The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

This was my first Erin Zak book. I got it as an ARC back in 2019 and am just now reading it. I'm working on reviewing ARCs that I completely forgot I had or never got the desire to read after requesting them. I'm awful at ARCs but I love them so much. I might have a problem...

So, this book. The premise, I liked. The execution was painful for me. I honestly skimmed most of the last 100 pages (that's 100 ebook pages and my ereader said there were 571 pages which is not accurate but has to do with my font size and all that jazz) because there was so much repetition in information stated that I knew I wouldn't miss a thing. I would go from paragraph to paragraph and skim for something new. Then page by page. It wasn't a joyous reading experience.

But in addition to all of the same things being stated over and over and over again - sometimes by all three POVs - there was all of the telling and so very little showing. The majority of the book is exposition which made the repetition worse. The characters weren't fleshed out at all and even had the same basic speech patterns and word usage. Granted Jackie and Beth used "whatever" and "like" and Susan didn't nearly as much but everyone, regardless of where they lived or their background used "eh?" at the end of sentences or calls people hot messes. That's just one small example. All three POV characters were also constantly using self-talk that involved calling themselves stupid, ugly, ridiculous, and other awful things. Although once in a while they each would have some internal monologue that included being pretty, hot, good at something, etc.

Let me look at my notes right quick...

OH! This book is a few years old now and I don't remember what the blurb said but I'm going to discuss the husband/father in this story. He's portrayed throughout as crazy and violent and stalkerish and just awful in so many ways. And then everything with him is resolved in a page or two. It was a huge part of the story and then blah.

The whole concept of the birth mom and adoptive mom of a child meeting and the three of them developing a relationship was very interesting to me. Unfortunately, very little of anything dealing with the actual adoption issue was ever discussed. There were no demands (or even gentle requests) to know why she gave the baby up. Beth was just like, "Cool, you're my birth mom. No problems here!" It was just unbelievable.

There are other things that I have noted but the above covers enough. I will likely try another of Zak's books but I don't think I'll stick it out if the same show/tell and repetition of info happens. Overall, I was really disappointed but because it could have been such a great story. Still going to give it 3 stars because, even though I started to quit several times, the idea of the story and what might end up happening wouldn't let me completely drop it.

Thanks to Bold Strokes and NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review this book. Sorry it took so long. I imagine there'll be some even older ones in my TBR that will end up here too.

There's a little too much emphasis on "this is how you should do things" for my taste, but if you can get past that by pretending that the entire book is a collection of suggestions, it's not that much of a bother as long as you don't make the mistake I did of trying to adapt to any cookie-cutter system. With that in mind, this book does do a fantastic job of pointing out the inadequacies of note-taking as I was taught it in school, and how better to approach the activity.
(Although, the way I was taught to take notes was the vague advice to "always have a pen and paper handy," and that was about it.)
If I'd read this book while I was at school, I might have left with more than two highers (Scottish qualifications). The ADHD I didn't know I had made it hard for me to retain the right information because, through traditional note-taking, there's no intuitive way to make connections, and certainly there was not the same software out there to help in that regard as there is now. A video I watched about Zettelkasten led me to this book, and this book led me into a deeper dive into the rabbit hole that is PKM and Obsidian. That rabbit hole has re-made me. I was on the verge of quitting my writing career and now I'm writing more than ever while I've also got an OU course starting in a matter of days.