Reviews tagging 'Chronic illness'

How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu

90 reviews

imtejada's review against another edition

adventurous challenging emotional hopeful inspiring mysterious reflective sad tense fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? N/A
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Terminal illness

Moderate: Cancer, Child death, Medical content, Chronic illness, Death of parent, Suicide, and Grief

thegouldfish's review against another edition

adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful inspiring reflective sad slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Medical trauma, Terminal illness, Grief, Child death, Death, Chronic illness, and Medical content

Moderate: Cancer and Pregnancy

emmalouisereads's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional sad medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.25

The beginning of this book forces you to confront the concept of mortality. 

It is incredibly, and profoundly, depressing. 

It’s written as a series of short stories, all based in the same reality. I prefer this style to the usual disconnected short story collections and I enjoyed seeing characters from previous stories pop up in later chapters.

The book went in a direction in the end that I didn’t like so much. I won’t elaborate as it would be spoilers, and I do think that it is a personal preference. 

Please read the trigger warnings

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Child death, Chronic illness, Death, Death of parent, Medical trauma, Animal death, Terminal illness, and Suicide

If child death is going to upset you in a way that’s damaging to your mental health, do not read this book

livlovread's review against another edition

dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes

4.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Grief, Terminal illness, Chronic illness, Child death, Death, and Medical content

scarlettiscrying's review against another edition

adventurous emotional medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A

4.25

I loved reading this - I liked the connections between characters, I liked seeing different reactions to and infrastructure around a plague (nothing like ours, so probably won't be triggering), but was disappointed when I had to give up making these connections because they became tenuous in the last quarter. The mention of one name I had no hope of finding in the rest of the book. 

And I'm sorry, that last chapter was so unnecessary in it's trying to tie everything up (not super successfully), that I'm truly mad at it.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Child death, Chronic illness, and Terminal illness

Minor: Suicide

ashleymg99's review against another edition

dark hopeful inspiring reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

Wow. This book left me speechless. I couldn’t put it down. How High We Go in the Dark hits hard after the past 3 years that we’ve been through, and reminds us how much worse it could have been.

The stories wove together beautifully, and captured everything from love to loss, hope to despair, and sits squarely in the camp of “humanity is mostly good, and we all are just trying to connect with one another and make sense of this crazy life”. When I think of this book, I just keep thinking of the word beautiful. 

At its center, it’s a book about hope, the indominable human spirit, and the ties that bind us together. An absolute must read. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Terminal illness

Moderate: Grief and Suicide

Minor: Chronic illness and Cancer

hazmatzo's review against another edition

emotional reflective sad medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Terminal illness, Death of parent, Confinement, Suicidal thoughts, Death, Chronic illness, Grief, and Child death

There might be a deeper meaning, but this is essentially about death. It’s about mass death, for sure, as the story revolves around a pandemic — which is why it’s compared to Station Eleven — but the focus in the story, is mostly on individual people saying goodbye to their loved ones. Almost all perspectives were from those who lived as opposed to those who were dying. However, there was at least one perspective from someone who was dying, which gave an interesting perspective on the pandemic. The book a bunch of interconnected short stories threaded together by the pandemic, giving you a 360 view on everything that happened from a collection of minor perspectives. My favorite two stories were the one revolving around the spaceship and the last story of the book. My least favorite was the second chapter, which revolved around a “death carnival”, which I had to skip in order to not DNF the book.

My issue with that chapter in particular is that I feel like when children die, they want more than anything to be touching their parents, and it made me mad, but also feel like the concept proposed in the chapter where they children would die without their parents on a rollercoaster seemed unrealistic as an emotional solution and broke my suspension of disbelief because of that.

The prose and writing style are a whole vibe. It makes you feel cosmically reflective. Though the major concepts in this book include grief and processing death, with a few exceptions it was fairly easy to read. The stories started with the certainty of death, and because they were bite-sized character stories, it allowed me to intellectualize the grief and tragedy from afar.

viireads's review against another edition

emotional hopeful reflective tense slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.25

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Medical content, Medical trauma, Injury/Injury detail, Death of parent, Terminal illness, Grief, and Child death

Moderate: Chronic illness, Stalking, Pregnancy, Confinement, and Cancer

Minor: Drug use, Suicide, Animal death, War, Murder, and Death

lilacwhisker's review against another edition

emotional inspiring mysterious reflective sad medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

A must-read. My new favorite book.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Death of parent, Death, Body horror, Cancer, Chronic illness, Medical content, Medical trauma, and Terminal illness

Moderate: Abandonment and Addiction

danaaliyalevinson's review against another edition

adventurous dark emotional funny hopeful inspiring sad medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

Beautiful, emotional, sometimes funny, Kafka-esque, and existential. This book is about love, death, the need for human connection; about the failures of capitalism and hope that humanity will find a way to chart a better future. This is one of those books that will have me thinking for a long time. 

To call it a novel I think is somewhat of a misnomer. It’s kind of a strange love child between a novel and a short story collection. But the stories are all interwoven and take place against the backdrop of a singular uniting event. This structure also drives home one of the themes of the book, which is the ways in which we form human connection, sometimes unexpectedly. Sometimes the narrator from a previous chapter will pop up as a side character in another person’s chapter and we get updates on their life, which was also always welcome.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Medical trauma, Child death, Grief, Medical content, Suicidal thoughts, Chronic illness, Death, Animal death, Suicide, and Terminal illness