Consisting of 13 stories, A Manual For How To Love Us brought me into a gloomy and evocative womanhood theme that thoroughly explored on loss and grief, and the bizarreness of how loneliness and distress could sneak into one’s life in the brink of their trauma, desperation and sorrow.

Having only averagely rated most of the stories, I can’t help to still being invested on the author’s way in delivering her prose as I find her mellow almost mundane and depressing writing to be quite charming and inviting despite my underwhelming feeling towards most of her plot executions. Loving the intricacies of its characterization; mysteriously complex yet so appealingly crafted. I fancy how the characters sharing their musings, backstories and anxieties as well hauntingly narrated and captured the unflinching emotional pains that they endured.

“…my nerves were so raw with melancholy that I could almost feel them sizzling and curling up under my skin…”

“He was mine, too, in a way: But I did go on existing after he left, and carrying our story alone turned me feral with grief.”

Few stories that I personally enjoyed— Nest (a girl losing her dad due to a drowning incident and think his ghost has inhabited a knot in her hair), We Were Wolves (twisted characters with a wild mystified premise), The Box (a relationship stress, of solitude and emotional burdens told in a unique metaphorical narrative), Watching Boys Do Things (a girl work as a silent gazer at a fraternity house and started questioning the purpose of one’s existence) and Instructions For Assembly (tragic loss in a family with an impact of domestic violence and emotional abuse).

Not really a startling collection to me overall but I appreciate the central theme of it and how each observed a vast perspective and interpretation to one’s selfhood; on inner conflicts and self-fragility that specifically told through a woman’s voice. 3.5 stars to this!

Thank you Times Reads for the gifted review copy!