I cannot rate this book. My feelings towards it are too complex. It’s 0 stars, 5 stars, and everywhere in between, all at once.
 
My biggest qualm with All About Love is that the core premise conflates love with ‘wellness’, ‘health’, and ‘sanity’. With this, hooks labels behaviours, beliefs and systems that subjugate and obstruct love, like capitalist greed, dishonesty, and dogma, as ‘madness’, ‘psychosis’, and similarly pathologising and sanist language and ideas.
 
With this conflation underpinning the book’s core argument, I had a really difficult time enjoying it, even when I appreciated other parts of it. Hooks also almost exclusively cites psychoanalysts throughout the text, which is…definitely related! And equally disconcerting.
 
I similarly struggled with other aspects of the book. For e.g., in instances where hooks named behaviours/belief systems that she states oppose love, acknowledging their operationalisation in social institutions of power and control, only to shun individual community members for succumbing to them. Drug dealers, drug users, liars (of ANY magnitude), and people who cut off abusive family members were among those hooks claimed were inherently anti-love.
 
Each argument made was an absolute, with little room for flexibility or nuance. While I appreciate hooks’ unrelenting staunchness, this got to a point that often bordered on dogmatic, making for a really uncomfortable read at times.
 
That said, this book was also expansive and revolutionary, rich in deep wisdom, care, and vulnerability. I adored a lot of the commentary on community care, and challenging normative relationship and family structures (though this was later somewhat undermined by a very cishetero and mononormative discussion on romantic love). I also enjoyed much of hooks’ broad, inclusive, polytheistic approach to religion, and her conversations around death.
 
I know a lot of people love this book, and for good reason. I personally found it to be such an internally polarising read, though. And even now, months later, I just cannot put a number to my feelings towards it.

(Review initially posted on Instagram)