I wasn’t sure what to expect when I started reading this book. A book about beauty; such an abstract concept, as well as subjective. Good for an essay, perhaps, but how do you fill a book?
The answer? With a lot of filler - handwritten quotes taking up a whole page, artwork taking up several pages. The book itself is written very well, describing beauty in poetic language and evoking the imagery of the beauty it describes. It is a very gentle book containing philosophical musings on the meaning of beauty and what society views as beauty vs. actual beauty, as well as lots of paragraphs listing what the author herself thinks is beautiful.
However, I found the constant alternating between typed paragraphs and yet another quotation written in a hard-to-read style of someone with poor handwriting quite jarring, and the illustrations that go over two pages, also with quotes on them, hard to read on an e-reader. Overall, it was not a smooth reading experience. I suspect this may be the kind of book you buy in hard copy to flick through when you have five minutes. It is hard to read from cover to cover due to the constant shifting from print to handwritten text - don’t buy if you are expecting a lot of content because it simply isn’t here. That said, the illustrations are pleasing enough and what content is there is pleasing to read.
With thanks to Netgalley and Random House UK for providing an advance review copy. All opinions in this review are my own.
Verdict: ⭐⭐⭐
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