Rare Bird by Anna Whiston-Donaldson

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Product Details
A memoir of loss and love.

This is the story of a mother's journey through grief after her 12 year old son went out to play on a rainy Thursday evening and never came back.  He got caught in a creek that was normally almost non-existent, but because of the extensive rainfall had become a raging torrent.

To be honest, I really have no idea what to say about this book.  I finished it with very mixed emotions.  The writing style is not really my style at all.  Everything is written present tense with some past tense mixed in for the things that happened before the accident. Otherwise, it is present tense whether it happened the day of the accident or 2 years later and so it was hard for me to tell exactly when some of the things happened.

One thing I have learned as I've gone through my own journey(s) of grief and walked with others through theirs is that everyone grieves differently. There is no right way to grieve.  I have learned that it is best to get down and messy with those who are grieving than to just be a stand-by observer.  I have done too much standing by when I should have been getting more involved. Losing someone precious to you helps to change that, I think and I hope.

So with the previous paragraph in mind, I can understand her process of grieving to be her style, her method of dealing with it: I don't have to agree with it, but neither do I want to say that that is not healthy grieving. It is impossible to judge that, in my opinion. I will be honest and say that her medium/psychic/intuitive friend who claimed to be in touch with Jack and to see/hear what he was saying made me nervous. I believe God can bring comfort through dreams and objects and images, etc. but the whole psychic things was a little off to me. It would be one of the things that would make me wary about loaning the book out to someone else to read.

That and the bits of poor language scattered throughout the book.  I have no use for the "f" word to ever be used and for sure not in a book when you can definitely edit it out and still get your point across. That being said, I am convicted about the extracurricular words I can say in a day as well.

While the story was nice and I think Anna gained a bigger perspective of who God is and how much bigger He is than she believed before the accident, it just didn't flow with me.  It's the type of book that I'm actually trying to decide if I even want to keep. I likely will because I have a very hard time getting rid of books, but we will see.

This book was given me by Blogging for Books in exchange for my honest review.

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