“You have nineteen minutes left.” – Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt by Ben Reeves
Death in the form of a handsome young man living across the hall from a woman and her boisterous daughter? I had Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt by Ben Reeves played out in my mind just how I wanted before I read a single word. There was going to be romance, maybe some missed death situation because Death himself prevents it all in the name of true love.
And then I read. What I found was not this death-defying romance I conjured up in my mind, but something far too real. I found myself tearing up over lifeless planets, a mother deer, mayflies taking flight, and the beauty of the ordinary, repetitive, mundane, boringly-exciting human existence.
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Summary: Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt
Travis Smith is Death. He lives alone in a small English town while spending his days comforting people during their final moments. He never interferes with anyone’s life, until he meets Dalia, a midwife living across the hall with her young, boisterous daughter Layla.
As Travis becomes more and more connected to this small family, he begins to discover all the strange, messy, complicated, beautiful things that make human life truly worth living.
Review: Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt
Look, Ben Reeves, I can’t believe I managed to keep it together while reading this entire stream of conscious-like beautifully painful prose all to loose it at the very last sentence. Sure, I teared up plenty but to make me ugly cry with one sentence at the very end? Brutal. Beautifully brutal.
The writing here gave me so many moments to stop and think.
I especially loved the way Reeves constantly pairs opposites together. Beautiful and agonizing. Frightening and lovely. Destruction and creation. Birth and death. The passage about two planets colliding in a lifeless galaxy describes one breaking apart “like a robin’s egg,” which immediately made me think of birth. Something is dying, but something else is always beginning.
That felt like such a perfect reflection of the book’s larger exploration of life and death always existing alongside one another.
The mayflies were another part that stayed with me and made me sit and think. Their incredibly short lives become this symbol of what it means to actually live at all. Their time is so brief, very frantic, a little painful, but beautiful. Reeves manages to show all that truth at once.
But the passage that ultimately hit me the hardest was the idea of being given twenty minutes right before death. Twenty minutes to return anywhere in your life. Return to anyone. Reeves suggests kissing a partner, playing with your kids, or wandering the world.
And I just know, in this exact moment of life I would simply spend those final minutes doing something so everyday-ordinary in my home, with my husband and kids. And then to already lose a minute? That is why I SOBBED.
Suddenly all of the book’s ideas about the importance of small, seemingly insignificant moments became incredibly personal to me and my ordinary, extraordinary life.
Final Thoughts: Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt
Time is fleeting, and this book was a beautiful reminder that life isn’t only made meaningful by the biggest moments, sometimes it’s the quiet everyday ones that contain everything.
I didn’t connect with every part of this book, but there are so many beautiful passages and ideas that I know I’ll never stop thinking about. And ultimately, I think that’s what this book successfully did for me: it reminded me to take the time to slow down and truly submerge yourself in life’s most ordinary moments.
⭐⭐⭐⭐ Thank you to Avid Reader Press, Simon & Schuster, and NetGalley for providing me with this ARC!
