Welcome to my stop on the last day of the Body Talk blog tour!

Body Talk:
37 Voices Explore Our Radical Anatomy

Kelly Jensen, Editor

August 18, 2020

Algonquin Young Readers

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Blurb: It’s time to bare it all about bodies!
 
We all experience the world in a body, but we don’t usually take the time to explore what it really means to have and live within one. Just as every person has a unique personality, every person has a unique body, and every body tells its own story.
 
In Body Talk, thirty-seven writers, models, actors, musicians, and artists share essays, lists, comics, and illustrations—about everything from size and shape to scoliosis, from eating disorders to cancer, from sexuality and gender identity to the use of makeup as armor. Together, they contribute a broad variety of perspectives on what it’s like to live in their particular bodies—and how their bodies have helped to inform who they are and how they move through the world.
 
Come on in, turn the pages, and join the celebration of our diverse, miraculous, beautiful bodies!

Purchase Links:
Shop your local indie bookstore | Amazon

We are living in both a horrible and an amazing time. For the first time that I can remember, people are talking honestly about what it is to be their unique selves. Yes, there are those who judge them, who want them to shut up, and who are vehemently putting their opinions out there, but there are so many more welcoming the dialogue because when it comes right down to it, none of us are immune to frailties of mind and body.

Body Talk is filled with honest conversations. Essays written by individuals who have struggled or dealt with accepting or not accepting who they are or what others might think of them. I found most of the essays to be insightful and enlightening, opening my world and view. The essays don’t follow a party line, for which I was grateful. This was especially true for those essays dealing with weight, being fat. Being a person whose weight has been like a roller coaster, I identified with some of the voices but not others. And, I think that’s where these essays succeed. Each person’s experience is their own, and the reader accepts that. We do not live in other people’s bodies or minds, only our own so that is the limit of our experience unless others share.

None of the essays is particularly long. Some are told conversationally. Some dryly. All are well-written and informative. Some touch you. Some make you cringe. Many you’ll think about long after you’ve read them.

This book could not have been published when I was a teenager, but I am glad that it has been published now. While Body Talk is geared toward teenagers, I believe that it can and should be read widely across all age groups. I am positive that anyone who reads it with an open mind would discover something more about what it is to be human beyond their own circumstance. Perhaps if we truly understood what it was to walk a mile in another’s shoes, we would be far less judgmental–and imagine that world!

I very much appreciate the publisher providing me with a copy of Body Talk in exchange for an honest review.

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rating:

4 butterflies and a ladybug out of 5 butterflies

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