BookReview

Safe, Wanted, and Loved is a story of resilience, love, and the quiet, brutal battle of living alongside mental illness. It doesn’t preach, it doesn’t dramatize—it simply lays bare what happens when the mind of someone you love turns into a stranger’s. One morning, everything in their home was normal. By the end of the day, nothing was. That’s how fast life turned for this family. What follows is not just a story of a woman battling psychosis but of a husband trying to hold onto the woman he knew while the illness ripped through her mind, of …

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I didn’t know women could do this. Hell, I didn’t know people could do this. When I first picked up Wild by Cheryl Strayed, I had no real concept of long-distance hiking. I thought of nature as something you visited for a few hours, maybe a weekend if you were adventurous. The idea of walking for months through the wilderness, alone, carrying everything you needed on your back? That was the stuff of movies or, at best, something rugged men did in the 1800s. But here was this woman—Cheryl—who had never even gone on a hike before deciding to …

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Grief isn’t a story. Until it becomes one. There’s grief, and then there’s grief that leaves you gasping for breath. "Little Matches" by Maryanne O’Hara is the latter. It’s a book that doesn’t just tell a story—it sits with you, presses into your chest, and makes itself at home in the quiet spaces of your heart. And yet, somehow, it doesn’t leave you drowning. Instead, it hands you a match in the darkness. Maryanne’s daughter, Caitlin, was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis (CF) at two years old. If you don’t know much about CF, let’s …

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Life has a way of sending curveballs, but few can rival the one thrown at Dr. Thomas Sims in 1971. Just as he was about to begin his pediatric surgical residency, Sims got the kind of letter that could derail even the best-laid plans: a draft notice for Vietnam. Instead of stitching wounds in a battlefield M.A.S.H. unit, Sims was offered a different type of war zone—Nome, Alaska. With his very pregnant wife, young daughter, and a van full of pets, he traded the temperate halls of California hospitals for the bone-chilling barrens of the Alaskan …

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