If you know me you’ll know I’m a HUGE Hannah Brencher fan and when I say huge I mean HUGE. I’ve read her blog for as long as I can remember, love her social media content, wrote letters as a part of MLL, attended her webinars & have interviewed her here on the blog: essentially if she had a fan club, I’d be the president. I even keep a Google Doc of her best quotes so I have something to doodle when I’m bored. So when she announced a new book I knew I’d love it, because, well, Hannah Brencher. I joined her launch team & was thrilled when this beautiful book ended up on my door step before its release. Not only is the cover gorgeous with stunning typography, the words inside are beautiful as well. Hannah advised the her readers to read “with a highlighter and pen” to mark it up and there is not a page that isn’t underlined, highlighted or noted.
Come Matter Here pretty much got me through the last two weeks of high school as I read it after exams, in coffee shops, pretty much any downtime I had, I was reading it. My copy is now very well loved with coffee stains, water crinkled edges and many dogeared pages. It’s hard to summarize this book into a few paragraphs because there is so much goodness. I’d say it’s a book about faith but faith books are often cheesy, boring and repetitive & this one surely isn’t. Then I’d say it’s a book about mental health, but it’s so much more than just her mental health story. It’s not a memoir and it’s not a how-to book. It just is what it is.
It follows Hannah’s experience of transitions: moving, mental health, dating and adulting in a narrative style, that will make you cry, laugh and probably sigh a lot. Personally, as I’m moving four hours away next fall to begin a crazy, wonderful new chapter in life this book hit home, so much so that I gave it to many as graduation gifts. Each chapter is a wonderful, relatable pep-talk but also incredibly convicting, making you want to not just change for a few minutes but be an actually better human being. If kind words are like honey “sweet to the soul and healthy for the body” then this is straight from the hive.
Thank you Hannah, for the most relatable thing since Taylor Swift’s Fearless album. It’s wrecked me in the best way possible & I’ll forever be the president of the HB Fanclub, wearing an obnoxious tee-shirt with one of your quotes on it.
Check out Come Matter Here, here (& submit a receipt here for some free goodies!)
xo
Mags