Ms. Hen reviews Everything Here is Beautiful

Everything Here is Beautiful

Mira T. Lee

Penguin Books

2018

Ms. Hen decided to read this novel because a hen friend who is a writer mentioned it to her, and she is interested in mental illness in as portrayed in fiction. She has read a lot of great novels on this subject, and some bad ones, too, and she is always intrigued to learn about the various viewpoints.

EVERYTHING HERE IS BEAUTIFUL is about two sisters, Mira and Lucia, dealing with Lucia’s mental illness, which is not specifically pinned down in the novel. She is diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and a little bit of a few things. The novel is also about love and the men in Lucia’s life: Yoni, her husband, an Israeli shopkeeper, a boisterous noisy man, and Manny, a Latino immigrant, the father of her child.

The novel is told through alternating viewpoints of Mira, Lucia, Yoni, and Manny. Ms. Hen did not think that it was difficult to discern who was talking, because the voices are distinctly different. The author does an excellent job of capturing various voices of different character, which Ms. Hen knows can be difficult.

This novel is also multicultural. Mira and her sister are Chinese American, and come from a family of immigrants. Their mother moved to America with Mira as a small child, while pregnant with Lucia, and became successful through hard work. Yoni is from Israel, and lost one arm when he was in the army. Manny is an illegal immigrant, and lives in fear when he is in New York. The novel also spans continents, from New York to Switzerland to Ecuador to Minnesota.

One of the reasons Ms. Hen admires this novel is because she thinks that the voice of Lucia when she is psychotic is realistic and believable. Ms. Hen imagined that the author might have experienced such things, because it’s not easy to write with authority about the psychotic process unless one has had direct experience, but she did research, and read some interviews with the author, and she said that she has family members with schizophrenia, and has had to be a caretaker for them. Ms. Hen was surprised when she read this, but she realizes that people who do not have mental illness can be capable of writing about it with skill.

Ms. Hen enjoyed that there are some significant chickens in this novel. When Lucia and Manny live in upstate New York, a man in a chicken suit walked around the town, and everyone called him El Pollo Loco (the crazy chicken). “Pollo was one of those neighborhood characters, wore a giant chicken suit and walked up and down Main Street every day.” Lucia interviews him for an article that is never published, and found out he is a lonely vet with PTSD. Another section with chickens is when Lucia and Manny moved to Ecuador, she would ride to the city in the chicken bus, “Finally they boarded a chicken bus, one of those old yellow busses from the States granted an illustrious afterlife, spray painted with neon colors and flamboyant designs.” A chicken bus is a bus that people ride with the chickens to get to where they’re going. Ms. Hen likes the idea of a chicken bus, and she would like to go on one someday if she has the opportunity.

Ms. Hen loved this novel, though she found it sad. She prefers to read novels about people with mental illnesses who have hope for the future, and are able to go out in the world and be productive and successful and blend in with others and have a normal life. She knows this is not possible for everyone with a major mental illness, but it is possible for others. She dreams there will be a novel published someday that gives hope to people with psychiatric issues to forge on and not be ashamed, and to live full lives.  Even though she found this book to be a downer, she thinks it’s worth reading because it’s an important story, with many different aspects to it, and she realizes that life does not always have a happy ending, and that reality can be utterly depressing at times.