Lilibet Bombshell's Reviews > No Two Persons

This is the second meta book about, well, books and readers of said books I’ve read in the last couple of weeks (the last being Taylor Adams’ thriller The Last Word) and I’ve got to say I’m not hating it. This one is maybe a little more relatable simply because every time I go to write an ARC review I can see what other reviewers think of the same book I just finished reading and sometimes it seems like they read a totally different book than I did. That’s the thing about art, though: It’s subjective. Art is meant to be seen differently by every person that views it. Books are meant to mean something different to everyone who reads them.

I enjoyed this book a great deal. It’s subdivided into ten different parts, one for the writer of the book, and then nine others for readers of the book and how it affected their lives. At first, this format is enjoyable. Somewhere around the sixth part, though, the format (and the book, really) starts to become less entertaining and begins to lose steam and impact. In my opinion, it begins to quickly lose the resonance that came through so clearly in the earlier parts. Did I like the ending? No. It was wrapped up too neatly for my tastes. It seemed too serendipitous for a book that is full of messy people and messy lives.

That doesn’t change the facts: No Two Persons is a beautifully written book about a very simple and relatable concept that happens every day. It’s about people from different walks of life who somehow all pick up the same book in different ways and it affects them all differently, which causes them to do what all of us do every day: Think, make choices, change plans, make decisions, move on, maybe even get inspired.

And, hey: Maybe you should pick it up, simply because you’ll get something different out of it than I did. That’s the whole point anyway.

I was provided a copy of this title by NetGalley and the author. All views, ideas, thoughts, and opinions expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.

File Under: Literary Fiction/Women’s Fiction