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Amy Krouse Rosenthal has cultivated a distinct blend of nonlinear memoir, observational humor,...
The Joyous Cosmology
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In describing the effects of mescaline, Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception opened a...
The Good Women of China
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When Deng Xiaoping's efforts to 'open up' China took root in the late 1980s, Xinran recognised an...
China Asia Non-Fiction History Women's Memoir
When Did I Start Looking Like a Cop?
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A Brooklyn native, Joseph Belcastro joined the New York City Police Department in July, 1983. He...
Call the Midwife - Season 7
7.9
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In the old houses and bold new apartment buildings of 1963 London, expectant mothers need more help...
nurse doctor midwife doula maternity motherhood
Extreme Metaphors
J.G. Ballard, Simon Sellers and Dan O'Hara
10.0
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A startling and at times unsettlingly prescient collection of J. G. Ballard’s greatest interviews....
You'll Never See Daylight Again
8.0
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The gritty prison memoir of Michaella McCollum, one half of the infamous 'Peru Two', imprisoned in a...
ClareR (5879 KP) rated A Certain Hunger in Books
Mar 16, 2023
I mean, if you’re going to murder someone, why not go the whole hog and make something nice out of their buttocks or their tongue? Yes, it’s gory, but Dorothy Daniels is such a narcissistic psychopath that it’s all done so terribly nicely.
I listened to this on audiobook as I read it, and maybe I’ve been able to take something else from this. The Narrator, Dorothy (aka Hillary Huber), sounded superior, well-educated and completely logical. Obviously she’s not - she’s writing her memoir sat in a prison cell!
What would have been the icing on the cake, would have been someone finding her memoirs at the end.
Clearly this will be a marmite book, and as someone who is usually ambivalent about marmite, I actually rather liked Dorothy Daniels and her distinctive tastes!
Environmental Management:: Revision Guide for the IEMA Associate Membership Exam and NEBOSH Diploma in Environmental Management
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Written by Adrian Belcham, author of Manual of Environmental Management, this is the essential guide...
Haley Mathiot (9 KP) rated The Sugarless Plum in Books
Apr 27, 2018
There was a lot of information about Diabetes in the text, and I did skip over a paragraph occasionally. But for the most part it all fit in perfect. She described how she worried about how much Insulin to take before a show so that she wouldn't faint on stage. She told about how she was in complete denial for a while. She told about the horror to find that after she broke down and tested her blood after eating off-diet for so long, and her reading was off the charts—and another time, while she was having short black-outs, her reading was so low she didn’t know that a human’s blood sugar level could get that low… and how she felt in all those situations.
How Zippora felt was a key element running through the book. It wasn’t just “this is my story, hope you enjoy.” No, it was “First this happened. It looked like this, it felt like this, it smelled and tasted like this. Then this happened!”
Would a non-dancer relate to this book? Yes I believe they would. Maybe they wouldn’t have the same respect for what she went through as I do, but they would still relate. I danced through injuries and illnesses and partnered people who could at any moment throw up all over me and had six hour rehearsals en pointe and stayed at the studio from 8:00am to 7:30 pm with only a few crackers and water keeping me alive and ate dinner at 11:30 at night. I remember how it feels. But Zippora’s memoir tells us how it is in the professional world—which is all that I mentioned to a higher degree—and does it in a way that you don’t have to have that background to understand and relate to it and feel it (Although dancers will know what a pirouette or a tendue is without the explanation that she gives. At least the better if they call themselves dancers :).
THE SUGARLESS PLUM wasn’t just for dancers. It’s for anyone who dreams of the stage. Any athlete who suffers from an illness or an injury, either Diabetes or otherwise. It shows people that although they may not be able to overcome or fix a chronic disease, but it is possible to achieve your goal and cope with it and still achieve what you dream of most.
Content: There is one scene with brief mention of sex but no explicit details, and there is no language.
Recommendation: Ages 12+ to anyone who has ever dreamed about the stage, any athlete who suffers from Diabetes and needs encouragement, or anyone who loves a touching and inspirational memoir.