mothumn's Reviews (377)

Thank you to Netgalley and Bloomsbury for the e-arc in return for an honest review.

I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokbokki is a essentially comprised of dialogues between the author and her therapist, and her reflections on what she has learned from those conversations. I found the dialogues to be very long and tedious, as well as very personal to the author. The things she talked about, the ideas provided to her, and her reflections did not seem very applicable to other people. While some of the reflections I felt provided an interesting or different perspective that I could apply to my own life, most did not seem very helpful. By the end of the memoir, when there were no longer any more dialogues between her and her therapist, I started to enjoy it more. I found the things the author was saying to much more engaging and impactful and therefore think this could have been better had the dialogues been omitted or at least shortened, seeing as they were about 10 pages each, which is much longer than they needed to be.

I did appreciate how open and vulnerable the author was, providing all the negative thoughts and the struggles she went through in detail. A lot of struggles did feel very relatable to me as someone who also struggles with my mental health. I also really appreciated that instead of ending it with saying she’s all better and now the depression is completely gone, she explained how there are periods of feeling bad and periods of feeling good, and there will continue to always be periods of good and bad. Rather than having it go away, she learned to live with it and how to continue to live during bad periods. 

While there were definitely some good qualities to this and the author is clearly a talented writer, I just found that I had to force myself to continue reading this. I unfortunately found it very dull and I don’t feel that I gained anything from this. I really wanted to like this but I ended up being very disappointed. Overall, I gave this 2.75 stars (rounded up to 3).

Thank you to Netgalley and Andrews McMeel Publishing for the e-arc in return for an honest review

Everything is Ok is a nice graphic novel memoir that follows the author's journey of struggling with mental illness, being diagnosed, and learning to live with it and accept it rather than hiding it or trying to ‘get better’. I thought it served its purpose of talking about that experience well, but it didn’t go any further and felt like a very surface level look at it. I feel that this would be great for younger audiences or people who are just beginning to struggle or look for help with their mental illness. However, as someone who has been living their life with a mental illness and was diagnosed many years ago, I felt that I didn’t gain anything from it. It didn’t really teach me much that I haven’t already heard before. There’s nothing really wrong with that, I just think that it’s not for me, but would maybe help other people, specifically someone who may have just been diagnosed and is struggling to accept that. The art I felt did the job, the blues really fit the subject matter, but for the most part didn’t really stand out to me. There were a few pages where the watercolour art style was really utilized and as a result were really beautiful and eye-catching. One of the main parts of the medium of graphic novels is the art, but unfortunately I didn’t find it to be very interesting in this. It wasn’t bad, however, especially considering some pages were really great, it just didn’t feel super creative or interesting. I wouldn’t really recommend this except in very specific situations, such as if someone I knew was just diagnosed with depression, then maybe this would help them with that experience. Overall I gave this a 3.25 stars.