A powerful, quietly moving memoir of abuse that encapsulates one woman’s incredible resilience.
Odell discusses the sexual abuse she experienced at the hands of her childhood riding instructor in this memoir.
After a second round of couples therapy with her husband, the author realized that many of the problems she’d experienced stemmed from her failure to thoroughly confront her past—specifically the sexual abuse she suffered from Clarentine, a riding instructor at the Ivy Creek Stables where Odell began riding at age 10. She recalls Clarentine making sexual jokes that she didn’t understand, both to and about her, almost immediately after she arrived: “Needing to pretend to be sexually savvy while protecting myself against my own vulnerability became a coping tactic. Strategies like this started impinging on my nervous system. The grooming process had officially begun.” Odell also recalls Clarentine’s callous physical abuse of the horses in order to “break” them (including a brutal scene of castration), as well as his attempt to bribe Odell into having sex at age 15 with the promise of being able to ride her favorite horse at all of the shows that summer. (Clarentine’s inappropriate behavior with all of his riding students remained an open secret among the girls.) The author, now a therapist herself, maintains a calm tone throughout the memoir in spite of the deeply upsetting events she describes. Her desire to please Clarentine even after she moved away to college—going so far as to visit him in prison after he murdered the father of one of his students—may be difficult for some readers to understand, but Odell articulately explains the emotional hooks that he placed in her (and so many others). The author also effectively ties in her current problems, especially those in her marriage, with her past traumas. Odell’s emotional breakthrough at the memoir’s conclusion will likely prove truly inspirational to readers, whether or not they have personally experienced similar trauma.
A powerful, quietly moving memoir of abuse that encapsulates one woman’s incredible resilience.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781647428723
Page Count: 200
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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