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Women We Buried, Women We Burned

A Memoir

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
For decades, Rachel Louise Snyder has been a fierce advocate reporting on the darkest social issues that impact women's lives. This is her own story. Snyder was eight years old when her mother died, and her distraught father thrust the family into an evangelical, cult-like existence halfway across the country. Furiously rebellious, she was expelled from school and home at age sixteen. Living out of her car and relying on strangers, Rachel found herself masquerading as an adult, talking her way into college, and eventually traveling the globe. Survival became her reporter's beat. In places like India, Tibet, and Niger, she interviewed those who had been through the unimaginable. In Cambodia, where she lived for six years, she watched a country reckon with the horrors of its own recent history. When she returned to the States with a family of her own, it was with a new perspective on old family wounds, and a chance for healing from the most unexpected place. A piercing account of Snyder's journey from teenage runaway to reporter on the global epidemic of domestic violence, Women We Buried, Women We Burned is a memoir that embodies the transformative power of resilience.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      May 29, 2023
      Journalist Snyder (No Visible Bruises) offers a penetrating memoir on grief and redemption. After her mother died when Snyder was eight years old, her father moved the family from Pennsylvania to Illinois, where he married a woman he met at an evangelical church. Snyder recounts her difficulty adjusting to her new life, highlighting the constant bickering between her, her brother, and their stepsiblings. The oppressive rules of evangelicalism, though, proved to be the hardest adjustment of all: “Cancer took my mother. But religion would take my life,” she writes. Eventually, Snyder’s teenage rebellion against religious strictures got her expelled from school and kicked out of her house. At age 16, she slept on friends’ couches and worked odd jobs while studying for her GED. In college, a study abroad trip sparked a lifelong love of travel, and Snyder became an international journalist, reporting on violence against women. Once she returned to the U.S., she and her father took unsteady steps toward reconciliation. Snyder delivers her inspiring story with lyrical prose and sharp insights, particularly about the fraught father-daughter relationship at its center. It’s an eloquent portrayal of the power of forgiveness. Agent: Susan Ramer, Don Congdon & Assoc.

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Rachel Louise Snyder's trauma and empathy are powerfully present in her narration of this memoir. Snyder's mother died when she was 8; two years later her father remarried and violently forced strict evangelical principles upon her family. Kicked out of school and her home at 16, she could barely manage her life; she was too young for a lease or bank account. Snyder's voice is deep and expressive. She sounds calm in the face of constant obstacles--as if she hasn't connected the dots between her chaotic childhood and her self-destructive behavior. When she becomes a mother and recognizes the cruelty and inappropriateness of her parents, it lands like a gut punch. But this is a story of forgiveness, and Snyder's care of her dying stepmother decades later is beautiful and tender. A.B. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
    • Library Journal

      June 10, 2024

      Award-winning journalist Snyder (No Visible Bruises) is no stranger to hardship, having reported on everything from natural disasters and genocide to domestic violence and sexual assault. She now takes on her own harrowing life story of grief and growing up, beginning with the loss of her mother when she was just eight years old and continuing through her restrictive religious education, rape, rock and roll, and redemption. Read by the author, this memoir is a heart-wrenching and deeply inspiring listen. While her delivery is straightforward and sober, performed without added theatrics, Snyder's discussion of being unhoused, unruly, and unloved is infused with enough emotion to be engrossing. Though her life has been touched by tragedy in so many ways, this reflective recounting of her journey from heartache to healing is inspiring and engaging. VERDICT This audio will appeal to listeners seeking a candid coming-of-age story of survival and self-discovery. Recommended for fans of moving memoirs about religion, resilience, and relationships, such as Michelle Dowd's Forager: Field Notes for Surviving a Family Cult and Lisa Nikolidakis's No One Crosses the Wolf.--Lauren Hackert

      Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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