wrenching.
It is clear that Gardner is a seasoned hiker. I learnt an enormous amount about safety measures, what you pack, how to stay alive, rules of the hiking fraternity and so much more – it makes for fascinating reading and Gardner is a clever guide. Opening preparations alert Frankie as to the emotional undercurrents of the party but all seems fairly stable as Nemeth sets out on the path. This is a gruelling hike as we move into the mountains of the Shoshone National Forest in Wyoming to a fictional destination - Devil’s Canyon. And the key is in the devil … I walked with them, felt their fears, held my breath and wept with the frustrating failures. Suffice to say Gardner has produced an unpredictable page turner which will most certainly have your nails bitten down to the quick.
When nature’s agenda for protecting its own comes up against human manipulation the battle begins. Step by excruciating step the secrets of the mountain are revealed and, as the hunters face one setback after another, when food goes missing, ugly screams are heard at night and no seeming answers they slowly realise that they have become the prey and the game is on…

Children of Sugarcane

7/4/2022

Author: Joanne Joseph
Publisher: Jonathan Ball
Reviewer: Nancy Richards
‘If only’ is what I thought after reading Joanne Joseph’s Children of Sugarcane (Jonathan Ball). If only all young women could be so courageous as to take charge of their own destiny, against all odds and in the face of so much social and familial pressure. If only all young women could be so determined to gain as much knowledge and learning as they could. If only they could have so much self-belief, self-insight. compassion for and

understanding of others. If only – and this was the big one - they could express themselves and their beliefs so articulately and with such passion as Shanti. Shanti is the young woman, the protagonist of this book who at the tender age of fourteen makes the decision, in order to avoid a forced and arranged marriage, to sail from the Madras Presidency in India to Port Natal in South Africa to become an indentured labourer in the British-owned sugarcane plantations. A reminder, she was fourteen years old. She was alone. And this was 1916. Imagine! Just imagine, apart from anything else, the interminable sea voyage shared with the hope, struggling and suffering of a shipful of others.
There is a speech, a full page long, that Shanti gives towards the end of the book, that is nothing short of sizzling. To an unsympathetic, largely hostile audience, she delivers a heartfelt and impassioned cry, a demand for justice, rights and understanding (and all this in English, not her mother tongue), that had me punching the air in her honour. If only, I thought, all young women could find the words to express themselves so powerfully and clearly.
To my mind, Joanne Joseph’s book epitomises power and passion. It seems to me that the passion she had for writing this story – a collective of so many people’s narratives, and one that for her was triggered by an internet image she found of her maternal great-grandmother, was what led her to undergo a total immersion into the ‘rabbit-holes’ of her family’s history as well as the deep waters of specialist academics who have written extensively on Indian indenture in the 19th century. In turn the passion gave her the power to piece together this layered story in way that makes it so accessible. It also enabled her to breathe power and passion into Shanti making her both impressive and inspirational. If only young women, then and now, could have half as much confidence and clout. If ever I were looking for a speech writer Joanne Joseph would be top of my list.

Tomorrow I Become a Woman & Wahala

6/27/2022

Tomorrow I become a Woman by Aiwanose Odafen (Scribner)
Wahala by Nikki May (Doubleday)
Reviewer: Nancy Richards
Wahala means trouble or problem in a number of Nigerian languages including Pidgin English. I learned that from Tomorrow I become a Woman by Nigerian born Aiwanose Odafen who thoughtfully included a glossary at the back of her debut novel. Whilst I was at the back of the book, I also read that it’s ‘loosely based on the real stories

of real women known to the author’. Which was a bit of a shock. The things that protagonist Obianuju goes through at the hands of her dapper, church-going husband shouldn’t happen to…well, just shouldn’t happen. And what she tolerates from the mouth of her traditional and unbending mother just shouldn’t be said. That it all takes place between 1978 and 1999 makes you hope that perhaps these things don’t happen anymore. But hey…lets look at our own GBV statistics and opinions on what constitutes a woman’s role before we start pointing fingers.
The years covered mean that it post-dates the Biafran war (1967-1970) that if you read Chimamanda Adichi’s ‘alf of a Yellow Sun. you may remember was harrowingly central. But the stain of war, any war, lingers and the Biafran conflict crops up as one of the themes in this book. Interestingly Aiwanose participated in Adichi’s Purple Hibiscus Trust Writing Workshop. So who knows what influences or not may have been at play, but this book feels very much her own and based on what she has witnessed.
One of the other relationship themes that runs through ‘Become a Woman’ is that of female friends. Well in the book ‘Wahala’, also a debut novel by Anglo-Nigerian writer Nikki May, a group of ‘inseparable mixed-race friends’ living in London take the leading roles. So it’s full-on female. And set in the present day, it’s about as contemporary as it gets, ‘Boo tapped her nails on the steel of her laptop’, and life is a million miles from decades-past downtown Lagos. ‘… Simi spent Saturday afternoon in the Cowshed spa… three hours – salt scrub, reflexology, deep tissue massage and hydro-gel mask facial.’ But it’s also laced with Nigerian nostalgia ‘You’re such a coconut. I’ll have amala with ogbomo and assorted meat.’ ‘Jollof rice and chicken for me,’ said Ronke. She couldn’t bring herself to order pounded yam in front of skinny, glamourous Isobel.’ And then there’s the inimitable dialogue, ‘Na your choice be dat. I go make you handbag and headwrap. The aso ebi be like entry ticket – it shows you belong.’
What the two books have in common is that they are both indicators of the painful and poignant world of women – but unlike ‘Become a woman’, ‘Wahala’ is wickedly, if agonizingly, funny.
The reason for talking about them in the same breath so to speak, is that they are both so very much ‘of Nigeria’ – and both offer such female insight. In addition they are a testimony to how culture can impact your life as a woman – then as now, and wherever you are.
Oh, and while there’s no glossary at the back of ‘Wahala’, there are some recipes to add flavour, including ‘Ronke’s Jollof Rice’.

Echoes of the Mountains: the unsung champions

5/26/2022

Author: Pindiwe Mgjima-Mabhena
Publisher: What Now
Reviewer: Nancy Richards
Pindiwe Mgjima-Mabhena describes her book as a tribute and a challenge. A challenge from her to others – those who’ve come from small villages, like hers, Matatiele - but to all the ‘unsung champions’ who lived and laboured under apartheid – to tell their story too.
Relatively speaking she says, she was one of the lucky ones – a school principal father, a

strong, hard working role model mother who ploughed, sewed, cooked and cared diligently and lovingly for her large family. Pindiwe was the last born of seven children. She reflects on what should have been an idyllic rural life – eating vegetables fresh from the fields, cows available to be slaughtered in celebration, surrounded by mountains and rivers. But the shadow of political injustice was long and heavy. Many of her siblings ended up spending more time in exile or in prison than at home and as a family at one point they escaped to Lesotho. They paid a high price for their beliefs.
Some of her siblings fell victim to alcohol, Aids and abuse – and her father, despite his stature and values, became a philanderer. All of this made things considerably worse for her uncomplaining mother who, as Pindiwe laments, never got to enjoy the fruits of her children becoming successful citizens.
It’s a tough story, and as I read it, I was conscious of its echo, not just of the mountains, but in the stories I’ve heard snatches of from so many people who lived and grew up in the apartheid era. Although she writes little about her own journey, other than touching on it here and there, the book is also a vehicle for her to express her own feelings about family and about the social situation, ills and solutions, in general.
It is undoubtedly a challenge to write such a book – dredging back through unhappy memories and troubled times, but its also an opportunity to reflect on and express gratitude for love and loyalty. As the youngest, and one of the few surviving members of the family, it seems appropriate that it was Pindiwe who chose to pull together this family memoir for which I applaud her. It must be said though that not all ‘unsung champions’ to whom she pays tribute, would have the resources, strength, support and skill to undertake such a task, but she has certainly set an example. And even if they never get into print, one hopes it would be healing for others who follow it.
Finally she talks of the living monument she hopes to create in her home village as well as the Bhelekazi Foundation she plans to set up to give back to her community. Wishing her well and watching this space.