4 out of 4 stars
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Bullets & Babies: A True Story of Love, Violence and the Spirit to Live is a touching and inspiring memoir of Janice Riddle written by Richard Ballo.
Janice is a young and attractive woman who has unpleasant experiences with the men in her life. She got married at sixteen and became a mother of three at twenty. Fed up with her abusive husband, Wayne, she had an affair with another man, Ron, and bore his child. When Janice and Wayne got divorced, she married Ron, but when Ron moved out, she had an affair with yet another abusive man, Glen.
The story begins on the night Janice makes up with Ron. As they are checking out a friend’s gun collection, a collection the couple suspects to be originally theirs, a gun goes off and Janice is hit. The bullet enters her left chest missing her heart. It travels and hit her left shoulder blade, bounces and pierces through both her lungs, ricochets off a rib, into her throat and hits her spine shattering her vertebrae and cutting her spinal cord consequently paralyzing both of her legs.
This is a very interesting and ultimately inspiring story of a courageous woman who had lived a difficult life but accepted her fate and remained grateful. Compared with other memoirs I have read, this book is relatively short. After reading the entire book, however, I realized that the author focused on and featured only the things that really mattered to Janice: her parents, her children, her grandchildren, the men in her life, and her relationship with God. This technique makes this book very easy to read.
The author did an excellent job in telling the story through Janice’s perspective. Reading the book felt like listening to Janice tell her story, her pains, her fears, her insecurities, her anger, her hopes, her loneliness, her faith in God and even her sexual longings. Through the author, Janice was able to show the world her strength in the midst of adversity, her inexhaustible will to learn to take care of herself, her fiery temper when defending someone too timid to stand up for herself, and her enormous faith in God as she tried to make sense of everything that happened to her and how it fit with God’s greater plans for her life. By telling her story and baring her soul in this book, Janice teaches us some great and valuable lessons, most important of which is to enjoy and to be thankful for having functional legs, something she ignored until she lost it.
All in all, this is a great book. Besides a few noticeable errors (like for divorced, check’s her mom’s pulse) the book is, generally, well-written.
I, therefore, rate this book 4 out of 4 stars. It is informative, encouraging and very inspiring. I recommend it to readers who enjoy memoirs and stories about rising above adversity. It is a story about a tough woman who lived a very interesting life and whose life we can learn a lot from.
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Bullets & Babies
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