Reviews with content warning for Miscarriage - You Could Make This Place Beautiful

Reviews tagging 'Miscarriage'

You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith

42 reviews

keirahelena_'s review against another edition

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emotional hopeful reflective medium-paced

5.0

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kelly_e's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful reflective medium-paced

3.5

Title: You Could Make This Place Beautiful
Author: Maggie Smith
Genre: Memoir
Rating: 3.50
Pub Date: April 11, 2023

T H R E E • W O R D S

Poignant • Intimate • Poetic

📖 S Y N O P S I S

In her memoir, poet Maggie Smith explores the disintegration of her marriage and her renewed commitment to herself in lyrical vignettes that shine, hard and clear as jewels. The book begins with one woman’s personal, particular heartbreak, but its circles widen into a reckoning with contemporary womanhood, traditional gender roles, and the power dynamics that persist even in many progressive homes.

💭 T H O U G H T S

I'd previously read Keep Moving and appreciated Maggie Smith's style of writing and sense of encouragement, so it was easy to add her most recent release to my TBR with the hope of having a similar reading experience.

Written in verse, each vignettes presents a comprehensive picture along with beautiful imagery and metaphor. The writing is superb! There is a lot of strength, inspiration, and relatability in Maggie's words. Her self-awareness shines on the page as she navigates the journey of rediscovering herself. Despite all of this, the content has me puzzled and questioning the reasoning behind publishing this exact work. At times it felt forced and there is a lot of repetition. This doesn't happened often with memoirs, but I did start to lose interest in what she was telling.

There is no denying the quality of penmanship within You Could Make This Place Beautiful however, I never felt fully invested in what Maggie Smith was selling this time around. I certainly hope it was a healing and therapeutic experience for her to put these words out into the world and I do look forward to future writing from her.

📚 R E A D • I F • Y O U • L I K E
• Maggie Smith's writing
• vague truths

⚠️ CW: infidelity, abandonment, toxic relationship, pregnancy, miscarriage, infertility, mental illness, post-partum depression, grief, medical content, blood, divorce, emotional abuse, gaslighting, misogyny, sexism, pandemic/epidemic

🔖 F A V O U R I T E • Q U O T E S

"Where there had been a future, or at least the promise of one, there was now an ellipses."

"Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final."

"When you lose someone you love, you start to look for new ways to understand the world."

"Life, like a poem, is a series of choices."

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immovabletype's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful reflective sad slow-paced

4.0

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blorence's review against another edition

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Pretty/flowery writing, sad, repetitive

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pollybirdie's review against another edition

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dark emotional sad slow-paced

2.5

I don’t think I’m the intended audience for this book. If you are over 40, have children, and/or have been divorced, this might be just what you need. I found it depressing and very slow paced, with more introspection than plot, which bored me.

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bookath3na's review against another edition

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emotional reflective sad slow-paced

5.0

An exploration of the grief of the author’s marriage ending, told in vignettes. She also discusses miscarriage, division of labor, and motherhood.

The writing is beautiful. She includes a couple poems. I’m not a big poetry person but Bride choked me up. I’ll be adding Maggie Smith’s other titles to my list to track down and read.

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