Book Review: I Belong to Me: A Survivor’s Guide to Recovery and Hope after Religious Trauma by Tia Levings-Self-Help

Hello, dear Readers,

Below is my book review of I Belong to Me: A Survivor’s Guide to Recovery and Hope after Religious Trauma by Tia Levings.

Title: I Belong to Me: A Survivor’s Guide to Recovery and Hope after Religious Trauma 

Rating: 5/5 Stars

Genre: Non-Fiction/ Self-Help

Author: Tia Levings

Publisher: St. Martin's Essentials
Publication Date: May 05, 2026

Language: English

Hardcover: 400 Pages

Meet the Author: Tia Levings

Buy Me: Amazon

Book Description

What does it mean to heal from trauma caused by the people, beliefs, and practices of your faith? And to rebuild a sense of self, when high-control religion said you shouldn’t have one?

Indoctrinated from early childhood to obey, conform, and want what others wanted for her, Tia Levings learned love and acceptance meant being someone other than herself.

After years of abuse in a violent marriage and high-control religion, Tia Levings escaped with her children (a story told in her memoir, A Well-Trained Wife) and thought the hardest was behind her.

But leaving was just the beginning.

With an audacious persistence to reclaim her life, Tia set off on a 15-year quest to psychological peace. The result is an emotionally regulated, actualized, self-aware woman who is able to tell her harrowing story without retraumatizing herself ―a woman who can reach back to help others claim what’s theirs. If trauma took your past, it shouldn't get your present and future, too.

Through a series of personal stories, therapeutic stages, and resources, Tia Levings guides readers through the journey that helped her leave abuse, rediscover selfhood, and heal her mind, soul, and body after religious trauma ―so that you can too.

My Thoughts

I will say this over and over. I am so glad I found Tia Levings's work. I read her first book and now this, her second book, and she will definitely be an Auto Buy author for me forever.

More than a self-help book or a step-by-step instruction book, I Belong To Me is what these types of books should be. An honest, raw, and hopeful guide based on personal stories, journeys, backed up by research, and, more importantly, from real-life situations. 

In her first book, we learned how Tia escaped from a high-control religion and how she took herself and her children out of a horrible living situation. Now, in I Belong to Me, we learn how Tia was able to rebuild her life and heal from that high-control religion, her controlling husband, and a life of not being able to be her true self. 

It will always amaze me how, through other people's lives, we can learn so much about many other things that happen in the world. I will always be grateful to Tia because, thanks to her work, not only her books but also her social media platforms, newsletter, etc, I have been able to educate myself and better understand a lot of what is going on in the world now. From politics to religion to subjects that specifically concern women. 

I highly recommend this book. You don't necessarily have to be a religious trauma survivor to read this book. I believe what Tia shares with us in this book can also be applied to many other situations, including traumas or difficult situations we have experienced in the past or may be experiencing now. 

Thank you, St. Martin's Essentials and NetGalley, for the free advanced copy in exchange for an honest review. 

Wendy

Book Review: Citizenship: Notes on an American Myth by Daisy Hernandez-Immigration Studies

Hello, dear Readers,

Below is my book review of Citizenship: Notes on an American Myth by Daisy Hernandez.

Title: Citizenship

Rating: 5/5 Stars

Genre: Non-Fiction

Author: Daisy Hernandez

Publisher: Hogarth
Publication Date: February 17, 2026

Language: English

Hardcover: 304 Pages

Meet the Author: Daisy Hernandez

Buy Me: Amazon

Book Description

A provocative, personal, blazingly intelligent examination of one of the most vexing questions facing the United States today: Who is, and should be, a citizen?

“[A] fascinating, urgently needed new book.”—Chicago Tribune

“How did ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free’ turn upside down to where we are today? Everyone needs to read this book, citizens and non-citizens alike. Brilliant!”—Sandra Cisneros

“The most comprehensive book on citizenship/immigration I’ve ever read. A must-read!”—Javier Zamora

“The book I have always wanted to read.”—Jose Antonio Vargas

“Personal, profound, engaging, and comprehensive . . . this is an essential book for these contentious times.”—Booklist (starred review)

In this one-of-a-kind book, Daisy Hernández fiercely interrogates one of the most complicated subjects of contemporary life and politics: citizenship. Braiding memoir, history, and cultural criticism, she exposes the truths and lies of how we define ourselves as a country and a people. Turning to her own family’s stories—her mother arrived from Colombia, while her father was a political refugee from Castro’s Cuba—Hernández shows how the very idea of citizenship is a myth, one of the stories we tell ourselves about the American soul and psyche.

Reframing our understanding of what it means to be an American, Citizenship is an urgent and necessary account of the laws, customs, and language we use to include and exclude, especially those who come from Latin America. With her scholar’s mind and memoirist’s gift for narrative, Hernández weaves a story both personal and national, while reckoning with our country’s ongoing debate about who belongs and providing fresh ways of thinking about citizenship. At once bracing, fearless, and tender, Citizenship is a powerful portrait of one family’s experiences in the borderlands of citizenship and an honest illumination of the country we live in.

My Thoughts

If you are lucky enough, you come across books like Citizenship, and I feel so fortunate right now.

I didn't want it to end. I was so immersed in the story, and I also felt validated about many things I had been thinking about regarding immigration and citizenship in general. Sometimes we question ourselves, and what we believe or how we see the things going on around us, and when you have is a book like Citizenship, when another person puts into words a well-researched, well-told story, it can be a pretty powerful tool for the rest of us who are trying to educate ourselves and understand. I loved how the author goes into the story putting her personal touch in a memoir sense, but also adding all the references, facts, and dates, without making it too technical, boring, or difficult to understand.

Thank you, Hogarth and NetGalley, for the free advanced copy in exchange for an honest review. 

Wendy

Book Review: Out-Classed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back by Joan C. Williams-Non-Fiction

Hello, dear Readers,

Below is my book review of Out-Classed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back by Joan C. Williams.

Title: Out-Classed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back 

Rating: 5/5 Stars

Genre: Non-Fiction/Economic Conditions

Author: Joan C. Williams

Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Publication Date: May 20, 2025

Language: English

Hardcover: 368 pages

Meet the Author: Joan C. Williams

Buy Me: Amazon

Book Description

An eye-opening, urgent call to mend the broken relationship between college and non-college grads of all races that is driving politics to the far right in the US.

Is there a single change that could simultaneously protect democracy, spur progress on climate change, enact sane gun policies, and improve our response to the next pandemic? Yes: changing the class dynamics driving American politics.

The far right manipulates class anger to undercut progressive goals and liberals often inadvertently play into their hands. In Outclassed, Joan C. Williams explains how to reverse that process by bridging the “diploma divide”, while maintaining core progressive values. She offers college-educated Americans insights into how their values reflect their lives and their lives reflect their privilege. With illuminating stories ―from the Portuguese admiral who led that country’s COVID response to the lawyer who led the ACLU’s gay marriage response (and more)― Williams demonstrates how working-class values reflect working-class lives. Then she explains how the far right connects culturally with the working-class, deftly manipulating racism and masculine anxieties to deflect attention from the ways far-right policies produce the economic conditions disadvantaging the working-class. Whether you are a concerned citizen committed to saving democracy or a politician or social justice warrior in need of messaging advice, Outclassed offers concrete guidance on how liberals can forge a multi-racial cross-class coalition capable of delivering on progressive goals.

My Thoughts

A lot of information, but well-organized and well-explained. Fascinating and very informative. 

I appreciate the author's effort to put together all the information, specially in the times we are living in, very relevant book. In an America so divided politics wise, it is always good to be informed and well-educated on topics that affect all of us one way or another. 

Thank you, St. Martin's Press and NetGalley, for the free advanced copy in exchange for an honest review. 

Wendy

Book Review: The Girl Who Smiled Beads by Clemantine Wamariya-Biographies/Memoir

Hello dear Readers,

My book review of The Girl Who Smiled Beads by Clemantine Wamariya.

Title: The Girl Who Smiled Beads

Rating: 5/5 Stars

Genre: Biographies/Memoir

Author: Clemantine Wamariya

Publisher: Crown

Publication Date: April 24, 2018

Language: English

Hardcover: 288 pages
Meet the Author: Clemantine Wamariya
Buy Me: Amazon

Book Description

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

“The plot provided by the universe was filled with starvation, war and rape. I would not—could not—live in that tale.”

Clemantine Wamariya was six years old when her mother and father began to speak in whispers, when neighbors began to disappear, and when she heard the loud, ugly sounds her brother said were thunder. In 1994, she and her fifteen-year-old sister, Claire, fled the Rwandan massacre and spent the next six years migrating through seven African countries, searching for safety—perpetually hungry, imprisoned and abused, enduring and escaping refugee camps, finding unexpected kindness, witnessing inhuman cruelty. They did not know whether their parents were dead or alive.

When Clemantine was twelve, she and her sister were granted refugee status in the United States; there, in Chicago, their lives diverged. Though their bond remained unbreakable, Claire, who had for so long protected and provided for Clemantine, was a single mother struggling to make ends meet, while Clemantine was taken in by a family who raised her as their own. She seemed to live the American dream: attending private school, taking up cheerleading, and, ultimately, graduating from Yale. Yet the years of being treated as less than human, of going hungry and seeing death, could not be erased. She felt at the same time six years old and one hundred years old.

In The Girl Who Smiled Beads, Clemantine provokes us to look beyond the label of “victim” and recognize the power of the imagination to transcend even the most profound injuries and aftershocks. Devastating yet beautiful, and bracingly original, it is a powerful testament to her commitment to constructing a life on her own terms.

My Thoughts

Loved this book so much. The urgency on Clemantine's voice for her story to be heard, the power on her words, a very emotional read. Makes you see certain things in a total different way, a new perspective on life, what we might take for granted, for others is not even an option. A must read.

"This was the first time that I was told that my story, all the information I needed, was already there. I just needed to slow down and know how to look, how to listen. I needed to trust that the lingering details contained the whole history."

Wendy

Best Books I Read In 2017

Hello dear Readers,

Another year came to an end and with it a lot of great books.

Here are my favorite books or the best books I read in 2017. No particular order, and not all of them were published in 2017 but I read them in 2017.

You can click on each Title to read my Review.

• A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J Maas

• Into the Water by Paula Hawkins

• Behind Closed Doors by B.A. Paris

• Emotions by Arnie Cantarero

• The Hate You Give by Angie Thomas

• In Order to Live by Yeonmi Park

• Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur

• To Nurture and Kill by E.M. Markoff

Wendy