A review by jadesara15
Thin Places: Essays from in Between by Jordan Kisner

5.0

One of my favorite books of the year. It is not often you read a book that, to very annoyingly quote J.D. Salinger, “when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it,” but this was that for me. From the first essay, I felt a kinship with Kisner. I furiously underlined thoughts that I felt were deeply personal to me, which she had somehow written out more eloquently than I could’ve imagined.
The thing that most struck me, though, outside of my own identification with so much of Kisner’s outlook, was how utterly compassionate she was with each subject. Whether she is writing about Evangelical Christians who scout new converts at clubs or about south Texas beauty pageants or about queerness or her own OCD, she never defaults to skepticism or mistrust. She always approaches the unknown with the possibility that it is more beautiful and complex than we assume. Because of that, she mines some wonderful insight from the most unexpected places.
I cannot believe this is her debut, and I cannot wait to follow her career.