Review: Girl in Pieces | Portrait of a Sad Girl

Title: Girl in Pieces

Author: Kathleen Glasgow

Publisher: Delacorte Press

Publication Date: August 30, 2016

Genre: Young Adult, Mental Illness

Rating: 4 Stars

Dear fellow Babblers,

This is a morbid story from the first page. Everything that happens is bad and rawly portrayed. There is no romanticization or good here. I was initially intrigued by the synopsis but was by no means prepared for what I read. This book was just so much to digest and take in, I had to put it down multiple times just to process the overwhelming darkness blanketing each page. Mental illness, suicide, self-harm, rape, love, abuse are all ever so evocatively described. Literally everything that happens in this book is a trigger for an even greater disaster than the one that preceded it. This book shows what happens when too much happens too quickly. Life becomes difficult to bear and an entrapping nightmare that blurs one’s perceptions of reality and the reality of their minds. 

Where Delphine Be At + Book Aesthetics Tag

Dear fellow Babblers,

I’ve been an awfully terrible blogger these past few months. After the high and excitement went away regarding my new home in France I quickly fell into a long, dreary and dark wave of depression that resulted in nostalgia and ended with complete and utter helplessness. So finding the motivation to blog and even read, which has always picked up my spirits before, has been hard, if not impossible – hence my lack of activity here on wordpress lately. I find it fascinating how we can go from joy to grief in such a short and abrupt amount of time and we often have no idea what triggers this. I mean, I love it here in the Burgundy region. I really do. But it has not wiped away the problems I had back in Los Angeles – it only masked them for a while. And now ? They are all coming back to the surface. I ran away from my problems. I packed my bags and came to France in hopes that I could forget everything that happened a few years ago. Life doesn’t work that way though and now I’m more lost than ever in a place far from everything I’ve ever known. I’m sad. But I’m a hopeful kind of sad. The sort of sad that just takes time. Soon everything will get better, I still have faith… 

ARC Review: Alone | Bizarrely, Dreadfully Illusive

Title: Alone

Author: Cyn Balog

Publisher: Sourcebooks Fire

Publication Date: November 7, 2017

Genre: Young Adult, Mystery, Suspense

Rating: 4 Stars

I received an ARC copy of Alone in exchange for an honest review. Thanks goes to NetGalley as well as Sourcebooks Fire Books for this advanced copy which was recently released on November 7, 2017. Also, my apologies to NetGalley, the publisher and the author, Cyn Balog for the late posting of my review.

Dear fellow Babblers,

Alone by Cyn Balog is altogether thrilling, curious and strangely beautiful. Balog goes beyond authors to create a story that leaves readers puzzled, relieved, frightened, traumatized. The plot is unheard of. The writing style is quick paced and slow to climax; a paradox yes, a mistake no. The characters are disastrous and unknowingly on their way to their fate. The feelings provoked are doubt, sympathy hatred for things unseen. This chilling tale starts with the disturbing infatuation of a mother who inherits and old mansion, affecting her children’s contact with the outside world, especially her teenage daughter, Seda. Through Seda’s eyes we are trapped within the creaking rooms and dusty exterior of this place she fears she must now call home. All is sad, but quaintly uneventful until a group of friends lose their direction on their way to a winter resort. When these teens enter the mansion seeking safety, it is without pause that they enter a faraway, yet so close universe where fun is mixed with fear, and life becomes death. 

Author Interview: Auriel Roe

Dear fellow Babblers,

I recently interviewed debut author, Auriel Roe about her book,  A Blindfellows Chronicle, about her life as a writer, the thoughts, feelings and processes behind her debut novel. My discussion with Roe has been empowering for myself and I hope the same can be said for anyone out there – writers, artists, athletes whose grasp is torn between logic and passion. 

Review: The Sacrifice | Delphine’s Sacrificial Review

Title: The Sacrifice

Author: Indrajit Garai

Publisher: Self-Published

Publication Date: August 25, 2016

Genre: Short Story

Rating: 2 Stars

Dear fellow Babblers,

I was given a copy of Volume 1 of the collection of short stories, The Sacrifice by a friend of the author, Indrajit Garai in exchange for an honest review. These quick three stories are exactly as the title of the volume entails: stories of sacrifice. Each tale revolves around a troubled character who must ultimately make the greatest sacrifices, including his or her happiness for that of loved ones. This has been done before by countless authors – Dickens, Sartre, Murakami. These are all big names in the publishing industry so unless a writer can really create something uniquely thrilling and thought-provoking with the theme of sacrifice it is unlikely that it will be worth picking up. Being his first work of fiction all three of Garai’s stories were rooted and thorough. But when does clarity and focus damage the overall impact of a book? That is hard to tell. With The Sacrifice, this is exactly how I felt, explaining why for me this was a sacrificial read, not at all pleasing.