Monday, April 3, 2017

This Too Shall Pass

A Review of:

This Too Shall Pass
Milena Busquets

By: Renea Reviews

This book is about a forty-year old woman named Blanca and the grief she goes through after losing her mother. The storyline has a very honest and blunt approach to how people really deal with grief. However, this doesn’t mean I enjoyed the book.

I truly wanted to enjoy my break from non-fiction reading, but unfortunately for me it wasn’t meant to be. For starters, the book itself is a difficult read: the paragraphs are long and speech follows a dash instead of the less-confusing quotation marks I’m used to. It’s very difficult to tell who is speaking and when they’re speaking. A few lines from the book for example (quotations due to the fact I’m quoting, the book doesn’t actually contain them):

“- My mother loved to play poker, I say
- Why don’t you ask her to join us?”

It’s not extremely hard to get used to, but I do prefer the quotation marks to tell me when someone’s speaking as opposed to the dashes.

I didn’t particularly like the plotline either. The entire book seems to focus on sex and using sex to escape your current situation. I have a love-hate relationship with that idea. While it’s true that sex is used to escape stress, hurt, and the daily life, I don’t like that this book has normalized sex as an “escape”. At the base of my dislike is the simple fact that I was expecting to read something about overcoming grief, while the main topic of this story seemed to be sex.

This book isn’t all bad and maybe if you read it your view may be a more positive than mine. The author is obviously skilled in writing. I particularly enjoyed her descriptions of Blanca’s innermost feelings. The scenery descriptions were well-written as well.

I’m giving this book 2 stars, but keep in mind that you’re opinions are different than mine. Read the whole review to decide if you may enjoy this book even if I didn’t. Lastly, I received this book for free from Blogging for Books in exchange for this honest review.