I enjoyed this collection of stories that Elizabeth put together. The concept of the book was something we needed in the literary space. Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC. I think it will resonate with women that are searching for resources on living a child-free life or exploring what that may look like. Elizabeth includes a lot of examples from women in history.

I have been imagining an enormously complex Venn Diagram since I completed Elizabeth Felicetti’s Unexpected Abundance: the Fruitful Lives of Women without Children. In one circle are heroines, in another warriors and activist, another folks who live lives of solitude, another artists, and so forth. And the shared core of this Venn Diagram is women who were childfree. I learned so much reading about these women, many of whom I already admired, some of whom are new heroines to me, some I would not like to cross in a back alley, but all powerful women.

I love Elizabeth’s candor and I am a better person for having read Unexpected Abundance. In it, she describes the desert where she grew up as anything but barren, but it is often described of as just that. I am one of those floodplain southeast coastal types who thinks of the desert and only things of sand and Wile E Coyote cacti. Walking with her through her childhood yard through her written descriptions taught me a great deal about the beauty and the resilience of the plants, bugs, birds, and snakes that live in the dessert.

Elizabeth uses the word childfree throughout her book. It was not until I encountered it for the third time in the book that I paused to think about the implications of describing women as childless. This book challenges the notion that women without children are LESS; in contrast, we all have gifts to share, we all have the capacity to create, and we all make an impact on those who matter to us.

In this book Elizabeth does a wonderful job of weaving in her own journey of being barren and fruitful, with the stories of many other amazing women whose fruitfulness was prophetic, generative, and life-giving to so many. I highly recommend this book to all, and may your soul be as fed as mine was in reading this book.

Elizabeth Felicetti's UNEXPECTED ABUNDANCE: THE FRUITFUL LIVES OF WOMEN without CHILDREN reached out and grabbed me on page 1, when she said, "I grew up in Arizona and the desert burned into my soul," for though I am a Virginia native, I , too, love the Arizona desert, and I am also childless by choice. I never struggled with my decision, but I have watched many women struggle, pray, and grieve for children that never came. Felicetti shares her own struggles with being childless and the attempt to live a meaningful life in which she makes a difference with her time, talents, intellect, and faith, and she does so in a time when women are still often made to feel they are inferior or incomplete if they do not have children. She provides a colorful array of women from every walk of life-from the church to the British monarchy to the country music industry-and she demonstrates in great detail how each woman managed to lead, contribute, and serve God and her fellow man in spite of being childless, and perhaps, because she was childless. This book provides a great deal of wisdom and healing for any woman who has struggled with her self worth because she does not have children. She brilliantly links all that is beautiful about the "barren" desert to the beautiful life a "barren" woman may have. In fact, she adeptly reverses the connation of the word "barren" and leaves the reader with a feeling that being childless, whatever the cause, is nothing of which to be ashamed. I surmise that the author healed throughout the writing of this book, and she succeeds in sharing hope and healing with the reader. I enjoyed her honesty and her fresh viewpoint. All women should read this book.