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A review by goosemixtapes
Everything Here Is Beautiful by Mira T. Lee
2.0
3 stars on a technical level, knocked down to 2 for personal enjoyment.
this book is full of absolutely gorgeous prose and it absolutely did not do it for me. if i had to guess why - i don’t think i ever connected to any of these characters the way i was meant to. i had sympathy for all of them and i never openly disliked anyone! but i also didn’t… like them? and i don’t know; oftentimes, despite the periods of time when we see lucia mentally stable, it still kind of felt like she was mostly seen in the context of her illness. i know as the book progressed there was an emphasis on the question of how much is her illness versus how much is HER, and while i think that’s a complex topic that needs exploration, it just fell flat for me personally because i did not… see a lucia outside of her illness. even the periods on-page when we see her “stable” are colored by the way everyone treats her and the sense that she’s a ticking time bomb, and i get that the author did this purposefully but i still think it didn’t go deep enough.
that said, there’s a chance i am just inherently biased against this book based on [major spoilers]
tl;dr: very well written book. not for me, though, and i am conflicted about it.
this book is full of absolutely gorgeous prose and it absolutely did not do it for me. if i had to guess why - i don’t think i ever connected to any of these characters the way i was meant to. i had sympathy for all of them and i never openly disliked anyone! but i also didn’t… like them? and i don’t know; oftentimes, despite the periods of time when we see lucia mentally stable, it still kind of felt like she was mostly seen in the context of her illness. i know as the book progressed there was an emphasis on the question of how much is her illness versus how much is HER, and while i think that’s a complex topic that needs exploration, it just fell flat for me personally because i did not… see a lucia outside of her illness. even the periods on-page when we see her “stable” are colored by the way everyone treats her and the sense that she’s a ticking time bomb, and i get that the author did this purposefully but i still think it didn’t go deep enough.
that said, there’s a chance i am just inherently biased against this book based on [major spoilers]
Spoiler
the ending alone. yes this book was a complex layered compassionate look at a family struggling with mental illness & etc etc etc but GOD i am so tired of Mental Illness Books where the mentally ill person dies. and describing her place of death as “beautiful,” saying she went out “looking for something beautiful…” again, i GET what the author was going for but it tasted bad. i hate to judge one book and its unique story based on a larger trend of many books, but, like. when i realized lucia had died my gut reaction was a sigh and an “of course” so. there we are.tl;dr: very well written book. not for me, though, and i am conflicted about it.