User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
Update $1.99 kindle special today. — great deal!!!
Audiobook... read beautifully by the author, Suleika Jaquad
An amazing story of triumph....
....harrowing...
....loving...
....heartbreaking...
....a book that makes a difference by a woman whose contribution to others is huge...
....a GIGANTIC gift to me!!!
....articulately written with emotional truth!!!
Honestly...
....I never expected to be affected as hard as I was.
My close friend’s son died of myeloid leukemia... a year after he had married - at age 32.
I know dozens and dozens of people who have had cancer…
Many have died.
Many have lived.
So... I just didn’t expect to be THIS SHAKEN - MOVED - INSPIRED....
I was wrong ... I was all these things.
I found everything about this book valuable... worthy of reading...
... including having to reflect on things in my own life.
People who are sick might have a hard time reading this memoir. Healthy people may also have a hard time reading it..... and as hard as it was I couldn’t put it down.
Details are explicit, graphic.
But also real.
Suleika’s (gorgeous name), extraordinary story of pain, perseverance, and hope....
gripped me to the core...
shredded my guts...
I cried a half dozen times...
Crying while hiking hilly trails is risky business—
I felt like I was going to hyperventilate once - as holding ‘back’ the tears wasn’t easy either.
Parts of this book scared the shit out of me...
But it would take pages to explain why.
Other parts— about her relationship with Will, her mom, dad, friends, were compelling.
Mostly ... I just want to say that on a personal level I’ve fallen in love with this young wonderful woman —
One of the happiest moments for me in this memoir was just before Suleika needed another chemo therapy treatment....
her immune system was still weak, but she was better and strong enough to have a dog.....
Only once did Suleika play ‘the cancer card’...
it was when she desperately wanted a little runt.... whom she named Oscar.
Geee.... I cried when moments were happy too!!!
I even cried when Oscar went pee pee on the rug of Suleika’s house.
My god... it’s true that dogs are great healing medicine.
Suleika had a friend who was in the hospital at the same time when she was. The other sick cancer patients became her friends.
One day he gave Suleika a bracelet that said:
“I’m such a big fan of you”.
Me, too....
“I’m such a big fan of you, Suleika!!!”
Rating: really liked it
3.5 stars, rounded up
I had to pysch myself up to read this. Right now, depressing stories are hard to take on top of real life. Suleika is 22 years old when she’s diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia. All of a sudden, her tiredness and mouth sores aren’t just a case of anemia. It was scary to realize how many decisions had to be made in such a short time amount of time, like fertility issues, experimental trials.
It’s a dark, at times tortuous story and I will admit to having to skim certain sections just to get through them. I had to keep reminding myself that the story obviously has a happy ending as she lived to write the memoir.
The book reminds us of the importance of being surrounded by a caring community. Not just her family, but a relatively new boyfriend. How many people would have put their life so totally on hold like Will for even a week let alone much longer? It’s also a reminder of how utterly draining dealing with cancer can be, for all concerned.
This is a brutally honest account of everything Sulieka dealt with - her emotions ranged all over the map, as you would expect. When a social worker asks her to consider a 100 Day Project, she returns to writing. This provides the outlet she needs, first through her blog and then a column for The NY Times. Sulieka truly has a gift for writing. “My cancer was a junkyard dog. It may have been fenced for now, but it was mean and growling, threatening to dig under the barbed wire and escape.”
The title refers to a quote from Susan Sontag about holding dual citizenship in the land of the well and of the sick. The second half of the book discusses how she moves on from being a cancer patient, the search to find her new identity. I found this half of the book much more interesting and new. She discusses her need to move beyond the fear. She revisits folks she met on her cancer journey. It's obviously a much more uplifting tale.
My thanks to netgalley and Random House for an advance copy of this book.
Rating: really liked it
"You will never know how strong you are until being strong is the only choice you have. " - Bob Marley Right after graduating from college, Suleika Jaouad was ready to take on the world. She had moved to Paris and to purse her dream of becoming a war correspondence. Life would set her up for a different kind of battle. She began to itch. Not the little itch that we all experience from time to time but a drawn out annoying one that had her waking each day to find scratch marks on her body. It was persistent and did not go away. Then fatigue set in. After many doctor appointments, and right before her twenty third birthday, she was diagnosed with Leukemia with a 35 percent chance of survival.
"Until death, it is all life. " - Miguel de CervantesLife had changed on a dime. She moved back in with her parents, lost her job, her apartment and her ability to freely live her life. She would be in and out of the hospital, facing treatments, exhaustion, fighting for her life all the while chronicling her experiences and illness in the New York Times.
She had many who were there for her as support throughout her long battle which altered her dreams, her relationships and her life goals. Cancer not only took a toll on her body, but on her outlook but also on those in her life. She mentions in the book that "Cancer is greedy." It ravaged everything and left her to rebuild again.
"Death never comes at a good time..." When she was declared "cured" what would life look like for her? How do you move forward when those you have met and bonded with are gone? How does such a life altering illness effect your relationship?
I always find it out and often difficult to rate a memoir as I do not want to rate that person’s life and experiences but do want to rate the level of writing and my ability to relate to or learn something from their memoir. Her writing is beautiful, and I am awed by her bravery in sharing just how the cancer ravaged her body. She does not shy away from sharing the details.
Obviously, we know she survives and even thought her career goals changed, she continues to write and wrote an Emmy award winning column titled "Life Interrupted." Her wok has been featured in magazines and she has created Isolation Journals. She may not be a war correspondent, but she has made an impact in journalism.
This is a moving, thought provoking and powerful memoir.
Thank you to Random House and NetGalley who provided me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. All the thoughts and opinions are my own.
See more of my reviews at www.openbookposts.com
Rating: really liked it
Let me start this off by saying that I am not a dramatic person. With that being said, this book kinda changed my life.
Just for some background: I’m 20 years old, I was diagnosed with Myelodysplastic syndrome at the age of 7 (which is the rare pre-leukemic disease that Jaouad got before it turned into full-blown leukemia). I also almost lost my life in a battle with GVHD (Graft vs. Host Disease, which Jaouad also dealt with). I’ve luckily been living a happy and healthy life since then.
And for extra funsies: I won this book in a goodreads giveaway and knew practically nothing about it before it landed at my doorstep.
———————————————
My family and I don’t talk about the time we spent in the hospital. It was deeply traumatic for them in ways that I will (hopefully) never understand, and I respect that. A consequence of this, however, is that I knew nothing about what I had until decided to write about it for my college application essay. I didn’t even know the name of the disease until I was 17. What I was left with was a swirl of memories and feelings that were processed in my 7-year-old brain and were left essentially untouched. That is, until I read this.
I know what it feels like to have people talk about your health as if you weren’t even there. I know the frustration when you suddenly find out that you’re infertile (I found out by browsing my MyChart page my freshman year of college because no one told me). I know what the catheter feels like, and what it felt like when it was gone. Later in my life, I began to understand what Jaouad means when she writes that she realized “all the other imprints of illness with which I have yet to contend”.
Anyways, if you’re here looking for an ***actual review*** of the book and not my weirdly personal confessions, here it is:
Trauma reshapes the way we look at the world and the way we interact with the people around us, and Jaouad expertly describes the complexities of that liminal space that one exists in when going through something life-changing like cancer. If you’re someone who has gone through the death of a friend or family member, a serious diagnosis, or heartbreak, this is a book for you. If you haven’t experienced any of those things, this is also a book for you. While her specific experiences are rare, she speaks to a larger truth about finding selfhood in a constantly changing world. The stories she chooses to tell about the people she meets along the way are some of the most heartwarming and heartbreaking stories I’ve read. Not to mention, she’s fucking funny! Just read the book, ok? You won’t regret it.
Rating: really liked it
Omg!!
Thank you to Netgalley and Random House for giving me a digital copy of this book
BLOG:
https://melissa413readsalot.blogspot....
Mel 🖤🐶🐺🐾
Rating: really liked it
I thought this would be a road trip book based on the cover and description, but that's only the last third of the book or so, and it meanders once it gets to that point. Instead it was two-thirds a graphic account of what it's like to get cancer and the treatment process. It's obviously not easy to get cancer at such a sensitive time in your life, and she had a particularly difficult case, but it's hard to watch her railroad her family, and particularly her boyfriend who took up the mantle of being her primary caretaker despite barely knowing her. She deserves credit for being somewhat honest about not being perfect in these times, and obviously she was quite young, but the retelling does feel a bit... constructed, to the degree that you wonder what the realities were.
I know it's a memoir and it's her reality. Obviously the cancer ravaged her livelihood, but, she chose to also express how it ravaged her relationships. I don't love the picture that emerges there, or the example it sets, and by that I mean: Every conflict becomes about her and her ability to forgive herself for acting out over the basic needs over those around her, and not empathy for those around her and whether their needs were also valid. When she still can't get there, especially now that she has the 10,000 foot view as she's writing a book if not in the moment, that feels like the thought pattern of a self-centered asshole, frankly. I notice she did not thank Will in the acknowledgments; strange omission!
When cancer puts people so far beyond reproach, even makes people afraid of engaging with a person's less than honorable qualities, I'm not sure she's entirely holding herself accountable in her relationships. "I had cancer!" covers all manner of sins. The writing was nice.
Rating: really liked it
*Some of the scenes depicted of Suleika's sufferings were quite graphic*
Some say the world is your oyster and for Suleika Jaourd that seemed to be her future. Recent college grad, moving to Paris and a new boyfriend make for a life that seems to be unfolding before her. Then Suleika is bothered by itchiness that drove her crazy. Next came exhaustion that even six hour naps couldn't quell. A trip to the doctor confirmed this was something awful, leukemia with the chances of survival placed at 35%. The world that was bright, sunny, and destined to be wonderful, turned into one of a nightmare with three and a half years of chemotherapy, radiation, and a bone marrow transplant. She survived with the help of family, friends, and her devoted boyfriend, but it did cost her greatly.
The doctors said she was cured, but along the way she lost so much, her job, her life in Paris, her life with her devoted boyfriend, and many of the friends she had made while undergoing treatments. She suffered greatly not only from the pain of the cancer, but also the many ways her young life had turned to days of vomiting, losing her hair, exhaustion, and the many horrors of this disease.
However, Sulieka survived. She began writing a column for the NY Times, and that gave her a purpose during the life threatening times she endured. Through her writing and a blog she met many people who had lost someone, or was suffering from a deadly illness. She connected with many of them and later on in an attempt to find her way after all she had been through in a one hundred day journey across country with her dog as her sole companion,she met face to face with some of them. Sulieka felt these people enriched her life and gave it a meaning she didn't think she could recapture.
But recapture she did and she began once again on that journey called life. She found that she and others, really all of us, live between two kingdoms as we survive the ills of our lives and learn to begin once again.
Thank you to Suleika Jaourd, Random House, and NetGalley for a copy of the memoir due out February 9, 2021.
Rating: really liked it
The memoirs that I admire most open both my mind and heart.
Between Two Kingdoms does this and more. You might question, like I did, if you really want to read about a young woman's experience with cancer. But Jaouad makes her story an adventure - a beautifully written, eye-opening and perilous journey that has informed and deepened the way I view illness, recovery...and life. I loved listening to Jaouad narrate her story on the audiobook.
Rating: really liked it
The first 60% of this book focuses on the author's fight against acute myeloid leukemia. After her treatment concludes, she spends the remainder of the book documenting a 100-day solo journey across the United States. A huge theme of the book is the bifurcation of her life: the times before and after being sick. It makes sense that the book would mirror that by being divided into the story of her illness and the story of what came afterward.
For me, the dichotomy did not work and felt like two entirely different books. Her writing about her treatment was a raw and devastating depiction of cancer treatment guided by the facts of her illness. The second half of the book was an entirely self-reflective spin on Eat, Pray, Love that did not really work for me.
We've all had to reevaluate how truthful a memoir is after Oprah and A Million Little Pieces. Turning memories and journals into a narrative is a very challenging endeavor. Still, I groaned through a lot of the too-clean quips that read like fiction and a handful of completely unbelievable scenarios. For example, she claims that she convinced a guard at the Taj Mahal to help her break some essential ground rules because she is so very special. Sure, that makes for a good story, but that doesn't ring true. The author's Instagram posts from the time of illness also show a lot of things that went completely unaddressed in the book, such as multiple overseas vacations and career milestones.
For all of her self-reflection, the author seems to have a lot of blind spots, particularly around her privilege. She makes a passive comment about only being able to afford Princeton through scholarships but then describes multiple study abroad trips and unpaid/low-paying internships that require financial privilege. She barely reflects on the privilege of having health insurance or being able to get appointments at some of the best hospitals in NYC for her treatment. Money seems like a complete afterthought, and the financials of her life (particularly after her cancer) are mysterious.
It would have also been nice for her to have some self-reflection on her pattern of codependent relationships. She jumps immediately from a long-term relationship that was colored by the trauma of her illness into another without any reservations.
Rating: really liked it
Absolutely beautiful. Check out my review on Booktube!
Rating: really liked it
Part memoir and part travelogue, Between Two Kingdoms is a deeply personal book about the author's journey through her cancer treatment and the road trip she embarks on after her treatment concludes. Jaouad doesn't hold back in describing every aspect of her experience, whether it be physical, mental, or emotional. It's a must read for anyone interested in increasing their knowledge of what it's like to have cancer.
Rating: really liked it
Four Stars
Suleika Jaouad had just graduated college when she was diagnosed with leukemia. As the book begins she is ready to take on the world, bravely embarking on a new job in Paris. To her utter surprise, new boyfriend Will decides to come join her. Everything is going well except nagging in the background, this tantalizing itch that would start up her feet and move up her body. Then there was the weakness that prompted Suleika to take hours long naps. She was almost 23 when she finally received the diagnosis of leukemia, for which there was a 35% chance of recovery. She returned home to New York and her parents to focus on treatment. Then Will gave up everything and also returned from Paris, to live in Suleika's parents' house and become her primary caregiver.
The first part of the book where Suleika was fighting cancer, mostly in the hospital, was the most interesting and engaging to me. I guess you would call this the "1st kingdom" of the book. Suleika's brother essentially saved her life by providing his bone marrow. Even so, it would take time to know if the process was successful and there could be pitfalls along the way. Suleika would get disappointed when she found out that more chemotherapy treatments would be necessary after the bone marrow transplant to ensure the best odds of beating the cancer. She and Will took up residence in her parent's empty small apartment in the village where Will was her sole caregiver, even while working a full-time job. I found his dedication truly inspirational and could sympathise from personal experience with the strain such an arrangement causes.
The "2nd kingdom" of the book is after Suleika recovers from cancer. One would think after the intense, life and death struggle she's endured that making it to "the other side" would be all joy. To her surprise, she's experiencing a whole spectrum of feelings to work through that she never expected. It's as if she's another person now, and needs to find herself. While a patient in Sloan Kettering, she wrote articles about her real-time experience fighting cancer that was published as a recurring feature in the New York Times. Her resultant notoriety sparked a correspondence with other cancer warriors across the country. In a cathartic exercise, she embarked on a 100-day 15,000 mile car ride across the country to visit some of these people whom she had become close pen pals with. Being a New Yorker who relied on subways and taxis, she had only recently learned to drive. But a friend lent her his trusty Suburu and this too became a new rite of passage, learning to navigate the roads. So she packed up her dog Oscar and began her journey.
Like I alluded to earlier, I found her cancer fight in the hospital the most riveting to read. I was interested in the doctors, treatments, symptoms, etc. I also enjoyed reading about the hospital environment itself- like the other patients she encountered and the floors of the hospital she found most comforting. Suleika made close hospital friends and lost most of them to cancer along the way. This realm of the book hits you where you live, which is why I found it such an intense and moving read. I became a bit detached towards the end of the book when Suleika took her cross country trek. When she expounded on each family or person she visited, if it got too detailed I wasn't as interested. However, Suleika writes extremely well and overall this culminates in a high quality read.
Thank you to the publisher Random House for providing an advance reader copy via NetGalley.
Rating: really liked it
Between Two Kingdoms by Suleika Jaouad is a memoir about a woman’s cancer journey from diagnosis through life cancer free. Jaouad does a great job taking the reader through her cancer journey. Between Two Kingdom is the perfect mix of informative and emotional. Jaouad discusses everything she went through as well how cancer and her actions affected her loved ones. She was very open and honest. Jaouad wasn’t afraid to say things she messed up and how she should’ve done something differently. Suleika was graduating from college when she was diagnosed. The life she was planning to live changed into a life based around treatment without being able to work. Suleika has to find hobbies to fill her time that she is able to do while sick and tired from chemo. This is what got her into writing. Suleika is a strong woman and it is empowering to read her journey. Learning about Suleika’s cancer journey was very interesting but my favorite part of the book was her describing entering back into a cancer free world. I feel like this is something that isn’t discussed and is something I never would’ve thought of. Suleika goes on a roadtrip meeting other survivors and discusses their experiences. I highly recommend Between Two Kingdoms for anyone that is interested in learning about a strong woman’s cancer journey and learning to live without cancer.
Thank you Random House and NetGalley for Between Two Kingdoms.
Full Review: https://justreadingjess.wordpress.com...
Rating: really liked it
02/09/2021: HAPPY PUB DAY! So excited to have this out in the world. I decided to reimagine my survival as a creative act.
A book such as this one deserves no less than 5 stars.Grit, jubilance, pain, terror, ingenuity, heartbreak, and resilience—all are conveyed through Suleika Jaouad’s vibrant, compelling prose. This memoir delves into some of the heaviest topics a person will ever grapple with in their life, and then some.
When Suleika Jaouad was twenty-two, she began experiencing inexplicable symptoms. It started as an itchiness that spreads throughout her entire body, then morphed into bone-deep fatigue. Sores erupted in her mouth; she lost weight as quickly as she lost the motivation to attend her job as a paralegal in Paris. When the diagnosis arrived—a rare and aggressive form of leukaemia—Jaouad’s life was entirely, irrevocably derailed.
Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick,” Susan Sontag wrote in Illness as Metaphor. “Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”
In the subsequent years, she undergoes numerous bouts of chemotherapy that ravage her as much as the cancer, seeping into every aspect of her life: her body; her relationships with friends, partners, and family; her once boundless aspirations to become a writer or foreign correspondent; her understanding of grief, mortality, and what it means to be
present. She eventually embarks on a 100-day road trip across the U.S. to visit several key individuals who supported her throughout the seemingly insurmountable trials and years of being a cancer patient.
The tangling of so much cruelty and beauty has made of my life a strange, discordant landscape. It has left me with an awareness that haunts the edges of my vision—it can all be lost in a moment—but it’s also given me a jeweler’s eye.
Jaouad’s narrative voice hits all the right notes to keep you reading. In fact,
the resonance of her words is such that I promise there is something to ensnare every reader, regardless of who you are. You do not have to be a young adult battling cancer, a child of immigrants, a woman with incredible grit, to understand, empathize, or find meaning. Importantly, this resonance does not, as Jaouad writes, “reduc[e] your suffering to sameness.”
As a person with a chronic health condition, I understood her frustrations with the medical system, the ways in which they failed her—neglecting to tell her that chemo might leave her infertile, for example. As a reader, I was utterly drawn into her storytelling, which invites us to be braver and more imaginative than ever before without ever requiring us to “find the silver lining.” And as an aspiring 23yo writer, I loved reading how she, an unpublished 23yo, pitched and was granted a weekly column with The New York Times;
Cancer had made me brazen, she writes. The accompanying video series that she proposed and filmed for this column went on to win an Emmy.
To learn to swim in the ocean of not-knowing—this is my constant work.
Bottom line: Within these pages, I was simultaneously filled with Jaouad’s fear and her fire.
Between Two Kingdoms is not only marvellous storytelling, it is also one woman’s struggle to make sense of a world that seems impossibly, devastatingly uncertain—and in the process, pares humanity down to its most compelling and compassionate core.
Many thanks to NetGalley and Random House for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Rating: really liked it
Between Two Kingdoms is the fabulously well written memoir of Suleika Jaouad. Some readers may recognise her name from her
Life, Interrupted column which was syndicated in numerous newspapers and magazines across America. This was a captivating book, both devastating and uplifting in equal measures. Devastating because it tells of her cancer diagnosis at just 22 years of age, of the toll this disease took not just on her life but on the lives of her family, friends and the ways it negatively impacted a beautiful relationship. Uplifting because despite all of those things she was a survivor struggling to pick up where life left off. When she was beginning to succumb to depression she instead dusted herself off and regained control of her life and took steps to actively re-engage in life and to live it in a more positive manner.
There are not too many people whose lives are untouched in some way by cancer. Not necessarily themselves but perhaps a work colleague, friend or family member. It's a torturous ordeal for the patient and stressful for loved ones. Suleika's story makes that blindingly obvious and highly relateable. The suffering is not only physical though that's dreadful enough. It's also pyschologically damaging, particularly when you're only 22 and continuously having near death experiences. Suleika speaks openly and eloquently about her sense of loss, her resentment and the envy she felt towards those still living their lives and moving forward. She writes of anger, of pain and of fear. She admits to huge bouts of guilt at the financial burden she placed upon her parents on one hand and the pressure upon her brother to become a bone marrow donor on the other. She made clear just how sad it was to make beautiful new friendships with other young cancer patients only to lose them and to then have to arrange their memorials. Each one of those factors made it hard to read Suleika's story.
Possibly even more than all of those things I was saddened about the way the disease wreaked havoc on the beautiful relationship between Suleika and her boyfriend Will. Suleika wrote with honesty and tenderness about the way Will took on the carer role and the sacrifices he made in his own life, the toll it took on him personally and professionally, and eventually the ways and reasons their relationship failed. Though she was resentful and had clearly been angry, she eventually worked through her feelings and though she still loved him she was adult enough to acknowledge the ways she had been responsible for the ultimate failure of that relationship. Her book had the feel of an ode to Will wrapped in an apology of sorts.
Post disease, not only was Suleika a new person in the sense of her changed DNA (thanks to her bone marrow transplant) but she needed to make a new life for herself, to figure out who she was now, what was important to her and how she could live within the physical limitations of her body. Instead of remaining mired in the difficulties of living, of dwelling on how life was not what she hoped and planned it to be, now that she had technically survived, Suleika forced herself to make some changes. In this spirit she embarked upon a 100 day roadtrip taking in 33 states meeting up with twenty of the people (strangers) whose words and thoughts helped sustain her during her cancer battle. This was inspiring and showed the true grit Suleika had demonstrated throughout her illness.
I cannot be more thankful to Jess from Penguin Random House for the invitation to read this tremendously moving memoir. Thank you too to NetGalley for making this possible. Finally my congratulations and thanks to Suleika for sharing her inspiring story. I wish her every happiness for her future and decades of good health to follow.
