Thank you Bloomsbury and NetGalley for this ARC. I am new to short stories and wonder what I. Have now been missing out on.
I loved the observations and thought bombs throughout this book. It was lovely to have something to pick up and read here and there throughout my day. I will be looking out for more from this author,

Can You Tolerate This? by Ashleigh Young is an uneven collection of personal essays on a variety of different topics.

This collection of personal essays is such a mixed bag. I really connected with about half of them, but found it took me a while to warm to the meandering writing style, trying to figure out where a tangent was going and if we'd ever make it back to where we had veered off from. I think the stronger essays were in the later half of the collection, and I really enjoyed the honesty and introspection of them. There were often sentences that I wanted to read more than once because of their stand out lyricism, but then there were whole essays that I just didn't get. I did like the format though - rather than a straight up memoir Young has curated tales of oddities and studies of the mundane to make a collection that really makes her stand out as a person and as a writer. I just thought that it could have been a bit more refined, though judging from other reviews there are those who loved the bits I didn't so maybe there is something in here for everyone.

It is a long time since I read a book of essays, reading this made me realise that I have been missing out and that I should do far more reading of shorter forms of writing. Ashleigh Young writes the most beautiful sentences, they are deceptively simple. She draws you in and had me reading story after story, although they aren't really stories they are musings and wonderings and reflections. She examines her family and her past. Musings on her childhood anxieties and siblings are so personal and thoughtful that I became very invested in her life, I think because there was a lot of familiarity there. I recognised places but also the feelings she has as life in her household is described.

My favourite though was her musing on yoga. Her descriptions of the feelings of examining the feelings of the stretches and the introspection that yoga brings. Bikram yoga is extreme, I think. The idea of choosing to exercise in unbelievable heat is something I just couldn't contemplate yet to have Ashleigh Young describe it and almost meditate upon it, makes it close to appealing.

I've been trying to describe this book to friends and I have difficulty putting my finger on what exactly it is about it that I loved so much. I think it is connection. I was right in there with her throughout all the situations she describes. I was cheering her on in times of insecurity as she worried about her hairy arms and while her family was being terrified flying over my hometown in a storm. I adored the story of her mum learning to glide with it's really terrible ending.

This is a treasure of a book. Ashleigh Young I'll read all your books in the future.

Thanks to Netgalley and Bloomsbury Publishers for giving me access to this book.

This was… highly uneven. I thought the second half worked a lot better than the first (there were some really amazing essays there) but if I hadn’t had a review copy of this, I don’t think I would have even gotten that far. The first third of the book was particularly difficult to get into.

Ashleigh Young wrote essays on a variety of topics, often semi auto-biographical in nature but always considering other perspectives as well and in theory I should have adored this. There is a fairly long essay early on in this collection (Big Red) dealing with her relationship with her brothers that seems custom-made for me (I do love sibling relationships) but made me nearly give up the book. I found it unfocused and to be honest, pretty badly written in a vague way.

I did, however, really enjoy her essay on working in Katherine Mansfield’s birth house which signaled a shift in quality for me. After that her essays become both more experimental and more assured in tone. Her essay on her eating disorder was the high point for me. I adored how she structured it and the vulnerability and strength she showed.