Not sure how to rate this. This was the first ‘classic’ I have read in years, and it wasn’t really like anything else I’ve read recently. I mostly base my rating of books on how thrilling they were, or how much I needed to keep going, or my attachment to the characters. However, this novel doesn’t fit into those boxes for me to rate. It will stick with me for a long time and I’ll desire to learn more on people’s takeaways from this, so i suppose it deserves a high rating. I think I related to Esther in many ways, and found her prose to be beautiful and symbolic. Her use of the fig tree and all it’s branches was something I have often felt about my own life, all the ways in which it could go, and how I feel I might never make that decision. Another quote from the book that stuck with me was “If only something were wrong with my body it would be fine, I would rather have anything wrong with my body than something wrong with my head, but the idea seemed so self involved and wearisome that I didn’t say a thing.” What a great way to capture the struggles of mental illness, how difficult it is and how impossible it is to rationalize to oneself that you’d rather this physical pain to take place.