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A review by samarakroeger
The Beauty in Breaking by Michele Harper
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
3.0
a fairly run of the mill memoir that took a preachy turn towards the end.
Dr. Harper tries to interweave her traumatic upbringing with vignettes about her ER patients but spends too much time lecturing on the beauty of yoga and not enough on meaningful self-reflection. I thought she was leaning too heavily on the inevitable emotions of the ER (like dead babies) to carry the heft of the memoir. It didn’t really work.
There’s still plenty of interesting material to engage in, though, so I’m not mad about finally reading it.
Dr. Harper tries to interweave her traumatic upbringing with vignettes about her ER patients but spends too much time lecturing on the beauty of yoga and not enough on meaningful self-reflection. I thought she was leaning too heavily on the inevitable emotions of the ER (like dead babies) to carry the heft of the memoir. It didn’t really work.
There’s still plenty of interesting material to engage in, though, so I’m not mad about finally reading it.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Physical abuse, Cancer, Rape, Medical trauma, Abortion, Domestic abuse, Death, Gun violence, Child death, Injury/Injury detail, Medical content, and Terminal illness