Allie Brosh’s second book, Solutions and Other Problems, has a lot in common with her first, the New York Times best-selling Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened.

Both feature Brosh’s signature art style: cartoonish drawings that appear crude, until you realize their weirdness is very much intentional: Brosh is quite a good artist but seems to depict herself as the strange creature she feels herself to be.

Hyperbole and a Half was born out of Brosh’s popular blog of the same name, in which she disclosed details about her life, from grammatical pet peeves to outrageoulsy weird tales from her childhood to the mischief caused by her assortment of very bizarre dogs. That blog led to the book deal and Hyperbole was published in 2013. NPR called the book one of the best of the year.

Both are laugh-out-loud funny, although Solutions was not quite the gut-buster that Hyperbole most certainly was, which is entirely understandable once you read a few chapters in.

After some extremely amusing chapters like the ones about Brosh’s childhood obsession with the person who lived next door and mysterious piles of excrement that began to randomly appear in her home, Brosh imparts some devastating news in a chapter called ‘Losing’.

Brosh, who has frankly dealt with her struggles with depression and other mental illness on her blog and in her first book, pulls no punches when revealing two horrific events that occured just after her first book was published.

It’s a dark chapter, and while Brosh does manage to pull some humor out of what happened to her, she manages to achieve something more astounding: a bleak, nihilistic point of view that leads to something more hopeful than one might expect.

I wanted to explain all of it.
The whole thing.
Her whole life, and my whole life, and life in general.
But I don’t know how.
Sometimes all you can really do is keep moving and hope that you end up somewhere that makes sense.

Allie Brosh, “Solutions and Other Problems”

Her writing is self-deprecating, sharp-witted and very, very humane. She does not give herself the same chances to make mistakes and be imperfect that she gives to others, and she knows it.

By writing about coping with loss, both successfully and not so successfully, she gives voice to the hopelessness and struggles we all endure. And her sometimes darkly humorous, sometimes just plain goofy stories give us something to laugh at, a lot, as well. This book is highly recommended.