I am going to need to reread this book. It took a while to get through it and at soe points it was confusing. All in al I think that it is a good book and I eed to sit down and read it all in one time. I was reading several other books while reading this pne. ( )

This is a tortured memoir about a dysfunctional Australian family and the role of colonialism in their lives. Assigning collective guilt to a generation that had no part in the atrocities committed by their culture and ancestors is a popular trend. Unless you enjoy having your nerves flayed by family drama and general unpleasantness I would look elsewhere.

Monsters: A Reckoning, by Alison Croggon, is very much an up and down read for me. Parts had me thinking and largely agreeing, while others simply made me tired of hearing her version of the dispute with her sister.

I found more of importance here than I did of annoyance, so I leave it with a generally positive feeling toward the book. It isn't easy facing the cracks in how we were presented the world when we were kids, the injustices and indifferences in our past (familial or cultural). I found a lot of her discussion of the larger issues, from colonialism to blatant racism, to be the best parts of the book for me.

I found the frame of the familial conflict to be less interesting and actually made my view of her a bit lower. I am not even going to discuss any kind of right or wrong, throughout most of the book the "dispute" was kept so vague that I just tuned out. I hate to use this word because it can be used in such a broad sense, but in this case I mean it in the way it is most commonly used in interpersonal interactions: Croggon comes off as whiny. Tone of voice, the "I tried everything but..." storytelling, I get the feeling I wouldn't like anyone in the family even if I find a lot of her questioning to be spot on.

I readily admit that how a reader "hears" a writer's voice is as much a creation of the reader as it is the author's actual voice, so I am trying to judge the book as a whole on the other elements as much or more than the voice. In a nonfiction book I am more comfortable doing this since part of what I want is information to help me to understand. I want to better understand not only what has happened to the author but I want to understand how to apply what I am reading to my own life and my own (familial and cultural) past. And I did get a lot to digest in that sense, thus the more positive overall review.

I would recommend this to readers who are open to questioning the past, even if the answers to those questions might be hard to accept. For those wanting to read a memoir(ish) book for enjoyment, well, I would suggest reading an excerpt and making sure you like the authorial voice. If you do, I think you will enjoy the content.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via LibraryThing Early Reviewers. ( )

Just hard to even get into this book. Not my cup of tea and not what I thought the book would be about.

I received this from LibraryThing Early Reviewer for an honest opinion. ( )

A family that is torn apart by dysfunctional parents and life events that change relationships between sister is the core of the book. This book also looks at privilege and it how it seeps into every part of life. I have mixed feeling about this book, the parts about her family compelling yet incomplete. While she talks about privilege and being a woman and white I don't quite understand what this has to deal with her and her family. It seems to me she was holding back on a story that is painful and where she takes a lot of the blame, yet it seems that there is a lot of blame to go around ( )