Syl Sabastian’s Ask Biella is unlike today’s typical self-help books—ones that are quickly read, interpreted, and forgotten. Instead, Ask Biella is a thoughtful and thought-through self-help reference work featuring a fictional guide from Syl Sabastian’s core series fielding deep questions from real readers. It asks its audience for a different kind of commitment to its deep sharing: a raw, self-exploratory approach in which one creates a realistic-ideal world for themselves through the process of positivity and emphasis.
Ask Biella invites readers to turn inward for enlightenment, satisfying their questions with lasting internal empowerment rather than external compromises. Biella reveals the harmful mental habits to which we are all prone and points to the rope that can save us from ourselves. After all, according to Biella, “We, and we alone, are the creators of meaning.”
Biella’s world is rooted in real-world wisdom with an easy-to-follow candor, and pulls from Biella’s “Dictionary-of-Power,” hyphenating and capitalizing particular words and phrases for emphasis to change how the reader engages with the text. For example, Biella hyphenates and capitalizes the phrase “Thinking-Things-Through-TO-THE-END” to capture readers’ attention, changing the way readers’ brains respond to the words via emphasis. These specific words and phrases, or “tools-of-living,” cover a wide variety of topics.
From relationships to business endeavors, self-love to suffering, and social media to sobriety, Biella has something to offer those who seek answers.
At times the vocabulary of Biella’s Dictionary-of-Power loses its whimsical shape, and the author allows his personality to seep through. This change may catch the reader off guard with colloquial words such as “suckers,” “lol,” “kinda,” “umm,” and “bullsh***ers,” but it serves to bring a sense of our own human experience into contact with the divine wisdom of the Universe as explained by Biella.
Ask Biella is a visually beautiful book, featuring original digital art by Sabastian which complement the topics addressed by Biella throughout the book. Central figures find peace and attune themselves with positivity amid colorful surroundings in the art, and each depiction provides a window into Biella’s imagination, inspiring readers to visualize alternative solutions to their problems.
Ask Biella is intentionally formatted to create a lasting effect on the reader.
Each chapter entry includes a question from an external source, and Biella’s response is broken down into digestible categories, followed by hashtags that summarize the keywords addressed in the chapter. These small, organized segments reveal a rhythmic pattern in the book that provides the reader with the tools necessary to think through the ideas presented with clarity, interrogating the text, their personal experiences, and their beliefs to go “beyond the usual, convention, the expected and assumed.”
Syl Sabastian’s Ask Biella is an inventive approach to the self-help genre.
It invites readers to approach the questions in their lives with curiosity and internal satisfaction rather than providing neatly packaged solutions to common modern problems. Slipping at times it between its invented Philosopher, Biella, and its author, the overall message is clear and important to all readers: “Trust in yourself, Trust in your Goodness, Trust in your Honesty, and Trust in your Integrity. If you are Real in your being, Realness will follow.”
