2.5

I went into this book thinking it would mostly be about trauma cleaning, but it was a bit of that mixed in with a biography of Sandra Pankhurst. While I enjoyed reading about Sandra's life (gender reassignment surgery, brothel work, failing relationships, etc), I was disappointed that it wasn't an in depth look into trauma cleaning and all that entails.

As a result of many of the things that have happened to Sandra throughout her life, she didn't remember all the details of what happened to her. Krasnostein's conversations with her and following her to job sites helped put many of the pieces together. Sandra's story is told in alternating chapters, one of a segment in her own life story, then one of her at job sites dealing with various clients. This isn't a story of the scientific cleaning of crime scenes; The Trauma Cleaner is a story of human connections, of proving that we are all in this together no matter how isolated we may feel.

This is definitely the type of book to read when you're moping around thinking, "Why me?" Very few of us have had the sort of soul-searing life Sandra Pankhurst has had, and to watch her deal with the most recalcitrant clients with her own special brand of common sense, understanding, and compassion is a joy. Krasnostein's writing is perfect for this type of story: "But it is equally the ineffable smell of defeat, of isolation, of self-hate. Or, more simply, it is the smell of pain." Pain does indeed have a smell, and it's one that Sandra Pankhurst does not ignore. If only the rest of us followed her example.

I was so super excited to read this when I saw the title. I live for nonfiction that involves people talking about unconventional jobs. The more rare and weird, the more desperate I am to read them.

Sandra Pankhurst is kind of a bad ass. She is the cleanup crew. She is Mr. Kaplan from <i>The Blacklist</I>. She goes in to hoarding houses, to crime scenes, to the homes of people who have had some form of trauma in their life and their home has gotten to a state that requires hazmat suits and pick axes to excavate the remains of a life.

When I was about to start this book, I came to GoodReads and skimmed over some of the other reviews, and I got a sinking sensation. So many reviews were complaining that this book is less about the actual cleaning side of her life, and more about her origin story. I love a good origin story, but that's not what I picked the book up for.

Well, I'm here to tell you not to listen to those other reviewers. Because this book is beautifully split between past and present. You watch Sandra's ease and proficiency when dealing with...erm...stuff you shouldn't be reading about while eating lunch, and then you flash back to what led her to this place in her life.

Sandra is so much more than just a business woman with a good manicure. She's a survivor of child abuse. She's a former sex worker. She's a transgendered woman who came into her own in the 70's. All of this adds up to a life of being treated as less than. And to see who she is vs where she came from, it should be impossible to not be inspired by this.

There are definite flaws in this book. For one thing, it's established literally from the start that Sandra's memory is beyond unreliable. Years of hard living and heavy drug use have rendered chunks of her memory gone in the ether. It seems like the author did everything they could to verify her story, featuring interviews with other people present and police and court reports. But it's hard not to wonder. I tried not to find it distracting, but it does stay in the back of the reader's mind.

Also...I have to admit, I don't like Sandra quite a few times throughout this story. It circles around her first marriage, and her abandonment of her wife and two very young sons. There's a bit of resolution at the end in this regard, but it's one thing to excuse selfish behavior when she was so miserable in that life and just needed to run. But the fact that 40+ years later, there's so little sympathy to be found, it's so damn difficult to not hate her a little.

I found this story infinitely interesting. I certainly could have read a book entirely made up of the stories of her clients, I would've found it just as compelling, if not more, because that is what I signed up for when I requested this book. It's disgusting, and disturbing, beyond words, the environments this crew walks into. But the living clients, the houses that are not being cleaned after deaths, Sandra treats with such respect and dignity. It's a job I couldn't do, by any stretch of the imagination.

There is one person in here. Anyone who reads this, and knows me, would know exactly who I'm talking about. I feel like...I feel like I'm one bad trauma away from being them. It's more than a little off putting.

A really, truly, good and thought provoking read. And an important glimpse into the past, as well.

Interesting but not what I expected given the title. Sandra Pankhurst has had a really difficult life. Really. She was born a boy, experienced abuse, became a woman, experienced abuse, gave abuse, and so on. The trauma cleaning is minimal except to frame the biography of a woman I found hard to like. There's a lot of trauma and in fairness, the cleaning part is more about Sandra becoming herself than anything else. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC.

I had no idea what this book would turn out to be when I started reading it. I've always been fascinated by jobs that surround traumatic events or mental illness, and "trauma cleaner" sounded like it fit the bill. Initially, I expected this to be a straightforward, workhorse biography - I thought it would just paint a day-to-day picture of the job in the title, exploring a few specific situations and explaining how one comes to be a member of such a profession.

I was dead wrong.

What I got was so, so much more than I bargained for: Sandra Pankhurst, the "trauma cleaner" at the center of this beautiful biography, is a testament to the resiliency and kindness of the human spirit. She began life as a boy - adopted by two parents who soon had more biological children and summarily dismissed him from their home, refusing to properly house, feed, clothe, or care for him. James married and had children, but something was always just a bit off - and finally, he left his wife and sons to become the person that would become Sandra Pankhurst.

In 1970s Australia, the journey of a gay man, let alone a transwoman, was a particularly rough one. Sandra takes all sorts of jobs to make ends meet, making the most money as a sex worker in a brothel -- right up until she is violently raped. This part of her story is absolutely harrowing. It's incredibly difficult to read, so it must have been unimaginably hard to live through - but she did. And she went so far as to testify against her rapist in court, at a time when her very existence as a woman was barely acknowledged by the society in which she lived.

Sarah Krasnostein has produced an incredibly elegant portrait of Sandra in this book, alternating the narrative between her present trauma cleaning jobs and stories from her complicated past. Krasnostein makes astonishing connections between Sandra's past and her ability to empathize with the clients she encounters as a trauma cleaner -- after all, Sandra can see just how easily she might have ended up a hoarder, a murder victim, a suicide, or any number of the situations that demand her services.

Krasnostein does not shy away from describing some of Sandra's more difficult qualities - she swears constantly, she answers her phone in the middle of any conversation, and she's more than willing to cut someone out of her life if they cross her or get too close - and though Krasnostein doesn't excuse these qualities, she does well at unearthing the reasons they came to be.

I was absolutely astonished by this book. It's informative, certainly, about trauma cleanup and what it entails, but it is an even more impressive portrait of a complicated and unbelievably strong woman.

I received access to this title via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you so much to NetGalley and the publisher for the advanced copy of this book - all opinions are my own.

This book completely surprised me, in the best way possible. I had been fully anticipating the book to focus on the stories of Sandra's work in trauma cleaning, but I hadn't expected such a brutally honest reflection of Sandra's life. However, after reading the book, it becomes so clear that one piece cannot exist without the other.

Sandra Pankhurst is a remarkable and complex human being. Husband, father, drag queen, sex worker, woman, wife, community leader, entrepreneur - Sandra's life story is as unique as it is heartbreaking. The book weaves together stories of real life trauma cleaning cases that Sandra's team has done, with a biography of her life, from childhood to present day.

For those unacquainted with trauma cleaning - it is the cleaning work that is completed in extreme circumstances; after deaths that have left behind bodily fluids, including both homicides and suicides, homes that have fallen victim of extreme hoarding tendencies, buildings that are in many cases unliveable, because of the build up of dirt, feces, and mold. This is the work that Sandra and her team does, while showing exceptional compassion and care for the human beings within these situations.

Every chapter is compelling in its own way, but the commonality of the story is the compassionate, non-judgemental, extraordinary human at the center - Mrs. Sandra Pankhurst.

This is possibly the most unique book I have read this year, certainly one of the most unique biographies I have ever come across. Sandra's story is NOT easy to read - but is one that deserves to be told. Readers looking for something different to read - this is one you don't want to miss.

TRIGGER WARNING **** Please note that many parts of Sandra's story are true reflections of the life she lived as a transgender person and sex worker. There are explicit scenes of physical assault, rape and death. If any of these are triggers for you, please read with care.

"I’ve always set tough standards. As a prostitute, I was a great prostitute. As a cleaner, I’m a great cleaner. Whatever I do, I do to the best of my ability."

This was a different book than I was expecting. From the title I expected different vignettes on horrible cleaning jobs (and I was looking forward to reading about the clean-up situations and the methods of clean-up, expecting some horrific scenes and some stomach churning situations.) But in this case I would say 95% of the book is about THE TRAUMA CLEANER herself - Sandra Pankhurst.

Sandra is the founder of Specialized Trauma Cleaning (STC) Services Pty Ltd. and the story takes place in Australia.

It basically covers the time period starting in the early 1950s through 2015. It covers Sandra's abusive childhood and then goes on to explore being transgender back that early and the rough road she had to follow to survive.

Now granted Sandra's life is very colorful and interesting but I was looking for stories about hoarders, crime scenes and more and all that goes into cleaning these sites. There were probably 4-5 stories of this nature in the whole book.

The book was well written even though the author does state up front that she had to extrapolate a lot of the details of Sandra's life that her memory has blocked out.

I received this book from St. Martin's Press through Net Galley in the hopes that I would read it and leave an unbiased review.

Ohh, I’m torn about this one.

On the one hand, it tells the touching story of a woman whose life started on a completely wrong footing, who had to both lose and find herself throughout various trials in her life—a marriage that couldn’t last, realising that she couldn’t be herself if she stayed a man, sex work, bad health, and so on; a woman whose memory is badly altered, so much so that her biographer admits how difficult it was at times to piece together all those events. And yet, at the end, in her daily job of running her trauma cleaning business, a woman capable of empathy and compassion towards other, even though she may still not have that same compassion towards herself, having been forced to disconnect herself from relationships due to her own trauma.

There’s the trauma cleaning business, too, showing various situations of the kind Sandra and her crew have to deal with on a regular basis: hoarders’ houses, a flat where a woman died of an overdose, another where a sexual offender lived, the sofa where a man bled to death, a house turning out to be so bad even the walls have grown soft with mold inside… Gruesome situations, but never considered with condescension or bad feelins, and always with the aime of both cleaning and making those people feel at ease with the job, especially when the ‘hoarders’ were concerned (that desire to ‘check that one last bag just in case something good got mixed up with the trash’… I mean, who’s never spent more time than they thought cleaning their place because they were distracted by checking the contents of this or that forgotten box?).

Going back and forth between eight trauma cleaning jobs and various periods of Sandra’s life, in chronological order, the book, the book clearly points at how entwined these two narratives are, the first one mirroring Sandra’s own trauma and how she got through life in spite of it, ‘cleaning’ behind her by severing ties with people who had hurt her, or always moving from city to another.

On the other hand, it also felt that the book could never decide what its focus was: the cleaning, or Sandra herself? These can’t fully be taken separately, but I admit I didn’t see as much as Sandra’s own insights as I wanted, nor as much of the trauma cleaning as I wanted—not in a voyeuristic way, ‘oh look at those hoarders living in squalor’, but from a practical as well as from a relationships standpoint. The author treats us to her observations of Sandra and her crew on various jobs, yet this was always coloured by her views of Sandra, and… I don’t know, for that specific part, I would’ve preferred if she had been more ‘detached’, more matter-of-fact (because I was genuinely interested of knowing the details: about how Sandra handled her contacts in the police when there was a murder house to clean, for instance; or about the exact techniques used to restore an apparently unsalvageable home to a clean state). Perhaps, in fact, this would have deserved to be two books instead of one, with more careful research regarding Sandra herself? But then, it would’ve made it difficult to show the connection, to show how Sandra, not in spite of, but thanks to her own hard life, is able to connect with her clients. It’s a tricky fence, this one.

Conclusion: 3 stars, it was enjoyable and compelling to a certain extent, but it left me feeling that something was missing nonetheless, that it wasn’t going in-depth enough.

The Trauma Cleaner is a subtly layered narrative which asks questions about identity, memory and the way the people and things around us give us our sense of who we are. It is the biography of Sandra Pankhurst, the trauma cleaner of the title, and the story of how her work in an apparently difficult and unappealing area allows both her healing and her clients’. There is also a quietly building sense that the author’s preoccupation with Sandra’s story relates to her own past.

Sandra Pankhurst has lived not one but a number of extraordinary lives: boy, husband, sex worker, gender reassignment patient, wife and successful business woman. She has also been the victim of a number of horrific crimes, and the book highlights the prejudice and legal discrimination faced by sex workers, the gay and transgender communities and during her lifetime.

The chapters alternate between Sandra’s past and her present. Each of the present chapters tells the story of one of her house-cleaning assignments. She is called in to deal with the aftermath of crime, decomposing corpses, hoarding and infestation .

The author shows the strength and compassion Sandra brings to her clients as well as the physically and emotionally demanding nature of the work and the demands it places on her staff. Some of these chapters work better than others. While we can learn something about people by excavating (in some cases literally) their homes, searching for the meaning in possessions has its limits. A teetering pile of old, rotting newspapers is ultimately just that. The chapters where the homeowner is present and shares something of their story are more interesting.

Sandra’s memories are fragmented and contradictory. There are significant periods where she says she can remember nothing at all and the author has relied on other sources. Perhaps because of the trauma she has experienced, there are a number of points in her life where she cuts herself off completely and starts afresh, meaning there is no friend or family member who has known her throughout her life, who can confirm or contradict her perceptions of herself. She has also hurt many of the people she has left behind.

The gaps and inconsistencies somehow add to the authenticity. Memories are always incomplete and unreliable, and the family myth or the well worn anecdote are just as likely to be flawed, reshaped by each telling, moulded by the expectations of the group.

In trying to build rebuild Sandra’s life piece by piece from archive sources and the people who knew her, the author allows the reader space to imagine and create thir own version of her story. And just like the author, the image we have of Sandra, and the way we relate to her, reflects something back about our needs, experiences and sense of self.

I was left with a vivid impression of a complex, courageous character and an awe of the capacity of humanity both to harm and to heal.

Great insight into Sandra's life and job. Sandra was born a boy and was treated horrendously bad by his parents. I enjoyed reading about Sandra's life and job and her clients lives.

Going into this book I was hoping that it was going to be more about trauma cleaning and hoarding. I was pleasantly surprised when I found out it was something different and I really liked it.

Sandra Pankhurst was born a male named Peter. He was adopted into a very toxic home and suffered years of abuse. This is the story about changing genders and find her way and the hard life she has lived and is still living.
This book shows how her life has made her the perfect person to enter the lives of people who are dealing with hoarding and mental illness. Thank you to Netgalley for the book in exchange for an honest review.

This book was very good. I read it in 2 days. Love the Author. Only gets better. Run...to buy this book. Highly recommend!!!

I chose this book because I thought it would be about the work that a cleaner does. This book is more the portrait of one particular cleaner. That threw me off as did the fact that the "Present Day" chapters of this book is told in the present tense. For some reason, that just grates on me as a reader. Another thing that grates, the author is clearly a good friend/in deep awe of her subject and that ruins her objectivity. While I agree that Sandra Pankhurst is a pretty amazing woman, this book shows only a shining light on Sandra. I like to see a little more grit, more of the dark side of a biography's main topic. And we know for sure that Sandra herself is an unreliable narrator, so how much can we trust the historical chapters interspersed with the present day?



Two and a half stars
This book comes out April 10

An iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnteresting book. Like Mary Roach's Stiff, but maybe not as funny as Roach. I enjoyed reading this and recommended it to several friends, though it's not one I would probably reread.

This is a marvelous book, full of honesty, humor, and compassion - but for readers with a strong stomach!

The Trauma Cleaner was not at all what I expected after reading the book description. There was some crime and death cleanups along with hoarding clearance but the majority of the book was a biography of a transsexual named Sandra Pankhurst. She was born a male and she suffered greatly growing up. I did feel empathy for Sandra but I was disappointed in the book content and it did take me a while to finish reading this book.
I received an ARC from Netgalley and this is my honest review.

Easy to assign a 5 star review.,This is such a lovely book. I thought it was going to be what the title said It was, but it is so much more than this. While the chapters re each case are very interesting, the real meat of the story is Sandra and her life before, during, and after gender reassignment. Adding to it is it was back in the scary days when it wasn't accepted. Though bless her lovely husband George who accepted her as is. Sandra sounds like a woman you would want to be. Strong, courageous, wicked smart, good at business, and really good at starting over when life throws a curve ball. Not to mention gorgeous inside and out.

This book wasn't at all what I expected. I went into it thinking it would be mostly gory crime scenes and instead I got a beautiful story about a woman who's been through it all.
I was pleasantly surprised by the alternating chapters discussing both current trauma cleaning jobs Sandra's business was completing and the people they meet on the the job along side the chapters on Sandra's past.
I do think the train of thought jumped around a little to much, but I'm unsure if that was due to the ARC I was reading or of it was actually how the book was set up.
I really enjoyed this read, although it was slow going for me and not at all what I was expecting.
I received a copy of this book for free from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.

Sarah did a wonderful job addressing sensitive matters with such grace. Living or dead, people deserve respect and that she did.

An interesting read, although I thought there was going to be more chapters about the actual trauma cleaning, with that being said, I still enjoyed the biography chapters, overall a book that kept my attention with an interesting, diverse cast of people.