From My Balcony to Yours

Plot:

No one expected 2020. No one expected a global pandemic. No one expected lockdowns and stay at home orders and endless days of quarantine. In From My Balcony to Yours, Nino Gugunishvili reflects on the early days of when the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States. She talks about kinship and loneliness and isolation. She explores social media and television and all of our great plans for the hobbies we were going to learn in quarantine and totally didn’t. In essays spanning March 2020 through September 2020, Gugunishvili shares her personal stories of living through the era of the coronavirus in America.

What I loved most:

If I’m going to be honest… I was a little nervous to read this book. The pandemic has just been such a weird time, and I didn’t know if I would like bringing myself back to the early days of when everything was so up in the air. But it ended up feeling really cathartic to remember back to March and April and the first stay at home order and how far we’ve come since then.

We’re sitting in our homes, glued to our phone and computer screens, holding our breaths and waiting for what’s going to happen next. What’s the plan? What’s the scenario? What’s the future? For how long are we going to stay home? When is the self-isolation going to end? We need to know because we think we can control when we know, and when we handle, we can plan, and planning means going back to normal. But what if all this Coronavirus story is about shifting the focus and not being so obsessed with planning and controlling and wanting to know what’s next? What if it’s all about enjoying what we have right now, at this very moment, and not worrying about the future? Not worrying about what we weren’t able to do because of the pandemic, but enjoying what we did nevertheless while our plans were ruined?

From My Balcony to Yours, pp 16-17

I mean, isn’t that beautiful? I’m HERE for finding the good in every situation, for taking the time to breathe and reflect and choose to look at positives.

Read this book if you like:

Reflecting on current events, growing, positive mindsets, genuine feelings, vulnerability

Book details:

• Author: Nino Gugunishvili
• Publisher: Self-published (Holla for authors making books happen on their own!)
• Date of Publication: October 14, 2020
• Interest Level: Adult

I received a free copy of this book from the author, but all the thoughts in this review are my own. I only write about books I enjoy, and was not financially compensated for this post.