A review by hmatt
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty

informative lighthearted reflective medium-paced

3.5

I wanted a lot more out of this book than it provided. It was good, it did what it set out to do, but for a memoir I would have liked it to focus on a broader timeline in more detail. We get almost day-in-day-out accounts from the author's early years in the industry, but the timeline skips around and forward much more quickly after she returns to school. The narration assumes that we know the information to fill these gaps - it feels like it's assuming that the reader has kept up with the author's career progression as soon as she entered the public eye. Did I know who she is? Yes. But did I know the details of how she build her online presence and eventual business endeavours? No... and I still don't, because the book doesn't cover it.

I mostly appreciate when the author narrates their own non-fiction work, and that holds true here. I mostly appreciated it. But I felt as though some of the narration was stilted. The same inflections that work in the author's online videos don't always work in the context of narrating a book, and it's very clear at times which of these the author is more used to.

All that said - it was a solid read about a topic that I haven't seen a lot written on. It just lacked that extra "oomph".
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