So Much for Love: How I Survived a Toxic Relationship

This was a tough read, but a worthwhile one. Part memoir and part self-help, So Much for Love details the author's experience with an immensely toxic and emotionally/mentally abusive relationship before moving on to things she has learned in therapy and throughout her healing process, resources, and tips for readers who may suspect they, too, are in an unhealthy relationship.

While she delivers the story with a lot of brevity and candidness (and really cute art), the relationship-based bits of So Much for Love are hard to read at times. As a fellow abuse survivor, there were moments that hit way too close to home, but it was cathartic, knowing from the get-go that the author wrote this book from a perspective of someone who had escaped that terrible situation and is healing.

So many domestic abuse depictions in stories feature the beginning and the middle, but not the end - or if they do feature the end, it goes into very little detail thereafter. We see the trauma, but not its long-lasting effects or the healing process afterwards. That's not the case here: the abuse depictions only last (for the most part) until somewhere around the halfway mark, and the rest is all healing, and I loved that a lot. It was so heartwarming to read the things Sophie Lambda has learned in her time since leaving her ex, and I was so proud of her (as well as some other important figures in her story) by the end of it that I just wanted to give her a big hug. ♥

Thank you so much to the publisher for providing me with this review copy in exchange for an honest review!