"Embrace Luminous Acceptance"

The plan was to listen to the audiobook for 20-30 minutes before sleep, but instead I found myself listening for 1-2 hours, losing my sleepiness. I savored the lines I had heard, sympathized with the terrible things the author had experienced, and reflected on my own childhood. This is the best compliment I can possibly think of, more so than simply calling it "the memoir of a generation."

From a craft point of view, the raw emotions, cadence of the monologues, and reconstructed dialogues are more enjoyable and relatable than some of the acclaimed contemporary novels such as "The Rabbit Hutch." "Acceptances" language was natural and illuminating with truth (or at least the related truth, which persuaded its trueness), while avoiding the artificial dullness that has been plaguing recent literature. Dont get me wrong, I enjoyed "The Rabbit Hutch" a lot, but I enjoyed "Acceptance" more because of the less beautiful language. "The Rabbit Hutch," like "All the Light We Cannot See," was too beautifully written, that quoting NY Times on its review of "The Rabbit Hutch," "her longer monologues tend to come off less like the cadences of ordinary speech than the workshopped thoughts of a star student, placed between quotation marks." (Gunty earned an M.F.A. in creative writing from N.Y.U.)

For me, as a writer, there is still a lot of work ahead of me. And I learned something about conveying female emotions in sentences. For that, I am also grateful.