Ours to Explore: Privilege, Power, and the Paradox of Voluntourism by Pippa Biddle

 *I received a free e-ARC of this book in exchange for my review.  All opinions are my own.*

I read Ours to Explore over the weekend, and I can NOT stop thinking about it. 

Short version with no context: I'm going to incorporate it into my next post-pandemic travel course. (To Costa Rico or Ecuador, through a travel provider who uses locally owned businesses.)

Slightly longer version with a hint of context: I also can't stop thinking of this episode of Friends.

If you've ever gone on a mission trip or included a service learning project in a travel course, you might want to read this book.  Actually, you SHOULD read this book, but you might not be ready to re-evaluate your choices.

Pippa Biddle looks at the Western history of combining supposed "good works" with travel and finds that many of these trips have historically done as much damage (if not more) as good and shows that even when we have a strong desire to help, we can cause hurt.  

So if you think the only thing that counts is your intention or your calling without looking at the financial and human cost, you should probably skip this book.

Anyone else who wonders how a single week's commitment to a construction project, an orphanage, or a medical center by unskilled and untrained visitors can actually do any good should read on.

If you've ever wondered why you're asking your congregation or community to raise $4000 for a trip where only $400 of the total go toward the people in need because the rest is spend on transportation, lodging, and sightseeing for your neighbor or congregant, this is a great book for you.  After all, if your community will donate $4000, why not just send the whole amount to the local project and your neighbor stays home?

This is the issue of voluntourism--combining vacation, travel, and volunteering--and should not be confused with NGOs like Doctors Without Borders or mission trips by actual tradespeople trained in the work they're traveling to complete.

In 2014, Pippa Biddle wrote an article that highlighted the problems with sending unskilled teenagers for a week of "work" to build a library and volunteer at an orphanage.  She saw the tradesmen her group worked beside undo a days' worth of poor construction efforts by the teenagers and redo it on their own.  She was later told that the volunteers were fed better than the children they were there to aid.  The one "good" that came from the trip is that the volunteers, those untrained teens, felt really good about what they did.

Pippa's article spawned further research on her part (that became this book) as well as other articles that looked at the ethics of sharing pictures of social media of orphans and medical patients without permission or consideration as well as the ethics of volunteering to pad your medical school application. You can see a sampling of that type of article below:

I can't stop thinking about this book because it is a LOT to process, and Pippa doesn't shy away from pointing out the racism, colonialism, and paternalism used to justify many of these efforts.  (Even when, maybe especially when, they're faith-based efforts.)  She also shares some solutions in how to turn our strong desire to help into actual help instead of merely feel-good moments or social media posts.

My only real complaint is that the copy I received used all lower case letters for the acronyms for the volunteer organizations and NGOs that were referenced which made for jarring reading.  Hopefully, that's just a problem with the e-ARC and will be fixed in the final version of the book.  Additionally, because this is a footnote heavy book, the e-book version is a bit awkward; Kindle doesn't handle footnotes well.  This may be easier to read in print.

The Lost Girls of Foxfield Hall by Jessica Thorne

 *I was given a free eARC of this book in exchange for a review. All opinions are my own.

Part ghost story, part WWII intrigue, part time travel, part Arthurian legend, part love story.

The Lost Girls of Foxfield Hall is a bit out of my typical reading habits, because time travel is too fraught for me.  I liked this book and think that anyone who like time travel or historical fiction would probably love this even more than I do.

Megan Taylor is having a rough time, because her brother is missing in action.  To distract herself from her own grief and her parents' inability to cope with the situation, she takes a job renovating and design the old garden at the manor-house-turned-hotel that her best friend manages.

There, Megan meets a pretty hotel trustee who leaves her tonge-tied, but because of Megan's grief over her brother's situation, she thinks she's not in the right mental space find a new girlfriend.  While Megan is out for a night run, she sees green lights in the garden that lead her to the heart of a maze . . . and 1939.

Megan encounters Eleanor Foxfield, the daughter of the previous owner of Foxfield Hall.  Local history shows that Eleanor went missing just a few nights later than the night in 1939 that Megan first visits.  Eleanor gives Megan a corn dollie  as proof to them both that neither was a dream.

Megan makes a second visit to 1939 and warns Eleanor about her limited future, and Eleanor, in turn, gives Megan a book to help her figure out the green lights, the local myth or ghost story of the Green Lady, and, possibly, the nature of Eleanor's disappearance.

All of this is set against Michaelmas and the Harvest Festival in the English countryside.

Any more details, and we're into spoiler territory, but I will say I loved the characters, their interactions, and the story resolution.  

If you like a little magic with your history or a little romance in your WWII intrigue, I think this is a great a book for you!

The Cornish Midwife by Jo Bartlett

 *I was provided a free eARC of this book in exchange for my review.  All opinions are mine.

In good conscience, I've gotta start by saying I don't usually read women's fiction.  I've read Bridget Jones's Diary and a few Jodi Picault novels.  

(Here's a great article, by the way, that differentiates women's fiction from romance. Main difference? Women's fiction is about a woman's journey, often emotional or spiritual, and growth.  Romance has the romance as the central arc of the characters, and there's a happily-ever-after or a happily-for-now.)

(Side note: do not challenge a romance author on that last point.  It will end poorly for you.  Just change your definition of romance right now.  You'll live longer.)

The Cornish Midwife starts with Ella Mehenick's carefully-planned life being towered. (Think of The Tower from a tarot deck, or just read this.) So she moves back in with her parents and take a job in the small coastal town in Cornwall where she grew up. 

Most of this book is Ella coming to terms with the fact that she needs to rethink her childhood definitions of success.  She catches up with old friends, make news friends, and reconnects with an old love. It is her journey, and that's why I'm categorizing this as women's fiction.

If you like the type of story that has a lot of internal struggle and self-inflicted strife that could be corrected by some straightforward conversation and trust, you'd probably love this book. It will also introduce the typical U.S. reader to some Cornish slang and scenery.

And you should stop reading this review and go pre-order the book now.

If you're more likely to pick a romance than chick lit, keep reading.

I found this character's journey completely annoying. 90% of the way through the book she was making the same mistakes she made in college.

AND SHE HAD TO GET HIT BY A TRANSIT VAN TO SEE THE ERROR OF HER WAYS. 

At the point she's putting her old boyfriend through the same trauma she put him through a decade ago, I actually yelled at the book "Good, you're better off without her."  

And then she got hit by the damn van. (She's fine.  Just a concussion that apparently caused some synapses to fire that had been dormant up to then.  She finally realized that her parents didn't think she needed to be in London to be successful, for example.)

I also felt like the sheer amount of internal struggle meant the reader was cheated out of some interactions between Ella and the supporting characters.  At one point, you're told that she considers her new boss her friend, but you don't really see that friendship develop.  She also falls back with her old boyfriend even though she spend one-third of the book thinking he's a horrible capitalist who needs to take better care of his sister. (Ella is wrong on both accounts.  I really don't know what he sees in HER.)

So, yeah, this book didn't make me fall in love with women's fiction.  That genre and I are not getting a happily-ever-after or even a happily-with-this-book.

Furbidden Fatality: A Catskills Pet Rescue Myserty

 

*I received a free ARC of Furbidden Fatality in exchange for my review.  All opinions are my own.*

Last spring and summer when everyone else was baking bread and comparing sourdough starters under a stay-at-home order, I was bingeing BritBox.  There are 21 seasons of Midsomer Murders, and I watched them all.

But my gateway drug to BritBox was ITV's Agatha Christie's Marple (filmed in the 2000s and starring Geraldine McEwan and Julia McKenzie) which then sent me backtracking to the BBC's Miss Marple series from the 1980s that starred Joan Hickson.

I do love me a good British murder mystery.  (See my much earlier review of Dreaming Spies by Laurie R. King as evidence.)

And while the cozy mystery at hand, Furbidden Fatality by Deborah Blake, is set in the New York Catskills instead of Great Britain, the main character, Kari Stuart (we shall forgive her for misspelling the world's best name) is compared to Miss Marple more than once throughout the story.  While Kari is noticeably younger and significantly less interested in knitting than Miss Marple, she does manage to discover a dead body and solve the murder before the local police.  She also works with one of her former teachers who has Miss Marple's long memory for the residents of the local community and who offers character insight by comparing the characters under suspicion to people she knew long ago.

(I always wondered how Miss Marple's tiny village of St. Mary Mead could fit so many shady characters and still be a tiny village, but I digress.)

When the book begins, Kari is at a crossroads.  She's recently won $5 million on a lottery ticket, and she's trying to decide what to do with her winnings and her life.  Before she can come to any conclusions, she discovers a black kitten near her apartment and tries to to find an animal shelter to take in the stray cat.  Her efforts to find a home for the kitten actually lead to Kari finding her own new home and, maybe, her vocation, when she impulsively buys a failing animal sanctuary and its nearby rundown farmhouse.

The animal sanctuary has a couple of strikes against it. One of its resident pit bulls has been accused of escaping his kennel and biting someone, and the local dog warden seems determined to shut the sanctuary down. 

The situation only gets worse when Kari discovers a dead body in the fenced-in dog run.

Kari must work to try and save the pittie from being euthanized, save the sanctuary from a cease-and-desist order, and save herself from suspicion of murder.  Happily she has good staff at the sanctuary, good friends in town, and a new black kitten with an eye (or paw, perhaps) for finding clues.

This is a fun and entertaining read that is exactly like what cozy mysteries are supposed to be--an amateur sleuth trying to unravel a conundrum without direct police access and absent a lot of gore. I am SO glad I read it. Cozy mysteries (like the books of Ngaio Marsh, Agatha Christie, Donna Andrews, and Diane Mott Davidson) should not be confused with police procedurals or crime dramas (like the books of Patricia Cornwell or Kathy Reichs).  

And after the year we've had, I think everyone should cuddle up with a cozy mystery.  You've earned some entertainment that challenges the mind and provides characters to root for without making your heart ache.

This is also a great book for animal lovers.  I'm not personally a fan of animal stories per se. Please keep your Call of the Wild and Black Beauty far from me.  But . . . I do love Donna Andrews' Meg Langslow books which always feature a variety animals. And, at one point, I had read most of the Sneaky Pie Brown mysteries where the main character, Mrs. Murphy, is a cat.  So Kari's new kitten, Queenie, fits  in a long tradition of clever animals in cozy mysteries, and if your heart warms at the idea of a heroine who is saving animals while she's saving herself, this is a must-read for you.