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marywahlmeierbracciano's review
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
5.0
Samantha Hunt’s The Unwritten Book is like nothing I’ve read before, although it did at times bring to mind Heather Christle’s The Crying Book, another genre-defying, death-adjacent meditation. Here, Hunt explores mortality and connection while investigating an unfinished manuscript left behind by her long-dead father, a recovering alcoholic. Between lyrical essays, she annotates her father’s words with curiosity and family history, with fascinating and often humorous “see also”s, guided by Joseph T. Shipley’s Dictionary of Word Origins, which she found among her father’s belongings. This book is full of the unexpected, full of dreams, of flight, of possibility.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Cancer, Death of parent, and Alcoholism
Minor: Murder, Sexism, Child death, Grief, Gun violence, Pregnancy, Medical content, Confinement, Forced institutionalization, Pedophilia, Rape, and Suicide
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