Everything You Ever Wanted: A Florence Welch Between Two Books Pick

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Her fellow Nyxians are a rootless generation of Ravs and Abbys, Stellas and Yukos, whose shifting, transnational accents mirror the shifting, transnational lifestyles they led before. Mona was born when Iris was 15 – “too old to be her friend, too young to appreciate babies, too busy counting the years till university when she could finally leave home”. It is about what finally breaks us; what finally allow us to either connect or disconnect with people.

The novel’s short chapters and frequent paragraph breaks made this a great book to pick up and put down during a busy schedule.

We, as readers, get to experience Iris' first few days on Nyx and all her fresh excitment and optimism for her new life. Despite being, in some fundamental way, more damaged and, obviously, much more ruthless than Tiggy, Scarlett was smart, was funny and a clear survivor: I couldn't help rooting for her and I worried that she might get, eventually, sacrificed on the way to Tiggy's happiness in 'normal' life, away from strip clubs, punters and prostitutes. This deeply personal and supportive series offers listeners an honest and relatable insight into how some the UK's best-known celebrities have coped with mental health difficulties, ranging from OCD to insomnia, addiction to grief, and depression to anxiety. I realize this now that after reading it was advertised more so as realistic fiction, so I guess that's my fault. Then, one day Iris hears about a new reality TV programme, Life on Nyx, a chance to start again on a new planet with no social media, no work pressures and no anxieties over your appearance.

As a premise, it’s straight out of the Black Mirror playbook and there are shades of Charlie Brooker’s creation both in the way in which Sauma dissects Iris’s growing plight and in the cool, biting prose with which she lays out the emptiness of her previous life in London, working for “a creative agency with outposts in New York and Amsterdam”. She has framed the novel as a millennial tale, defined by social media and hashtags, cynical references to veganism, yoga, and other trends. Her first novel, Flesh and Bone and Water, received widespread critical acclaim and she was listed by the Telegraph as one of their 'ones to watch' for 2017. I really hoped that Sara Shepard explored the grief part more in depth since it was hinted at towards the end. Imagine having three life-coaches who had been through the toughest mental and physical challenges; a crack team of problem-solvers who knew in their day job that one mistake could be the difference between life - and death.Scarlett's arrival at Tiggy's flat and her grand plan nearing completion start the fast plot of the novel moving, but it's the contrast and the dynamic of the relationship between the girls which truly powers Everything You Ever Wanted. I guess I was looking for a complicated plot when it became apparent to me that I was looking for something that was not there; the plot was simple. It offers a very clear and stark comparasion for the reader between what Iris had and what she so desired. The people of Japan believe that everyone has an ikigai - a reason for being; the thing that gets you out of bed each morning.

Suddenly, there comes news of a wormhole that has opened up in the Pacific Ocean which leads to a distant planet someone has named Nyx. All those conversations that should happen, but don’t; the things we are too frightened to say, the decisions we leave until it is too late. After a week-long journey “via an underwater wormhole in the Pacific”, claustrophobia grows in the sealed hub that becomes home to Iris and her fellow cast members, with a measure of tension in the question of who will be next to crack from boredom and try their luck in the unbreathable atmosphere outside. The biggest set ups of the plot never materialize into anything (Silvie never meets “the boy’s” dad, we don’t see the confrontation with Charlie and his wife after his meeting with Bronwyn, etc. In this five-part series, US happiness expert and positive psychologist Michelle Gielan and British journalist and author Oliver Burkeman explore ways to become truly happier, backed up by scientific evidence.This woman is Iris, a twenty-eight-year-old office worker in London whose job is to help brands market themselves digitally. We find her on “a beautiful new planet” whose marketing material promised “a meaningful new life; are you ready?

At the half-way point the sci-fi aspect of the novel takes the wheel and we get to see a stripped-down kind of science-fiction that doesn’t deal in technicalities. It feels jumbled, and while the open-ended elasticity of the scenario ought to be a good thing, it seems accidental, not designed – a symptom of how much is left dangling in a novel that proves more tantalising than fulfilling. After work you get so blackout drunk you can’t remember the circumstances which have led you to waking up next to your colleague. His wife, who deliberately married into this family, was trying to escape her own family but you cannot outrun yourself. In this controversial and exciting listen, Pollan explores caffeine’s power as the most-used drug in the world - and the only one we give to children (in soda pop) as a treat.I felt that the storyline was all over the place and wish it focused on one main issue instead of having a million different issues being highlighted. It didn’t go into enough detail , felt like I was guessing who each character was, and there seemed to be too many drama’s.