Eat Pray Love- Book Review

Just looking at the title of this book, you wonder to yourself, how can these 3 things- Eating, Praying, and Loving- all come together so importantly? How does this woman who is going through so many hard times, deal with it all by herself? Does she do it by herself? She must be a strong woman...
After going through an extremely hard divorce, Elizabeth is really struggling, which makes sense. You would think that she would lock herself up and grieve, but she does exactly the opposite. She travels across the country. She visits incredible places and meets incredible people. Each of these people teach her things that she will use to get her life back together and great again. She falls in and out of love, makes new “family” and forgets about the hardships that she had been faced with.
After reading this book, I can honestly say that I expected more. I loved some aspects of this book, but there were some parts where I got extremely bored of the story. While reading this book, I learned a lot about how a good memoir should be written. She used such rich and interesting details while describing her life and her story, which sometimes was really cool to read about. She would include flashbacks and zoom-ins and would use concrete details. But sometimes, it would get to the point where I would be reading about the same detail for the better part of 5 pages, which would make it hard for me to stay focused. I learned that when writing a memoir, you need to give lots of details to the story to keep it interesting, but make sure that you don’t go on and on about the same thing for too long. In my opinion, the author needed to cut out some of the details that made this story go on and on at some points.
This author had a very distinct style of writing. She uses a lot of italicizing to emphasize her internal narrative. This was something that I found really cool because throughout the book, I would get a sense of her sarcasm that she has. When she said “I was like, Back off, kid! What are you- a transcript of my most evil thoughts?”, It was as if I could hear the way that she was saying this in my head. Another example of her writing style was at many times throughout the book she would tell us the way that she talks to herself. At one point she was on a beach relaxing her mind by repeating “It’s OK. I love you. I accept you. Come into my heart now. It’s over,” to every bad thought that would come to her. I thought this was very cool because this did not come across as a sort of internal thought, but as literal things that she said out loud. This showed us how she was able to help herself through hard times, which was something that really put this whole book together and inspired me. The last thing that Elizabeth utilized immensely in her writing was dialogue. This really gave the story some depth and detail. When she was talking to her sister, the conversation went “‘Listen,’ I say, ‘be sure to call me when your plane lands safely, OK? Not to be morbid, but...’
‘I know, sweetie,’ she says. ‘I love you too.’” The way that she uses dialogue in her stories really shows us the character development and connections. This to me is one of the most critical parts of this story, because she meets so many people on her journey that all mean a lot to her, and this can really help us develop those relationships.

I would rate this book a 3 out of 5 stars, if I were rating it. This book honestly was very hard to read and stay interested in because a lot of times she would go on and on and I would get very bored. But aside from that, I enjoyed this book because of the lessons you learn from it and the things you learn about yourself. At some points, you really feel connected with Elizabeth and you start feeling like you understand her, which is such a cool feeling. I feel like this is more of an adult book, but teenagers can definitely read it too. It is a little mature at some points, but nothing that a mature teenager can’t handle.