A Little Life

This book is so moving and so well written!!!

I can’t help but give this precious, different, sad, and alarming story about an extraordinary man, who could not grow up, a five star rating. There are a lot of characters. For a reason. The reader might get discouraged with the barrage of people and scenes, but never fear… they will reappear throughout the novel revealing more each visit. The reader has time to know them better and understand what you learned earlier. Stick with this book, and the unique way the author writes. I’ve never read stream of conscience written this way. Tenses disappear. You start reading something and suddenly you are somewhere you didn’t know you were headed. This is true. For three months, I could not finish reading this novel. I read a few paragraphs and gratefully found something else to do. I only read while at a doctor’s appointment. I didn’t want to stop the pain. I wanted to see success. Was there a happy ending? And yet, it ended rather beautifully, and the rest the reader can discover for themselves. This special, great novel explores who you think you are. And if you are turned inside out, colorful and bleeding, engrossing and gross, who are you then? Who do you praise or blame?

Honestly this book probably needs a trigger warning for some readers, so if you are sensitive to certain subjects including certain traumas then I would advise you to caution yourself. However, this book is so beautifully written. It keeps the reader engaged throughout this entire book and reaches a level of heart wrenching and complete sadness that I didn’t know I could reach when reading a book. The last half of the book I never wanted to put it down. My heart hurts and it will take some time to emotionally recover from this but would recommend this book to anyone willing to trek through this emotional rollercoaster.

Every synonym for tedious applies to this book; banal, annoying, boring, dreary, humdrum, exhausting… where was the editor? It had just enough juicy tidbits to keep you going, but ultimately didn’t care about any of the characters and just wanted it to end already. I love a deep dive character study, but this was so repetitive and boo f*ing hoo… pick up Demon Copperhead instead!

The author’s character development is superb! I definitely felt like I knew these characters personally and I internalized all of their emotions as my own. This story shows the best and the worst side of men. Obviously, the abusers were the worst of the worst and yet the loving courageous men like Harold, Willem, Andy, Malcolm were the best of the best! I highly recommend reading it if you can emotionally withstand the pain. It’s beautifully written and tragically sad…

this book totally destroyed me in good and bad ways. in some parts it read like a journal and in others it felt like there was a dagger in my heart. i recommend this book for its detail and storyline. just beware, you might have to put it down and come back to it when you can handle it again.

The book is literary but it is so exhausting having to read detail after detail that doesn't pertain to the story. Not only should this have a trigger warning, the excessive jumping back and forth made it difficult to be emotional through the story. I read this for the heart break and only found myself irritated.

I grew to like this book. At first I found it was a very hard read and wanted to quit several times but I pushed through and then found I could not put it down. I feel as if at times it was hard to follow along. The author was jumping between the characters point of views from one sentence to the next in some parts and I was lost trying to figure out who was telling the story. Also I thought she could have shortened the chapters. A lot of It I feel was very unnecessary information used as a sort of filler to make the book longer. After pushing through all of this I feel like the story finally got to a point where I was very interested and started having a real emotional connection with these characters. I 100% feel like Jude endured a horrible life and think that this sort of thing really happens to people in real life and it’s just horrible. I wanted to reach into the book and grab him and just give him the love he longed for and then when he lost the one person who he gave his heart to and let him in, it just tore me up. I was a mess the rest of the time after that until I finished the book. As much as I ended up liking the book, I gave it 3 stars because as much extra “filler” material that was given along the journey of these characters, I feel like the ending was very rushed and I felt a little cheated that knowing something good could have came from all the bad. I was left feeling emotionally overwhelmed and frustrated.

Soul wrecking and so beautiful. No words can describe the immense emotion while reading this beautiful piece of art.

I did love this book for making me cry but it was a little long for my liking