IMO Mari Andrew can do no wrong. She is an extremely talented writer and artist. I love everything that she puts out.

Mari Andrew (Am I There Yet?) doesn't care for "emotional binaries: the idea that you're either happy or sad, positive or negative." Through encouraging essays and vibrant watercolor-and-handwriting illustrations, she posits that our cultural obsession with staying positive and choosing happiness is failing us, preventing humanity at large to recognize the beauty in trials, challenges, frustrations and even failures. "I want the full menu," Andrew writes in the introduction to My Inner Sky, "everything available to me in this life: dark, bright, purply-pink weird twilight color, and golden."

A list of things that make New York magical; paralysis in a Spanish hospital; what French winemaking can teach us about creativity; a dance party on the streets of Rio; a flight full of paper hearts on the way to her father's funeral. These moments make up not just Andrew's book, but her life, moments in which she finds lessons on beauty and awareness, hope and reflection, healing and humanity. She recalls her disappointment in those who failed "to engage in the world as sensuously as I hope" as she urges readers not to fail in the same spectacular way. The world, she writes, is full of "people with whom I have very little in common, except my entire humanity." How could one read such a sentiment and not see their own connection to humanity? This is the gift that My Inner Sky offers readers, a much-needed balm against the disconnection we hear so often lamented, a reminder that magic is all around us, if only we remember to notice it.

This book was lovely and honest. It didn't pull me in like some memoirs do but it was worth a read. I am looking forward to seeing the hard copy to enjoy the art work.

I've been following this author's instagram doodles for years, so I was excited to see this book. It did not really work for me. I do applaud that she wrote lucidly about going through something very difficult, an intense illness while traveling alone. Some of the ways she wrote about that were very valuable. It's good to read about people dealing with illness who aren't always brave and dignified and suffering nobly.

But much of the rest of it read like some warmed over self help, which I don't love, or just very privileged travel writing. There a sentimental, romantic streak in the author that I enjoy in instagram format but ends up being a little grating in longer form writing. Like many writers, she's at her best when things are very specific and closely observed. The best part of her book was relating lovely things seen in NY, which I'd seen before on instagram.