I received an ARC of "BEAUTY IN THE BROKEN PLACES" from NetGalley for an honest review.

So touching and so well written..and so un-put-downable!! No kidding..blurry eyed and nodding I managed to finish this beautiful memoir in one night. I had to!
Allison Pataki skillfully alternates chapters between her husband’s stroke and recovery and their romance and courtship. Her writing is raw and honest and so beautifully done and you can feel the love for her husband leap off the pages.
A very strong 5 stars, but I am sad I can't give it more. You this on you need to read list...might need a hanky!

This book blew me away. It’s a beautiful memoir told in alternating chapters between the life before the author’s husband had a stroke and that of the life after. I highly recommend this book.

When Allison Pataki was pregnant with her first child, she and her husband, Dave, left their home in Chicago for a babymoon in Hawaii. While on the flight Dave suddenly lost consciousness, and they made an emergency landing in South Dakota. Doctors there determined that Dave, a healthy, young man, had suffered a stroke. Over the next few days, Allison and her family began to find out the extent of Dave's injury. Life changed forever, as the part of Dave's brain that stores short-term memory had been destroyed.

Since Dave couldn't remember anything, Allison wrote him letters so that she could tell him the things that had happened. She shares those letters here, as well as the journey that brought her and Dave to that moment when he lost consciousness on the plane. Theirs is beautiful story of love, loss, faith and resilience that will break your heart, and then put it together again as you see all the ways that love fights for hope and healing.

Beauty in the Broken Places is a memoir worth reading. I don't think you can read it without admiring Allison and her family as they rallied around Dave, prayed for healing, and did whatever they could to help him recover. I can only imagine the pain she must have gone through. I admire her bravery and fortitude in telling her story. Life isn't perfect. Things break and fall apart, but there is still beauty in the broken places, if we take the time to look.

Such an inspiring memoir that reminds us how life can change in the blink of an eye! Just months before the birth of their first child, the author's husband suffered a major stroke on their flight to their babymoon in Hawaii. Suddenly Alli and her husband Dave were facing a new normal. The memoir alternates passages about their life "before" and life "after". I was continuously amazed at how much progress Dave made towards recovery in a relatively short amount of time. Thanks to NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review this memoir.

“Beauty in the Broken Places,” is author Allison Pataki’s moving account of having her life upended when her 30-year-old surgical-resident husband experiences a devastating stroke while she is pregnant with their daughter.

Pataki uses two literary devices to tell the story. First, she alternates from past to present in each chapter, recounting how her relationship with her husband developed and relating the experiences she went through during his illness.

Then, she incorporates excerpts from letters she wrote her husband every day during his recovery, telling him what they were experiencing and the emotions she went through.

Pataki explains, “I realized then that I had to write. I had to write in order to make sense of what had happened, what was still happening. I have always found that I can best make sense of the world and of intense or incomprehensible situations by writing.”

Her comment reminded me of author Joan Didion, who said in the essay, “Why I Write,” “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

In fact, Pataki’s book shares some ground with Didion’s account of her husband’s last illness in “The Year of Magical Thinking,” which also jumps back and forth in time relating how her relationship with her husband evolved.

But, while Didion reports and analyzes her emotions and reactions to relate a complex inner life, Pataki reports more superficially on how she was feeling, offering deeper meaning through comments about her religious views and positive-thinking slogans like, “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better.”

While Pataki’s book seems earnest, honest, and even raw in many places, she keeps things at too much of a distance to offer a real exploration of the experiences she went through. Following her through a year where she goes through several life-changing events – her husband’s illness, her daughter’s birth, a move, a book launch, and even her father’s presidential campaign – I didn’t get the sense that she was transformed by her experiences.

To her credit, she avoids exploiting her husband’s condition or invading anyone’s privacy (including her own). But, that left me wondering what her life was really like, since she never gives much of a glimpse. How did she manage to crank out her excellent historical novel “Sissi” – which clearly required extensive research – in a year when she was dealing with everything else? How did she and her husband re-establish their relationship, when so much had changed? What were her surroundings like? What did she learn?

“Beauty in the Broken Places” is a well-written book, and readers will find it easy to sympathize with Pataki during this difficult and frightening chapter in her life. But, without giving a sense of the deeper insights and lessons she drew from her experience, it lacks depth.

Memoir of how author (Allison) and her husband (Dave) survived his stroke at age 30.

Utilizing the letters and notes written during her husband Dave's recovery, the author of this beautiful memoir provided an intimate look at how she and Dave overcame his incapacitating stroke at age 30. Despite being a healthy, athletic doctor, Dave suffered a massive stroke while he and Allison were in a plane flying to their babymoon. Five months pregnant, what followed was Allison's account of their struggle to heal after being utterly broken. Was Dave able to participate in the birth of his first child? What was the recovery process like for him, and for Allison? How is he doing today? Find out in this breathtaking and inspirational look at surviving a tragedy with faith and resilience.

"The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places." - Ernest Hemingway

I would highly recommend this for anyone who loves someone suffering from debilitating health issues, and I look forward to reading more from this author!

Thank you to the author and the publisher for an advance copy of this book! All opinions are my own.

Location: New York City, New York and Chicago, Illinois

‘May we always remember to begin the day being grateful for life, however difficult that life may appear.’ ‘Beauty in The Broken Places’ is a beautifully written memoir about faith, love, and family. Thank you Allison Pataki for sharing your story which was written with courage and honesty. Although the story will touch anyone who reads it, hopefully it will reach and impact someone struggling with a traumatic experience and give them faith to believe that everything will eventually be okay.
Alli’s honesty really came through on the pages of this book. I love how she alternated chapters between her husband’s stroke and recovery and their romance and courtship. This is an amazing story about love and faith that keeps the reader engaged from the first page.
I received an Advance Review Copy of this book. All opinions are my own.

This is a beautifully well written memoir by Allison Pataki. At 30 years old and 5 months pregnant, she and her husband were on their way to Hawaii for a few days of rest and relaxation. Her husband, Dave, was a surgical resident who worked long hours and they both needed a few days away to relax before the baby changed their lives completely. Little did they know when they boarded the airplane, that their lives would be drastically changed before they landed. Dave had a stroke during the flight -an almost unknown occurrence for a young healthy person - and when they made an emergency landing, they weren't sure if he would live or die. Both families went to Fargo, ND. where the plane landed to help with the situation. What follows is such a beautiful story of family and love, friendship and faith that it brought me to tears.

When Allison finds out that Dave has no memory at all and can't retain information, she writes to him every day so that when/if he regains his memory, he will be able to read what happened every day and about her concerns about their lives in the future.

This is a beautiful book that is full of inspiration and love. I am so glad that I read it and highly recommend it.

Thanks to the publisher for a copy of this book to read and review. All opinions are my own.

Allison "Alli" Pataki never imagined that her babymoon trip would result in a hospital trip. Her thirty-year-old husband, Dr David Levy suffered a stroke while en route trip to Hawaii. Beauty in the Broken Places is a product of the letters that she wrote to her husband during his treatment. Allison shifts back and forth in time referencing their relationship journey while holding the hope that the "old Dave" come back to her.

Most people start these kinds of personal projects with the hope of helping others but end up experiencing catharsis and self-discovery. Allison's journey of maturing in her faith will be evident to her readers. Alli says that she had experienced luck although her life from her privileged youth to her stable relationship with Dave. However, Dave's stroke helped her recognise the difference between innocence and purity. While the former is circumstantial that is dependent on exposure or experience, purity is about an active choice that can only be attained through passing a test or trial. She recognises that prior to Dave's accident she possesses the faith of the innocent which was easy to keep. However, this new normal helped expose the weaknesses in her faith that she needed to re-examine and work through. As she says:

"Ultimately, I realized, this was the moment when things between God and me finally got real. This was when I needed to live the faith that I had been thinking, for thirty-one years, that I had been living. I did not understand why the things that had happened had happened. But did I still—even in that place of not knowing or understanding, especially in that place of not knowing or understanding—believe that God was with me? Was He there beside me in my pain and brokenness, just as I had always believed Him to be beside me in my joy? Did I believe that God could take this heartbreak and this fear and this fatigue and somehow weave something beautiful from all of the frayed and feeble threads? That there was a divine plan at work here, a much larger picture than the one I could see, a framework that exceeded my capacity to understand?"

Readers will fall in love with the couple and their journey of re-discovery and will make them yearn for intentionality in their relationships. If you loved the late Dr Paul Kalanathi's book When Breathe Becomes Air, then this book is right up your alley. Like Kalanithi, Allison has her way with words but without the more technical and philosophical tone that can be attributed to his medical training. Personally, I have never read any of her historical fiction novels which she wrote mostly during this trying period. Beauty in the Broken Places has piqued my interest in what else she has in store.

Allison Pataki's Beauty in the Broken Places is a memoir of love, faith and resilience. A beautifully written memoir of the strength of the human spirit and a loving relationship. 5 stars all the way. Put this one on your #TBR list. It will inspire you and move you to tears.

This book is so beautiful! Allison Pataki writes so raw and exquisitely her heart, her fears, her faith and her love. The one thing that kept me totally on edge is that I did not know how Dr. Levy improved or not. I avoided all articles and blogs. I wanted to find out through Allison's incredible telling of their story! This is one of the best faith filled books that I have read in a very long time!

This was such a moving memoir. It was at times heartbreaking, hopeful, uplifting and almost always it evoked these emotions at an incredibly deep level. The author writes about the life she shares with her husband and their expected child. It switches between life prior to the life changing event and of course, afterwards.

What makes this so heart wrenching for me is the contrast between the two timeframes. Their lives seeming to be mostly happy and content with so much to look forward to until that instant they were plunged into uncertainty and despair. In these pages of raw emotion there is nothing held back or at least that's how it seemed to me. Of course, realistically it was likely far more terrifying to live through at the time.

I had often thought death would be the worst thing that a couple in love could face. This book showed me otherwise. At the other end of the spectrum is the faith and hope that occurs when people come together in love and support. I am in awe of the sheer will and determination shown by all through this experience. It brought up more than a few pearls of wisdom regarding marriage and relationships as well as general insights about treasuring every moment in life.

All in all I came away from this book feeling so much better for having read it. Sure, it deals with a lot of uncertainty and a highly stressful situation but getting to witness all the relationships and interactions between family, friends, medical staff, and even colleagues was such a gift. It gives the reader hope that even in the darkest of hours, kindness, compassion, faith, and love can (and do) rise above.

It's a great read.

This book is well written, authentic, vulnerable and the resilience the author learns and shares will take your breathe away at times. She the memoir of her life with her 30 year old husband when he has a unique type of stroke and the cognitive part of his brain dies, and must be rebuilt with intense therapy, stimulation,and support. It's a story that as readers we all hope and pray isn't ours and will never be ours. Yet as Allison Pataki shares her letters to her husband in his year of recovery, she reminds us that we are all lucky and often don't realize the level of gratitude and blessing present in the normalcy of life. And she reminds us and empowers us that with faith, your tribe, and love you could survive, even learn to thrive in chaos, exhaustion, and the struggle of your husband unable to do many tasks he's always done, and all of it falling to you, that you will find a way, you will learn to ask and accept help, and you will have a few melt downs, but you will make it through, and life will go on.
The traumatic brain injury and the explanations throughout the story of what Dave needed to grow and connect his brain, as he worked at renewing and developing his memory and cognitive capacity, is so accurate from all my own reading about brain research, and also added new emphases to aspects that are vital to neuroplasticity. I'm thankful she includes the facets of how brains can recover and how it works.

As the guardian to a kiddo who needs to keep developing neuroplasticity, this story brings hope, research and more understanding of how the brain grows. Well written heart wrenching unique experience that without the stroke happens with children all the time. The memoir and rigor that went into Dave’s recovery shows similar challenges and gave many questions about the similar yet different plasticity issues, but showed the power of pushing ahead. And the likelihood that all the love also made the connections stronger. This book will encourage many parents striving to build and rebuild brains. I am so glad I was able to read this and share my review. Thank you Random House and Netgalley for the ebook version.

Such an interesting story and written so well, straight from her heart. It reminds you that life can change in an instant, finding the strength and love to deal with those changes comes from within.

Beauty in the Broken Places is a compelling, heartfelt memoir...I applaud Allison Pataki’s honesty and insight into a harrowing time of her life. The journey that Allison and her husband Dave embarked on was scary and life-changing, fraught with fear and despair and the unknown....there were times that their love was tested almost to the point of breaking. This candid book shows readers all the sides of this story; the emotions, the struggles, the desperation and the love of this family fill the pages of this book.

"Life will never look exactly the same as it did before."
A wonderful story of hope, faith and believing that life will move forward, one minute at a time.
This memoir is written alternating from the past to the present to allow the reader to understand all the love given to this wonderful family following a crisis that was just not "supposed" to happen.
Well written and uplifting!

Thoughtful and beautifully written, this is Pataki's love letter to her husband and children. She doesn't spare the reader emotion or reality. What set this apart for me is that Dave was so young when he had his stroke. These two happily have a lot more life to live and I wish them well. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC.

Beauty in the Broken Place by Allison Pataki is a deeply moving, powerful memoir about the trials suddenly thrust upon her when her husband Dave Levy has a sudden, life-threatening stroke at the age of thirty. This memoir provides us an honest insight to the devastation that a traumatic brain injury has on a family.
Within this beautiful, heart-warming memoir are moments of their almost fairy-tale life before the stroke - from when they met to the very day of the stroke - and the gut-wrenching moments after the stroke. The battles of recovery and the pressure of responsibility and the crushing emotions that are often kept hidden behind closed doors - it's all there in the book.
This memoir wasn't written to be a tear-jerker, it was to share a journey of faith and love and determination. And while I cried, also laughed in places and smiled in others. Beauty in the Broken Place is a book that really reminds people to truly step back and savor every glorious moment, be grateful for every little gift in life because in the blink of an eye, it could be gone.
Within the book, there were pictures of their lives, both before and after as well as the MRI result on Dave's brain, and it was truly breathtaking to see everything. The love in Allison and Dave's eyes, the moments with their families. All of it.
This memoir is a truly remarkable work and it's message will stay with me for a long time.

Beauty In All the Broken Places is a memoir written by author Allison Pataki. It’s a mesmerizing story about her husband Dr. David Levy who while on a plane headed to Hawaii for a much needed baby moon with his pregnant wife, suffers a rare and life threatening stroke. I found this to be an absolutely amazing story of a wife’s love and devotion to her husband in the worst of times. It tells how she writes letters to her husband telling of their past and of his day to day recovery. Taken from a line in the book, this is a story of pain and love, loss and hope, fear and faith, beauty and brokenness. I don’t believe there’s a person out there that wouldn’t enjoy and learn from reading this inspirational story. It has taught me to appreciate everyday and to never take anything for granted because tomorrow is never promised.