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

Reviews tagging 'Toxic relationship'

You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith

8 reviews

kelly_e's review against another edition

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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atamano's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful inspiring reflective medium-paced

5.0

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thatsssorachael's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful inspiring reflective relaxing sad slow-paced

3.0

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leweylibrary's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional hopeful reflective slow-paced

4.25

Okay so I picked this up having a completely wrong idea of what it was 😂🙃 Listen, I see the name Maggie Smith and do not think of a poet lol

BUT I was pleasantly surprised, largely because the author IS a poet--they write the most beautiful memoirs I swear. This one centered on the author's divorce from her husband which certainly isn't a groundbreaking topic, but she writes about it in a very unique way. Some of the poetic devices did wear on me a bit (the whole "I have a friend who says every book begins with an answerable question. Mine is..." thing got obnoxious fast). My last gripe is a personal one because I don't love hearing so much about pregnancy and kids. Those things in a book would normally warrant a much lower rating from me, but the writing really was gorgeous, and I feel like there was still a lot I took away and connected with, like about relationships and their ebs, flows, and endings.

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elderwoodreads's review against another edition

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emotional reflective sad medium-paced

4.0

My main criticism of this book is that Smith spends a lot of time setting boundaries with the reader about her story, specifically around her kids, yet she tells a very vulnerable story about her son at one point.

where he says he does not feel like has a family

Past that I think this was a great reflective work and story of both a marriage and a divorce. I will be seeking out more of Smith's work later.

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