Absolutely encouraging book and something I needed to read In the season of life that I am in. teaching the principles of not only trusting in your faith but being ok come what may in life. I can not wait until this book is released so I can go grab a copy to add to my inspirational/motivational book shelf.

Beautifully written, a masterclass on memoir from one of the best editors and now writers. Duncan Smith's memoir takes you through her journey of pregnancy, loss, birth, and postpartum as she makes the case that "even after everything", loving is still worth the risk. She juxtaposes the church liturgical calendar with her own cycle of creating life and experiencing death. I do not usually read memoir, but when I do I want to be moved, inspired, and awed by the writing and this book did not disappoint.

Disclaimer: I received a copy from NetGalley and am friends with the author.

Lovely, wonderful, such a gift. So grateful for the opportunity to read this book. What an important message to have out in the world.

This book came at the perfect time of year for me and I’m so grateful to have read it. It is a deeply thoughtful book about the rhythms of life and faith that are connected so closely to the life of Christ and the liturgical calendar but also to stories of pregnancy, pregnancy loss, birth, and post partum. It is a unique book but I appreciated this and found myself highlighting a lot. I truly wish this book all the success! It just came out so make sure to pick it up!
Thanks to netgalley and the publisher for the advanced copy.
Oh and there is a wonderful thread from A Wrinkle in Time woven from start to finish.

“When fear menaces our hope, when we have no knowledge or control over what happens next, all we have is the now. Frame by frame. Breath by breath. Beat by beat.”

This is my favorite kind of book. It is deeply personal – intimate, contemplative, honest – and because it is so personal, it becomes universal. While our stories are different, we have all experienced loss and uncertainty. We have all carried grief and fear, joy and hope.

Stephanie Duncan Smith is a brilliant writer and you can tell that she’s also an editor because every sentence felt so intentional. This book is part memoir and part reflection on the liturgical year and the rhythms and seasons within our own bodies. I love how Stephanie shared so thoughtfully and vulnerably about her pregnancies, miscarriages, and postpartum experiences.

As someone who also gave birth to a child during the height of the pandemic and then navigated a high risk pregnancy and now a rare health diagnosis for those children, I felt seen and understood by Stephanie’s words.

Whenever I am asked about parenting my boys, I always say that it is the greatest fear and the greatest love all at once. This book feels like a testimony to that feeling – “Ultimately, if this – if anything – is a love story, it is also a risk story. To open ourselves to love is to expose ourselves to the Great Asterisk that renders every love – large or small – person or passion – vulnerable to the terrible risk of loss.”

If you love writers like Madeline L’Engle, Tish Warren Harrison, and Shauna Niequist, you will really love this one. I underlined the whole thing and know that I’ll return to it again.

Friends, not every life story needs to become a memoir. In fact, I’d guess that if this author were not a publisher herself, this book would not have happened.

My biggest problem with this book is that a very reliable source recommended this as a five star read. My expectations were high. She described it as a look at life in relation to the liturgical calendar (which I happen to be very interested in). But in reality, this is basically this woman’s story of miscarriage, birth and journey to becoming a mother. Her “...𝘥𝘦𝘴𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘦 𝘴𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘤𝘩 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘢𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘴, 𝘸𝘩𝘪𝘤𝘩 𝘴𝘩𝘦 𝘧𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘨𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 𝘺𝘦𝘢𝘳 𝘢𝘴 𝘢 𝘨𝘳𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘤𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘮𝘪𝘴𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘸𝘦 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘴𝘦𝘦𝘯 𝘣𝘺 𝘎𝘰𝘥 𝘪𝘯 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺 𝘴𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘰𝘯” felt secondary to her after being able to tell her birth story.

At one point one of the chapters felt like a giant biology lesson about menstrual cycles. As this woman was analyzing changes in her body for pregnancy, I’m analyzing mine for menopause symptoms (TMI?). As she is beginning her journey into motherhood, I’m launching my kid off to college. I believe there’s a book for every reader and a reader for every book. I was not the right reader for this one.

I was tempted to quit reading at several points but I am glad I persevered. The epilogue was my favorite thing about the book. The references to 𝗛𝗮𝗱𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗼𝘄𝗻 were spot on.

If you are a young, Christian woman, at the beginning stages of starting a family, this one might be for you. I am old, grumpy, and well beyond that stage of life.

In full disclosure, I worked on the author's website several years ago and emailed her my gratitude for this book immediately upon finishing it. That being said, I adored this. It is both timely and timeless - a book for now and a book for the ages. Highly recommended for anyone wrestling with personal grief or devastation in any arena.

Even After Everything - Stephanie Duncan Smith
Genre: Christian, Spiritual, Self Help

What a beautiful, complex, layered book is Even After Everything by Stephanie Duncan Smith. Two caveats for readers. Smith is a believer and her faith is imbued throughout the text. A reader can certainly benefit from her ideas without sharing her faith, but the faith is leading the content in most ways. Also, she talks frankly and passionately about pregnancy and miscarriage. If as a reader you are in an uncertain place here, proceed with this knowledge. I am a long way from pregnancy. The lessons she teaches (and I don’t think she’d prefer that wording) are universal. I am finding it difficult to encapsulate the thesis of the book simply (beautiful and complex, right?). Smith discusses the need to love and hope even in the face of loss and inevitable death. She frames her discussion around the church’s liturgical calendar - arguing that we try to live in a linear way when the world invites us to live in a cyclical way: the seasons, the liturgy, women’s monthly cycles.
I love this way of thinking. Raised a United Methodist, I have long had my worship framed by the liturgical calendar, but Smith’s insight takes it from a frame to a philosophy, and I am here for it. I have learned over a long period and with good counseling that for me grief is, in fact, cyclical (not what I was taught in Psych 101) and that trying to power through it with “positivity” was not working for me. I had not, however, made the connection to the cycle of liturgy that organizes my faith life. She points out how the loss is baked in and that we acknowledge it yearly. And suggests that we gain wisdom each time we move through cycles. I love that. Her reasoning is compelling and the idea is beautiful and points to a more hopeful way to experience loss and turmoil. Can I just advise you to read the book?
For me, the use of poetry and literature to support her ideas is very powerful. I have long believed that literature can clarify so much about life if we would just allow it to do so. She also quotes other research and thinkers. She creates these beautiful metaphors based on her personal experience. I value her transparency very much. She, then, uses the stories and experiences of others to expand her ideas. Finally, she anchors these ideas with literature and research, speaking to the universality of them. Oh how she speaks to the English teacher’s heart here. Also, I love liturgy and church history. I cannot celebrate the joy of Easter without reflection on sacrifice during Lent. I love the advent approach to Christmas. I have been told by more evangelical friends that this approach seems quite old fashioned and out of step, but how it works for me. I am grateful to Stephanie Duncan Smith’s Even After Everything for deepening my liturgical life and increasing my propensity to hope in a difficult world. I am thankful for the reminder that God will meet us where we are.

Happy release day to this book! I kid you not -- paging through my copy of the book is like flipping through a kaleidoscope of highlighter colors, because this book gut-punched me in nearly every paragraph and I highlighted so many sentences. I was so hungry for this book and it edified me in ways I didn't know I needed. I could say more but simply, go read this book and give it to your friends.

Even After Everything – The Spiritual Practice of Knowing the Risks and Loving Anyway by Stephanie Duncan Smith is a new release book dealing with miscarriage, grief, and living in the middle of joys and heartache. At times, the writing in this book is written in a very eloquent/poetic type of writing, if that is something you enjoy reading. Though I like more simple to the point writing. However, it is beautifully written.

I really enjoyed how she tied in the liturgical seasons with her everyday living. She explains the purpose of following a liturgical year and how this can be one way to bring you closer to Jesus. I do wish that the baptists would do a little more with the liturgical calendar, like some other denominations do. Having a Lutheran/Catholic background, I continue to participate in Lent and Advent. As I believe, it provides a more meaningful rhythm to daily living and the season of Christmas and Easter. It helps me to stay focused on what matters and what the season is truly about, Jesus Christ.

A few notes I took from the book:

Will this make me happy, it too often our default metric. But perhaps a more telling question is: Will this choice meaningfully expand my life, my interior self?
Within the liturgical year, there are celebratory seasons and preparatory seasons, and Advent is one of preparation.
This promise of presence steadied me in the midst of a spiral, and this is a promise – perhaps the only promise – that holds for all of us. In whatever spiral we find ourselves, the I AM is With Us in anchoring, unbroken rhythm.
Sacred time invites us to mark the moments and seasons of our lives-no matter how difficult or dissonant – to say this matters.
The cycle of the seasons can be trusted, because we know where they ultimately lead.

Even After Everything is about the inherent risk of love and how loss itself can teach us the risk is worth it. It is also about how the Christian liturgical seasons can help us find our way through the most difficult seasons of our lives. Stephanie Duncan Smith’s story of pregnancy, pregnancy loss, and birth illustrates how essential it is for people of faith to be able to experience the entire range of love and loss. When we love we will eventually experience loss. But this book is a reminder that joy can coexist with grief and eventually love will take up more space in our hearts than pain if we are willing to take the risk.

I appreciate that the author tells readers up front that she twice lost a pregnancy and twice later gave birth. By eliminating any dramatic tension around her pregnancies, the author allows the book to be about something bigger than her personal story. The way she tells her story also makes clear she knows not everyone’s story is the same, nor does she think she did anything to deserve or earn the experience of eventually giving birth—just as she did nothing to deserve or cause the pregnancy losses she experienced. Even so, by sharing that she did give birth, she offers a kind of tender warning: someone who has recently experienced pregnancy loss but has not given birth may not be ready to read this book.

I also found it incredibly helpful how the author outlines the liturgical calendar. Every church should print out what she wrote and distribute it! She ensures her readers have a basic understanding of the language and lens she will be using. That being said, this book is written for Christians. Its content, its substance, could be beneficial to anyone, but the liturgical calendar framework would be a barrier for most non-believers or non-Christians. However, this could be exactly the book for someone who has found the church unhelpful or even hurtful, who is questioning God, or who longs for a faith that is more connected to the challenges of real life. I’d also strongly recommend it to clergy.

Even though the author does a great job writing a book that can have meaning for other experiences of pain, loss, and grief, this is fundamentally about the unique experience of pregnancy and pregnancy loss. I have experienced neither. But I suspect a significant percentage of women have experienced both, and this book validates every experience and every emotion. It also promises God is with us in the tensions of life and offers tools to connect with God when it feels like everything is falling apart.

Thanks to Convergent Books and NetGalley for the privilege of reading an electronic ARC. All opinions are my own and I have pre-ordered a hard copy.

This is a deeply personal, moving memoir of pregnancy and the harrowing pain of miscarriage and trying again. It examines themes of love and loss, grief and resilience, sorrow and joy, enduring faith, and wavering hope, all depicted against the cyclical nature of the Christian liturgical year from Advent to Lent.

“…the range of the liturgical year presents itself to us as one of its greatest gifts. There is nowhere for us to go that God is not. There is no experience of love, loss, or liminality that is stranded outside of this divine witness and with-us empathy.”

Alone as the author might feel in her longings and pain, she awakens to a growing awareness of the with-ness of Christ’s presence with her and with us. We are accompanied in our sufferings. More than that, we are held. We are comforted. We are encouraged to open ourselves to life and love, to the promise of new beginnings being birthed in us.

Despite the fluctuating emotions she experiences, the emphasis is eminently positive. Our seasons of Advent and Lent serve to remind us of life’s flux and flow and help us retain a sense of optimism because the best is yet to come. I love these words from the Epilogue:

“May we be the ones who try. May we be the ones who remember our death, and try for life anyway. May we be the ones who accept the ashes, and shout our alleluias when it’s time. May we be the ones who remember we are dust, and stardust, too.”

Grateful thanks to Convergent Books and NetGalley for the e-ARC. It was an enlightening experience to savour this beautiful, poetically written book. I highly recommend it for the wise life and faith lessons it imparts.

This is both a heart-rending and uplifting memoir and testament to the author's faith and resilience. Beautifully written, this book talks about the joy of discovering she was pregnant; the darkness of grief after losing the pregnancy; hoping for another pregnancy yet fearful that she might face the same outcome; and getting pregnant again during the Covid pandemic.

Smith takes a unique approach to her narrative by interlacing the timing of events and seasons in her life with the Christian church's liturgical calendar.

I applaud the author's strength and courage to share what has to have been one of the most stressful times of her life, and also for sharing her faith that got her through.

My thanks to Convergent Press for allowing me to read a DRC of the book via NetGalley. Publication is 10/15/24. All thoughts and opinions expressed in this review are my own and are freely given.

A beautiful memoir written unlike any I've read before. Thank you, Stephanie for sharing this sacred story with us.

Thank you, NetGalley and Convergent Books for the e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I usually don’t give ⭐️ ratings to memoirs because I feel wrong rating someone’s literal life, but I’m giving this a 5 to help Stephanie Duncan Smith get her book out there and her story heard because it’s so needed!

I am reading this as someone who has not experienced pregnancy loss, but is not naive enough to think it won’t happen to me. I’m reading this as someone who is not yet pregnant or a mom, but enjoys hearing stories from other women and learning as much as I can. And I’m reading this as someone who does not come from a liturgical Christian tradition, but absolutely loves the beauty and the reverence that comes with the more traditional aspects.

I loved this book so much. the stories, the words, the wisdom, the metaphors, the ties to scripture. I can’t wait to get my hands on a physical copy of this book and copy all of my kindle highlights and notes into it to better come back to and remind myself of the truths within these pages.

There are two main themes that I remember so well and want to reference in the review:
1. Staying with your breath. Stephanie was learning how to breathe and move her body in ways that will help prepare her for birth. Much like the answer and the best tactic in birth preparation is breathing techniques (something we’ve done our entire life), the answer to all of life’s “contractions” is God who’s been there with us this entire time. (Aka the breath of life!)
2. The entire premise of the cyclical Christian calendar and the cycles in our lives. The Christian calendar has highs and lows like our lives have highs and lows. At the low point of Jesus’ crucifixion, he follows it up with the resurrection. With what Mary went through for being unwed and pregnant and the birthing pains she endured, Jesus was born.

I received this book from the publisher through NetGalley. Opinions expressed are my own.

CW: pregnancy, pregnancy loss, medical, religion

What a beautiful walk through love, loss, and liturgy. Even After Everything chronicles a journey through heartbreak and healing, patterned alongside the liturgical year. Smith candidly shares her faith and her motherhood journey, and how the two became intertwined and informed each other. A great read for anyone interested in the church year, faith, or stories of motherhood.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book! Part memoir, part theological application of lessons from the liturgical calendar to our daily lives, Smith’s insights are thoughtful and almost poetic. She openly shares the heartbreaking loss of her first pregnancy and the joys and trepidations of her next, coinciding with the significant seasons of Advent and Lent. Her allusions to tessering fit perfectly with her exploration of faith and pain, and especially appealed to this longtime L’Engle fan. I’ve read other reviews that describe this as “gorgeous,” and I completely agree.
Thanks to Booklist and NetGalley for the arc!

This memoir does something unusual - it pairs the church calendar with Stephanie's cycle of pregnancy loss and then carrying a pregnancy to term. This is a creative way to look both at the serious issues of miscarriage (and postpartum physical struggles) and also the church calendar.

Recommended for Christians who have experienced and continue to struggle with pregnancy loss.

I found this book both meaningful and a little bit frustrating. I loved the examples of miscarriage and motherhood and related to them, but I think it was overdone and would not be for many readers.

Love is risky. We know that after the first disappointment, the first heartbreak. Yet are we willing to stay open to new people and fresh experiences when those things happen and those people crush our expectations (not in a good way ...)?

I came late to the Christian calendar, growing up in a low-Protestant environment where liturgy and church feasts were suspect. This book reconciles the human need for connection and being a conduit for living water with the reality of a broken world.

Smith makes personal the idea of having hope amid distractions and disappointments. She offers stories and pathways to see life as abundant and glorious even in seasons of pain. She invites the reader to connect to the life of Christ and the life of others: of "joining" this unfolding of the Kingdom of God.

I enjoyed it. I recommend it to spiritual seekers, those distrustful of Christ's community of faith, and to those maturing and opening their hearts to the joy offered in the Body of Christ.