What Does It Feel Like?

Emotional, personal and poignant, this is not Sophie Kinsella's typical book. 

In her latest book, What Does It Feel Like? Kinsella shares a compilation of fictionalized vignettes based on her own health struggles. Readers get a personal perspective about the emotional and physical ups and downs of a person living with a life-threatening illness and how it impacts the patient and their family.

This book looks at cancer in a candid and intimate way. As someone who had a family member suffer through a brain tumour, this book hit close to home. But with humour and heart, Kinsella shows that through pain and adversity you can still find moments of joy and inspiration.

Short but powerful and full of insight and optimism, you may want to keep the Kleenex box handy, but you will ultimately finish this book in deep awe of Kinsella (and anyone living with a life-threatening disease) as she shares her deeply personal experiences living with a brain tumour. 

Disclaimer: My sincere thanks to Dial Press for the complimentary digital copy of this book which was given in exchange for my honest review.

My Rating: 5 stars

Author: Sophie Kinsella

Genre: Contemporary Fiction, Tearjerker

Type and Source: eBook from publisher via NetGalley

Publisher: The Dial Press (Random House Publishing)

First Published: October 8, 2024

Read: Sept 11, 2024

Book Description from GoodReads: Eve is a successful novelist who wakes up one day in a hospital bed with no memory of how she got there. Her husband, never far from her side, explains that she has had an operation to remove the large, malignant tumor growing in her brain.

As Eve learns to walk, talk, and write again—and as she wrestles with her diagnosis, and how and when to explain it to her beloved children—she begins to recall what’s most important to her: long walks with her husband’s hand clasped firmly around her own, family game nights, and always buying that dress when she sees it.

Recounted in brief anecdotes, each one is an attempt to answer the type of impossible questions recognizable to anyone navigating the labyrinth of grief. This short, extraordinary novel is a celebration of life, shot through with warmth and humor—it will both break your heart and put it back together again.

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