Welcome to Litsy!

Check all CW please! I thought this book would focus more on the work the main character does as a lawyer in a psychiatric hospital. However, the novel primarily focuses on the internal experience of traumas impact. It does an accurate job of exploring the connections brains make to keep us safe and what it is like to live as a woman who experiences violence from men who is ‘stuck‘ in her brain & bodies protective mode. Challenging read

Read this as part of a book club, otherwise I probably would have bailed. I started off loving this, but then all of the body shaming/body issues & jokes about SA and violence was just too much for me. It felt uncomfortable to read the character making light of so many dark issues.

12-27-22: My 128th finished book of 2022! Vivian is a dedicated lawyer who advocates for her mentally I‘ll patients at a NYC psychiatric hospital. Privately, she contends with the aftereffects of her rough childhood. She lives in a constant state of fear that makes every day activities almost impossible. She self medicates with men, alcohol and weed until a family reunion prompts Vivian to make a bold move and she unravels. ⭐️⭐️⭐️📖#️⃣1️⃣2️⃣8️⃣

I definitely should have made space to read something else between this and Big Girl as it dealt a lot with disordered eating on the OTHER end of the spectrum. I was excited for this but was ultimately a bit disappointed as the MC didn‘t really seem to grow or evolve. Frankly I found her rather annoying.

4☆ An ambitious debut novel on surviving and living with trauma. Johnson's prose were very compelling, and I found this tough to put down. The intimate, at times claustrophobic feeling of being in Vivian's head was impressively written, she is a manic, paranoid character due to living with her trauma, coping until she cracks. I think Johnson really conveyed what surviving trauma can look like. Plot wise its slow, but character depth was great.

I had high hopes for this book. I love the concept behind it, but I ended up despising the main character so much (which I think was partially intentional) to the point that I wasn‘t even rooting for her in the end🤷🏻‍♀️ Some chapters dragged a bit, and I found the book was extremely wordy with not much depth.