Mini-reviews: Ejaculate Responsibly, The Borrowed Life of Frederick Fife, The Bright Years, Our Spoons Came From Woolworths

 More mini-reviews in a mad rush to be able to start 2026 all caught up!

Ejaculate Responsibly: A Whole New Way To Think About Abortion by Gabrielle Blair

Read by Gabrielle Blair

3 hours, 8 minutes

Published October 2022 by Workman Publishing Group

Publisher's Summary: 

In Ejaculate Responsibly, Gabrielle Blair offers a provocative reframing of the abortion issue in post-Roe America. In a series of 28 brief arguments, she deftly makes the case for moving the abortion debate away from*controlling and legislating women's bodies and instead directs the focus on men's lack of accountability in preventing unwanted pregnancies. 

Highly readable, accessible, funny, and unflinching, Blair builds her argument by walking readers through the basics of fertility (men are 50 times more fertile than women), the unfair burden placed on women when it comes to preventing pregnancy (90% of the birth control market is for women), the wrongheaded stigmas around birth control for men (condoms make sex less pleasurable, vasectomies are scary and emasculating), and the counterintuitive reality that men, who are fertile 100% of the time, take little to no responsibility for preventing pregnancy.

The result is a compelling and convincing case for placing the responsibility-and burden-of preventing unwanted pregnancies away from women and onto men.

My Thoughts: 

Don't look at that one word in the title and decide this isn't a book for you. In fact, if that word bothers you, there's even more reason to read this book. Blair (who I follow on Instagram for many reasons), has written a book full of ways the number of abortions can be vastly reduced. It's eye-opening and well-reasoned and I really wish the people who need to read and heed would do just that. I definitely recommend it, but you might want to hide the cover if you don't want people in the doctor's office waiting room to look at you strangely. 

The Borrowed Life of Frederick Fife by Anna Johnston

Read by Tim Carroll 

10 hours, 49 minutes

Published September 2024 by HarperCollins

Publisher's Summary: 

“Would you mind terribly, old boy, if I borrowed the rest of your life? I promise I'll take excellent care of it.”

Frederick Fife was born with an extra helping of kindness in his heart. If he borrowed your car, he'd return it washed with a full tank of gas. The problem is, at age eighty-two, there's nobody left in Fred's life to borrow from, and he's broke and on the brink of eviction.But Fred's luck changes when he's mistaken for Bernard Greer, a missing resident at the local nursing home, and takes his place. Now Fred has warm meals in his belly and a roof over his head-as long as his look-alike Bernard never turns up.

Denise Simms is stuck breathing the same disappointing air again and again. A middle-aged mom and caregiver at Bernard's facility, her crumbling marriage and daughter's health concerns are suffocating her joy for life. Wounded by her two-faced husband, she vows never to let a man deceive her again.

As Fred walks in Bernard's shoes, he leaves a trail of kindness behind him, fueling Denise's suspicions about his true identity. When unexpected truths are revealed, Fred and Denise rediscover their sense of purpose and learn how to return a broken life to mint condition.

My Thoughts: 

I learned about this book at my local library's annual Book Bash and I will say that the premise that sold me on picking it up lives up to my expectations. It is a unique idea that is the "feel-good...novel about grief, redemption, forgiveness and finding family" that the publisher's summary proclaims it. Unfortunately, it's not quite a clever as they also proclaim it. 

Being as the lead character is male, Johnston seems to have felt like she needed to throw some things in that made it feel more like a story a man has told - there are so many references to farts, peeing, and other bodily functions, most of which could have easily been left out. It does require that readers suspend disbelief (which, for the most part, I was willing to do), but it also gets repetitive frequently. Overall, I enjoyed it; it just required my forgiving the faults I found. 

The Bright Years by Sarah Damoff

Read by Ferdelle Capistrano, Joy Osmanski, and Lee Osorio

8 hours, 50 minutes

Published April 2025 by Simon and Schuster

Publisher's Summary: 

Ryan and Lillian Bright are deeply in love, recently married, and now parents to a baby girl, Georgette. But Lillian has a son she hasn't told Ryan about, and Ryan has an alcohol addiction he hasn't told Lillian about, so Georgette comes of age watching their marriage rise and fall.

When a shocking blow scatters their fragile trio, Georgette tries to distance herself from reminders of her parents. Years later, Lillian's son comes searching for his birth family, so Georgette must return to her roots, unearth her family's history, and decide whether she can open up to love for them-or herself-while there's still time.

Told from three intimate points of view, The Bright Years is a tender, true-to-life debut that explores the impact of each generation in a family torn apart by tragedy but, over time, restored by the power of grace and love.

My Thoughts: 

This one suffered, for me, from having had my listening broken up by several weeks. To the point where it took me a good 20 minutes, when I got it loaned again, to remember that I'd even started it before. I think if I would have listened to it straight through, it would have been a book I would have liked a lot more. Which is not to say that I didn't like it; I did. 

The characters are interesting, the relationships feel real, and I liked (even though I didn't think I would when the last narrator began), the way Damoff finished the book. This book is much more a novel about grief, redemption, forgiveness and finding family than is The Borrowed Life of Frederick Fife. I would definitely recommend it for book clubs - so much to discuss! 

Our Spoons Came From Woolworths by Barbara Comyns

224 pages

Published 1950 by Eyre and Spottiswoode originally

Publisher's Summary: 

“I told Helen my story and she went home and cried.” So begins Our Spoons Came from Woolworths. But Barbara Comyns’s beguiling novel is far from tragic, despite the harrowing ordeals its heroine endures. 

Sophia is twenty-one and naïve when she marries fellow artist Charles. She seems hardly fonder of her husband than she is of her pet newt; she can’t keep house (everything she cooks tastes of soap); and she mistakes morning sickness for the aftereffects of a bad batch of strawberries. England is in the middle of the Great Depression, and the money Sophia makes from the occasional modeling gig doesn’t make up for her husband’s indifference to paying the rent. Predictably, the marriage falters; not so predictably, Sophia’s artlessness will be the very thing that turns her life around.

My Thoughts: 

First published in 1950 and set in the 1930's, this is the kind of British book that's become a modern classic, even if you've never heard of it. It's also largely autobiographical, which I was not aware of until I was pulling the information about the book. In many ways that makes the book even more poignant. 

Sophia really is quite naive through most of the book, particularly vulnerable to society's mores and the belief that Charles isn't the bum he actually is. When Sophia gets pregnant, she is no longer able to work (because it's the 1930's and just not done, for the most part), throwing their little family into poverty. Charles doesn't want the baby and is the terrible father you'd expect. Sophia hungers for someone who cares, throwing her into an ill-advised affair. As terrible as things get for Sophia, as the publisher says, things turn around for her, just as I'd hoped they would. Thanks for the recommendation, Ann Patchett!