Review of The Vine

[Em Woods]

[Following is a volunteer review of "The Vine" by Adria L. Dunn.]

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3 out of 5 stars

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My rating of Adria L. Dunn's The Vine: Messages of Hope From Around the World is three out of five stars. While Dunn did bring together an inspiring harmony of voices from around the world, I deducted a star because some of the reflections are not as strongly connected to the timely, explicit, and specifically contextualized overarching theme of hope as others take care to circle back to. For example, Chapter 14 dove into the personal, social, and professional experiences of a Mongolian mother and son and then vaguely mentioned their allied community work at the very end. Likewise, Chapter 23, Carol Lee's (Mrs. Universe 2013) story, while an extremely important representation of and for the disability community, does not relate all the way back to hope found particularly amid the pandemic setting of COVID-19, which I understood to be the collection's origin and pitch. The final essay speaks heavily to climate change, another topic I deeply admire, but again left me looking for the parallel.

Still, the contributions from a fair amount of the diverse international figures---religious and political leaders, models, musicians, athletes---such as Dr. Lotay Tshering, clearly reflect on both national and universal reactions to the historic moment through autobiographical as well as biographical (e.g., Oyungerel Tsedevdamba's snapshots of her son) anecdotes. I particularly enjoyed Dr. Edith Eva Eger's and Reem Khouri's respective epiphanies of transhistorical four-letter words and interconnected trauma. Additionally, the inclusion of young Leon Rocco Feldman Birigner's activism had me hoping to see even more generational voices included---and I did through some of the relatable master's students.

I deducted another star because I also noticed several proofreading errors; I believe these occurred because the essays openly come from a variety of cultural backgrounds all translated to English. It did not put me off the text because this detail honestly kind of added to the awe of the title's reach. However, I did pause reading when I noticed there was a missing or incorrect article before a noun or an error in plural subject-verb agreement.

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The Vine
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