Reviews with content warning for Grief - Hello Beautiful

Reviews tagging 'Grief'

Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano

35 reviews

jdamae11's review against another edition

emotional hopeful reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

Can’t lie, I don’t usually grab books with celeb or “book club” stickers because I feel so much pressure to enjoy them, but I’m grateful for the reading experience this book gave me. This book definitely made me feel ALL the emotions, especially in the final third. The writing was beautiful & although the pacing was slower than what I usually prefer, it was paced consistently well throughout. Each of the characters felt so solid to me, like I could grab them out of the pages, they were so devastatingly human. I’m a sucker for stories about sisters & their bonds, & at times it felt like I was peaking in on moments too intimate for me to be a part of. I appreciated how much personal reflection this book inspired, & a stand out element for me was the well-crafted portrayal of messy, complicated dynamics of mother-daughter relationships. I found the author’s depiction of depression to be so intensely real / visceral & relatable as someone who lives with it- if you’ve ever had depression &/or anxiety, I feel like you can recognize it in teen/young adult William immediately, & I personally felt dread when reading from his early 20s POV bc wow the thoughts were so close to home. Well done to the author on that for sure.

Here’s some of what didn’t work for me, light spoiler territory ahead so proceed with caution!! I haven’t star rated books in a MINUTE but if I had to frame it that way, this book had lost a star and a half from me b/c of some of this:

Using William as one of the main protagonist POVs didn’t work too well for me as a framing device, I found myself always wanting to be back in the sisters’ heads. At a certain point, I admittedly found him to be quite draining (not as a result of his mental health breakdown, rather as a result of him seemingly using that to absolve himself of responsibility for how his actions affected others). Re: William’s mental health overall - I don’t know if I like how I felt it was used as a device later in the book, almost like it could be leveraged to brush off some of his really harmful, continuous decisions without an acknowledgment of the results of those or any self-accountability for the character. Basically William at one point is like ‘I know I destroyed this family & keep leaving my daughter with awful abandonment issues’..& then just keeps being coddled & refuses to do anything about it. This I guess is what makes him feel so dang real as a character, but sometimes it leaned in a way that made me think I was supposed to be ‘poor William’ boo-hooing as well. There were also a few moments in the book when things seemed to just conveniently fall into place for the characters’ benefit that didn’t feel natural or earned - eg William & Kent both getting lucrative pro sports jobs AND at the same team, like cmon. My big ick with this was that a man—William—could absolutely destroy what is painted as an impenetrable bond between 2 of the sisters, & ultimately all of the women of this family. My not nice version of this is that William ain’t sh*t. Julia is for sure a Capricorn & came with the coldness, but she did not deserve to be played so bad the way she was. She was a lil too relatable for me, as was Sylvie, which if you’ve read the book, is hilarious & makes me basically a walking contradiction (true)

Content Warnings

142whoopingllamas's review against another edition

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challenging emotional reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

This was an okay book, but there were very few content warnings so I was blindsided by them.

Content Warnings

macykey's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

I was so emotional reading this book. This book is the perfect manifestation that two things can be true at once. You can have made some shitty choices that hurt people, but they still were the best choices for you and you’re happy with the outcome. You can have made choices that were the best choice for you at the time, but later on you realize it might not have been the best choice. You can be mad at people, but still love them with your whole heart. You can go years without speaking to someone and then come back together and it’s like picking up where you left off. I loved every single Padavano sister. I loved Kent, I would read a whole book just on Kent. I even loved William. I loved how

Alice embodied William’s best and worst qualities even though she had never met him before. She was tall like him, she had his spirit, she had his physical features, but she also had some of his mental health problems.

This book also gave me a newfound appreciation for all the time I got to spend with my Memaw in the years leading up to her death. This book takes place mostly in the 80’s and, when I read books like this one that take place in a specific time period, I often wonder why the author wrote the series of events in that time period. Especially because a lot of the time, you could easily transpose the book onto a different time period and it’d more or less be the same book. But with this one, I get it. You need the time period to give a little context or set the stakes higher for certain things that happen. The time period itself helps explain the motives of some of the characters even if the characters don’t.

Content Warnings

kelly93's review against another edition

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emotional reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Content Warnings

sarahflanders's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

Content Warnings

ella_gus's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful inspiring reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

I enjoyed this book, especially the back half. It's a story about love and generational trauma and forgiveness and the flaws that make us human. It's sort of soapy but not enough to disengage me. The author definitely "tells" instead of "shows" but it didn't bother me too much. Overall, I really enjoyed the narrative and I would recommend it to someone looking for an easy read with a little more substance.

Content Warnings