syellico 's review for:

Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath by Heather Clark

4.5

dark emotional informative reflective sad slow-paced

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I read this as a buddy read, and it is a daunting book at 45 hours on audio but I do want to say how well the audio was done. I don’t think I would have stuck with this in print. The writing of a biography this long must have been daunting but it was well researched and the way Clark weaved everything together was impressive. I do plan to read The Bell Jar at some point when I am a little further away from this reading experience. As far as her poetry I feel like I have read a lot through this book and there was so much analysis that I may or may not read some at some point. I will certainly have a different view of those readings now that I have all of this knowledge.

I have a lot of thoughts about this book, but there’s so much content that it’s practically impossible to summarize them. This book was educational, enlightening, sad, disheartening, uplifting - there are just so many emotions that you go through while reading this book (which speaks to the feat that Clark has accomplished here). 

Starting out, I knew nothing about Sylvia Plath and I have never read any of her work. This was chosen as a random pick for our buddy read and I am so glad that I read it and learned about the genius that Sylvia was.