A review by asurasantosha
Devotion by Patti Smith

challenging dark emotional inspiring sad fast-paced

4.5

Two brief essays and 2 poems bookending a short story. And ending it all with an image collage. This was a somewhat unconventional collection of writings. The essays might even be described an extremely breif surrounding the writing of the short story. Those portions of the book were incredible. My favorite part. I also very much enjoyed the two poems and the context that the other writings provided on them.

The short story was challenging for me, though I'm aware it wasn't intended to be happy or satisfying. I had less issue with the handful of dark moments and allusions. I had much more issue with the fact the to protagonist of the story is 16. I'm not trying to imply that bad things don't happen to children, but I'm so indlcredibly uncomfortable with writing such an adult-themed book where the CHILD protagonist is/is expected to be as autonomous as an adult. I mostly mean this in the sense that her rejection of the adult characters "caretaking"
(If you can call an adult/minor relationship that 🤮)
and mentoring and "controling" is expected in the narrative. But it shouldn't be for a child. As a child, her rejection of others having sway in her life should be the "wrong" move. I can't help but feel this might be sort of romantizing the wrong thing. Had the protagonist been 18 or 19, I would have had no issue with any of this.

Otherwise, it was lovely. So poignantly written. Beautiful and incredibly metaphors and juxtapositions. I liked the roll winter played in this and loved seeing how Smith's experiences in the first "essay" transformed into an allegory of deeper meaning in the story.

I'd definitely recommend this book for artistic types with a grain of salt to some of the values here.
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