Author: John Lagos, Alan Swyer, Belkis Slama, Mark Payne, Dianne Lowe-Breakfield, Libay Linsangan, Anea De Guzman, Dann Barbare, Scott Bell, Diamante Lavendar, and Cristina Vega
Publisher: Dreaming Big Publications
Reviewed by: Michaela G.
About the Book
This collection of poetry, memoirs and stories of short fiction presents to the reader such themes as depression, suicide, hopelessness, grief, loss, love, mental illness, and abuse both emotional and physical experienced by the writers or someone close to them. This collection serves to demonstrate that hiding behind shame or fear rather than sharing emotional pain as the authors in these works do is tantamount to “putting on a mask” or “wearing a person suit.” It is pretending. It is a state of existing but not truly living life to the fullest. The 11 authors featured in this collection have taken off their “person suit,” exposed their true selves to the world so that others may find their own voice and the courage to speak about mental illness and abuse of any kind.
My Review
Rating: 3
The collection of poetry, memoirs, and short stories of fiction bring light to mental disorders or mental illness to the face of the readers. It brings up topics of physical, sexual and even emotional abuse, as well illnesses like PTSD and Depression. I commend the authors and poets that contributed to the making of this collection for showing the realities that many people in the world face but, the world chooses to ignore. The mesh of poetry introducing topics and ending the collection with the collection of stores and memoirs in the middle seemed a great way to frame and organize the collections. However, there were a few things that were bothersome as a lot of the stories were underdeveloped. The stories needed more character development as I did not understand the motives of the characters, what they sound like, what were they thinking, most of the times it was not descriptive enough. Sentences of description would often be, he did this and not describing what is actually happening. At times it was also very confusing and seemed rushed to finish taking away the experience to really enjoy and understand how mental illness and abuse are present. It is a very promising book and has great stories and other stories that have potential that can be expanded more.
About The Author
Consists of 11 authors, John Lagos, Alan Swyer, Belkis Slama, Mark Payne, Dianne Lowe-Breakfield, Libay Linsangan, Anea De Guzman, Dann Barbare, Scott Bell, Diamante Lavendar, and Cristina Vega that came together to write a collection of poetry, memoirs, and short stories.
Person Suit link : https://www.amazon.com/Person-Suit-Anthology-Mental-Illness/dp/1514261405/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8