Sorrow and Bliss is a fresh romance novel. In some ways, it's the opposite of a romance novel. The story centers on Martha, who is dealing with a mental illness, and her love interest, a family friend named Patrick. You follow the two as their lives intertwine and as Martha's mental health stabilizes and deteriorates.

The characters and their situations are extremely-- and heartbreakingly-- relatable. Sorrow and Bliss is probably one of the most realistic depictions of mental health and illness that I have encountered in a long time. Often, mental illness is treated as a small bump in the road on the way to a triumphant outcome for the character. Sorrow and Bliss shows how all-encompassing and inconsistent mental illness can be. One note is that I found it an odd choice that the author never revealed the mental illness, instead choosing to use blanks in its place. It didn't bother me, but I wanted to know why she chose to do that.

Overall, I highly recommend Sorrow and Bliss. It is a romance novel that truly fits into our time.

This was a raw, honest look at mental illness that I won't soon forget. This book left me speechless even though I flew through it.
Honestly.
Martha was so relatable and lovable and I want to be her friend. My husband has PTSD and my brother in law suffers from bipolar disorder so I am all too familiar with mental health and this book just was so real.
Such a rich book that I will be telling everyone about.

Thanks to Netgalley for my advanced ebook copy.

Perfect chick lit weekend kinda read. It’s a fast moving book with well developed story and characters. A weekend fun read for sure.

Such a beautiful story of Martha and Patrick, of love and hate, of mental health and illness. I loved reading this tale, and had trouble putting the book down. Martha struggles with some sort of emotional illness and numerous treatments. She experiences an unhappy relationship with her quirky mother, but loves her sister, and finds love and fulfillment in her sister's growing family. Patrick grows up essentially an orphan. Their lives entwine into a dynamic, difficult marriage. Martha ultimately finds a true diagnosis and effective treatment, but her marriage to Patrick is damaged. The book has an almost satisfying ending - the reader is left to guess the ultimate outcome.

Meg Mason has a gift for writing a compelling emotional story. I only wish she had made up a name for Martha's illness, rather that just referring to it as ___.

I recommend Sorrow and Bliss to female readers, especially those of us who suffer from emotional illness from time to time.

Thanks to NegGalley for allowing me to read this book.

I'm still absorbing Sorrow & Bliss after devouring it in one sitting but it's easily one of the best books I have read this year (and thanks to quarantine the list is now approaching 100). Martha's relationships with her family and husband are well developed and rich. The quirks each relationship has cements their presence in your brain immediately. No relationship or character is a ploy or a plot device and the characters are what make this book so exquisite.

Martha is a complex character and like the best kinds of complicated characters in literature, at times I was rolling my eyes at her antics, frustrated by her interactions with almost every character in the book, and heartbroken over something or other at almost every other page. The book is lengthy but it never felt long to me; every interaction felt very necessary to the development of Martha as a character and her eventual diagnosis (which is never explicitly named but I actually quite like that decision). Martha's wit and level of candor, even when the situation is decidedly not funny (in fact especially when the situation is not funny) does ring reminiscent of Fleabag and I'm sure comparisons will be made but the voice is singularly fresh and unique.

Initially I struggled with the structure a bit, especially the style and length of sentences but at the end of the book I understood all of those choices and it made me want to read the book all over again, to read it with new eyes. It has left me with so much to think about and a lot of hope, which is something we could all use right now. Many thanks to Harper & Netgalley for the ARC.

This was a very interesting novel. The premise of the book, narrative voice, and particular characters all feel unique and well fleshed out; no caricatures or tropes here. The writer is clearly talented. I admire that the book takes on mental health in such a thorough way, and doesn't fall into the too easy traps we often find in media (ie: symptoms are not just being "sad" or sleeping too much, etc). That said, I found the book to have a very long middle (when we're in the throes of the narrator's undiagnosed illness), and actually wished the reveal of her illness (which is, curiously, never named) and the fallout of her marriage and life came earlier. The ending of the book was one of the most interesting parts to me, because it felt so unique. I would have liked to see more of what came after, as I also think that is the harder stuff to deal with--an unaware narrator is tough to swallow, after some time, and I struggled to find our narrator likable, even though I did pity her. I found her lack of empathy for others difficult and wished the character arc for her realizations had come sooner. That said, I'm sure plenty of people will love this book and connect to it, and I do still think it's worth reading.