Book Specs 📖

• Authors: Tiffany McDaniel
• Genre: Historical Fiction/Literary Fiction/Bildungsroman
• Pages: 476 (Paperback)

One Sentence Synopsis🔖

Notes/Thoughts📝

• General thoughts: I would highly recommend this book to anyone that loves poetic prose and historical/literary fiction. IT IS SAD (my favourite genre hehe) Any novel that is able to masterfully sweep a reader through multiple years and generations while providing the cultural/historical references is *chef’s kiss*. If you read voraciously, Betty is a good fiction/non-fiction cross between Pachinko and Hidden Valley Road. I loved how McDaniels honoured the ugly truths in her mother’s story and balanced this with the beautiful memories we mould in our formative years. I bawled towards the end of the book and it was so overwhelming at one point that I had to set it down, but there is a little piece of redemption (if you are like me and see the silver lining in everything). PS. Betty has trigger warnings of rape and violence.
• Life is ironic. The book helps us understand that hurt people hurt people, but also that how we look at the world and what we choose to do makes the difference between LIVING and surviving. The life you want to live is the one that will be had.
• “Story always has been a way to rewrite the truth.” Storytelling can be interpreted as masking the truth or used a tool to help us communicate and understand the world. We continue to tell stories at work and in our personal lives to engage audiences and make data/information interesting. Important lesson is to focus less on relaying content and more on how you deliver a message. Inspire>>>
• Echoing the respect for animals and nature in Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, the more I read into indigenous culture, wisdom, tradition and ritual, the more I realize how we’ve gone backward as a society. We’ve taken destruction and consumption as a sign of progress and traded in our souls for convenience and ignorance. There’s a lot for me to learn in my everyday life about how I can consume more responsibly and shrink my ecological footprint (shop more at farmer’s markets, learn to make food from scratch i.e. broth, fermenting vegetables)
• Found out through ChatGPT that Breathed was a fictional town. Cool way of integrating both fact and fiction in McDaniel’s writing and achieving the mystical/magical realism through Book Setting.

Questions

• Why did Landon want his boots taken off at the end???I have a theory that it had to do with his work but i’m not sure…
• The mystery shooter mentioned in the Breathanian…I also have an idea about who it was and why they did this but I will likely need another read to connect the dots (Had to do this for Drive Your Plow through the Bones of the Dead and it was illuminating when I got it✨)

“Quotes”🗣

Times will never be the same, so we give time another beautiful name until it’s easier to carry as we go on remembering where it is we’ve come from

My father used to say that when a child is born, their very first breath is sent on the wind to become a plant or insect, a creature of feathers, fur, or scales. He would say that this human and this life are bound together as a reflection of one another.

Everything we need to live a life as long as we’re allowed has been given to us in nature…That’s not to claim if you eat this plant, you will never die, you will never die, for the plant itself will one day die, and you are no more special than it. All we can do is try to heal the things that can be healed and ease the complaints of the things that cannot be. At the very least, we bring the earth inside us and restore the knowledge that even the smallest leaf has a soul.

Your life is what makes you rich…The people you love, and the people who love you back.

No matter if we can’t find a single penny in our pockets, we got the wealth of the world between us.

When we see somethin’ bad, we have a great responsibility to do somethin’ about it.

Stars don’t exist for us. Somewhere out there is a world that we’re the insects to. Someone in that world has caught us. This planet we call home is really just a jar they keep us in. A big jar to us, but a small jar to them. Those lights are our airholes showin’ through to the light of the world we are too small for.

No matter how beautiful the pasture, it is the freedom to choose that make the difference between a life lived and a life had.

It doesn’t matter where you are or where you’re goin’ because you’ll always be south of heaven