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Details of Girl, Wash Your Face by Rachel Hollis Book
- Book Name: Girl, Wash Your Face
- Authors: Rachel Hollis
- Pages: 176
- Genre: Self-Help
- Publish Date: Feb 1, 1997
- Language: English
Book Review:
Girl, Wash Your Face by Rachel Hollis this is a book that I continuously see on the bestsellers lists in the self-help genre, and I was also reading it for a side project.But getting right to it, this book was not for me. It didn't speak to me, clearly there are people who like it, but not me- I didn't like this book.
I think overall it was because there was no new ideas, um, and it came off really narrow-minded. And perhaps the biggest thing is that, I'm sure it was supposed to be inspiring and empowering, but for me by the time I finished it, I felt less moved than a rock.
I felt very uninspired. It can be awkward to rate a book like this low, because when the author is telling their personal experiences, or if it's a memoir or something, it can feel like you are rating their personal experience low.
But that's not it- it's how they take their experiences and turn it into advice, and the message they are giving in their book.I just didn't like this one. Obviously, most of my thoughts for this book are negative, but I do have a few positives that I'll put at the end so we can end on a positive note.
The first thing I want to talk about is how it was repetitive, and it also lacked depth- it felt very, like, surface level. And basically the gist of the- what she's saying for the whole book is that you are in control of your life. If you want to change something in your life, you need to just do it. If you have a problem, just do it.
I had this problem, and the solution was that I just did it. And there was honestly nothing groundbreaking about anything that she said, even though she made it seem like these big revelations. It came off a like watered down Pinterest quotes, you know?Like,
I've seen it before, and I've even seen people claiming that she plagiarized a lot of the words, which, I wouldn't have a hard time believing because it feels like you've read this stuff before. But also, she has a habit of contradicting herself.
So the way the book is structured is ever chapter starts out with a lie, and through a story or something, she explains how that lie is a lie- not true. And then she ends with, um, some advice or tips. These were some of the tips that she provided.
One of them was 'Keeping my goals in plain sight.' Cool. 'Starting with one small goal.' Cool. 'Setting goals, not time limits.' Cool. I get it, goals. and then a couple of chapters later, she's talking about goals, again. And she's talking about having visual picture goals in her closet and one of them is this, "the second is a picture of a vacation home in Hawaii.
Both have been on my wish list for years. The house in particular feels extremely- feels extra dreamy but hard to achieve. My goal is to own it by the time I'm forty. So I've got five years." What happened to not having time limits?
It was a lot of things like that that kept coming up. And the next biggest problem that I have was that it was very tone deaf. There was a lot of things that she was preaching and highlighting that just showed to me that she wasn't recognizing her privilege.
Even though she makes a point of calling out her privilege in one chapter, Imma talk about that chapter in a little bit because- um, hm. She also seems to try too hard in my opinion to try and sound relatable- she'll say 'girl,' 'sister,' 'yo',
you need your 'tribe' of women, you need to find your 'tribe'- things like that that just came off cringey to me. Also something she mentioned was that her son called out that she was not like other moms. That- she pulls the I'm not like other girls often.
But the reason why she said that she's not like other moms is because of how much she works and this is what she had to say, "because of that, I made a special effort to volunteer in his classroom every other week.
But that wasn't right either, because even though I sat in the teeny tiny chairs cutting papers and stuffing homework folders like other volunteers, I wasn't in jeans or yoga pants. I was in high heels and a white blazer that I should have known better than to wear on the day they were making teepees out of brown modeling clay.
" Oh my goodness, the chapter on body image and exercising and dieting. There's a lot of underlying assumptions and judgement that she has, but it's disguised as I'm just telling it how it is.
That's kind of her vibe that she gives off, like, everyone else is gonna sugar coat it, but Imma tell you how it is. There wasn't a single source or, uh, any bit of research to back up anything that she said- she was kind of just pulling things out of nowhere and saying this is fact regarding exercising and dieting.
Then she would say things like this "I believe your Creator delights in the intricacies of you, and he is filled with joy when you live out your potential. I also believe that humans were not meant to be out of shape and severely overweight."
And there's a lot fo comments throughout the book about, like, somebody having a piece of cake and it's shameful or something like that, and it's just weird. Also, even though I had never heard of her before reading this, she is a successful entrepreneur or businesswoman, she has, like, her own company and there's nothing wrong with being a proud successful woman.
But after repeating the same thing, like, five times in a kind of self-serving way, it becomes just obnoxious honestly. It started to feel very unneeded. And another problem I had was the choice in stories that she used to explain a message.
Honestly, it seemed to be like such a stretch some of these things, like, why? You're really using this story to talk about this idea? She talked- she started a chapter out about how she shaves her toes and how she was like, yes, I know, I shave my toes. And, believe or not,
I bullied a girl once for shaving her toes, and now I do the same thing. And I was just like, why am I reading this? And I get the intentions that she hide behind so many of these things, but it just really wasn't written well for me.
I also mentioned there was a chapter where she acknowledged her privilege. In this chapter she mentioned how it wasn't until basically junior high that she went to Disneyland that she got her first experience with people who didn't look like her.
Like a more diverse environment- she saw, um, she saw two men holding hands or she say other people of color and it ends up turning into a big ole chapter of you need to make sure you hang out with those people. She even says,
"One of my best friends is"- can- can you guess where this is going? Can you guess? She says "One of my best friends is gay, African-American, and Mexican American." And, she goes on to talk about how that friend- I believe it's the same friend- has become a type of teacher for her that always listens to her questions that she has. And that's just a side thing that I personally really don't like- is like having, um, having people serve as your teacher instead of just educating yourself. Um, I- I- I'm not going to get into that.
And the last thing I'll talk about is the title itself. I did not understand why it was called Girl, Wash Your Face- and that's not the whole title. The whole title is very long and it says "Girl, Wash Your Face: Stop believing the lies about who you are so you can become who you were meant to be."
But the Girl, Wash Your Face piece- you don't understand why it says that until the very last chapter- the very last paragraph. And it just really didn't sum up the book. That's it for the negatives, I said I was gonna end on positives.
So I'll start with her honesty. I appreciate how honest and transparent she was about her experiences. Especially, she had a very traumatic family death in her immediate family when she was younger and she was open about that, and also her experiences with the fostering and adopting system.
And those were very small parts of the book, obviously what I've been talking about has nothing to do really with those subjects, but, I appreciated them.
And also, I did like how she was talking about how she was trying to get a book published once- a separate novel- and she wanted to maintain the integrity of the story. She is a Christian girl and she didn't want her protagonist to be, um, written differently because the publisher was saying that it needed- like, the character needed to be written differently.
And I appreciated what she had to say about that and standing her grounds, so that was neat. And it's a short, quick read.
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THANK YOU SO MUCH
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