Prepare yourself to cry. This stunning memoir chronicles an opera singer's battle with a chronic disease, and not one but two double lung transplants. Her story is awe inducing and inspiring, and refreshingly honest in it's approach.

This memoir chronicles opera singer and author Charity Tillemann-Dick's medical and emotional journey through not one, but two, double lung transplants during her mid-twenties. As its subject suggests, this story is absorbing and inspiring, and I definitely cried through much of it. However, perhaps more surprisingly, it is also refreshingly honest, especially for someone coming from such a high-profile career and family. And the book is very well-written: the story flows in a way that makes it hard to put down, and somehow even manages gripping suspense in a memoir, a genre in which the reader always already knows the ending.

I also realized, reading it, that there are not many memoirs in which well-educated people who grew up in the US talk really openly and personally about faith in a story that's not solely about faith. As someone who's spent much of her life trying to explain my own intersection of faith and left-learning politics to incredulous, not-religious people around me who think that intersection is an oxymoron, I appreciated the effort it takes to articulate that belief publicly and personally, especially in writing, even if it's a faith different than mine. But even if faith's not your thing, the story is so compelling it doesn't matter.

So, if you're interested in music, in medicine, in faith, or just in hope and an odds-defying story, this is a book for you.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.