August 30, 2021
Young Adult author Croggon (The Books of Pellinor) grapples with both personal and historical demons in this impassioned if uneven collection of essays. Croggon asks probing questions about self-perception and trauma, and about how people deal with pain, abuse, and injustice. As she works through her past and her present, she focuses on the possibility of change, wondering after reading a Sunny Singh essay if people are “irreparably broken by our histories.” The monsters of the title are plentiful: throughout the essays she addresses her British colonialist ancestors, her abusive mother, the “traumatic tedium” of her relationship to her sister, and herself. “How many people died because of my family?... How many cultures did they trample?... How do you quantify this?” Croggon asks. Questioning is at the heart of her volume, and she is acutely self-aware of the potentially performative nature of her constant questioning (“I’m not interested in writing a mea culpa,” she acknowledges), which counters moments of navel-gazing. And while her exploration of larger concepts such as colonialism, racism, and sexism are ambitious and full of thought, Croggon is on the firmest ground when talking about her own story: “How does one measure change, especially in something as uncapturable as one’s own self,” she wonders. Lyrically rendered, this reckoning will leave readers with plenty to think about.