All Booked | A Girl’s Gotta Be a Girls’ Girl

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Hello, fellow bookworms!

This week, our fabulous Marketing & Promotions Manager Richelle Boyd brings us three books featuring legendary female characters whose stories have captivated us for years, and I’m shining a spotlight on area author Linda Allen Blue, whose incredible story of resilience and hope will both break your heart and inspire you to take on life with a new perspective.

Living a Charmed Life: How to Feel and Deal to Heal by Linda Allen Blue

Linda Allen Blue lost four of her immediate family members within three years. Her two sisters, Gayle and Karen, died four months apart in 2010, each having battled cancer. Her mother and father followed. Through it all, she also experienced romantic breakups, the loss of her beloved dog, and being there for friends who were handling their own tragedies. Written over 20 years, Living a Charmed Life is Blue’s chronicle of her family and friends, her grief, her hope, her healing, her bad days and good days.

With so much grief and heartache to carry, anyone would find it understandable if Blue were to find the struggle too much to bear, or to live her life fearful that the same circumstances that befell her loved ones might happen to her next. But despite it all, Blue’s indomitable spirit and true love for life shine through the pages as she describes the importance of letting yourself grieve and processing emotions, while ultimately choosing to live your life not in a cage of anxiety but with passion and fearlessness. I particularly loved the way Blue writes about her “angels,” her loved ones both gone from this earth and still here.

After experiencing so much loss, it would be understandable to want to guard your heart from more grief, but Blue emphasizes the importance of “finding your angels” — caring for family and friends, connecting with neighbors, and fostering the connections that make the world a better and kinder place.

While healing is an ongoing journey that never truly ends, Blue’s incredible amount of resilience and determination to live her life with love and optimism are sure to be a comfort and an inspiration to anyone experiencing grief and hardship. I definitely came away with a resolve to follow Blue’s advice: “Live now! … This is my new mantra: If I am alive, it’s not over.”

I’ll hand things over to Richelle Boyd for her selection, and in the meantime, I hope everyone is taking advantage of these lazy summer days to sit outside with a cool drink and a book! Happy reading.

—Tessa, allbooked@independent.com

I have always considered myself a “girl’s girl” — and to steal a line from the internet, for me it means, “I support women’s rights and women’s wrongs.” This selection features some of my favorite female characters who highlight the good, the bad, and everything in between.

Carrie by Stephen King (1974)

I’ve always been a fan of horror so it’s no surprise that Carrie by Stephen King, and the story’s protagonist of the same name, is one of the stories where I support women’s wrongs. This story follows a sheltered girl oppressed by her parents her whole life only to be met with unrelenting bullying at the hands of her peers in school for that very reason. In the midst of this, Carrie discovers and begins to develop telekinetic powers.

Though this novel is a few decades old, it resonates with me now as much as it did when I sneaked a reading of it when as a teenager — and what agro-teen wouldn’t want to control stuff with their mind? While Carrie can’t handle the pressures around her and her new power within, the story shows how much society can warp who we think we should be versus what we really are. Not only that, it shows a true misfit struggling to find real connection in the world and eventually losing their life for it — a parallel that is all too familiar to many in the LGBTQ+ community, among many others who are shamed simply for being themselves. Like most horror stories, if you take out the gore and overall dread of the piece, King hones in a misunderstood character with too much pain and too many secrets longing to be free. And in the end, Carrie is able to finally recognize true innocence in the world and someone she could have turned to if only she wasn’t so blinded by trying to fit in. Regardless of her rampage on a town, I cheer on Carrie as she fights the social norms forced on her.

Circe by Madeline Miller (2018)

The sorceress Circe was popularized by Homer’s Odyssey and is only notably known for her power in witchcraft that she uses to turn Odysseus’s men into pigs. Madeline Miller — in all of her ancient Greek mythology wisdom — took this simple figure who is no more than a temporary ally and lover to Odysseus and gives her a story of her own, expanding well beyond her well-known year of supporting Odysseus and his men. The story Circe shows a young girl with two powerful parents who expected their special talents to be passed down. But Circe does not possess enough power to impress the Gods or her Titan father, so she finds refuge in the mortal world on the island of Aeaea, a safe haven where she can escape the cruelty and wrath of the gods who wish her harm.

Beyond Circe’s love affair, Miller expands on the life of an independent woman having every challenge thrown at her and taking it all head-on. Circe making her own safe haven on Aeaea, adopting and nurturing the animals around her, and perfecting her craft in potions to better understand her power and talents are just a few of the many layers Miller applies to and peels away from her characters.

Not only does Circe rightfully defend her land against men looking to pillage it and take it for themselves, by turning them into pigs and other animals, she is complex enough to understand forgiveness for Odysseus’s men and even help them recover on her island, using her cultivated resources for a year, along with helping them prepare for their upcoming feats against monsters. Miller showcases a deep understanding of a powerful woman’s complexity and carries another hard-earned stamp of approval for this woman’s rights and wrongs.

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (1868)

One of my favorite classic novels, Little Women by Louisa May Alcott is a testament to women’s intelligence, strength of character, and individuality across the board. With a heap of dazzling and bubbling personalities all thrown into one pot, Alcott perfectly cooks together and blends the complicated and tangled life of the Marsh sisters. Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy all have different dreams and aspirations, each one chasing a different winding path though they are drawn together to be a support system while their father is off at war.

This book is definitely filled with more of women’s rights in life — especially the early societal critique of women having limited opportunities to them and the pressures to marry well. Jo is the sister who fights this sentiment the hardest, saying, “Women, they have minds, and they have souls, as well as just hearts. And they’ve got ambition, and they’ve got talent, as well as just beauty.” Well ahead of her time, Alcott reinforces this through every moment of hardship, personal growth, and through the relationships of the Marsh women. Beautifully showcasing the realities of life and love for a woman, her story still holds true and the timeless characters she created are all complicated, beautiful, and right in their own ways, just like every modern woman in the world today.

—Richelle Boyd

FROM OUR PAGES

We’ve had some great author visits and interviews recently, so don’t miss out. Here is some of our book-related coverage from the last two weeks! Read all this and more at Independent.com.

Long Live Queer Nightlife Shortlisted for Prestigious Award by Keith Hamm

Book Launch Celebrates Dennis Spangler’s Life and Legacy by Ella Bailey

100 Years for Montecito’s Tecolote Book Shop by Tiana Molony

UPCOMING BOOK EVENTS

Below, you will find a few bookish events coming up in Santa Barbara. If you are hosting a bookish event in Santa Barbara, be sure to submit the event to our online events calendar.

Poetry Grows Here: Presidio Neighborhood
Sunday, August 31, noon | Pico Adobe at El Presidio de Santa Bárbara State Historic Park

Fiction Book Club
Wednesday, September 3, 5:30 p.m. | S.B. Central Library

Blue Whale Reading Series: Christopher Buckley and Phil Taggart
Wednesday, September 3, 5:30 p.m. | Unity of S.B. Chapel

Godmothers On the Stage: Austin Channing Brown: Full of Myself: Black Womanhood and the Journey to Self-Possession
Wednesday, September 3, 6 p.m. | Godmothers

Chaucer’s Book Talk & Signing: Jinny Webber: Serpent Visions
Thursday, September 4, 6 p.m. | Chaucer’s Books

Godmothers In Conversation: Elise Loehnen & Courtney Smith: Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness: A Process for Reclaiming Your Full Self
Friday, September 5, 6 p.m. | Godmothers

Online Seminar Series: Monday Night Poetry Group
Monday, September 8, 5 p.m. | Online

S.B. SPOTLIGHT

We at the Independent get many books sent to us by area authors, sometimes too many! It’s practically impossible for us to read and review them all, but just because we are busy bees does not mean that they aren’t worth the attention. In an attempt to not completely drop the ball, we have compiled a list of books here that are either written by a Santa Barbara author, feature someone in our community, or have another tie to Santa Barbara. I urge you to look through this list. Perhaps you will find your new favorite read!

The following are the most recent titles that have been sent to us.

The Marigold Cottages Murder Collective by Jo Nichols

Service Entrance by Kiki Astor

If you are a local author and would like us to feature your book in this section, please email allbooked@independent.com with the subject line “S.B. Spotlight.”

Book Reviews Courtesy of CALIFORNIA REVIEW OF BOOKS*

Thanks to the generous contributions of David Starkey, Brian Tanguay and their team of reviewers at California Review of Books, we are able to provide a steady stream of book reviews via our content partnership. Recent reviews at Independent.com include:

Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks; review by David Starkey

Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism by Brooke Harrington; review by Brian Tanguay

*At the present time, all of the Independent’s book reviews are provided in collaboration with California Review of Books (calirb.com).