I requested this for consideration for Book Riot's All the Books podcast for its release date. After sampling several books out this week, I decided to go with a different book for my review.

Sadly this one was a DNF for me. I am also dealing with a health condition that no doctor can figure out. So the triggers are way too much for me right now. I can’t read anything right now that causes me anxiety. But I will definitely give it another go once I am in a better state of mind.
I do appreciate the punisher giving me the opportunity to read this galley. I just didn’t realize it would trigger me so much.

🌶️ HOT TAKE: When your deepest conversations are with the ghost of a Renaissance poet, you know there's something wrong with you…it just might not be as black and white as your doctor boyfriend might think.

🧶 THE SUMMARY:
Kate has been bedridden for months with a mysterious illness. She’s barely able to get out of bed without falling into The Pit for days as a consequence. However, a chance encounter with the neighbor upstairs (who is sicker than her) begins the first hope Vita has had in months. And as she begins to open up to these new people, the past Vita’s been running from begins to come to light.

💁🏻‍♀️ MY THOUGHTS:
🔸 I went into this one blind, not remembering the blurb that had made me request this back at the beginning of the year. Imagine my surprise when all of a sudden, the author, a modern twenty-something, was talking to a poet that was a Shakespeare contemporary. 😅 This book is weird for sure, but also kind of charming.

🔸 What made this book work so well was its length. At about 200 pages, this was definitely almost novella-length and I was impressed with the depth it was able to achieve within those pages. The author handled grief and trauma in a way that felt respectful, but still hopeful. I was happy with the growth that Vita experienced, and the realism of how her story ended.

Thank you to NetGalley & J.P. Putnam's Sons for the ARC, provided in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin Group Putnam as well as the author for this ARC in exchange for my honest review.
#NetGalley #PenguinGroupPutnam #There’sNothingWrongWithHer #KateWeinberg

Title: There’s Nothing Wrong With Her
Author: Kate Weinberg
Format: eBook
Publisher: Penguin Group Putnam
Publication Date: August 6, 2024

There’s nothing wrong with her? Isn’t there??? Vita Woods has a great job and a great boyfriend. So why can’t she get out of bed, or out of ‘The Pit”. A state of semi-consciousness and exhaustion that Vita can’t seem to pull entirely out of. No one can explain what’s wrong. Not her doctor boyfriend, Max, or any other doctor for that matter. Not her sister or her goldfish, Whitney Houston. Not her friend, Luigi but that could be because he isn’t real. Something is nagging at the edges of Vita’s consciousness, but what?

This book happened. I really liked the premise but the execution didn’t flow for me. I felt that the narrative mostly involved a woman with depression who couldn’t face difficult situations and kept falling asleep. It just fell flat for me. Vita was difficult to root for, even though I could relate to some of the manifestations of her illness. I would have liked to have had some more imagery so that I could paint my own picture, at least.

The things I did like were the author’s use of “Whitney Houston”, the goldfish as a way to show Vita’s mental state and points of view. Very creative and effective. I also liked Luigi, whom I liked to think of as a ghost. He was there as a comfort as well as helping Vita understand her illness and the things that are happening to her. There were some good things in this book. The author is clearly intelligent and creative and I felt like she had a good grasp on the story she wanted to tell. This particular book just didn’t work for me.

The book follows Vita, a young woman who is struggling with an unknown chronic illness. The doctors don't know what's wrong with her and the FMC spends a lot of time in bed.

A very different book but, overall, I enjoyed it. The ending felt a bit abrupt though.

Thank you NetGalley for the digital ARC.

Vita Woods spends a lot of time in bed, in the basement apartment she shares with her boyfriend Max and her goldfish Whitney Houston. For the past few months, Vita has spent her time fighting a chronic illness that no doctor can diagnose. When they run tests on her, they can see abnormalities in her blood tests, but there are not enough markers to give her an exact diagnosis, or any kind of cure. She spends her days falling into The Pit, the place where first the pain and then the darkness envelops her.

The illness started mysteriously soon after she moved in with Max, who is also a doctor not completely able to diagnose Vita. He spends a lot of his time a the hospital, but she can sometimes hear him talking on the phone. Sometimes he talks about her, and she thinks he’s not completely certain her illness is physical. Maybe it’s just mental, is the implication. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with her. Vita knows that the pain is real, and the exhaustion that hits her in The Pit, but she can’t put a name to her illness either.

Her sister Gracie is not a fan of Max. She thinks that Vita is settling for him, making her life smaller to fit his, and tamping down her spirit of creativity and adventure. They survived many years with a tyrannical stepmother, and that bonded them in wonderful ways. But Vita hasn’t connected with her sister much since she moved in with Max, since she fell ill, and she regrets that.

With Max gone so much, Vita enjoys the quiet companionship of Whitney Houston, and one day she wakes up to the presence of someone new in her room. Luigi da Porto is a sixteenth century Italian warrior-poet who Vita first saw in a painting when she lived in Verona. Luigi was injured in battle and lost the love of his life, but he also claimed to have written Romeo and Juliet before William Shakespeare came across the story.

Luigi isn’t there all the time. He comes and goes, popping up from time to time to help Vita or raid her kitchen for snacks. They talk about life and love and Twiglets. He reminds Vita of what she was like in Verona, full of life and creativity. She tells him about her job now, producing a podcast where celebrities talk about secrets from their past. Luigi is not impressed with the podcast, but he’s very impressed with the music coming from the upstairs apartment. Vita hasn’t met her upstairs neighbors, but she heard that she was a piano teacher and she wasn’t entirely well herself..

Not long after that, Vita is laying in bed when the ceiling starts to drip on her. There is a leak in the apartment above hers. She texts Max at work, but she never hears back. Vita puts Whitney’s bowl where the leak is, to catch the drops so they don’t soak the sheets. But she knows she will have to go upstairs to tell the piano teacher about the leak. Vita makes it upstairs before the tingling in her fingers told her that she was headed for The Pit, and the darkness started to close in on her. That’s where Jesse found her.

Jesse is a young man who lives with Mr. Rothwell. He’s an old family friend, and he moved in with her to help take care of her. He’s a musician too, and he goes to fix the leak while Vita talks to Mrs. Rothwell. They get acquainted over tea, and Vita finds that Mrs. Rothwell is a compassionate listener about her mystery illness, asking questions with curiosity, not judgement or doubt. After the visit, Vita finds that talking to Mrs. Rothwell lifted her spirits, and she makes the journey upstairs when she can.

As the weeks go by, with Vita in and out of The Pit, she finds herself thinking back through her life. She thinks about Gracie, and about Luigi, and about Max, and about Whitney Houston. She builds a friendship with Mrs. Rothwell and Jesse. And she starts to realize what it is she really wants from the rest of her life. If she stays sick or gets better, she wants to be happy. And only she can decide what that will look like.

There’s Nothing Wrong with Her is a deep dive into the resilience of the human spirit. It’s about dealing with chronic illness and the toll it can take on a person and on relationships. It’s about the frustration of how little medicine can tell us about what’s going inside our bodies and minds and the self-doubt that creates. It’s about loss and grief and hope, about ow the past is with us still and the future is there to be created. It’s about everything that makes us human and connects us at our core.

This is a book that I struggled to describe but I felt in the marrow of my bones. It is about the human experience, from the pain to the anger to the ghosts to the hope. It’s about creating stories of our lives, building meaning and learning to forgive. It’s about making mistakes and staring over. Vita is so courageous in her struggles with The Pit. She is generous and smart and imperfect and fascinating. This is not an easy book to read, as there are lots of painful emotions in The Pit and outside of it, but it is genuine and compassionate and resonant with the pains we have all felt in our lives. It’s not for everyone, but if you are one of the few who will pick this book and give it a try, you will find that you are one of the lucky ones indeed.

Egalleys of There’s Nothing Wrong with Her were provided by G.P. Putnam’s Sons through NetGalley, with many thanks.

Shocker! Medical professional treat women horribly, especially when they are experiencing pain.

If I sound flippant about the focus of this book it’s because I’ve experienced so much of this and spoken to so many people who have also experienced so much of this that it doesn’t resonate much to hear about it beyond basic empathy and the “yup, that’s how it goes.”

This is a really short novel and I think appropriately so, and the writing is lovely. I remember now after reading this why Kate Weinberg‘a The Truants stood out in a sea of similarly themed Dark Academia. But I’m not sure I got much out of this aside from some empathy for the protagonist and the reminder that Weinberg is a gifted writer.

The most interesting piece of this is the protagonist’s interactions with her upstairs neighbors. The fever dream aspects of this feel real and certainly inform the characters feelings, but I find things like this to be tough to engage with meaningfully in fiction.

There’s also a lot of past trauma here (TW for sexual assault)that is tough to get through with little reward and a lot of “your doctor husband is really a jerk” that is certainly a sympathetic situation but not especially novel worthy.

Thank you NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my unbiased review. It’s taken me a while to get around to reading this one and I wanted to stop reading it so many times. It was short enough that I pushed through and skimmed through at times. I realize I do not like character driven books without any linear plot. This book was focused on one woman’s struggle with an unknown illness while she simultaneously battles what is clearly depression (this coming from a MH professional). The whole hallucination of a long dead writer was very odd and I am not sure what the point of it was.. particularly since it was such a large chunk of the book. None of the characters really felt fully developed despite being a character driven book. I was hoping for some kind of clarity as I pushed through, but I found absolutely none.

This book starts out as if we know exactly what's happening and I loathe when stories do this. I feel behind from the jump and then never quite settle enough to continue. I'm sure the story is great, but I don't like being bombarded at the beginning.

* I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley. Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for this book. All thoughts are my own.

I was initially excited by the description of this book but it was ultimately not at all for me. It centers around a woman with an unknown chronic illness who lives with her boyfriend and talks to a hallucination of a man named Luigi who supposedly actually wrote Romeo and Juliet? The story really doesn’t have much of a plot and just feels like a bad fever dream the whole time. I think it’s just supposed to be how she’s perceiving the world but it didn’t work at all for me.

I think some people can probably relate to Vita but I wouldn’t recommend this book. There’s really not much of an ending and the book is super flat.

There’s Nothing Wrong with Her was part My Year of Rest and Relaxation and part Love, Holly. Vita is a young woman who becomes ill with a chronic, undiagnosable illness shortly after moving in with her doctor boyfriend (who also cannot figure out what’s wrong with her). She lives a life stranded in a basement apartment alone but for her pet fish while her boyfriend is at work all day, most of the time crippled by pain and fatigue with no sense of time, haunted by the past, and visited by a ghost who she spends too much time conversing with. One day, she manages to drag herself upstairs to intercept a package but faints - that’s how she meets her neighbors. Jesse is a young musician who carries his own ghosts and lives with his widowed mentor Mrs. Rothwell. The three become friends, with Vita spending the afternoons in their apartment when she feels up to it. But no one can explain what’s wrong with her and she worries that life will move on without her. Exploring chronic illness, mental health, medical gaslighting, depression, anxiety and the toll of isolation, There’s Nothing Wrong with Her is a realistic look into the struggles of coping with being unwell. It’s Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation but less unhinged.

I am definitely going to be looking for more books by this author. I enjoyed this book very much and I can’t wait to recommend this to my friends! 🩷 well written and lovely to read. I could relate to this book in many ways.

I had a feeling early on that this would be a great read, and I found myself deliberately setting it aside to savor it for longer. I believe that the right books will come to you at the right time, and if you've been grappling with grief, unexplained illness, or hiding from yourself, do yourself a favor and pick up this book.

Thanks to NetGalley and Penguin Group Putnam for the eARC.

This book takes a hard look at what it is like when you wake up and realize you are barely recognizable, in a place where you don't want to be in your life. It was not always easy to get through, but I found it to be real and honest. Perhaps the ending was a bit rushed, but otherwise super good book.

There's Nothing Wrong with Her by Kate Weinberg was a really great story!
I found this to be wonderfully written with engaging characters and a thought-provoking read.

There are parts of the story I liked, the imaginary friend Luigi who tries to tell Vita about what might be making her ill or the upstairs neighbor that makes Vita leave her apartment and help cheer up an elderly woman who just lost her husband, and Vita actually enjoys this part and starts getting her unstuck.
However, the majority of the story reminds me of when I was a kid and I didn't want to go to school because kids were mean to me and I had a stomach ache. I felt that Vita was doing the same thing but her problems that she was suppressing were much more serious than mean kids and it manifested into a depression she couldn't seem to break, even with a boyfriend that was a doctor. It seems in order for Vita to move forward someone had to give her a job that was more important than her illness and allow her to explore and release the bad part of her memory that was making her ill. There are some pretty sad situations that Vita is suppressing and it made me see why she was so stuck, but the majority of the story was about Vita resisting any attempt to move forward or end a relationships that wasn't working for her, and it made it hard for me to continue to understand her situation.
. By the end of the story. Vita seems to be turning things around and figuring out that she needs to know herself first before she can be with anyone else. Whitney Houston, the goldfish seems to be an indicator about how Vita is looking at the world at the moment and also how she is treating herself and others.

I want to thank PENGUIN GROUP Putnam | G.P. Putnam's Sons and NetGalley for an advance copy of this story about suppressing ones feelings

This was a deeply imaginative look at chronic illness and depression told from the perspective of a woman who finds herself falling in and out of "The pit" - a place in her mind where she finds herself during dark times. I feel like this book won't be for everyone but if you enjoy literary fiction and relatable mental health rep, I highly recommend it. Good on audio narrated by Louiza Patikaz. Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an early digital copy in exchange for my honest review!

This hit home hard for me. It was a good read and Vita’s struggles came through on the pages. The author handles the deluge of medical information well. My only complaint would be the ending felt abrupt and not satisfying.

Vita is struggling. She has lost her way and bounces from one romantic relationship to the next like it’s a relay race. Some days she is unable to get out of bed. Her current boyfriend is a doctor that is unable to diagnose her disease. Her loyal companions are an apparition named Luigi, the original author of Romeo and Juliet, and a pet Goldfish named Whitney Houston.

It’s not until drips on her bed from the ceiling above motivates her to make her way upstairs, a daunting task, to meet her neighbors. The connections that she forms with the elderly piano teacher and her attractive male caregiver inspire Vita to climb out of her pit and deal with what has been plaguing her physically and mentally.

This was a quirky self-exploration and deep character study of a young woman finding courage and clarity in the face a debilitating anxiety and hopelessness.

It wasn't always an easy read which made it harder to get through. There are some complicated topics, but I never felt it was too uncomfortable to be enjoyable. Definitely would recommend this book for people who like to learn more about mental illness, symptoms, past trauma, etc. It was a good read for me overall!