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This book is one of the few that I found that talk about sex workers in a nuanced light. This is largely because it's a book that's by sex workers, and that makes all the difference.

As someone reads through it, they'll start seeing the connections between a lot of different issues and sex work in particular: trans and queer issues, homelessness, misogyny and violence against women, migrant issues, race, and so on. It provides one more link in a chain that highlights the ways in which everything is connected, which is something that more people really need to be cognizant of.

There are a few parts that I take issue with, and it's largely because they try to be... more polite to people than I think they ought to be. There's a part of the text where they say something along the lines that they want to sit down and have genuine conversations with anti-prostitution feminists who they openly acknowledge they disagree with to make their positions clear, but many of those people that they list are also known TERFs (Julie Bindel). I think such additions of "wanting to talk" are really just pointless, and they most certainly were in 2018 (when the book was published). The belief that we can just talk to these people and make them change their minds... I struggle with that because a lot of time has been wasted on just talking with these people, and they haven't budged an inch. In fact, they've entrenched further.

So while everything else was great and really informative and helped build a lot of connections between issues, I really just wish they would've removed these elements of "sitting down and nicely talking" with people who have shown themselves to be openly hostile and violently aggressive to calm discourse.

This book suffers from two things in terms of its writing and structure. First, there's Graeber's desire to compress as much information into one space as humanly possible, even to the detriment of his own argument and the discussion he wants to push people to have. The second is that it seems, if I'm reading into both authors' writing styles correctly, Wengrow's desire to flesh out those concepts with more detail to further support them. (I say that because I've checked a few of his articles, and he has a tendency to develop even more focused detail than Graeber.)

I could be wrong about who was doing what, but regardless? The end result is a book that is a slog to get through and frequently leaves me forgetting half of what I've read, going back to skim it and remind myself about what they were discussing, and then trying to figure out what most of it has to do with the point being made. Which, yeah, the topics discussed do relate. But it's such a winding detour through excruciating detail that it makes it hard to focus on the overall picture that they're trying to get us to see.

So much of this would've benefitted from focused case studies rather than intertwining and switching between each of them. It also would've dealt better with more clear (instead of verbose and annoyingly lengthy) section titles that could serve as functional reminders rather than quippy sayings.

Overwhelmingly, I wasn't amused with most of this. Despite the obvious amount of time this had to have taken in order to gather all the resources and research, the writing feels rushed and confused. It doesn't feel nearly as solid as it really could've been.

This book was actually hard for me to read, mostly in terms of the writing style. There were a lot of places that needed an editor (spelling, duplicated words, weird spacing, inconsistent spellings, flow of language), but that didn't detract from the message or the interest.

It also repeats quite frequently, but I think that's largely because this is a chronological compilation of translated articles; it felt like I was being reminded of the same few things (meanings of words, structures of power, who people were) multiple times. In a lot of these instances, I started skimming because otherwise I felt like the information was too repetitive. A better use of space would be to have footnotes and a glossary for words like 'shabiha' instead of constant parenthetical notes about it that break engagement and forces the audience to stop, reread the sentence without the parenthetical note, and then continue. It was really frustrating.

Overwhelmingly, I think I would've liked these articles more as... articles rather than as a compilation because of how similar they could be. The information is something that we need to know more about because this story isn't really breaking into the world headlines from the perspectives of people who live in Syria. We get a lot of talking heads who are "Middle East experts" or "Middle East scholars" with no lived experience or "foreign relations experts" or "diplomatic experts" who haven't really interacted with Syria. In that way, this book is pretty refreshing.

Morpurgo's story was quite nicely done, even if awkward; I have not much to say about it. Almond's story was actually really good and interesting; it actually had a lot of feeling for a short story. I loved it.

My rating for this book, which is the one with three stories (96 pages), is so low because of John Boyne's story. His story was atrocious; it was just as bad as his other writing, which isn't even remotely shocking because he's just not a good writer.

The reasons for this statement include: 1. The nine-year old child that he wrote, for some reason, doesn't act like a nine-year old child. This is something he's never been good at (and is far more apparent in his novels from children's perspective). He looks at his mom and dad, as a nine-year old, and refers to them by their first names. It's weird

1. He writes an unnecessary thought-process of how French women take better care of themselves than Irish women (who wear potato sacks on days other than Sunday), and it had nothing to do with the story he'd written at all. It served no purpose, it doesn't work in our modern times (even if 'historically accurate' and also a constant feature of how French women are described by non-French people, if the media is any indication), and it just sounds massively sexist without commentary.

2. Why does this child look at his mother, after a brick has been thrown through their front window and think "Oh, I hate how you look in your nightdress. You look tired and not elegant"? It's so weird and absurd.

I had no choice but to DNF this book; I couldn't continue to force myself to read it, even if I liked the concept of it. There were just too many times you could skip parts and still have a coherent story. In fact, if a lot of the unnecessary details were dropped? It would've been more fun to read.

Part of what made me at least read half of this book was that it was as if there were multiple short stories tied to this accordion and that it, somehow and without communicating, was the main character. I liked that the book was supposed to give views into multiple immigrant experiences in the US, though I found it odd that their negative experiences kept getting tied to the accordion rather than the xenophobic Americans.

But this book had too much superfluous detail. There were moments where things that weren't important to the story (especially in the chapter involving sex-crazed German immigrants) kept getting described to death, as if the audience is incapable of imagining anything. None of the detail added anything, taught me anything, made me think any differently. It just made me bored and frustrated, inevitably leading to me handing this book over to a Goodwill just to make it go away.

Ignoring the back cover, I actually quite love this story of a gay boy coming to terms with who he is; I enjoy the tale of how he learns about his sexuality without it feeling over-burdened by excessive and irrelevant details or descriptions (in the way that many novels generally attempt to awkwardly explain LGBTQ people in the story, even when it focuses on that person). I adored a lot of it, and I kind of wish I'd had something like this growing up.

It's set in London and focuses on a boy who is coming of age (15), and his family is trying to push him into something he doesn't want: grooming him for coming of marriageable age. Much of the story is spent on his time feeling frustrated by the discussion of marriage: his oldest brother is collecting money for a dowry to get engaged, his two sisters are (annoyingly competitive with each other and) trying to find men to marry... Every party he's forced to attend has him talking with people who talk of nothing else, and he hates every minute of it.

I like that there's a symbolic nature of him being othered in many ways; not only does he feel different as he grows to learn about his sexuality, but he feels different in the pursuits and interests that he holds. There are a lot of great parallels.

The bit about the back cover is the bit where it's a "retelling of a Native American folktale." I'm rather curious as to which one (tribe/group affiliation), as it only gives the title: "The Girl Who Married a Ghost." I'd found the story in books about Nigeria and only found vague reference to it in the Northwest region of America; I really wish people would be more specific, since these stories aren't always things that are culturally shared between peoples.

It'd been so long since I'd last read it, and that's taking into consideration that I read the books after the movies had come out (as an experiment of sorts that showed only two movies in the entire series made sense as stand-alone projects).

I always love the magic, the imagination, the vividness of the scenes in my head. I always enjoy the characters, including a handful of the side characters that I wish played a much larger part. I enjoy a lot of the messages that are in the novel, ranging from aspects of friendship to being an assertive person who stands up for what they believe.

But reading them again after having been a teacher for a while, it leads me to be concerned over aspects of things that were done with regards to what we term "duty of care." It leaves me with changes of perspective of people like Severus Snape (who doesn't seem to maintain a fully consistent characterisation in some places and has a shoddy excuse for why he'd protect Harry, but I think this is largely because Rowling made it too obvious that he'd be a bait-and-switch; he's also given a personality for someone who should've left the teaching profession but stayed in because of reasons that no one really knows, since it's definitely not for the benefit of the students they're treating poorly) and Albus Dumbledore (who knowingly brought something on-campus that's dangerous and provides tools that actively encourage a child to undertake the protection of that very thing, so he seems to be okay with varying degrees of child endangerment).

And, at the end, they knowingly send him back to a family that was openly abusive at the beginning despite the fact that he could very well have stayed on at the school (which I know leads into the next novel). Things like this often leave me feeling a little uncomfortable with aspects of the story, especially now that I'm an adult (and very specifically one who works with children and has experience in a variety of schools).

It's a weird conflict to have that it's an engaging story with such awkward elements of characters or in-world policy.

I have always wondered why anyone would hire Gilderoy Lockhart, and then I started working in international schools; it makes perfect sense because, when in need, they hire absolutely anyone without an actual care for their abilities or expertise. It's scary.

Only benefit of Lockhart: Snape's appearances in the novel decrease in order to show how incapable Lockhart is. Snape appears almost randomly to make a student miserable, still making me wonder why anyone at Hogwarts would've ever kept him around since he hates approximately 75% of his students so much.

Regarding Lockhart: If he was the only available candidate for the job, I would've added hours to my other teachers' duties and had them teach the bloody class together. All of this is being said as a secondary teacher who has taken on additional subjects because our only applicants are so unqualified (in some way) that they have less of a right teaching them than I do.

One of the things I would've liked to have seen was more focus on the Malfoys (less so Draco, more so Lucius); Dobby's appearances, as a stand-alone text, feel weird and out of place. He feels superfluous to the story, only acting as a random events to Harry. If it didn't set things up later, I'd be really frustrated with Dobby's existence.

Snape is the one continuing element of these books that I always severely question, particularly after having worked as a teacher for a number of years.

It's one thing to hold grudges against people (Sirius Black and Remus Lupin, in this instance) for things they've done, but it's an entire other thing when your teenage grudge continues to plague your life and your profession (and, as a result, the professionalism that you should be showing to students). And this is something that I can, from experience, discuss; in the international school circuit, you often work with the children of your colleagues (and while it's preferable that you like them, it sometimes happens that you don't). If I let my feelings for my students' parents cloud my judgement, I would be unprofessional; I'd hope that my boss would talk to me about this and set me straight (or straight up fire me for too many transgressions).

The child of a person (or the godchild of a person) is not guilty of the crimes of the parent or guardian. The fact that a grown man is taking out his teenage feelings on the child of someone who he felt betrayed by is beyond disgusting. And it still leads right back to my constant question: What is happening in Hogwarts' management that they enable this behaviour?

It just perpetually frustrates me that no one seems to be actually managing the school, even in the background. Maybe it's just Minerva on her own, yelling at everyone to fix shit because they're all too busy holding grudges or acting mysterious while being over-well-informed but doing little else.

That said, the events of this book are a bit more interesting, though I'm still of the opinion that Quidditch scenes are beyond boring and provide further evidence that they care little about student welfare and are in desperate need of a child welfare check. (No, Harry, you can't go to Hogsmeade because your abusive aunt and uncle didn't sign the permission form, but it's entirely fine that you're up in a massive rainstorm with a near-tornado happening while on a broomstick because we're entirely incapable of postponing and moving intra-school games to different days of the week.)

The introduction of Lupin, Sirius, and the Marauder's Map is always one of my favourite things; I always enjoy the bit where Lupin describes how Sirius, James, and Peter just casually broke the law in order to become Animagus and keep him company during his turns. (Though, as for Peter, while this book fleshes out that part quite nicely for his existence as Scabbers, it's disappointing in review of the previous two because there was so little done to even hint at that other than to say he was passed down and missing a toe, so it feels like it wasn't originally mapped out nearly as well.)