Reviews with content warning for Self harm - All My Puny Sorrows

All my puny sorrows broke my heart. But also made me laugh and thinking about the essence of living… The story of two sisters: one desperately trying to end her life and the other equally desperately seeking to save it, is a hard story to tell. It is tragic. And yes, Toews manages to express the raw feelings surrounding and flowing through everyone involved, and still she does not let us sink in despair. Plenty of black humour and irony, the way that the narrator just jumps between her thoughts and memories, the comfort and sadness the characters find in music and literature, there is so much to take from this book.
This all just felt honest, it hurt, it truly resonated with me- these little conversations we all had with family members in face of hardships, the impossible questions one asks themselves when a loved one keeps spiralling down, the frustration and fear when they are sick in the hospital, the way that grief comes and goes and how hard it is to move on (the passage about ‘shredding the guilt’ really struck me).
Toews serves beautiful prose, so authentic and sincere it almost feels like eavesdropping.

“Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard”

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pizzasprite's review against another edition

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challenging dark funny medium-paced

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

4.75

This book helped me through a dark period of my life, and gave me clarity about my own struggles with suicide and mental illness. Beautiful prose and dark, wry humour.

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romeri's review against another edition

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dark emotional funny inspiring reflective sad tense medium-paced

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

5.0

One of my favourite books so far. It has a kind of dark humour that hits all the right places, made me laugh way more than I expected. It’s everything I wanted and needed.

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abbruzzese's review against another edition

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dark emotional sad medium-paced

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

4.0

She says isn’t it funny how every second, every minute, every day, month, year, is accounted for, capable of being named—when time, or life, is so unwieldy, so intangible and slippery? This makes her feel compassion toward the people who invented the concept of “telling time.” How hopeful, she says. How beautifully futile. How perfectly human.

another winner from miriam toews! it did not do to me emotionally what a complicated kindness or irma voth did, but it is still a fantastic book. i think what kept me from fully connecting to the story was just the age of the characters; being a 20 means i find it hard to relate fully to adults. however, that did not prevent me from crying all my mascara off.

a warning for anyone sensitive to suicide: this book has a lot of it. it's a main theme, written explicitly at times, and it's unavoidable. so just a heads up if you're wary about that kind of stuff!

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