Katherine E. Standefer's 3 favorite reads in 2025

• 2024
• 2025

THE RIVER'S DAUGHTER is both fast-paced and deep, a true adventure. Bridget Crocker's evocative but rather-impossible childhood had me on the edge of my seat, and her path towards a greater personal power felt resonant and moving. I loved THE RIVER'S DAUGHTER's unique, gripping look into the white-water rafting world of the Zambezi River in Zambia/Zimbabwe, which--more than being just an adrenaline story--incorporated issues of race, gender, and violence in impactful ways. Bridget Crocker's spiritual relationship to rivers deepened this book immeasurably, and I admired her unselfconscious ability to write these parts. Finally, I was impressed by Crocker's ability to show readers how impossible it can be for young women to avoid sexual assault in a culture in which men constantly (and incorrectly) conflate their desire for someone with a *right* to what they want. I read this book in a single gulp. If you're looking for an unconventional memoir you won't be able to put down, this is for you.

In POETS SQUARE CATS, Courtney Gustafson takes us inside a world few of us already know about. The cats themselves are cute, entertaining, and heartbreaking, but what got under my skin is the way Gustafson uses the world of feral cats to show us insights about current American culture, including issues like loneliness and friendship/community, gender-based violence, reproductive rights, food insecurity, and our relationship to unhoused folks. This book may not be what you think when you pick it up, but that's because it's SO MUCH MORE. Run, don't walk to read this unputdownable memoir.

THE DRY SEASON is smart, elegant, and utterly unique. In this book, Melissa Febos conducts the kind of fearless self-inventory that makes many would-be memoir writers blanch-- not only confronting how she has acted in the past but truly understanding it, taking steps to live differently on the other side. (Her list of commitments to herself at the end made me squirm with discomfort, because it created so much immediate dissonance in areas where I, too, might be living out of alignment.) THE DRY SEASON is both a compelling story and a proposed philosophy for living, and I don't think any reader will come away without a desire to inventory their own love and sex lives, to better understand their own behavior patterns, especially in the context of our culture. As a writer, I especially admire this book's structure, which reveals the right details at precisely the right moments and which kept me moving between past and present in grounded, clear, compelling ways. This book is a masterpiece.