Reviews with content warning for Grief - Hello Beautiful

I know mine is an unpopular opinion, but I think this book was too long and slow. In the beginning, a lot of time is spent developing the close family relationship, especially among the sisters, but just a few events manage to tear the family apart for 25 years. Granted, these are not minor events, but the book then shifts to processing everyone's emotions over and over. I kept reading because so many reviewers raved about it but I was disappointed by the repetition and the pace.

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marinajonesreads's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful inspiring reflective slow-paced

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

5.0

What a beautiful beautiful book. As a younger sister with a deep bond to my older sister, I was enraged and understanding and sad and mad all throughout. That’s how you know it’s a good and authentic story. I loved every part of this book, even when I was so angry at one of the sisters I wanted to scream.

It was so beautifully written. Getting to see such a unique POV structure was refreshing and I loved being inside all of their heads. This tiny nuclear family with diamond strings connecting them to each other.

I loved it.

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jdamae11's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful reflective sad medium-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

3.75

Can’t lie, I don’t usually grab books with celeb or “book club” stickers because I feel so much pressure to enjoy them, but I’m grateful for the reading experience this book gave me. This book definitely made me feel ALL the emotions, especially in the final third. The writing was beautiful & although the pacing was slower than what I usually prefer, it was paced consistently well throughout. Each of the characters felt so solid to me, like I could grab them out of the pages, they were so devastatingly human. I’m a sucker for stories about sisters & their bonds, & at times it felt like I was peaking in on moments too intimate for me to be a part of. I appreciated how much personal reflection this book inspired, & a stand out element for me was the well-crafted portrayal of messy, complicated dynamics of mother-daughter relationships. I found the author’s depiction of depression to be so intensely real / visceral & relatable as someone who lives with it- if you’ve ever had depression &/or anxiety, I feel like you can recognize it in teen/young adult William immediately, & I personally felt dread when reading from his early 20s POV bc wow the thoughts were so close to home. Well done to the author on that for sure.

Here’s some of what didn’t work for me, light spoiler territory ahead so proceed with caution!! I haven’t star rated books in a MINUTE but if I had to frame it that way, this book had lost a star and a half from me b/c of some of this:

Using William as one of the main protagonist POVs didn’t work too well for me as a framing device, I found myself always wanting to be back in the sisters’ heads. At a certain point, I admittedly found him to be quite draining (not as a result of his mental health breakdown, rather as a result of him seemingly using that to absolve himself of responsibility for how his actions affected others). Re: William’s mental health overall - I don’t know if I like how I felt it was used as a device later in the book, almost like it could be leveraged to brush off some of his really harmful, continuous decisions without an acknowledgment of the results of those or any self-accountability for the character. Basically William at one point is like ‘I know I destroyed this family & keep leaving my daughter with awful abandonment issues’..& then just keeps being coddled & refuses to do anything about it. This I guess is what makes him feel so dang real as a character, but sometimes it leaned in a way that made me think I was supposed to be ‘poor William’ boo-hooing as well. There were also a few moments in the book when things seemed to just conveniently fall into place for the characters’ benefit that didn’t feel natural or earned - eg William & Kent both getting lucrative pro sports jobs AND at the same team, like cmon. My big ick with this was that a man—William—could absolutely destroy what is painted as an impenetrable bond between 2 of the sisters, & ultimately all of the women of this family. My not nice version of this is that William ain’t sh*t. Julia is for sure a Capricorn & came with the coldness, but she did not deserve to be played so bad the way she was. She was a lil too relatable for me, as was Sylvie, which if you’ve read the book, is hilarious & makes me basically a walking contradiction (true)

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142whoopingllamas's review against another edition

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challenging emotional reflective sad slow-paced

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

3.0

This was an okay book, but there were very few content warnings so I was blindsided by them.

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