The day I received the book, I read it in one sitting, in the same chair for hours and only getting up to grab more tissues when my shirt was no longer a usable substitute. Zauner’s writing flows easily, indicative of her lifelong career as a musician. Despite taking liberal jumps back and forth in her history, the reader stays enraptured enough to never become lost, and the jumping helps to prepare us as we, together with her past self, approach the known inevitable – her mother’s untimely death after a long and embittered battle with cancer.