Monday, July 27, 2020

Book Review: Give Birth Like a Feminist by Milli Hill


Title:
Give Birth Like a Feminist
Author: Milli Hill
Publisher: HQ
Publication date: August 2019
Genre: Non-fiction, Pregnancy & parenting, feminism
Source: Review copy via NetGalley
Rating: 10/10

Description: Birth is a feminist issue. It’s the feminist issue nobody’s talking about.

For too long women have been told, ‘a healthy baby is all that matters’. This book dares to say women matter too.

Finally blasting the feminist spotlight into the labour ward, Milli Hill encourages women everywhere to stand and deliver, insisting that birth is no longer left off the list in discussions about female power, control and agency.

From the importance of birth plans to your human rights in childbirth, and including birth stories from women across the world, this call-to-arms will help you find your voice, take an active role in your choices, and change the way you think about childbirth.

My thoughts: So when I started reading this book, I thought it sounded like an interesting topic, and I was planning to start trying to have a baby soon, so it seemed like a particularly good time to read up on the topic. Then over the course of reading, I became pregnant, which made it an even more interesting book to be reading. However, I think it's really important that it's not just pregnant people or mothers who read this book. It's important that these topics come into the general discussion of feminism. 

Milli Hill highlights from the beginning of the book that in the birth room, people have got too used to saying 'that's just how it is' when experiences are unpleasant, undignified or traumatic, and instead we should be questioning things, exercising human rights, and pressing for change. Women shouldn't be told to 'leave their dignity at the door' or that 'a healthy baby is all that matters'. Of course, we want a healthy baby at the end of the process. But that doesn't mean totally discounting the mother and her experience. 

Some key topics she looks at: 
  • Consent during pregnancy & birth
  • The urge in some places (mainly first world countries) to push medicalised interventions, and discourage more 'hands-off' types of birth
  • Being 'allowed' to do things & the language around permission. (Clue: the mother should be the one in charge. She is allowed to do anything she wants.) 
  • Belittling & dismissive language used towards pregnant & labouring people
  • Difficulties for women who want to give birth in a way that differs from what's most common & accepted in their area 
  • The 'postcode lottery' of what you 'can' and 'can't' expect from your birth experience in the UK
  • The colour of your skin affecting your birth experience 
  • So many others! 

There are some stories of what a hospital birth was like in the UK for the author's mother & friends of that age that horrified me. There are stories of births in the UK today that were shocking. There are stories of brith practices that happen in Europe, Australia, and the US that made me very glad I'm having my baby in the UK. These stories were shocking because we don't hear about this stuff; people don't talk about this stuff. In my (39 week) experience of pregnancy, it's only at this stage of life that you hear about different policies between first world countries, through places like Facebook and Mumsnet where I've seen women talk about typical timelines and medical interventions that vary from place to place, like the UK vs US vs Australia. Outside of this book, I haven't seen much about what pregnancy & birth are like in other countries. We need to make the stealing of mothers' rights a big part of the feminist conversation, highlight the indignities and inequalities, and change them. 

Milli Hill does a really good job of providing scientific evidence around various policies, from delayed cord cutting, to giving birth lying on your back (did you know it's really not the greatest position to give birth in? I did not) to inductions. 

I could pick out more topics and probably devolve into ranting, so instead I'll say - go and read this book. It's well balanced, it's full of supporting evidence and it shines a spotlight on a topic that I think has been very neglected in our society. It might be very different from most of the books I've read this year, but it's still one of my 'best books read in 2020'. 10 out of 10. 

Saturday, July 4, 2020

Book review: Deal with the Devil by Kit Rocha

Title:
Deal with the Devil
Author: Kit Rocha
Publication date: 28th July 2020
Publisher: Tor
Genre: Post-Apocalyptic Romance
Series: The Mercenary Librarians #1
Source: Review copy via NetGalley
Rating: 10/10

Description: The United States went belly up 45 years ago when our power grid was wiped out. Too few live in well-protected isolation while the rest of us scrape by on the margins.

The only thing that matters is survival.
By any means. At any cost.

Nina is an information broker with a mission: to bring hope to the darkest corners of Atlanta. She and her team of mercenary librarians use their knowledge to help those in need. But altruism doesn’t pay the bills—raiding vaults and collecting sensitive data is where the real money is.

Knox is a bitter, battle-weary supersoldier who leads the Silver Devils, an elite strike squad that chose to go AWOL rather than slaughter innocents. Before the Devils leave town for good, they need a biochem hacker to stabilize the experimental implants that grant their superhuman abilities.

The problem? Their hacker’s been kidnapped. And the ransom for her return is Nina. Knox has the perfect bait for a perfect trap: a lost Library of Congress server. The data could set Nina and her team up for years…

If they live that long.

My thoughts: I've been a fan of Kit Rocha for several years now, particuarly the two series they have which are set in the same world as Deal with the Devil, so I was really excited to hear about this new book, and new series, and the fact that they were moving to a major publisher. But the switch (they self published the other series') also made me a bit nervous: would aspects that I loved from a Kit Rocha book be toned down or absent, to try accommodating to that big publisher audience? I needn't have worried. 

We meet Nina first, as she fights off multiple attackers before retrieving a mysterious package. Amongst the fighting, the authors put in enough casual details of the surroundings that you build up a clear image of the run-down city, and start to get a feel for Nina's personality. Knox has been following her, and when the story shifts to his point of view, you get more details about the city, the corruption running through it from the big corporations that rule the place, and the information that both Nina and Knox have some kind of biological enhancements to their genetics. Nina is super fast, and Knox himself is very strong, as well as having a communication chip of some kind wired into his head to help him keep in touch with his team. All of Nina's crew and Knox's Silver Devils have more to them than meets the eye; there's a bit of a superheroes, x-men quality to things, except all of these characters went through operations and years of training to change their bodies, rather than being born with the abilities. 

Knox introduces himself, and offers Nina the job of finding the old server. Nina & co know that it is absolutely a trap of some kind, but decide to go for it anyway, and the two groups set off on a road trip like something out of The Walking Dead or Station Eleven, where you never quite know what kind of little local community you're going to find in the next desiccated town, or round the next bend of the road in the quiet forest. And through it all, both fully aware of the dangers, Knox and Nina start to fall for each other. The tension of knowing about upcoming betrayals and also the hope for a romance between two tired people working out kept me turning pages late into the night. But even knowing that there were big shocks coming for various characters when secrets got exposed, what actually happened did come as a twist to me.

In both the Silver Devils and Nina's little group, there are the found families and their unbreakable bonds that make a key part of any Kit Rocha novel. Other things I was really pleased to find, that I'd been wondering about: the chemistry sizzles between Nina and Knox from their first meeting, and builds to some exciting sexy scenes later on. There's also enough page time for the secondary characters that I'm already looking forward to seeing them get their own books later on in this series, and Kit Rocha has laid the groundwork for another excellent series of a corrupt system gradually being overturned the good guys, and the power of friendship, love and compassion. 

I highly recommend Deal With The Devil, and I can't wait for the sequel! Overall, I'm giving this 10/10. 

Thank you Tor for the e-review copy.