Tag: review

A review of Girl, Stop Apologizing by Rachel Hollis

I first heard about Rachel Hollis when I saw the cover of her first book, Girl Wash Your Face. 

That title is a case study in why choosing a good title is so important. Hollis got that title spot on. Of course, I had to find out what this was all about. And of course, I had to read her book.

After reading it I had to get the next one. Because the first one was so great. I did a review of it before, you can read it here.

Now, if you read Girl Wash Your Face, you know that it was half self-help book, half stop apologizing pic twoautobiography. That’s what I would expect from any good self-help book. If someone hasn’t lived through Hell, I don’t believe they can help me get through it.

There wasn’t much of the biography experience in Stop Apologizing. There are little snippets of her life, sure. But not the full-fledged stories like before. That was alright, though. We got all that in book one.

What this book focused on was being, fully, unapologetically you. and you know how I feel about that. I’ve all but removed ‘sorry’ from my vocabulary. Unless I mess up, of course. In the past, I’ve literally apologized when other people ran into me! 

I’m working on it. 

Stop Apologizing is broken into three parts. The first part, and the longest, is the list of lies we tell ourselves to stand in our own way. And, most importantly, why they’re all bullshit. 

I think this is the foundation of any real, honest change you’re going to make in life. Start with weeding out the lies and bad habits. It’s like cleaning, you can’t start until you get rid of the clutter.

Next, we move onto habits to adopt. These are not hard habits, but neither are they easy. For instance, Behavior number five hit me right between the eyes.

Build a foundation for success. 

Mind you, I didn’t start reading this book until I’d already picked out my word of the year. You know, Foundation. So this chapter struck me right between the eyes. I love it when the universe lines up like that for me.

Finally, the last part is skills to acquire. Some of these seem like the sort of thing you’re born with or not, but the truth is that there’s little to nothing you can’t learn. 

I appreciate that the first skill listed is planning. No surprise there, it’s my favorite thing. But guess what? The only reason I’m able to get done what I get done is that I plan shit out. Do you think I could hold down a full-time job, take care of a mother in law recovering from hip surgery, host this blog, work for another blog and still put out at least one book a year if I didn’t have my life planned down to the half-hour? No, never. At least not if I wanted to, you know, sleep. And I do, I really do. Sleep is sacred.

I loved this book, and I hope that Rachel Hollis keeps churning them out. I love following her on social media, and I’m excited to see what comes next.

Did you read Girl, Wash Your Face or Girl, Stop Apologizing? What books have you read so far in 2020? Let us know in the comments below.

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Limetown series one overview. A huge letdown.

Okay, I have to start this out with an apology. I wrote a review of the first two episodes of Limetown, and I recommended it to you all. I thought it was going to be great. I thought it was going to be true to the podcast. I thought it was going to be worth your time to watch.

After finishing the show, I can confirm to you that it is, in fact, not worth watching it at all. It was such a disappointment, an absolute spit in the faces of the original creators. 

Let’s break down why shall we?

I’d like to start with Deirdre Wells. They decided to cast Marlee Matlin as Deirdre. If you’re not familiar with this incredible actress, let me tell you a few things about her. I first saw her on West Wing, where I fell in love with her. She’s funny as hell, a great actress, and also happens to be deaf. 

If you know about Limetown already, then you know that the town was testing tech that allowed people to hear other people’s thoughts. Now, I’m sure you can imagine that a deaf woman would be more interested in that than most. The ability to communicate, actually communicate with people after not being able to for most of your life would be too magical for words. They could have explored that. They could have gotten into how it was to be isolated her whole life, and then feel even more isolated when other people got the tech and she didn’t.

But they didn’t’ bother to do any of that. This was one of the few things that a show could have done so much better than a podcast. I mean, you can’t convey the actions of a deaf person in a purely audio medium. That sort of feels like a dick move. But no, there was none of that. She was just deaf, and they didn’t do anything with it.

What they did do instead was completely ruin the relationship between Dierdre and Max. If you recall from the podcast, Dierdre was all but convinced Max didn’t love her all that much. She was largely surprised when she heard that he’d called out “Goodbye Dorothy,” right before he died. She seemed more angry at him than anything. Like long term anger. One that had smoldered to a low blaze through the years. And Max? Max didn’t mention her at all.

Now, let’s talk about what really ruined the show for me. It was a specific thing, and it had a name.

Lia.

I touched on this in the first post I did about the show. I loved Lia in the podcast. She was sweet, smart and cared about what she was doing. And she really, really, didn’t give a shit about her uncle Emile. She didn’t remember him, didn’t realize the connection he had with her.

This was incredibly important if you read the prequel novel. Emile stays with his brother’s family for some time, and he has this great connection with Lia. It’s suggested but never said out loud, that he can’t hear Lia’s thoughts. That was important to him. Lia was important to him. So the fact that she doesn’t even remember their bond is heartbreaking. It means something that’s felt deeply. And this show just pissed all over that.

I especially hated what happened to Mark. It was ugly, it was brutal, and it was completely unnecessary. It just made me feel sick. And look, I’m all about the flawed hero character. I love flawed heroes. But there is a difference between a flawed hero and someone I just really genuinely hate. This made Lia into someone I hated.

Now, let’s talk about Emile showing up on the second to last episode. What in the hell was that? It didn’t make any sense for him to show up. And it made no sense, how Lia reached to him.

This whole show she’s having some sort of crisis because she wants to find her uncle. Then he shows up, right out of the blue, and asks her to come with him. And she says no. 

She hasn’t done a damn thing all season that wasn’t selfish. She’s done all these horrible things and she claims that it was all for the survivors. But it wasn’t, it was for her. But when the time came, she didn’t take what she’d been searching for all this time. 

But she didn’t. Now, this makes sense for the Lia of the podcast. She cared about the story, not her uncle. She would have turned him down. But the Lia of the show would have gone with her uncle all the way. 

Now finally, I want to point out something that I thought was done almost to perfection. The last episode was almost perfect.

Lenore was great. The actress, the lines, the execution. Everything about her was wonderful. All through this last episode were little added scenes that did add something to the story. It was masterfully done.

Maybe it was so good because Lia was hardly on the screen.

So that’s it. I have nothing more to say on the subject of this show. But I do have some advice for the creators. 

Don’t bother with a season two. Get season three of the podcast done instead. 

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