Between the Avalanche and the Ashes

𝗕𝗼𝗼𝗸: Between the Avalanche and the Ashes 📚
𝗔𝘂𝘁𝗵𝗼𝗿: Dorota Chioma ✍️
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Between the Avalanche and the Ashes is a raw memoir. Rather than offering a linear journey from illness to recovery, the book moves in circles through mania, collapse, grief, creativity, and fragile balance. One of the book’s greatest strengths lies in how it portrays mania and creativity without romanticising them. 

Chioma shows the intoxicating productivity and sensory intensity of manic states, while also revealing their hidden costs: fractured relationships, physical unraveling, and devastating crashes.

Grief, especially surrounding the death of the author’s father, forms another powerful strand of the book. Here, art becomes both refuge and record: paintings, poems, and exhibitions acting as containers for pain that cannot be spoken directly. The repeated imagery of woods, trees, and nature grounds the narrative, offering continuity amid loss and disorientation. 

This is a book about endurance, about staying present in the uncertain space between extremes. Chioma invites the reader not to seek answers, but recognition: a shared breath, a mirror, a pause. Memoir fans would have a great time reading this book.

• 𝗠𝘆 𝗥𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴: 5/5

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