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Final rating: 3.5 stars

Last May I went on a cruise to Alaska with my parents, brother, and grandfather. The book I was reading at the time was crap. Fortunately for me, there was this freaking cool library on the ship.



I'm going to go off on bit of a tangent here, but I think it's kinda lame how a cruise ship has a library and the island I live on hasn't had one since I was eight.

...Anyway, moving away from my general bitterness, let's go back the library. So I picked up this cool book called The Bell Jar. I enjoyed it so much that it became a favourite. Reading "Mad Girl's Love Song" made me more interested in Plath's poetry, so reading this was sort of bound to happen.

This book was probably longer than it actually needed to be. All the poems in the first part are repeated in the second part, which is a facsimile of Plath's manuscript with all of her edits and scribblings. The first part is just like the second part, except it's corrected. A lot of the poems in this book honestly made no sense to me until I analysed them. Most caught my attention, but few held it. "The Jailor" and "A Birthday Present" were so interesting and made me want to know how they'd end. "Lady Lazarus" took me back to the first time I read "Mad Girl's Love Song", while "Daddy" is very resentful and gripping. I also adored "Lesbos", "Elm", and (in some ways) "Wintering". I don't think I'm really geared towards poetry, but Plath does an exceptional job even when you don't know what the hell she's going on about and have to add "analysis" to the end of every Google search. What can be said about this book is that it really sets a certain tone throughout. It's a bit dark and depressing, but simultaneously rich and full of emotion. You have to be in the right mood to read it, but it's never anything less than beautiful. I tend to only keep five-star books on my bookshelf, but despite its imperfections, this book had quite a few gems, so it's a keeper.