Reviews with content warning for Adult/minor relationship - Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies

if I could give this book 6 stars, I would. if I could inject this book into my bloodstream, I would. if I ever write anything a quarter as good as this book, I would be happy. unbelievable. the best of the best.

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agnesbebon's review

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5.0

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hilaryreadsbooks's review

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4.0

This is (to be blunt) first and foremost a book about death, about the anticipation of death. The daughter, a child watching her mother deteriorate, describes her jaundiced mother as yellow. The husband imagines waking up in bed without his wife. And the dying—Lia—sees her entire life mapped out to this point, narrated by the voice of disease, culminating in a heart wrenching ending where disease melds with woman, even as she says “body expansive. not mine.”

As woman and disease consider her body’s history, Lia draws connections from point A to point B, wonders if the coming death is from having sinned. There is an underlying tenor of punishment: perhaps she is sick from what has been done to her body. perhaps violence can stay within, even after all these years later, and manifests as something physical, claw its way forward into the present. So, while this is a book about death, it is also a book about living. As in, how to live with the knowledge of how utterly fragile our lives are and what to do with that fragility. As in, how to recognize strength amongst our fragility. As in, how we continue.

Pick up if you’re okay with feeling sad and progressively sadder and sadder, and if you like novel-in-verse.

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