Wow, what a whopper of a book. While this book was heartbreaking, it had so much more. Definite must read.

Thanks to author, publisher and Netgalley for the chance to read this book. While I got the book for free, it had no bearing on the rating I gave it.

A wonderfully vulnerable and valuable book! As someone who professes faith but often struggles to hold the Christian platitudes with real life (aka all the ups and downs, joys and tragedies, hope-filled and devastating moments) this was refreshingly honest. Loss is hard. Grief is hard. Our lives and circumstances aren't neatly wrapped into a box and tied with a bow. Shannon Dingle appropriately holds space for all of it, with grace and humor, like sitting with an old friend.

If anyone knows how to live through a traumatic circumstance and come out stronger on the other side of it, it's Shannon Dingle! I first heard about her after her husband's untimely death while they were on a family beach vacation. That's what lead me to pick up her book "Living Brave." But not only has she lived through that horrifying circumstance, she also has a history of incest, sexual abuse, and trafficking from her own family. I was inspired by the strength and courage she showed throughout the book, and the way she's turned her own difficulties into a way to help others. I appreciate her courage and strength, and was encouraged that I can get through hard times too!

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC. All opinions are my own.

Full disclosure: I have known the author for several years through various social media groups and book launch teams. That being said, even though I already knew Shannon's story backwards and forwards, this book broke me into pieces, put me back together, and reminded me that light piercing the darkness is nearly always painful. There is so much hard-earned insight in these pages. I'm grateful that Shannon chose to lay her soul bare in her grief for the rest of us to learn from and identify with. Her courage is both devastating and inspiring.

This book is gutting, healing, and powerful. Shannon Dingle is a wordsmith, mastering and articulating thoughts I've struggled to wrangle in my own head. Thanks to NetGalley and HarperOne for an advanced copy, I lost myself in it over a weekend. It could have been twice as long, all her work is riveting and challenging and I never lost my focus. Lots of love to Shannon and her children.

There are any number of books in the market on grief and loss, on traumas survived and lessons learned. Shannon Dingle's book falls in a much smaller subset, among those who live with both past trauma and are still yet in the immediacy of fresh loss, and therein lies its power. Her words are authentic and powerful, speaking directly to those who need the wisdom that comes from still being in the middle in a way that those past their hurts cannot so directly communicate. And the timing couldn't be better for this book to enter the world as many are coping on a national scale with grief and loss. In her poetry and prose, Shannon offers hope and a way forward, built on the scars of her past, and proven in her current path through a new life without her beloved spouse. Read it. You'll be glad you did.

As is often true these days, I became acquainted with Shannon Dingle long before I laid eyes on her book "Living Brave: Lessons from Hurt, Lighting the Way to Hope."

It was Dingle's social media presence that caught my attention, a refreshingly honest presence that seemed to withhold unnecessary niceties in favor of transparency, vulnerability, and a no-holds barred approach to spirituality that felt safer than that which I experience from many of today's Christian voices.

I didn't really know about Dingle's background in the beginning.

I didn't know her story.

I didn't even know about her most recent tragedy.

I just knew that Dingle's voice was different and so I kept following her.

Truthfully, as someone who shares a surprising number of similar life experiences, there have been times I've had to reduce Dingle's social media presence in my life yet it's a presence I always return to time and again.

As Dingle says time and again in "Living Brave," this is not the book that she intended to write. I'm guessing it's not the book that HarperOne originally envisioned when they signed Dingle to pen a book based upon her life experiences.

Yet, "Living Brave" is Dingle's book. It's Dingle's voice and life and light and journey.

I started simply. I had just finished up another book and wanted to read a few more minutes before drifting off to sleep, so I read the first chapter of "Living Brave."

It was, as expected, an emotional experience.

The following night, last night, I hunkered down here in Indianapolis on an extremely chilly night wrapped up in my weighted blanket and began reading again.

I wouldn't stop until I'd reached the last page of "Living Brave," a book that reads like an extemporaneous discussion with Dingle and a book that feels honest and truthful and raw, incredibly raw, because it does come within the very year that her husband, Lee, was killed by a wave during what had been an otherwise joyous family vacation with their six children.

Shannon Dingle spent nearly half of her life married to Lee, whose presence certainly isn't responsible for Shannon's immense healing (that's Shannon's!) but is most certainly irrevocably intertwined with Shannon's ability to survive childhood sexual abuse and trafficking, a dysfunctional and abuse family situation, and a myriad of physical and emotional injuries that resulted from it all that continue to impact her daily life.

Dingle shares these experiences, all of them, with a rawness fitting of their impact on her daily life. She dwells less on graphic truths and more on how those truths shaped her emotional, physical, relational, and spiritual journeys. "Living Brave," it would seem, was originally designed to be a lighter text celebrating of that healing but, of course, that healing itself is now a quilt with grief woven into its tapestry following the death of Lee at 37-years-old.

At the same age, Dingle was forced to add a new branch onto her healing tree of life that allowed for parenting of six children including three that had been adopted who already shared immense traumas in their backgrounds. Similarly, Dingle has been forced to adapt to parenting as a single, widowed parent and has had to deal with all the practical things that companion this like developing an income as Lee, who'd recently received a substantial promotion, had an income that was essential to the family's health and welfare.

There was more, of course, as grief reveals all those things big and little to which we must adapt our lives over and over and over again.

I wasn't sure, to be honest, that I was up for "Living Brave," a title Dingle explains so simply yet beautifully. I honestly worried I'd have to take it in smaller pieces. I worried that Dingle's trademark uncompromising transparency might be a tad too much in a book-length dose. I worried, quite frankly, that it would trigger ever trigger I have myself...my own sexual abuse, my own family dysfunctions, my own grief, and my own physical challenges.

But, something rather miraculous began to happen the more that I surrendered myself to "Living Brave." I began to realize why I too had survived all those experiences. I began to see the wholeness of Dingle, her joys and sorrows and traumas and triumphs. I began to hear her voice as I read and to embrace the weighted truths of trauma and the occasional chuckles of dark humor. I began to see Jesus in the occasional appropriately placed f-bomb or other expletive that may turn off some Christian readers who prefer Hallmark Jesus.

I began to feel safe, in essence, with this woman I don't know other than through social media because I sensed a sort of namaste spirit that was willing to live into both the "this sucks" and "I still believe" moments of life.

If you're expecting a well organized, hoity-toity Christian book with "healing lessons," then you may find yourself a little bit taken aback by the book that Shannon Dingle has produced. Truthfully, even if Lee were living today I'm not sure that Shannon's unique yet vital voice could produce such a book. She's simply too real, too honest, and too raw. Instead, "Living Brave" is a different sort of theological beast filled with the kinds of lessons borne out of a difficult survived, at times monumentally and at times incrementally, and about the light and the love and the hope that almost unfathomably still guides it all. It's a book about finding a way to step forward when you can't even see six inches in front of you, your footsteps guided more by faith than anything else.

As "Living Brave" winds down, the grandness of the testimony is, at least in some ways, replaced by simpler truths present in the unknowing now of a life gloriously and beautifully lived with children and with friends and with family of choice and in safe community. Today, Shannon Dingle is "living brave" without Lee yet she's figuring it out and still believing and still loving and still lighting and she's choosing to share it with all of us.

That makes "Living Brave" a remarkable book, indeed.