Slings and Arrows by Julie Elizabeth Powell

This story was so powerful and wrought with many emotions and conflicting beliefs. It is about a mother who struggles through losing her two year old baby to brain damage that destroys the brain and deforms the vessel to create a non-response child. She is a shell of a human being, who is encased in a vessel that no longer functions without medical supervision. She is vaguely aware of her environment and stimulus does not awake her from her vegetative state. The mother's heart is breaking, with the many decisions that have to be made, the guilt, the anguish, and the emotional roller coaster of experiencing moments of sanity to insanity as each event the daughter may or may not live through a cardiac arrest or an infection tugged at this reader's heart.

This author has taken a plot of a person’s life's storm and wrote with an such intensity a sincere in-depth compassionate story that touches an individual soul to empathize with the mother and her personal battle of giving birth to a beautiful girl, losing her to an illness, struggle through her recuperating but not recuperating, and the incidents of life and death, and the agony of losing her for the final time at the young age of two and then again at 19. This story is very emotional and poetic as the writer describes the journey through the darkness and expressing the mother’s deep pain trying to release the anguish and sharing to heal and help others who not fully acknowledging the tragedy of living in this distraught mother’s shoes, may find solace in reading this inspirational and heart wrenching story.

The story explains the many decisions involved from placing her in a medical home that can take care of her needs on a 24 hours basis and the overwhelming guilt that a mother is in one way abandoning her child but at the same time is a warrior. Accepting this was in the best interest of the daughter. As well as the other responsibilities any parent of a disabled child may have to encounter to give their daughters or sons the rights they deserve, even against difficult circumstances.

 This author has written a powerful description of the seven stages of grief, with her heart and thoughts to help others heal through their darkness and share an inspiring journey through the birth, life and losing a child at a young age of 19, this book could be utilized as a therapeutic method of helping others through the seven stages of grief and give hope to parents in similar situations. This book should be read first and then the amazing one titled Gone, which is based on this powerful catalyst and is phenomenal with a supernatural plot of this mother pondering where her beautiful teenager daughter will go (… in the afterlife…), first when she suffer s through the first event at the young age of two, the in-between years and the concluding of her precious life at 19.

It is a reality and fantasy tale that is magical and full of mystery that inspires one to open their minds to the possibility of "what if's". This is an upcoming author that has amazing insight in herself and is able to express it in a unique writing style creative, honest and refreshing and invites readers to read her other fantasy stories, all in one way or another awakens a reader's mind, heart and soul to the wonders and the unknowns of life and the journey we all travel called life. And what destiny has in store for us and will we be as courageous as this non-fictional mother was in opening her world for all to learn from, strengthen by and entertained by. Here is the author's Amazon Link and you can Google her name Julie Elizabeth Powell and see more remarkable works by this talented author and mother. http://www.amazon.com/Slings-Arrows-Omnibus-Edition-ebook/dp/B007OA1S3M/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1341110530&sr=8-1&keywords=Slings+%26+Arrows+%2FGone+Omnibus http://www.amazon.co.uk/Slings-Arrows-ebook/dp/B005MAWNFI/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1341158743&sr=8-3 http://www.lulu.com/shop/julie-elizabeth-powell/slings-arrows/paperback/product-4141621.html