Simultaneously heartbreaking and heart restoring, HEALING HEARTS: Shatterproof, Jeanine LeBlanc’s courageous compilation of firsthand accounts about surviving life’s hardest knocks, is a masterpiece that intimately explores challenges–including loss, poverty, physical/sexual/emotional abuse, mental illness, identity, self-worth, and addiction–effectively covering vast ground via 108 succinct pages.
From Charise Thompson, left in a Texas ditch to die after being gang raped by strangers when stopping to change a flat tire, to Carole Chandler’s six months mandated bed rest due to a pregnancy suffering placenta previa which causes a baby to arrive blue yet still alive, to author LeBlanc’s own tale of losing her mother on an ordinary day by the sea when Mom attempts to rescue another little girl caught in a strong current–the stories collected in this slim volume are full of bravery and wonder.
Right from the first page readers are invited to put themselves into the shoes of others who are either very much like (and unlike) themselves, as the book opens with Rushton Luoma’s tale of growing up a girl who didn’t want to be a boy, per se; she/he/they just wanted to live free of the numerous constraints boys didn’t seem to have to put up with. Constraints such as not being allowed to aspire towards being a farmer like her dad, and big breasts that just continually got in the way. Not that eventually having top surgery solved all of life’s problems for someone who still prefers to identify as male while not intending to fully physically transition into becoming a man, even now that such things are possible. But this story, as so many others in the collection, portrays exactly how–slowly but surely– people can become more uniquely themselves, providing the world with their own distinctive, irreplaceable gifts as they undertake the journey. Indeed, it’s the gift offered by the entire compilation all the way up till the very last tale of Doreen Coady, who goes from homeless teen to achieving every single goal she sets for herself, even though she continues feeling like an imposter even today, no matter how many hours have been spent on personal development nor how many large, plush towels she has by now acquired.
Jeanine LeBlanc’s HEALING HEARTS: Shatterproof is a collection of moving, uplifting and encouraging firsthand accounts of true-life tales of personal tragedy–written in crystal-clear prose–and an emotional work of art.
~C.S. Holmes for IndieReader