Everything Here Is Beautiful

Everything Here Is Beautiful

2018 • 386 pages

Ratings9

Average rating3.7

15

This is a good book, depicting the helplessness and the burden of living with a permanent mental condition like bipolar disease or schizophrenia. How family members or loved ones of someone afflicted live in constant fear of a re-emergence of the condition, and how their constant worry and tutelage brings ill-will into those relationships. And this is also a book about the unexpected bonds you make with people, forged in shared misery and love for others.

I haven't encountered many fictional tales about the reality and the strain of dealing with mental health issues, so I really appreciate this book. It was well told, yet I wished it would have taken a path a bit bolder, by being more experimental, or more dramatic in its writing style. There's something about a lot of the contemporary English-language literature these days, that just feels slightly too clean, too detached.

May 21, 2018