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A review by afternoon_sunshowers
Hell Is a World Without You by Jason Kirk
challenging
emotional
funny
hopeful
reflective
slow-paced
5.0
Finishing a book with tears in your eyes, you KNOW it was done well. The empathy doesn’t so much leap off the page as quietly underpinning the entire book.
Isaac’s coming of age story is both foreign and relatable. I grew up in a church nothing like his but some parts rang so true and I hadn’t thought of in more than a decade. And the beats of life in the early 2000s were dead on.
His struggles, his inner monologue conversations, REGRET, sorry…it was all just so real. So believable.
I’m so glad I’ve followed Jason for years because I never would have picked this book up but I’m so glad I did. A story of an evangelical upbringing and subsequent questioning of the faith could have been so heavy handed and full of caricatures, but this book shines by showing the humanity even in people you just fundamentally cannot understand in some circumstances but deeply relate to in others.
I can’t wait to reread and quite possibly annotate a book for the first time.
Isaac’s coming of age story is both foreign and relatable. I grew up in a church nothing like his but some parts rang so true and I hadn’t thought of in more than a decade. And the beats of life in the early 2000s were dead on.
His struggles, his inner monologue conversations, REGRET, sorry…it was all just so real. So believable.
I’m so glad I’ve followed Jason for years because I never would have picked this book up but I’m so glad I did. A story of an evangelical upbringing and subsequent questioning of the faith could have been so heavy handed and full of caricatures, but this book shines by showing the humanity even in people you just fundamentally cannot understand in some circumstances but deeply relate to in others.
I can’t wait to reread and quite possibly annotate a book for the first time.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Misogyny, Suicidal thoughts, and Religious bigotry
Moderate: Gun violence, Homophobia, and Death of parent