All the Way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation
The organizing principle and revelation of the book: Gilbert’s journey with Rayya is merely an extreme version of a dynamic that 'all of us' can relate to ... I’m not sure that’s true. I’m also not sure that it needs to be ... Gilbert’s prose in All the Way to the River is often strangely flat and clipped ... The new book reads, at times, like the transcript of a Ted talk ... Much of the book is like this, with one-sentence paragraphs surrounded by white space, somewhat in the manner of an Instagram post ... This time, Gilbert doesn’t gesture toward the idea of moving on, or of being changed.
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A blockbuster: absolutely bonkers and right on the money; brutally honest, including about what it conceals; lurid, transcendent, and compelling. That said, whether readers enjoy it or even pick it up may depend upon their tolerance for its copious visitations from dead lovers and their mothers, dialogues with God, mediocre poems, lectures on codependence, and doodles with inspirational slogans, not to mention the author herself ... Across all her seeking and creating, uplifting and supporting, navel gazing and attention seeking, she is first and foremost a writer who excels at observing and chronicling individual experience, even if she sometimes walks a fine line between triumph and treacle ... Beautifully constructed, eloquent, funny, horrifying, self-aware, scrupulous, and gripping ... Its glory is in the details ... Does she go over the top? Sure. Does she do it well? Undoubtedly.
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Earnest, vulnerable but ultimately quite corny ... The book includes heartfelt meditations on grief, addiction, friendship and loyalty. These are watered down by poetry that manages to be both facile and inscrutable ... Had this book not been muddled by New Age extras and a whiff of solipsism, it might have packed a wallop ... Gilbert is to be commended for not tying a bow on any of it ... The drawings become particularly irksome ... Metaphors abound, many of them cloaked in the goopy recovery language favored by Gilbert in her current incarnation.
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