#mrs. everything

[drawingwaterlilies]

Jennifer Weiner - Mrs. Everything

[maryannmackey]

'I was raped, and I got pregnant. Abortion wasn't legal then, but there were ways to get it done safely, if you could afford it. Your mom and her friend were going to travel all over the world, and instead, she came home, all the way from Turkey, and she used the money she'd saved to take care of me. That's the kind of person your mother is. If she loves you, she'll do anything to help you. Give up anything she has; make any sacrifice she can make.' Bethie looked at Lila and tried to keep from crying. 'Your mother missed out on so much because of me.' 'Like what?' Lila's voice was suspicious, but at least it wasn't flat, or bored. 'Well, most of the 1960s, for starters,' Bethie said. 'While I was roaming around, protesting the war and dancing at Woodstock, she was married. When the world started to change- for everyone, but especially for women- she was already a mother. She missed everything.' 'Misses everything,' Lila said, and gave a faintest smile. 'It's like a joke. Like, there should be a Mister Everything somewhere.' Bethie found herself wanting to grab Lila by her scrawny shoulders and shake her. 'It's funny, unless you're the one sitting on the sidelines, living your life for other people.' Startled, Lila said, 'Is that what my mom did?' 'You tell me.' Bethie's voice was sharper and louder than she'd let it get over all those long weeks of the summer. 'Your mom wanted to be a writer. She wanted to see the world. She wanted...' She stopped herself, thinking that it was for Jo to tell Lila exactly what she'd missed, if Jo ever felt moved to do so, and made herself breathe. 'All I'm saying is that your mother is going to love you no matter what you do, because you are hers.'

-Mrs. Everything, Jennifer Weiner

[eatin-a-chicken-wing]

You need to read Mrs. Everything by Jennifer Weiner (Book Review #1)

Ok I read this book like a month ago and never got around to reviewing it but here I am at 4 am on a school night. No spoilers--since obviously I want you to read the book--but I will be loosely outlining character arcs and conflicts.

My scale (loosely based off my teacher's):

1: Counterproductive, harmful impact on the world

2: Should've skipped it

3: Glad I read it!

4: Some but not all of 5 star criteria

5: i) meaningful, well-resolved conflict ii) fully fleshed out characters iii) eloquent writing and good pacing

HERE'S WHY MRS. EVERYTHING IS A 5 STAR BOOK: it's not a story of the bravest warriors and glorious fighters. It's a story about reality. It's a story about the beaten. About the tired. It's a story about hope for those of us who ran out of energy to fight for who we are, for our places.

The conflict follows two sisters--Jo and Bethie--growing up in the early 1900s.

Jo, a lesbian rejected by her mother, fights with her family for her place in society. She fights for her right to her identity, for acceptance. But you can only fight for so long. Just one girl against an entire world. Again and again, the world slings stones and knives against her. Who could hold out? Who wouldn't get worn down? Eventually, she loses herself. She gets tired. Jo stops fighting. But from the very start of the book, Weiner lets us know: she will find herself again. And she does. Even though she gives up. Even though she gives in.

Bethie, on the other hand, slots in perfectly with women in society at this time. That's where her struggles starts. Women smile. Women clean. Women are the ones to blame when they are brutalized, assaulted, beaten down. Bethie doesn't need to fight for her identity, because her identity is right there, at the forefront. She isn't different than many other women from this time period—she is one of many who go through torture after torture, one of the numerous women dragged through a road of glass and stones for male pleasure. She isn't a warrior who breaks free from all these walls, she is a little girl, and she is weak. But she isn't alone. Somebody saves her. Somebody reaches out first. Somebody saves her, and she's okay. Even though she's weak.

Why does this matter so much? Because it's real. Because so, so many of us are tired. Because we shouldn't all need to be fighters. Because we CAN'T all be fighters. This isn't a story about warriors. It's a story about survivors. Meaningful conflict? Hell, man, of course. Being a woman in a patriarchal world. Being LGBT+ and having to fight for every inch of your existence. Why would you want to read this? Because in the end, they find themselves. Because you will lose yourself, you will give in. But in the end, you will find yourself. Not alone. Not because you are strong. Not because you clawed your way up from the bottom. You will find yourself because someone will save you, and because you are a survivor.

5 stars. All the way. Amazing conflict. Characters which are each indispensable and carry a crucial part of the conflict in some way. Eloquent writing that paces out entire lifespans within a book 2 inches thick. Read Mrs. Everything by Jennifer Weiner. Especially if you're a woman.

--Wing

[merricksunstone]

Stayed up all night to finish the difficult yet rewarding novel, Mrs. Everything by Jennifer Weiner. The lives she explains, the experiences; the sensitivity and bold candor with which she weaves feminism, race, religion, trauma, abuse, abortion, drug use, healing, divorce, rage; the broad spectrum with which she paints women’s existence — I started turning pages and couldn’t stop. Granted, as an abuse survivor, some parts were more difficult to read than others, and I was definitely triggered a few times. To anyone who has suffered any sort of s*xual assault, I would recommend asking someone else to tag certain pages for skipping, and/or censoring those passages if encountering said content without warning is too triggering. Weiner does not shy away from any subject and explains clearly without flinching certain scenes that may disturb some readers. That’s my only criticism of Mrs. Everything, though. She wanted sex scenes and, by golly, there are sex scenes! Weiner has such a different, direct and precise way of narrating sex scenes in comparison to the tidy, romantic or frank fade-to-black style of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid. Both of these books feature an incredible amount of similar topics touched upon (abortion, LGBTQIA+, BIPOC representation/civil rights), yet the grace and elegance and distinctions between the two made them marvelous to read back to back. It’s been so wonderful to find books written by women fairly recently that are intriguing enough to devour. Growing up sheltered from the changing world and being allowed to read only a select few kinds of books, and then highschool destroying my love of reading, I naively thought — out of the myriad of genres and styles of fiction out there! — that I’d struggle to find things I wanted to read. Thankfully, this has proven false! Mrs. Everything was so very much a mirror for me to see a semblance of my own life and actually feel a little healing and acceptance at certain plot points! I hope it helps others to see they also are not alone in this big, ugly world that can, in slivers of time with people we love and that love us, sometimes actually be beautiful.

[bookcoversonly]

Title: Mrs. Everything | Author: Jennifer Weiner | Publisher: Atria Books (2019)

[yournameoverandover]

just finished Mrs. Everything and it was... everything

[literaryvice]

A (Book) Flurry of Reading: Mrs. Everything, Normal People, A Better Man

A (Book) Flurry of Reading: Mrs. Everything, Normal People, A Better Man

It must have been the guilt of my last post, but I’ve done marginally better at turning down my social media and turning up novels. It helped that small human spent a weekend at the grandparents, but I read three novels (okay, part of it is in a mad dash to hit minimum acceptable book total for 2019…). (more…)

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