vasuki's review
5.0
I can’t put into words how this book made me feel. I bought it two years ago and kept it in my bookshelf because I knew it would take ten minutes to read and it intrigued me too much for it to be over so soon. So tonight I finally read it and it was exactly as powerful as I expected. It makes me so so so so unbelievably sad that people leave negative or mediocre reviews on this book like they aren’t getting it and it’s not a thing you can review because it’s literally just a moment of life, even the dullest and most stripped down account of life is bursting at the seams with meaning, the universal human experience, how rich it is yet also how simple… how magical it seems yet so familiar. How far away this life seems despite being less than 50 years old. The fact that she started this little journal when she was 86 changed everything for me. I want to be like her. I’m pretty sure she knew the secret of living life that we’ll all hopefully figure out at some point. She was happy, she was observant, and inadvertently so poetic. The days are passing us all by, sometimes beautiful and sunny, sometimes an early misty morning, and we cut our fruit and walk around
booksasmeals's review
2.0
It's hard to rate someone else's diary. It was interesting to read snippets of a stranger's life and it's given me a need to find & collect diaries at auctions.
framingthepicture's review
5.0
A profound literary exercise in concision, reconfiguration, memory, mortality, and empathy. An unshakeable emotional preservation of a book.
colinrafferty's review
adventurous
emotional
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.25
sandsing7's review
3.0
A sparse, postmodern novel in verse that came from a found diary. It’s simple and short but kind of lovely. A nice little experiment of a piece.
margaret_adams's review
Plenty has been said already about the structure of this (found poetry?) book so I won't pile on that. I will say that, unexpectedly, this excerpted journal of midwesterner in her late 80s made me feel hopeful about old age.