REVIEW | What Are You Going Through — Meonicorn

RATING: 3.5/5
AUTHOR: Sigrid Nunez
ISBN: 0593191412
ISBN13: 9780593191415
PUBLISHER: Riverhead Books
RELEASE DATE: September 8th, 2020
PAGES, 210
EDITION LANGUAGE: English
SETTINGS: United States

I read this book for the BookTube Prize of 2021, Octafinals Fiction group C.

What Are You Going Through is a wandering mind. It’s a book asking the titled question to each one of the characters in the book, and also the readers. Following the narrator who started to visit her dying friend regularly, and started some adventures with the dying friend, we experience different situations she encountered and memories she had where she met people who need audiences.

Grieving for past times, people, pets, and particular things, the narrator observes and analyzes the needs of the passengers in her life. Characters in this book vary, some people are long-term friends who have a deep meaning influence on the narrator, some people are the ones who she knows for long but not really knowing, some are just people who she came across once or twice. But the author vividly drew people’s personalities and past experiences via dialogues. Although she tells the stories of people around her using a rather relaxing tone, the insecurity of each person she met shows through the paper.

This is a lighthearted book discussing heavy topics, it draws you in the talk about death with a cheerful tone, and leaves you to think afterward.