A devastatingly beautiful story of recent immigrants, mental illness and lives on the margins. It’s a strong dose of empathy just when we need one. As the epigraph says:
“Let us be humbled in the knowledge that one may never fully understand the interior lives of others—but let us continue to care.”

This book broke my heart. In a million pieces.

At its heart, this novel is about the bond between two sisters (I love that!): Miranda, the older, more responsible one, and Lucia, the younger one who everybody loves. After their mother's death, Lucia starts to hear voices and spinning out of control, leaving her husband Yonah to have child with a younger man, Manuel/ Manny, being in and out of hospital, seemingly to get better to then just spiral out of control again. Mira T. Lee tells a complex story, dealing not only with mental illness, but also talking about experiences with immigration (Miranda and Lucia are Chinese-American, Yonah is from Israel and Manny is a illegal immigrant from Ecuador), about finding a home in the world, about finding a way to be happy. If there was one criticism of this book it would be that sometimes the author took on too much and the scope becomes too broad (the story spans different cities in the US, Ecuador, Switzerland, and China...).

What impressed me most was how complex the characters and their interactions were; even when they were at odds with each other, each stayed sympathetic to this reader. The story is told very effectively from alternating viewpoints; each time recontextualizing what happened before and adding even more depth to the story. It takes about a third of the book before the narrative shifts for the first time to Lucia's viewpoint; everything we see from her point of view is coloured by what we saw before.

Mira T. Lee shows the difficulties of loving a person with mental illnesses, but also how difficult it is to be that person. There is a point in this story where every time Lucia does something Manny cannot understand, he blames her illness, never thinking that maybe he is not innocent in how their relationship evolves (cheating on her when she just had their baby, not understanding why she wants to work when they move to his family in Ecuador, and so on and so forth). Miranda does the same to a lesser extent: in her desire to protect her kid sister she loses sight of the fact that Lucia is still a grown-up who is allowed to make decisions her older sister would not make. She also hopes that just by making sure her sister takes her pills that the situation will be under control, simplifying the complex situation to a dangerous extent.

There are no easy answers in this book, nobody is wholly innocent in how events unfold (except for Lucia's and Manny's daughter, obviously), but the characters stay sympathetic throughout, they were believable in their growth and their failures, and absolutely worth spending time with.

First sentences: "A summer day in New Jersey. A house with a yard. The younger one, four, likes to fold her body over the seat of her swing, observe the world from upside down."

At first, I thought this was going to be an immigrant novel, and it kind of is, but that's more of a background element. Lucy/Lucia moves with her single Chinese pregnant mother to the United States as a young girl. But the story quickly jumps to her adolescence and her first mental disorders surfacing and requiring hospitalization. Her sister tries to help, and the sister relationship is a thread throughout the novel. What if your sister was the only person who knew your medical secrets but lives far away with her own life?

I feel like the author did an interesting thing here. The point of view changes so sometimes the pov is from Lucia, sometimes when she is lucid, but also when she isn't. And the moments that really stuck out to me were those where I was seeing the world from her perspective and her decisions seemed valid, and then it switches to an outsider and you realize that she is acting paranoid, delusional, potentially harmful to her child. It was quite the reminder that for a person suffering from mental illness, it's not that easy for them to see what others see, or to fully understand they need help or medication. I thought it was very effective.

Lucy's second husband is Manny, an undocumented Ecuadorian, and along the way I realized that there are no white people in this novel, pretty awesome. Lucy had spent time in Latin America and at one point they move back there with their child, and I thought that was an unfairly challenging environment for her mental health but adds another interesting twist to the story.

What stood out for me was the prose, I really enjoyed Lee's lyrical writing style. Everything else was just okay. The development, plot, arc... I thought would have benefited from a different structure and execution.

Family is a beautiful and complicated tangle. It is especially knotty for Miranda and Lucia. Their bond is strong, but it is tested severely. The death of their mother marks the beginning of the most difficult test of their relationship. Lucia begins to hear voices. As she unravels, so do they. The novel follows the sisters' trials and triumphs in love and careers and life. The men they love and who love them are fully developed characters who add tremendously to the novel.
What I loved most in the story, was also what I found the most painful. Miranda's steadfastness, her drive to help Lucia was gorgeous and heartbreaking. Everything Here is Beautiful was not always easy to read, but it was worth the effort.

This book is a truly heartbreaking, realistic, and raw look at the effect mental illness can have on a family. The author pulls no punches in her descriptions of how mental illness takes hold of someone bright and beautiful and hopeful and shreds her. The multiple voices that tell the story offer honest and varied responses to the way each life is irrevocably altered by the choices the main character makes. A brave and unflinching book.