Book Review: Humble Roots

Another book from Netgalley, Hannah Anderson’s Humble Roots: How Humility Grounds and Nourishes Your Soul is a bit out of the way of the things I normally read - in particular I don’t read much Christian inspiration, unless C. S. Lewis counts.

But I really loved the cover so I thought I’d take a chance on it, and while I have some caveats, I did find the book helpful and enjoyable. It made a nice pendent to America the Anxious, which suggests that the roots of our anxiety lie in our quest for happiness. Humble Roots suggests that our anxiety grows from our search for perfection and control, and it strikes me that these two explanation dovetail: treating happiness like a quest means treating it as something that you can perfect and control, as if life couldn’t throw you for a loop with a car crash or a sudden death in the family or anything else it likes.

Humility, in Anderson’s book, lies in understanding that we are not and cannot be in perfect control of our lives. Once we accept this, our humility can free us “from the cycle of stress, performance, and competition.”

The book did rely more heavily on quotations from Scripture than I personally would have preferred (C. S. Lewis never needed to quote this much!), but then I’m not the book’s intended audience. And despite that scaffolding, I found Humble Roots’ steady insistence that we are often helpless and that’s okay somehow comforting. I can’t be in control all the time, and that means sometimes I don’t even need to try. Thank God.

I also really liked this observation: “If a person must announce his humility because we wouldn’t see it otherwise, he is not a truly humble person.” I’ve noticed this about a lot of qualities, not just humility. If someone has to explain that they are compassionate, or not an asshole, or filled with the warmth of lovingkindness… that’s a good sign that the truth is the opposite, or else they wouldn’t need to clue you in.

Book Review: A Witch's Kitchen

I read Dianna Sanchez’s A Witch’s Kitchen through Netgalley, and it has lots of delicious food descriptions, as you would expect of a book from that title. I made a batch of cookies just yesterday, and yet this book has filled me with the desire to make more.

Other than that… There’s a lot of surface cute here in the drawing of the Enchanted Forest. In fact I think “cute” might be the best word overall for the book, which is initially appealing, but becomes a problem as the book develops Millie’s relationship with her mother, Bogdana. At the beginning their problem seems to be miscommunication: Bogdana is exasperated by Millie’s difficulty casting spells and fails to adequately communicate that she loves Millie despite her seeming hopelessness as a witch.

But as revelations pile up, it becomes clear that this isn’t just miscommunication, it’s straight-up child abuse, and the book just doesn’t have the emotional range or heft to cope with that.

( It’s impossible to explain this without going into spoilers, so I’m putting it behind the cut. )

By the end of the book I wanted a responsible adult, any responsible adult, to be trying to get Millie the fuck away from her horrible mother. But this would be difficult and emotionally messy and probably not fit into the aesthetic of cute, so it all just sort of ends up patched over with “Well mistakes were made, but eh, Bogdana will do better in the future, and now Millie can visit her father sometimes, hooray!”

That left a bad taste in my mouth.