skwinslow 's review for:

To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara
4.0

I think Hanya Yanagihara is brilliant, but both The People in the Trees and A Little Life were traumatic reading experiences (for very different reasons), so I wasn't sure I was up for another one. This book is unlike both of those, and I loved it for its structure -- it's really three separate stories that "speak" to each other across time -- and the stunning prose I expect from this writer. I admit I became a big bogged down in the middle, and I needed to take a break for a bit; it's a heavy book, literally and figuratively, but I loved the first and last sections.

(The ending was a bit too much like the ending of The Handmaid's Tale for me, though, and I'm not sure how I feel about that. It's not that I mind ambiguity, I just felt like Margaret Atwood already wrote this scene.)