"Thin Places" by Jordan Kisner is a poignant and thought-provoking collection of essays exploring the intersections of spirituality, mortality, and the human experience. The author's writing style is evocative and lyrical, drawing the reader into each subject with ease. The essays are both personal and universal, touching on themes of loss, hope, and the search for meaning in life. If you're looking for a book that will challenge your perspective and leave you with a sense of peace and understanding, "Thin Places" is a must-read. I highly recommend this book to anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the human experience.

As a recovering Evangelical myself, this book of essays hit home for me in so many ways. Through the examination of all of the different gods we learn to worship while growing up (Jesus, Escalades, football, the hierarchy of teenage girls), and the exploration of the onset of her obsessive-compulsive disorder diagnoses, Kisner mixes her gorgeous prose in with culturally (and personally) relevant topics in a way that does not disappoint.

Thank you to Netgalley and FSG for advanced access to this title!

In Thin Places, Kisner presents a collection of personal musings and reported pieces that burrow into foxholes that may best be understood as worlds within worlds, like a Shaker community, a hyper-sensory media installation, and a morgue.

For Kisner, the universe seems chock full with places both internal and external that, depending on our approach to them, render us frighteningly claustrophobic or as free as we could dream of being. We are the frogs in the science experiment who do not realize the water is incrementally warming and will eventually boil us to death, or we are the goldfish in the bowl with no sense of what water is at all — it’s simply what is.

In both cases, we are contained. In one, our environment will end us. In the other, we thrive, or at least we believe we do.

In the wake of a pandemic, what I find most prescient in Kisner’s book is this: she does not recommend interjecting oneself into thin places as a recipe for self-help or as the cure for all that ails you. She seems simply to have looked up and decided to notice, to pay attention to the fact that there are ways to live that implicitly reject the notion that stillness could be found in a hectic world, and why would we want to find it anyway? The chaos is the thing.

But Kisner offers something else. “If you conceive of the mind as a thing that has dimensionality,” Kisner writes, “something that when you close your eyes seems to stretch up and behind and beyond you, then it is easy to imagine the mind as a place that one can move about in, and that this movement can be directional or aimless, wandering or purposeful.”

Jordan Kisner’s Thin Places is an collection of essays built around a theme: surprising unity in the face of seeming difference. Although many of the essays are quite interesting, the theme sometimes seems forced and the essays don’t quite coalesce to form a whole. The author uses a fairly pedestrian writing style that left this reader feeling disinterested in the author’s personal story which forms the backbone of the book.

I could have gone without the first to essays, but out of 13,This collection was very open minded and I appreciate that from the author. I really enjoyed 10 out of 13 essays not bad for a debut. Over all this was a 3.5 out 5. thank you, Farrar, Straus and Giroux for this gifted copy.

3.5 stars

I have so many conflicting feelings about this essay collection. Kisner writes beautifully but she also is prone to longwindedness and trying to pack too many disparate subjects into a single essay. I found loved the earliest essays that were the most distinctly focused on religion and spirituality (albeit a very Christianized understanding of such and it is dishonest of the blurb to claim otherwise). In the middle I started to get absolutely frustrated and bored and annoyed. I set the book down for weeks and came back finally to finish it and enjoyed a few essays only to hit another of the long rambling ones and feel frustrated again.

One example of what frustrated me, in the last essay- Backward Miracle- she somehow talks about tattoos and queerness and stumbles off into a very long tale of the first tattooed white woman and then suddenly she’s back to queerness again, her own queerness, and by then I had honestly forgotten that that had been where the essay had begun. It’s maddeningly difficult to follow some of these because of the long asides and often because there are many (the middle essay BLANK was the absolute worst at this).

I had some caveats with the “spirituality” pieces as well, since Kisner was a religious studies major but appears to have never recognized the way Christian hegemony dominants her understanding. This isn’t necessarily a problem but that the publisher blurbed this as being about spirituality and Kisner herself makes some minor attempts to venture outside of Christianity- it fails. And this is true of many attempts in this country to be ecumenical but oof there is a small part about Judaism that absolutely baffled me and made no sense at all. I’ll spare the long and frustrated diatribe I wrote about this section as it’s such a small part of the book but if you mention Judaism in a way that makes no sense to a Jewish reader, well, I had to question how accurate other parts were. Especially for someone who majored in religion.

Perhaps that was another one of the issues with this collection. Kisner reaches too far at times and loses her point entirely or ends up out of her depth. These essays could’ve benefited from being tightened up and edited further. Pretty or talented writing aside, I’m not a fan of indulging in that if the point or thesis statement of the essay is lost entirely. I truly found it maddening at points to read.

I really struggle to know what else to say or how to rate this. I took copious notes and almost had to in order to keep up with what was going on at times. But I read and love essay collections and they should not require this much work. There are gems within both the collection as a whole and even within some of the longer messier pieces. I would say maybe that Kisner’s style is not for me but I’m often guilty of being similarly longwinded and lapsing into asides as well and this is just not something you maintain in a final draft. I shouldn’t be reading an essay and complete forget what the point was or that oh wait we are talking about the authors queerness but I forgot because we lapsed into page after page about a woman captured and tattooed by an indigenous tribe and rambled off into her history and motivations. I’m not completely dense. I know that the overarching essay was actually about tattoos but it went in so many directions I was frustrated. That’s not to say even that these asides themselves weren’t interesting, often they were, maybe even too much so which is how I lost track of what came before them. Unfortunately this happened again and again and is not a pleasant reading experience, in my opinion.

All that said, I would read Kisner again but I think I prefer her in smaller doses. This collection felt very all over the place at times and was simply too much.

This is an excellent collection of essays about “thin places”—where boundaries are thin, where things are in flux, where you don’t feel settled. What a fascinating and relatable concept! Kisner gracefully covers everything from borders and history to religion and OCD, humbly searching for flares of happiness. Each piece is extraordinary, but my favorites were “Thin Places,” “Big Empty,” “A Theory of Immortality,” “Habitus,” and “The Other City.” I definitely want a copy of this when it comes out. Thanks, FSG and NetGalley, for the ARC.

DNF (did not finish) at 35%. Unfortunately this collection was not exactly what I expected it to be, and I found myself fairly uninterested while reading the essays that I did finish. I didn't realize the collection focused so heavily on religion, which caught me off guard to say the least. In all fairness, I'm not entirely sure what I expected Thin Places to be, all I know is that I wasn't jiving with it. The writing is beautiful, but I wasn't able to follow a lot of what was being said, which is most likely a case of "it was me, not the book." If you like lyrical yet real writing about religion, then you'll probably like Thin Places- I unfortunately don't, which is why I'm DNF'ing it.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me an advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review!

As a big fan of essay collections, I was excited to pick this up despite not being familiar with the author. The writing in this collection is calm, quiet, and often lyrical. Kisner takes on multiple thought-provoking topics related to philosophy, religion, and modern culture. The pacing of the collection was well done, with shorter pieces mixed in amongst longer, more engrossing essays.

A wonderful read if you enjoy essay collections, non-fiction, or long form articles!

In her debut collection of essays, Jordan Kisner ponders identity and spirituality in modern-day America - reading this as a European, I can say that many of these texts capture those cultural aspects of the U.S. that seem particularly foreign to us, especially when it comes to religious attitudes and mores like debutante balls. All of the 13 essays somehow negotiate the relationship between inside and outside and the questions whether these borders are permeable. Relating to that, the title-giving text states: "In thin places, the (Celtic) folklore goes, the barrier between the physical and the spiritual world wears thin and becomes porous. (...) Distinctions between you and not-you, real and unreal, worldly and otherworldly, fall way."

Kisner's essays combine reportage, memoir and factual reasoning. Often associative and re-constructing ways of thinking, the meandering texts tend to take their readers to unexpected places, drawing connections between the immigrant experience and coming out as queer, beach parties and church services, or mommy bloggers and activism against Trump. If you want to get an idea about Kisner's writing you can check out "Jesus Raves , which won a Pushcart Prize in 2016, or "Thin Places", which was selected for The Best American Essays 2016.

An interesting collection, but over the length of the book, Kisner didn't always hold my attention - I felt like some texts were lacking urgency.

A varied very interesting book of essays from religion to morgues to Mormon mommy bloggers.very personal very real.#netgalley#fsg

I really enjoyed this essay collection-- Especially the section on the medical coroner shortage. Very interesting and compelling read!

Thin Places by Jordan Kisner is a series of essays exploring diverse topics such as the author’s wrestling with her Christian faith, experiencing postmodern popup churches in Montauk, talking with Mormon mommy bloggers, and facing her own morbidity in the morgue when doing a story on forensic pathologists. Kisner is able to take an apparently mundane topic and dig into it like an archaeologist, searching for deeper truths. Sometimes she finds it; sometimes she doesn’t. If you’re into nonfiction and longform essays, this is the book for you.

The essays were mostly very personal in regards to life's meaning, religious topics, and being bisexual. I was looking forward to reading this one, but most of the essays did not stand out to me. There was one essay in particular that I very much enjoyed, which was about a coroner's office and details the daily happening's of a coroner.

I don’t read essays as a rule. I’m not sure why and going by how much I enjoyed this one, that rule really needs to change. But that’s just to say that this collection didn’t have an immediate attraction to me, outside of the fact that one of the essays was about OCD. That immediately interested me. But the thing is, it doesn’t matter how you come to the book sometimes, it only matters that you get there and I am so very glad I came to this book, because it was absolutely terrific. Thin Places are places in the world where the realities can bleed into each other, liminal and uncertain, complex, label defying layers that comprise so much of life. And Jordan Kisner makes for a superb guide to those places. She writes about faith, love, language in such a clever way, interspersing observational and personal perspectives. I suppose that’s the beauty of essay as a form, it allows for such infusions of personality, wherein journalism alone is valued for its detached objectivity. I’m not sure I appreciated that fact before now. But because essays are such personal beasts, the crux of their appeal hinges on the author and in this case, it works out perfectly. I’ve never read or heard of the author prior to grabbing this book off of Netgalley, so there were no expectations and had there been any, that would have still be blown right out of the water, because Kisner is just such a great writer, an absolutely awesome (yeah, awe inspiring) combination of stunning emotional intelligence, eruditeness and command of language. The best way I can describe this reading experience is…it was like having a conversation ( albeit format restricted one sided version thereof) with a smart well spoken person who told you the best, most interesting stories about all the things you found interesting. The range of these stories alone…from Mormon women uniting in their efforts to promote ethical (which is to say not the current one) government to Shakers to yes, that OCD one is notable. The way Kisner writes about things, putting them in historical and political context, drawing on facts and personal experiences…it’s so compelling. And she manages to give going on tangents a good name too, I absolutely loved the way the author veers off into a personal experience and then get right back to the main subject without skipping a single step, perfectly seamless connections between the author and their stories. And never not interesting, not for a moment. You can’t wait to see what she says next. It’s such a pleasure as a reader to be this engaged with, this excited by a book. Frankly, by a mind. Made me an instant fan. If all one sided conversations were this good, I’d pass on dialogue altogether. Loved this book and I can only hope it finds the wide readership it deserves. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley.

This blurb sounded very interesting to me, but the author’s tone and style just didn’t keep my interest. I did not finish this one.