Resilience throughout Recovery: A Memoir of My Journey through Mental…

The story might be good, but I couldn't get past the formatting and grammatical errors to find out. Such errors really detract from the purpose of the book. ( )

The title, “Resilience throughout Recovery” I feel is an interesting title for this book. I am not too sure that the title really describes what is really written in the book. I feel that the first and the last chapter of the book touch on Angela Grey’s mental health but don’t go into depth on it. The rest of the book describes the mental, physical and sexual abuse she incurred as a child and then going into her youth. If anything the book describes more of why she has a mental illness and the resilience of a child that is abused and neglected. The author did describe what it was like being hospitalized for her mental illness but it was not touched upon as much as her history of abuse and neglect. The book was not organized real well and there was some jumping around in the story.

The book also needs to revised. There a quite a few errors that I noticed while reading it. ( )

Because I personally know how hard it is to tell your own story, I was generous with the stars. I feel as if it fell more in a two star area with the actual book itself. There are some areas of brilliance, but there are others where you feel like five chapters have been cut out of the story. Some people are mentioned fleetingly and then later are referred to in a way that makes you think there should have been more emphasis on them earlier. The path of the story is rather discombobulated as well. I was also hoping that the end would wrap up with some sort of analysis of what in her life was significant to the mental disorder and what her actual disorder was. Being a psychology major, I see that there is PTSD with paranoid delusions. The author's synopsis on the back leads us to believe she had a breakthrough about her mental health, but the book does not convey this. We read of the horrors this woman went through as a child and her difficulties as an adult. There seems to be a huge chasm between these time periods that we are not even getting. I wish there had been more to it to really smooth over the entire story. This woman had lived through some terrible things and was greatly affected by them, but the book was hard to read because of the delivery of the story, not the story itself. ( )

The blurb on this book caught my eye. My reason for giving it two stars is that there is a good story in there, but it needs to be better executed.

The author has a traumatic childhood that follows her into her adult life. She has gone through things that no person should ever have to. It would be inspirational to read about her life and how she overcame, or is still overcoming, all the obstacles that she has had to deal with.

My problem is that the book jumps around. Important things get mentioned once and then forgotten. Some things are trivial and I wondered why they were in the book (ex: she moved around a lot and for some reason gave the physical address of one of the places she lived. Was there some significance to this address?). Then she jumped around (ex: her first daughter was placed in a foster home... then suddenly many years later, she doesn't say, the author is suddenly married with four more kids... there is nothing about the time in between).

This book needs to go through a couple of revisions. There is a story there, it just needs to be better told. ( )