Tiny Beautiful Things - Cheryl Strayed

Title: Tiny Beautiful Things
Author: Cheryl Strayed
Genre: Inspirational
Rating: 3/5
# pages: 304
Date read: December 2015

Life can be hard: your lover cheats on you; you lose a family member; you can't pay the bills - and it can be great: you've had the hottest sex of your life; you get that plum job; you muster the courage to write your novel. Sugar - the once-anonymous online columnist at The Rumpus, now revealed as Cheryl Strayed - is the person thousands turn to for advice.


I hardly know how to rate this book. 3 seems like an insanely low rating for something that touched me as deeply as some of Sugar's letters did.

On the other hand, 3 seems like a ridiculously generous rating for something that had me skimming through as many of the pages as others of Sugar's letters did.

That Sugar (a.k.a. Cheryl Strayed) is a kind, generous and empathatic woman is beyond doubt. She answers her questions with love and a poise seldom seen in 'Agony Aunts' elsewhere.

But the letters suffer from two main problems: A) Not all of them felt relevant to me (the reason for much of the skimming). B) Many of them were heartbreaking in their lack of follow up. It's the nature of the beast, obviously, but still left me with a slightly unresolved feeling.