Self Help

Living Resistance: An Indigenous Vision for Seeking Wholeness Every Day / Kaitlin B. Curtice

/ Alisha Helms / Leave a comment 
Living Resistance: An Indigenous Vision for Seeking Wholeness Every Day
By: Kaitlin B. Curtice
Genre: Nonfiction, Self Help
Number of Pages: 208
Published: March 7, 2023
Publisher: Brazos Press
Dates Read: August 2, 2023 - August 5, 2023
Format: Library Book / Hardcover

Living Resistance is about resistance and how you can use it in everyday life and not just at protests or boycotting things. Kaitlin B. Curtice looks at resistance in different realms: the personal, the communal, the ancestral, and the integral. She explains each realm at the beginning of each section to help the reader understand it more thoroughly. 

I was kind of excited about this book. I’ve been trying to get into reading more nonfiction and I thought this would be one I would enjoy. Maybe it just wasn’t really for me.

I felt like it was a bit repetitive, which makes sense because it’s about life and life is messy and isn’t always straight forward, but when I’m reading a different story with the same message at the end, it gets a bit boring.

It was also a bit more religious than what I was looking for, not so much spiritual.

I feel like a lot of people will be able to take from this, but it just didn’t speak to me as I would hope it would.

I will say, it did make me think about how I want to look to my descendants as their ancestor and what I would want to leave behind for them.

*Thank you Brazos Press and NetGalley for a digital advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review

This Book Will Make You Feel Seen / Chloë Jade

/ Alisha Helms / Leave a comment 
This Book Will Make You Feel Seen
By: Chloë Jade
Genre: Self Help
Number of Pages: 231
Published: December 8, 2022
Publisher: Self Published
Dates Read: April 14, 2023 - April 21, 2023
Format: Library Book / Paperback

Trigger Warnings: this book will most likely make you cry

This collection of writing from Chloë Jade contains themes surrounding mental health, healing, childhood trauma, self-compassion, self-discovery, heartbreak, letting go, and relationships. Woven with easy-to-digest gentle reminders and perspective shift prompts, this book will help you acknowledge your past and pain and help you begin to move forward with a better understanding and acceptance.

I was able to get a copy of this for my library so I could read it but this is definitely a book I will purchase my own copy of here in the future that I would grab off the shelf as I need it. There’s some solid reminders you sometimes just need to see as words in front of you in this book.

Shoot, in the first 20 pages of it had me crying a few times.

Some writing didn’t connect with me at all but there were others that though they didn’t scream at me right at the moment I read it, I either felt the connection from my past, or know that it’s something I will probably want in the future.

If you’re like me, who tends to self isolate a lot if something is wrong, sometimes I need a little pick me up without having to say anything; this book is definitely it.