Atlas Girl
Finding Home in the Last Place I Thought to Look
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Disillusioned and yearning for freedom, Emily Wierenga left home at age eighteen with no intention of ever returning. Broken down by organized religion, a childhood battle with anorexia, and her parents' rigidity, she set out to find God somewhere else--anywhere else. Her travels took her across Canada, Central America, the United States, the Middle East, Asia, and Australia. She had no idea that her faith was waiting for her the whole time--in the place she least expected it.
Poignant and passionate, Atlas Girl is a very personal story of a universal yearning for home and the assurance that we are known, forgiven, and beloved. Readers will find in this memoir a true description of living faith as a two-way pursuit in a world fraught with distraction. Anyone who wrestles with the brokenness we find in the world will love this emotional journey into the arms of the God who heals all wounds.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Canadian blogger and journalist Wierenga addresses eating disorders and parental illness in this meandering, uneven memoir. Maddeningly, the book is not organized chronologically darts from 2007, to 1998, to the early 1980s and back again. The patient reader who is willing to piece things together will learn that Wierenga grew up in a Christian family and developed an eating disorder at age 9; that her maternal grandmother committed suicide and her mother developed brain cancer; and that after marrying her late-adolescent love, Trenton, Wierenga eventually moved home to care for her mother. There are some well-written scenes: descriptions of her sexually awkward wedding night, as well as tending to her sick mother. But Wierenga has an unfortunate taste for slightly off-key imagery coupled with breathless sentence structure: "it all caught in the back of my throat, all the love songs and all the loneliness, it caught like a big wad of gum." At the end of the book, the reader will have traveled to a lot of places, but will not really know what the journey has added up to.
