Author: Cheryl Strayed
Title: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and
Life from Dear Sugar
Description: Dear Sugar is an online advice column;
this book is excerpts from that column.
Writing style: Sugar
is pretty blunt—there are several letters where she outright advises people to
leave their spouses or to do other fairly difficult/controversial things. She’s
always encouraging, though, in a sort of “pull yourself up by the bootstraps”
kind of way. She often comes across as a therapist (or at least, that’s how I
see someone who advises a person who really ought to be in therapy). She mines
her own experiences as she gives advice, so there are a lot of personal
examples in the book, making it read like a fragmented memoir.
Audience: Memoir
readers? This book has been a bestseller, so I figure it has a pretty wide
audience, but it’s tough to generalize on what exactly that audience might be.
Major ideas: It’s
up to you to make the best of your life, whatever situation you may be in and
whatever you have been through.
Wrap-up: As a
Christian, there were some ideas in this book that I disagree with pretty
fundamentally, but I can’t fault the writing, which was sparkly, or the overall
feeling I got from the book, which was that if no one else cared, at least
Sugar did. 4/5*
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