This book grew on me like mold. Toward the beginning it felt kind of icky, and then as I kept going it just continued to become more and more beautiful, and warm, and fuzzy. At first I thought it was going to be about a woman rediscovering her sexuality after losing her husband. Reading about Feyi going out, having fun, being messy, I was fine with that, but I wasn't looking forward to reading a whole book about it. Turns out this book was much more about Feyi deciding that she deserves to try and find happiness in the wake of extreme grief. About finding a way to push through the shame, trauma, and survivors guilt, and allowing love to come into her life. Because love finds her, and she had to do the work to open herself up enough to let it in. The sadness doesn't leave, but one of the things about being human is you can hold many truths at once.

Feyi is an incredible example of working through grief. She feeds it into her art, and holds onto it rather than ignoring it. Reading about her being able to connect with others through loss was inspiring. There can be so much shame in not living up to the expectations of others, and seeing Feyi truly embrace the "fuck it, life is short" of it all has left me feeling hopeful and excited in a way that I wasn't anticipating from this book.

I think this book is going to stick with me for a while, not to mention the art and music referenced within. I would really recommend readers look up the artists mentioned as they read, I think it adds a lot to the story. Overall this book is outrageous, bright, moody, and full of color, and I'm so glad I read it.

This is a beautifully uncomfortable book about a woman working towards this idea of a new future while working through the grief of her past.

I will say when I went into this read, I knew nothing. So when I learned, after finishing it, that this book is often categorized as a contemporary romance, I was actually surprised. Although I understand why it is there, my experience reading this felt more like a literary fiction with a romance. Because, despite there being a romance present in this book, it has a heavy emphasis on the rawness of grief, not just grief for the person lost, but for the way your life would have looked if that person had not died. And as much as romance is involved, this story, to me, felt less about that relationship itself and more about Feyi’s personal journey to get there.

One thing I absolutely love about this book is the painful reality of how messy life is. That there is no perfect anything. How the choices we make affect people for better or worse. And that people make mistakes even with the best intentions.

If you go into this book hoping for simple answers and clear lines of good and bad, you will be disappointed, as Emezi excelled at highlighting the complexities of life, grief, and love. Providing a compassionate take for all characters, acknowledging that just because we make mistakes, just because we hurt and are hurt, does not mean that is all we are.

This book was an uncomfortable look into Feyi’s journey and all the messy, wonderful, and not great parts of being human. And that uncomfortableness of it is what made it just so beautiful to read. I have no doubt I will be reading this again!

Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty is a love story between a woman floating numbly through grief, and a world full of so much life and joy begging to be felt again.

Feyi's journey is endlessly moving and full of so much raw humanity. She's a mess in the way that we all are; moving through wounds so deep that your brain chooses dissociation, putting on a mask and pushing down any rogue feeling because every emotion is at risk of detonation.

Her choices can be placed in a vacuum and dissected for moral purity, but the question Emezi pushes toward the reader is a simple one: isn't complexity the true beauty of existence? If we open ourselves up to our chaos and our flaws, we're welcoming pain and conflict, but aren't we also welcoming the joy of being human?

Through Feyi's experience, Emezi insists that sometimes the boundary between right and wrong is more gray than we'd like to admit. Each character in this book is elaborate and deeply realistic. They each have their own issues and strengths, their own experiences influencing the way they present themselves and the way they connect to others. Despite all of the hurt, the foundation for every tangled conflict is love and care. Emezi insists that making mistakes that hurt each other doesn't negate that love and care.

Our gut reaction to test for moral purity and to place people into good or bad boxes is often misguided. Everything we do happens in the context of our memories and experiences, and that complexity is so intensely personal that it's impossible to judge from an outside perspective.

Emezi proves this with evocative, decadent prose. Feyi, despite clinging to avoidance and believing she's cut herself off from the world, wears her heart on her sleeve. She feels everything so intensely, and Emezi makes sure the reader feels it too. From the unfathomable depth that is grief, to the desperation to feel normal again, to the guilt and anxiety and fear and excitement, Feyi's emotional journey propels you forward every step of the way.

Alongside nuanced emotion, Emezi's writing showcases such a deep love and appreciation for the Caribbean. There are mouth-watering depictions of food, intimate scenes involving Caribbean dance and music, homages to African and Caribbean artists, and immersive details of island living dotted throughout every chapter. Through Emezi's love for the culture, Feyi herself is able to find pockets of joy, able to begin to feel that insatiable desire to live again.

So deeply, uncomfortably, beautifully, unapologetically human. You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty is a reminder that human existence is unbearably tangled in grief, care, desire, and fear, and it demands that you hold love and harm in tandem.

This book is so effortless in weaving between humor and grief, levity and tenderness; it captures life in all its complicated and messy and terrible and wonderful glory. What it is to stay alive in an "after."

For the most part the characters and their relationships were astonishingly true to life. The friendships were especially well-crafted and had me smiling like it was me sitting with my best friends, laughing and calling each other out and just being partners in crime. The lowest point for me was the main romantic relationship, I felt the pacing around it was off and fell into insta-love territory that I just really dislike, and led me to have a real record scratch moment that made the rest of the book significantly harder to get through. But as far as the characters' relationships to self, I thought that was really well done, especially for Feyi. Her excavation of self and rebirth through this book was so compelling to read.

By far the best and most differentiating part of this book though was how Emezi wrote art and used it to depict grief. It sincerely drove me to tears just to picture. I don't want to give too much away, but one character described the art featured in this book as "an archive of madness that rots" and I think that captures it perfectly. The writing was so evocative and reverent and it makes me genuinely sad that I cannot sit in an exhibit of the works described. The book was worth it just for the opportunity to imagine it though.