Hi friends, happy Monday! I hope you’re all doing well. Today I’m posting my review of Miriam Toews’ novel All My Puny Sorrows.

All My Puny Sorrows by: Miriam Toews: Elf and Yoli are sisters who have lived different paths and want different things. Yoli is broke, trying to write novels, divorced and sleeping with the wrong men; meanwhile Elf is rich, a world famous pianist who is happily married, but she wants to die. Yoli desperately wants to her to live, but right before Elf’s international tour is about to begin she shocks her family with another suicide attempt. This time, Yoli isn’t sure she can help her sister as her situation becomes more complicated. This was a hard-hitting novel; the subject matter was really, really heavy and left the novel feeling dense to read through. There were moments, especially in the beginning, when the reader found it extremely hard to read because it was slow paced and the plot was thick with tension. Toews also has a style to her writing that may or may not be easy to read. She writes without the use of quotation marks and this story was told in the past tense, which got confusing at times, especially if more than two or three people were in dialogue with each other at one time. But despite the style she chose to write in, she still had some excellent writing that the reader could appreciate. Even if they didn’t care for the subject of assisted suicide, Toews gave the subject so much care and truly wrote it with such grace. The characters were memorable and very deeply developed. The way that backstory was used to help us understand the characters better was really effective. It was a great device to show how something that happened when they were children, explained why an event happened in the present. The fact that it wasn’t all at once either but a slow progression of back and forth helped too. We also learned so much through our main character and her sister as she fought to keep her sister alive; it was such a strong bond and the reader felt that. The secondary characters weren’t as developed, but they helped move the story and gave it more depth. In the end, this wasn’t this reader’s cup of tea, but it was still a well written novel with exceptionally strong sibling bonds.