Hurricane Season: Living Through a Broken Heart (Paperback)

~ Jeanette Stokes (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review

Hurricane Season bears witness to a woman courageous and spiritually alive enough to sit with her own mirrors...a naked soul sitting in the eye of a storm. -Jaki Shelton Green, poet --Book jacket

Hurricane Season is a wild and stormy ride of love and loss and how one woman struggled to find shelter for her spirit in the midst of a raging tempest. There is no agony like the agony of love. Here is a heart-wrenching account of survival. -Lynne Hinton, author of Friendship Cake and The Arms of God --Book jacket

Like Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, Hurricane Season is a dark journey to the edge of despair. However, in Stokes case, her husband does not die suddenly. Instead, he moves across the country and keeps calling and e-mailing his simultaneous rejection and affection. In crisp prose, Stokes chronicles the roller-coaster year of separation with bald honesty, fully owning the downfall of her marriage and its roots in her family of origin. -Georgann Eubanks, author of Literary Trails of the North Carolina Mountains --Book jacket

Product Description

Life is designed to break your heart. It just is. What you do with your broken heart is up to you. At least that s what Jeanette Stokes came to believe after the breakup of her marriage.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Words & Spirit; first edition (December 15, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0982184808
• ISBN-13: 978-0982184806
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #570,499 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The gift of the present moment, August 16, 2009

By	Liz (Chapel Hill, NC) - See all my reviews

Jeanette Stokes has written a brave, intense, honest, suspense-filled story of a loss being mourned, a grief being redeemed. As a writer I'm fascinated with how she weaves in her journal entries, letters and email messages to inject us directly into the immediacy of her feelings, whatever they might be at any moment -- pain, confusion, anger, exhaustion, even an empathy and serenity borne of unexpected flashes of wisdom and grace. As a minister I appreciate her courage and persistence in seeking to heal and to understand the deeper meaning of what has happened to her. As a reader I relish spending the entire year of the book as her companion, walking with her step by step, breathing along with her breaths, abiding with her in the present moment, and often identifying with her. After all, who of us has not also known loss and grief? Like Stokes, I began to plumb the depths of difficult feelings. Like Stokes, I began to sense a door opening. Like Stokes, I began to feel carried and shaped by forces larger than myself. And like any person who loves a good story, I began to long to know, ultimately, how things will turn out in the end, how brokenness can be made whole.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars beautiful writing, August 15, 2009

By	Nelly (NC) - See all my reviews

You don't have to have gone through a divorce to appreciate Hurricane Season. Anyone who has ever suffered loss or rejection (isn't that everyone?) will be moved by the beautiful writing of Jeanette Stokes as she describes her personal pain and the lessons she learns from it. She writes with wit and grace so that the reader can feel her distress without being beaten down by it. And I'm glad to say that this remarkable journey through a dark year ends with light and hope.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars And Thank You Kindly For Your Humanness, August 12, 2009

By	Patricia B. Webster - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I read Hurricane Season at a retreat during a season of my life in which I was deeply grieving contemporary wounds that became a doorway to re-examinine earlier wounds. While I brought other books with me to read, I found this one at the retreat, and began reading it first. Though I didn't know much about the content, other than that stated on the cover, I was amazed at the synchronicity that brought this book into my hands at just the right time. I was touched and inspired by Jeanette's raw honesty and the transformation of her soul as she took this journey. I was impressed with how Jeanette expressed her feelings from the depths of a journey in, through and out of the depths of grief,laced throughout with humour and poignancy.

What touched me most about Hurricane Season was the inherent permission to be fully human that I received through reading it. Though I am a psychotherapist by profession, I experience, among other things, those same human feelings that many of us feel when taking a journey through a grief experience. Those feelings include those of, "What's the matter with me?", and "You're taking these small associated silly thoughts and feelings too seriously". Jeanette's book is a wonderful reminder of our uniqueness and sometimes odd, quirky, poignant and soul-searing experience of being human. I found myself relaxing into my own grief process, freer from self-criticism on my journey, and less alone in the human experience.

Thank you, Jeanette. I recommend Hurricane Season to anyone who wants to feel companioned and affirmed in their humanness.

Pat Webster, Ph.D.
Co-author, Winning at Love
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