by Abbie Walker
“Do you ever suspect that everyone else has life figured out and you don’t have a clue?”
If you’re anything like me, you answered “Yes” to that question. And if so, Girl, Wash Your Face by Rachel Hollis might be the book for you.
Hollis is best known for her lifestyle website, The Chic Site, where she offers tips on motherhood, homemaking, career life, and more to her millions of followers. She’s also the CEO of her own media company.
In this book, Hollis lays out 21 lies that women often believe about themselves, lies such as “I’m Not Good Enough,” “I’m Not a Good Mom,” “I Am Defined by My Weight,” and other struggles that keep many women from living joyful, productive lives. Dishing out the same honest advice that her online community loves so much, Hollis combats these lies with truths she’s learned over the years, using her own examples of mistakes and faith to encourage and inspire.
I’ll be honest, I didn’t know who Rachel Hollis was before I picked up this book. But when I kept hearing her name crop up among podcasters, bloggers, and other women I admire, I decided to check it out. And I’m so glad I did!
What I love about this book is how refreshingly honest and real Hollis is. Instead of the fluffy, surface-level content that I unfortunately see from many Christian women authors, this book is packed with a lot of humor and wisdom. She covers a variety of topics: marriage, motherhood, comparison, rejection, addiction, and loss. Each chapter had something that hit home with me, and even though I’m not a wife or mother, the parts where Hollis talked about her struggles in those areas addressed a lot of fears I didn’t realize I had. Some of my favorite chapters were “I Should Be Further Along by Now” and “I’m a Terrible Writer.”
Hollis is a relatable and entertaining narrator who you can’t help but love. I laughed with her as she recounted peeing her pants as a grown woman, empathized with her through her painful adoption journey, and gave her a mental fist pump when she talked about training for a half-marathon.
The advice in this book is extremely practical. Each chapter ends with three tips that Hollis calls, “Things That Helped Me.” It’s reassuring to hear someone older than me talk about their journey so I don’t feel so alone in where I am now and to have a better sense of how to navigate what’s ahead.
Girl, Wash Your Face is for women of any age or life stage who want to face the lies and insecurities head on and start taking charge of the narrative. I’ve already been recommending or gifting this book to all my closest girlfriends.
“Get up, right now. Rise up from where you’ve been, scrub away the tears and the pain of yesterday, and start again . . . Girl, wash your face!”
The first book I would recommend, which ties in the Solo movie coming out on May 25, is 
The next movie-based genre-bender I’d like to recommend 
The other book I have to recommend, which relies heavily on its movie source material, is 
In The Path Between Us, Stabile shares the Enneagram’s wisdom on how relationships work–or don’t. With her generous and insightful approach, she reveals why all Enneagram types behave as they do. This book also offers help in creating more loving, mature, and compassionate relationships with everyone in our lives. This can be personal relationships, family relationships, and/or work relationships. We’ve pretty much all figured out what our Enneagram numbers are in the store, either by choice or by someone else figuring it out for us. So, we’re all working on using Stabile’s new book to help us interact with one another a little better. It’s very helpful to now see when a two is overwhelmed from taking on too much from others, and a five is feeling uncomfortable in a certain situation now.
I’m a 4, and we’re often described as very in tune with our emotions. As Suzanne Stabile says “4’s have as many emotions in an hour as [another number] has in a week.” While I already knew this about myself, it was helpful to learn more about how my number typically relates to other numbers. Now I know not to take it personally if a friend doesn’t take as much interest in something I as I do; it’s understandable that not everyone outwardly feels as deeply as 4’s do.
Being a six is not easy. We sixes want to make the world a safe place, especially for ourselves. It’s our most basic need. Just look at the world around us-DANGER ZONES everywhere. When the danger zone settles into our psyche—somebody, please bar the door! Being an awakened, progressively recovering 6, I channeled the need for safety to the homeless pets of the city of Jackson Animal Shelter, to help find safer places for them. That calling has changed my worldview. Thanks, Suzanne Stabile.
I know that Charles Frazier is most known for his novel, 
Married at 17 to a man nearly 20 years her senior, Varina is thrust into political life during the brutality of the Civil War. She suffers the loss of several children and then decides to rescue a black child named Jimmie to raise as her own.
When I found out that Michelle McNamara of the blog 
In January, I started with 
I have already finished my April pick. 
God Country has one of the most fascinating concepts I have seen in a while. It tells the story of Roy Quinlan and his family, particularly his father Emmett, who is suffering from Alzheimer’s. However, everything changes for the Quinlans when a magic sword falls from the sky in West Texas, and comes into Emmett’s possession. As long as Emmett is holding the sword, his Alzheimer’s is cured and all of his memories of his family return. However, the godlike beings to whom the sword belongs are coming for what is rightfully theirs, and Emmett is forced to fight for his memories. The story is fresh and interesting; it provides plenty of fun fantasy and action without giving up the soul at the center: the story of a family and a man who is struggling with the reality of his illness. The art style in God Country reflects the duality of the plot perfectly. The bleak, open landscapes of Texas contrast with Shaw’s fantastical concepts of the realms of the gods. Overall, God Country delivers emotion and spectacle in the five parts contained in this single volume.
The tagline of this volume, printed in large letters on the back cover, is quite unusual for a Superman comic:
The Doom Patrol is a classic superhero team that first debuted in 1963, and has had numerous iterations over the years. However, this new version of the team, created by Gerard Way of My Chemical Romance fame for his DC Comics imprint Young Animal, breathes new life into the characters. Doom Patrol Vol. 1 is a surrealist, bizarre take on the team. It brings a fantastic strangeness that doesn’t overtake a surprisingly solid plot. In its pages, you’ll find delightful weirdness, unique and fascinating characters, and wonderfully apt cartoon-esque art from Nick Derington that only further accentuates the sheer peculiarity of the whole book. Doom Patrol is a lot of fun and is great read whether you are an old-school comics fan or a new reader
Still, the aforementioned interest in card iconography made the cover of 
At 27, I would’ve shied away from a title targeting readers in the second half of their life without a recommendation, and I’m glad I took this one. Hollis offers a wealth of practical wisdom to understand how we are affected by our backgrounds, what is holding us back in the present, and how the choices we make are shaping our future.
Laying in bed and eating potato chips was more enthralling than reading my book club book. I finally realized that what was putting me in a slump was the obligation of reading. I didn’t want to read what I was supposed to be reading, and the thought of reading anything else left me feeling guilty about not picking up my book club books. So, what did I do? I didn’t read anything. At least a week passed by where I didn’t pick up a book except to move it out of the way to place my coffee down. I was itching to read, but I still had my classic novel in the back of my head making me sweat bullets.