Style Substance Soul | An online gathering of women who strive to look good, feel good, do good.

Jessica Keener’s debut novel, Night Swim, is glorious.

This finely-layered novel is told from the perspective of the bright, 16-year-old Sarah Kunitz. Through her eyes, we are offered an intimate look at her upper middle class family in 1970 suburban Boston. It’s an enviable portrait from the outside, but behind closed doors it is a darkly different story. Sarah’s mother is taking pills and floundering.  Sarah and her brothers must find ways to escape their parents’ bitter disagreements and their father’s difficult personality. Those harsh realities are soon replaced with confusion, grief and anger when their mother dies in a car crash. A certain drifting sadness looms while their father begins an affair with a young woman and Sarah embarks on her own romances.  Consequences abound, but Keener weaves the threads into a taut ending. … read full story →

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The eSSSence of Anna March

Style: Quirky.
Substance: Notice. Question. Think. Read. Talk. Write.
Soul: "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." -- Oscar Wilde

As I sat watching the vampiric ode to true love and white weddings that dominate the opening scenes of Breaking Dawn: Part 1, I waited anxiously for the honeymoon, pregnancy and birth scenes, wondering how the film would present Bella’s bruised body and horrific pregnancy. What caused me the most trepidation, though, were the imprinting scenes likely to come at the very end of Part 1. With many children in the audience, some appearing to be as young as six, I internally cringed, anticipating scenes that would likely glorify male dominance, romanticize female submission, frame pregnancy as THE happy ending, and suggest that an adult male falling in romantic love with a baby is sweet rather than gross.

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The eSSSence of Natalie Wilson

Style: Red is the best color ever. High heels are torture devices to be avoided at all costs. One can never have too many pairs of boots, nor too many books.
Substance: I question, therefore I am. I particularly like to question societal norms and all those silly “good girl” rules.
Soul: I endeavor not to be a human being, but a human doing, and, more specifically, a human writing and teaching towards social justice.