Emily May's Reviews > Everything Here Is Beautiful

And then, her worst fear: that the line between her sister and her illness was becoming irrevocably blurred.

Lately, I'm really enjoying these quieter family drama books with strong writing, unforgettable characters, and a deep emotional pull. Perhaps I'm a little burned out on tropes and action but, whatever the reason, Everything Here Is Beautiful worked its way into my heart and kept me hooked on the characters' lives until the very last page.

At its heart, this novel looks at living with a chronic mental illness. Lucia is the wild, funny, brilliant, extravagant sister, as the more serious and controlled Miranda has always known. She's also prone to spiralling into cycles of depression and obsessive behaviour, fuelled by her schizoaffective disorder. Miranda knows that, too, and her adult life has mostly been dedicated to ensuring her sister takes the pills that mute the voices in her head.

Later, I would be told I had a twenty percent chance of maintaining a full-time job, a twenty-five percent chance of living independently, a forty percent chance of attempting suicide, a ten percent chance of succeeding.
I was twenty-six years old.

As the two Chinese-American women get older, they build their own lives. Lucia marries a big-hearted one-armed Israeli man called Yonah and Miranda moves to Switzerland, whose clean precision suits her personality well. Lucia's life moves through ups and downs, soon taking her away from Yonah and to a young Ecuadorian called Manuel, who is living in New York as an undocumented immigrant.

The story centers around Lucia and her struggle with the "serpents" in her mind, as she takes on motherhood, living in Ecuador, and a career of her own, but Lee develops all the other characters around her so that Lucia doesn't feel like a lab specimen being scrutinized. Miranda, Manuel and Yonah are all intricately-drawn, with their own stories being as important and poignant as Lucia's.

The book moves through several different perspectives and switches between first and third person. In other books, I sometimes find such constant movement between characters to be jarring, but they were all portrayed with such love and sensitivity here that I never experienced that familiar dissatisfaction of being with a character who was less interesting than the others.

Lee shows all the misunderstandings and misinformation around mental illness. She considers Lucia's fear that her illness is the "reality" and that the pills are numbing it, as well as Miranda and Manuel's difficulty of distinguishing eccentricities from mental illness. Where does a person end and their illness begin? The honest answer is that no one really knows.

A beautiful, thought-provoking book with the kind of characters I know will stay with me.

I’m human first, aren’t I? Aren’t we all?

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