I almost bailed on this once I realized how sad it might become, part of me wishes I did. It was good, but not great for me, multiple narrators kept me going but I didn't 'love' any of the characters and I don't think I'll ever be 'thinking back to them' ( )

Miranda and Lucia are Chinese American women who are sisters. Miranda has always watched over Lucia, as Lucia has a form of mental illness. They live their separate lives, but there is that bond that is ever present. Miranda is in Switzerland, but it only takes a phone call from Lucia's friends, and she is always there to protect her sister.

This was a little hard to get into at first, but you are so charmed by Lucia that the reading is a pleasure. ( )

Exquisitely empathetic, and yet unflinchingly honest, this is one of the best novels I've read about the toll living with mental illness takes on the family members who choose to support their loved one through crisis after crisis. There were times I felt viscerally the fear and uncertainty and anger and lonliness. A beautiful story of family bonds, and of choosing to stay through the hardest times. Highly recommended. ( )

This is, first and foremost, the story of two sisters, one of whom suffers from mental illness. It's also the story of immigrants -- both documented and undocumented -- making their way in America. Miranda can remember coming to America from China with her mother, after her father's death. Lucia is younger, a free spirit whose mind eventually becomes unmoored from reality. Miranda is ever the protective older sibling -- too protective, perhaps?

The story explores painful questions. How do you help someone get well when that person doesn't recognize that she is sick? How does mental illness affect all those close to the person who is ill? Why are societal attitudes toward mental illness so different from attitudes toward physical illness? Can you always determine the boundary between the personality and actions of the person who is ill and actual manifestations of mental illness? (Is every reckless act the result of the illness?)

I just finished this, and it has left me feeling a bit melancholy. ( )

This was a heartbreaking read. ( )

Lucia and Miranda are sisters whose mother emigrated from China to New York. Protagonist Lucia has been diagnosed with schizophrenia. She marries and spends time in psychiatric wards. Her story is told through four perspectives – that of Lucia, Miranda, her first husband, and her second husband. She eventually moves to Ecuador with her second husband and daughter. Themes include mental illness, immigration, love, motherhood, and independence.

This is not a flashy novel, and it is sad, but it is very nicely put together. The characters feel like people I might know. The plot is creative. The writing is eloquent. Lee describes the locations in atmospheric detail. I could easily picture the dilapidated bus bumping along the narrow country roads from rural Ecuador to the nearest village. Dramatic tension is maintained by Lucia’s desire to direct her own life, whereas her sister and partners feel responsible for such issues as making sure she takes her medication and safeguarding her daughter. It is a complex situation since when Lucia is ill, she does not know she is ill. The various perspectives work together to give the reader enough information an understand of the characters’ motivations and fears.

It is character driven and contains action sequences tied to the major changes in life – marriage, relocating, divorce, childbirth, and, in Lucia’s case, stays in mental wards. It feels like a story of life, and how dealing with mental illness impacts everyone in the picture. I felt a range of emotions while reading it and would not recommend it to anyone currently suffering from depression. I found it multidimensional and original.
( )

The story of a young woman's struggle with mental health was compelling. It is told from other people's points of view as well as her own. The story allows you to see how others perceive the illness as as a how the person copes with those perceptions. ( )

This is a really good novel. It's about two Chinese American sisters and their journey through one of the sister's mental illness. The chapters alternate between different characters' point of view, and a chapter often covers several months or even years of story progression. Every chapter is well written and I feel has the literary value to be standalone short stories. (Ummm....maybe with the exception of the epilogue. The epilogue is not bad, but I feel the other chapters are of such high quality that it pales in comparison.) The author gave detailed description of life in NYC, rural Minnesota, urban Ecuador and rural Ecuador. I was impressed to learn the author had actually never been to Ecuador. It must have taken months of research in order to write in such detail! There were several chapters that ended on a surprising turning point and made me very eager to immediately continue into the next chapter.

In the books I've read in the past that were written by Asian American authors with Asian American main characters, the theme of Asian culture and identity always come up, and the way the themes are presented made me feel that I, a first generation immigrant from Asia, was not the book's target audience. It seems to me those books were written for non-Asian Americans to give them a seemingly authentic (but actually always a little off) (but it doesn't matter because the target readers wouldn't be able to tell) presentation of Asian culture or immigrant experience so the readers can feel they learned something, or they can feel they have increase their appreciation another ethnicity lol I am very happy to say this book is NOT one of those. It felt more like reading a novel published in my home country, in the Chinese language, targeted at Chinese readership -- an audience that do appreciate a Chinese cultural background but really care more about good characters and plot than anything else. The main characters' cultural background is there, but that's all that it is -- a background and not a main point. The theme of the book is who the characters are and what they choose to become when confronted with the sister's mental health issues. ( )

If you want to cleanse your... brain? palate? brain-palate? of the hellstorm that was 2017, this book is an excellent way to kick off the new year.

Everything Here Is Beautiful is the story of two sisters, Miranda and Lucia. Since childhood, Miranda has been the careful and responsible big sister, Jie, while Lucia has been the cheerful and impulsive little sister, Mei. But Lucia occasionally has episodes where she has violent mood swings, hears voices, and becomes increasingly paranoid. Miranda, frightened at what could happen to her baby sister - and, perhaps, what her baby sister could do to others - stresses the importance of medication. Lucia, however, stubbornly refuses to let her mental illness affect her life. But as she makes a series of sudden decisions - a marriage to an older man, a baby with an illegal immigrant, a family move to Ecuador - the question of what is due to her personality and what is due to her illness arises. Her bond with her sister also begins to fray as Miranda wearies of coming to the rescue and she becomes resentful of Jie's interference. You will race to the end to discover what happens.

A deeply compassionate story told engagingly from multiple perspectives, Everything Here Is Beautiful is, simply, beautiful. If you enjoyed [b:Little Fires Everywhere|34273236|Little Fires Everywhere|Celeste Ng|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1490351351s/34273236.jpg|52959357] or [b:Stay with Me|32969150|Stay with Me|Ayobami Adebayo|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1481563711s/32969150.jpg|52027766], I highly recommend you pick up this book.

(I forgot to thank Penguin Random House/First Reads for allowing me access to a digital galley! I really hope this book does well!) ( )

Everything Here is Beautiful is not a book that I would typically enjoy. It’s incredibly slow paced and deeply character centric. I’m torn between feeling that it was actually a very long book or if it only felt endless. I can appreciate Everything Here is Beautiful for what it is – a dive into sharing the struggles of someone who has a mental illness but wants to live a normal life. But I can’t say I enjoyed the book.

This book is a good fit for some readers – those who prefer serious books with complicated relationships and an emphasis on motherhood will likely enjoy it. I will warn that the book’s description is a bit misleading. On picking up Everything is Here Beautiful, I expected to read a story of sisters, of two parallel lives. This book is very much about Lucia. Intellectually you can infer bits and pieces about Miranda’s existence, but only in so much as it revolves around Lucia and their relationship not with each other, but with Lucia’s mental illness.

I’m always ready to pounce on a book that has a hyperbolic or otherwise problematic representation of mental health conditions. In this respect, I think Everything Here is Beautiful did a good job depicting a life and how a person can choose not to be defined by their mental illness even while it tries to control them. I personally have no experience with Lucy’s kind of mental illness – in the book, the doctors disagree on her diagnosis, but “bipolar” and “schizophrenia” are both tossed around – so I can’t relate as to whether or not it’s an accurate experience, but from an outsiders perspective, it feels good and respectful.

Everything Here is Beautiful has an interesting story and good research. I appreciate the Ecuadorian immigrant representation, the Chinese-American representations from two sides, the mental health representation. This is a good book for the right person. It’s a serious, slow-paced slice of life. If that sounds good to you, I recommend picking it up! ( )

audio fiction (13+ hours - family drama, mental health: sister with schizophrenia and bipolar episodes)

the heartbreaking struggle of not being able to help someone dealing with mental illness - not an easy one to listen to. It's also pretty long, and I almost quit at one point but glad I stuck with.

see also: Buffering by Hannah Hart for a nonfiction perspective re: challenges of mental health care. ( )

I read this for my local library's book club, but was not able to participate in the Zoom discussion, which was just as well as I didn't like the book. It's about a schizophrenic woman, Lucia, and her family - sister Miranda, husband Yonah, lover and father of her daughter Manny - and is told from each of their viewpoints. ( )

Excellent story of sisterhood, immigration/migration and mental illness. Miranda and Lucia are of Chinese descent - their mother came to America when Miranda was a child and Lucia was in utero. There are glimpses of their childhood here, mostly with Miranda as mother figure while their single mother worked her way up America’s ladder of success. The majority of the book takes place in their adulthood as Lucia struggles with potential bi-polar issues and other undiagnosed mental illnesses and Miranda stands by helplessly. Always fearless, Lucy spent her twenties traveling and writing. Now she is searching for stability to fill a void in her life (also part of her illness) and settles on marriage to a Russian Jew, Yonah. He has a zest for life having immigrated from Israel and experienced the alternative. This fits with some of Lucia’s manic episodes and all is well until she wants a child. She becomes involved with Manny, an illegal immigrant from Ecuador and together they have a child, Esperanza. This triggers a severe depressive incident and all involved struggle to cope. “...if pain and tears were correlated, surely we would’ve all drowned by now” (151), she observes later in more rational moments. Lucy’s solutions are never true solutions - moving to Ecuador becomes her next course of action with predictable results. Meanwhile Miranda struggles with the rightness of living her own life in Switzerland, finding happiness for herself and setting limits with her sister. This book does a great job of showing both the inside of the illness from Lucy’s view and the outside from the others in her life. Memorable characters and an uplifting ending that finds the bright side of a horrible situation. ( )

Narrators are Cassandra Campbell, Emily Woo Zeller, Ozzie Rodriguez, Kim Mai Guest, and Paul Boehmer.
3 stars. ( )

a dnf for me. I stopped at p. 128, after I realized I had no attachment to the story or its characters, and that I didn't care what happened next. Now I'm cranky. I need to dive into a book that has more visceral appeal. But first I am going to walk to the little lending library around the corner from my house and deposit this book inside, because I'm sure someone else is going to love it.

Lucia has a mental illness. Her story was intriguing. The author helped the reader understand her personality and her relationships with her family and friends. The story from her sister's perspective fell flat. Honesty, the other characters weren't as well developed. The only other character I cared about was Yonah. The story is centered around Lucia, so overall, very enjoyable. ( )

Story of two sisters life when one of them is diagnosed with bi-polar/ schizophrenic disorder. it was interesting to read about the mind of a person with schizophrenia. I learned how difficult this disease is to control because the medication has so many side effects, the afflicted do not wish to take these medications for very long. Families struggle with this when a loved one has mental health issues. ( )

Heartbreaking story of two Chinese immigrant sisters, one of whom struggles with mental illness makes a compelling story. ( )

This book will stick in my mind forever (a place where surprisingly little sticks). I'm amazed that this is a first novel - not a single wrong note for me. I love the way the author slowly builds an understanding of the characters by seeing them through various eyes as well as their own - and it happens gradually, just the way you get to know people in real life. It must be so hard to write idiosyncratic characters without making them annoying stereotypes, but that is definitely not the case here. Ditto for writing about mental illness without sinking into melodrama. There is a lot to think about in this book, and I think two key deep dives are to examine the title, and to think about one of Lucia's favorite portuguese words, saudade, which Wikipedia defines as "a deep emotional state of nostalgic or profound melancholic longing for an absent something or someone that one loves. Moreover, it often carries a repressed knowledge that the object of longing might never return".

I can't really point to examples of great writing because all of it is so seamlessly well done. But having personal experience with a loved one with mental illness, I was especially struck by Miranda's thoughts about her sister Lucia - that mental health advocates stress that a person with mental health struggles are more than their illness and shouldn't be defined by it, but there comes a point at which you wonder whether the illness hasn't swallowed them whole, and the person you loved is no longer there. "And then, her worst fear: that the line between her sister and the illness was becoming irrevocably blurred."

Last but not least, I didn't expect this to be such a compulsive, unputdownable read. I'll be on the lookout for Lee's next book. ( )

This was a lovely and tender book about mental illness and family, and about the fine line between love and obligation when a family member has chronic mental illness with acute episodes. The story follows Lucia through her life - a wide-eyed adventurous woman who is plagued by mental breakdowns that are not always curbed by medication. Once she is off meds, the voices in her head become more powerful than those she loves and her behavior becomes erratic and unsafe.

Lucia and her sister, friends and lovers are all fully drawn characters and each who tells part of the story has a unique voice. The story takes place in New York and rural Ecuador. I read the book in 2 days and found it fulfilling and emotional. This first-time author has a great career ahead! ( )

A tale of mental illness and the toll it takes on families. Lucia and Miranda are sisters. Their mother brought them from China to America when Lucia was still in utero and Miranda was about 9 years old. They were very close as children, but grew apart as adults. The love and bond of sisterhood kept them connected. Lucia was either a schizophrenic or bipolar.
I never really loved or even liked any of the characters, but it was well written, so I am giving it 3 stars. It was a heartbreaking story of mental illness.

#EverythingHereIsBeautiful #MiraTLee ( )

Miranda and Lucia are sisters and couldn’t be more different- Miranda the older sister responsible for caring for Lucia after their mothers death. Lucia begins to exhibit signs of mental illness which shapes her relationship with Miranda and other significant people in here life. This is a wonderful story of the frequently complicated relationships between sisters made even more so by mental illness. Overall an excellent read ( )

A book that represents mental illness through the eyes of the person, family and health care. Each voice in the book is unique and written differently. Excellent read. Also highlights the issues in mental health mainly the disgusting medication for a disease that lasts a life-time. ( )

Mira Lee has given us an intricate depiction of mental illness. In vivid detail Lee describes what it is like to live through the diagnosis and the effect mental illness has on the family. I especially liked Yonah and Manny, Lucia's two relationships. A minor quibble, I would have liked more story about Miranda, Lucia's older sister. One of the blurbs stated it was a sisters story but Miranda's character was no more paramount than Yonah or Manny. Would definitely recommend this book to someone who is okay with reading this type of subject matter. I know these characters will remain in my head for years to come, a sign of a well written story. ( )

Miranda and Lucia are the daughters of a single Chinese immigrant mother. The book begins as their mother is dying of cancer and Lucy is announcing her impending marriage to Stefan, a Jewish Russian immigrant, almost 20 years her senior with an upper extremity amputation. From this point the story moves back and forth in time and the chapters have different narrators.

We learn that Miranda is the older and more responsible sibling and that Lucy has a history of mental illness that began when she was a college student. The bulk of the story deals with the difficulties of helping an adult with serious mental illness without abridging their human rights as an individual. Sometimes Lucy is lucid, especially when she takes her medication. But one of the hallmarks of her illness is the lack of insight into the illness causing her to resist taking her medications.

The story is well written and heart breaking. ( )