A leukemia diagnosis split Jaouad’s life into two distinct parts: before and after. 'Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted' is a beautifully crafted account of this split, this rupture — But what might be more harrowing, and ultimately more affecting, is the interiority of this book. Jaouad gives readers an intimate look not only into her experience but also into her thinking about the experience. Her insights about the self, connectedness, uncertainty and time speak to all of us, not only readers who’ve faced a life-changing — and potentially life-ending — diagnosis ... Jaouad’s self-awareness is part of what makes this book such a transformative read ... book about human connection, a book about the ways Jaouad, now 32, was held by others — the family and friends who cared for her, the doctors and nurses who tended to her, the patients she befriended, even the strangers whose generosity gave her more time.

In the beginning, we treated the pandemic as a suspended time between two realities, hoping we could hold our breath and wait for things to resume. Between Two Kingdoms, by Suleika Jaouad, has arrived as a guide to another kind of in-between, with haunting similarities ... There are times the pacing plateaus, where length dilutes urgency, but I was immersed for the whole ride and would follow Jaouad anywhere. Her sensory snapshots remain in my mind long after reading ... Not only can Jaouad tolerate the unbearable feelings, she can reshape them into poetry ... Her writing restores the moon, lights the way as we learn to endure the unknown.

Here is the key to Between Two Kingdoms — Jaouad’s disarming honesty. There is no self-pity in this telling and few of the expected pieties. Rather, what we get is a young person wrestling with a situation she would have once considered unimaginable, until it became the substance of her life. 'How do you react to a cancer diagnosis at age twenty-two?' she wonders. This question functions as lodestar, something of a guiding light ... But how does this happen? And what does one do after it has? The key is not so much recollection but reconciliation, which is part of the intention of the memoir. What, though, does reconciliation really mean? How do we put a piece of our lives away? ... Jaouad’s point is that we never fully get better, just as we were never fully well in the first place. Life and death, health and sickness … they overlap and blur together in the singular experience of the now. To highlight this porousness, she reveals how cancer changed her family dynamics ... But Between Two Kingdoms is also about the struggle to remain a participant in one’s own life. Jaouad makes that explicit by shifting to present tense in the second half of the book — the part about recovery — as she travels the United States, visiting the people, many of them readers of her blog, who offered her solace during the years she was sick. It’s a bold move, this tonal shift, and at times it can be jarring. Yet this is also, I think, part of the point. Jaouad is writing about a process, a back-and-forth. In the tension between health and sickness, past and present, a new balance must be forged.

In her searing memoir, Emmy Award–winning speaker, writer, and activist Jaouad describes how, diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia at age 22, she found herself, as Susan Sontag described coping with cancer, as living in a world divided into two kingdoms: the healthy and the sick ... Boldly candid and truly memorable.

Jaouad's book stands out not only because she has lived to parse the saga of her medical battle with the benefit of hindsight, but also because it encompasses the less familiar tale of what it's like to survive and have to figure out how to live again. It helps that she is a deft researcher, a smart, sometimes painfully honest writer, and an audacious reporter. Between Two Kingdoms is a spectacular debut which leaves us eager to see what this gifted young woman will do next.

Raised to roam the globe, Jaouad found that her world had suddenly shrunk to a hospital room at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where she underwent a stem cell transplant and other grueling treatments, which she began chronicling in a New York Times column called 'Life Interrupted.' Her engrossing memoir, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of Life Interrupted, paints a more complete portrait of her experiences during and after treatment ... Between Two Kingdoms is a thoughtful book from a talented young writer who never sugarcoats or falls prey to false hope ... Her message will ring helpful and true to many, regardless of the challenges they face.

Every chapter ends with a cliffhanger, adding a surprising level of suspense to a work where the broader outcome isn’t in question. This is a stunning memoir, well-crafted and hard to put down.

A thoughtful memoir of dealing with cancer and feeling 'at sea, close to sinking, grasping at anything that might buoy me.' ... Memorable, lyrical, and ultimately hopeful: a book that speaks intently to anyone who suffers from illness and loss.