Emily Vance Brown

by Dean Spade

4/5

I haven’t read books in the self-help genre in a long time, and to be honest, I’m not sure I would have picked this one up in the first place if I’d realized that’s how it was classified. Love in a F*cked Up World addresses the flaws within the self-help genre head-on, specifically calling out the damage that’s been done by the self-help books in regards to relationships and sex. 

The subtitle and back cover description are ambiguous to the point of being misleading, and, shockingly, I actually like that. Whether intentional or not, focusing the book’s description on activism and community building tricks readers into doing the type of internal and interpersonal work that can allow those movements to thrive. It offers an accessible basic survey of therapeutic interventions and strategies for developing secure and well-rounded relationships of all kinds. I found it to be well-organized with an appropriate amount of activities and exercises mixed into the bulk of the reading. 

Hard to give a comprehensive review because I think whether or not this book is helpful will be extremely individualized. Personally, I found that some sections that were helpful to me and gave me a framework for thinking about my interpersonal connections with others, while other sections were much less helpful, either because they’re not issues I struggle with, or because they are repetitions of issues I have already tackled to a deeper extent on my own or in therapy. 

In spite of how much I liked this book, I most likely would not recommend it (at least not without some kind of disclaimer) due to the unfortunate abundance of editorial errors and discrepancies. One chapter had the incorrect header for over forty pages, and there were several internal citations that pointed the reader to the wrong page. I also noticed several instances of extraneous or missing words. I know these issues are essentially cosmetic, but even so, they distract from the seriousness of the topics being discussed and make me question whether this publishing company is one I can trust.