Love & Olives by Jenna Evans Welch
“Do you think it’s possible that you can believe in me for a bit? How do you believe in someone who left when you were eight years old? And how was I supposed to manage the enormous chasm that existed between how he said he felt about me and what his actions said he felt about me?” Liv thought her biggest problem was trying to find a way to tell her boyfriend that she wants to attend art school rather than follow him to Stanford. […]
The Journey from Abandonement to Healing by Susan Anderson
Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents by Lindsay C. Gibson, PsyD
Please Yourself by Emma Reed Turrell
It’s time for the heavy-weight competitors of the Self-Help category! A team up of not two but three books that are written by highly regarded mental health professionals and containing a wealth of helpful and, in this combo, complimentary advice on how to get over your damn shit! Okay but seriously, the combo of these books and the order I read them in was really great, which is why I’m doing a triple review. The Journey from Abandonment to Healing: Surviving and recovering from the […]
FINNA by Nino Cipri
Well this was an adorable little slice of a book. A wormhole opens in a giant IKEA-like store, a customer wanders through it, and two disgruntled employees (who have recently broken up and have been trying to avoid each other) are assigned to go fetch her, using a FINNA device to track her down. Ava and Jules hate their soul-sucking retail jobs but love each other, even though their various neuroses have made them incompatible. When the employees are all herded into a break room […]
Broken (in the best possible way) by Jenny Lawson
If you’ve read a Jenny Lawson book before, you’ll know what to expect here. Side-splitting anecdotes, social anxiety, lots of animal stories, bizarre arguments with her husband Victor, talking openly about mental health issues like depression, etc. (She has treatment resistant depression and doesn’t shy away from talking about her lowest moments, including feeling suicidal.) And yet this book feels light and very human. Some notable departures in this one, she spends quite a bit of time reflecting on the differences between her and Victor’s […]
Get Well Soon: History's Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them by Jennifer Wright
Perhaps it is an indicator of my improving mental health (it is), but I really enjoyed this book! In a morbid, worrisome, fun kind of way. Get Well Soon is a book about famous plagues and diseases (and lobotomies? for some reason?) and not only was it a fast, interesting read, it was also funny (obviously, humor is subjective, and I’ve seen several reviews saying the humor missed the mark for them, but it hit 100% for me—it helps that the audiobook narrator, Gabra Zackman, […]
