Terminally Beautiful Kindle Edition

I don't do big reviews.I loved the spare writing in Terminally Beautiful. Where did that style originate, maybe Sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar? Whatever, it's kind of poetic, it works for me and has a lot of impact, it allows the reader to slip into Diana's problem and experience it from the inside. Having said that I kind of wanted more from Christy, it's like the scaffolding is up the walls are up the window slits are in place but where is the glass, the glass she can polish and I can see the world reflected in? Therein lies the missing star.Diana is like one of the side characters in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and that's no bad thing because there's probably more disturbed meat in a side character than in a McMurphy. She's in some kind of institution where fellow travellers are being readied for reintegration back into the world. Some of that reintegration involves surgery, mainly it is session work.The missing window panes for me lie in the resolution, but even without that this is one fine looking house.

While it's a quick read, it's definitely satisfying, and one that you could (and I will) go and re-read a few times. A book that I would buy some friends, but definitely not my parents.If you like Chuck Palahniuk, but think he's getting a bit tired, you should definitely read this. It's fresh and original, and angry and sad and bitter and genuine. The writing is good, and the characters interesting.

Dark and complex, this is a book that makes you really think about the views that society imposes on us all. This is a book that makes you feel like a sliver of it has wriggled under your skin, in the best and worst way possible

I didn't exactly enjoy this story, but I don't think I was meant to. As a human being, this story makes me want to cry and scream and tear my hair out. As a queer & disabled writer, I FELT this story, and as a writer in general I appreciate the author's style. More than anything, though, as a queer & disabled human being, this story makes me want to WRITE."Terminally Beautiful", on a sort of meta level, has reminded me that it's okay to write things that aren't palatable, and it's okay to write things for their own sake. And maybe from the perspective of people like us, it's actually better to go ahead and publish things that are ragged and sick and real. I can't help wondering what a cishet abled person would think of this book.Thank you for making me want to write.

My favorite thing about this book is how freaking funny it is. There's this constant sardonicism, macabre humor, and silliness under every sentence, somehow balancing out the bleakness of the setting and the narrator's depression. No matter how grim things got for the narrator I couldn't keep myself from giggling.Actually, my favorite thing about this book is how relatable it feels. Every moment in the narrator's head feels like an old, painful memory. The anxiety and suppressed rage on every page is half liberatingly cathartic and half depressingly familiar, but more than triggering my personal baggage it makes me care for the characters. I cared more deeply for these kids than I do for nearly any fictional character - or, if I'm honest, most real people.Or no, my favorite thing about this book is how great it is mechanically. Most writers would take hundreds of words to convey the feelings Stewart gets across in four. The pacing is phenomenal, the book's perfectly constructed without feeling orchestrated. I want to compare the intricate simplicity here to some kind of perfectionist architecture, but I don't know anything about architecture and anyway that sounds too dry. I only noticed it re-reading the book, the first time through I didn't have time to examine the words, I was too caught up in what they were saying.Honestly, I guess my favorite thing about this book is that it ties all that stuff up into only 75 pages like it's no big deal. But Terminally Beautiful is totally a big deal.

You might not think you're pretty, but Diana does. All the young women in this book do. They wish they could be as pretty and normal as you are so that they could go back to their lives. At the end of the book you get to go back to your life. But Diana doesn't. None of them do.Terrific read, quick but worth going through again (and again.)