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Book Review: Ann Napolitano’s Hello Beautiful

The novel that has finally broken my emotional drought

Anton Kutselyk
4 min readJan 14, 2024
All drawings were made by me

The post contains book spoilers.

For my 28th birthday, my boyfriend got me a beautiful book — Hello Beautiful by Ann Padavano. Over the last few years, I developed a need to buy beautiful books. In a way, it’s a necessary need. Otherwise, I would hardly ever pick a book over many other distractions I’m exposed to these days. The proximity between me and a book has to be minimized. In that sense, visual and tactile beauty helps — it can drive a pleasurable, unputdownable reading experience as it involves not just my mind, but my eyes and hands in the process.

It’s a sensational thing to do, in a very straightforward sense of it.

When I pick a new book in a bookstore, I look for a cover that’s beautifully designed and nice to touch. I want pages to be thick and the font to be well-sized for comfortable reading. I want chapters to be fairly short because my attention span is likewise these days. Hello Beautiful is that book. It was a special experience to hold it and read it over the last few weeks.

The novel is as beautiful outside as it is inside. It tells the story of four Padavano sisters who look for romantic love while they try to keep the fire of their sisterhood love…

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Anton Kutselyk
Anton Kutselyk

Written by Anton Kutselyk

I live in Kyiv and write about local culture, life, war and signs of inevitable peace.

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