Toward the Light: A Year in Paris by Deborah Svec-Carstens

WOW! WOMEN ON WRITING TOUR

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Toward the Light: A Year In Paris

By Deborah Svec-Carstens

About the Book:

What happens when the City of Light turns dark?

At twenty-two, Deborah Svec-Carstens leaves small-town Iowa for Paris, hoping a year abroad will bring adventure, independence, and a fresh start. But just as she begins to feel at home, a morning run ends in sexual assault.

Every instinct tells her to leave. Instead, she chooses to stay.

As the months pass, Deborah leans on an unexpected community of friends, wrestles with questions of faith, and finds purpose in caring for Lily, the young girl entrusted to her care. Slowly, she discovers that healing is not a destination, but a path taken one step at a time.

Set against the cafés, parks, and neighborhoods of Paris, Toward the Light is a coming-of-age memoir of trauma, resilience, and the courage of simply staying.

My Review:

I enjoyed this coming of age memoir of a young woman entering the unknown as she became an au pair in Paris. She was unprepared for the loneliness. She learned to adapt to the changes in living conditions and parenting styles. She stepped out to make friendships. She survived sexual assault and the aftermath. I really appreciate her account of the long road to healing and what she learned psychologically and spiritually.

Svec-Carstens has done a good job of taking readers into the atmosphere of Paris and other places she visited. She shares her experiences well as well as what she learned from them. It is a good memoir of working through a terrible experience to a new level of living life with confidence.

My rating: 4/5 stars.

 

About the Author:

Deborah Svec-Carstens, JD, MTS, is a writer, book coach, spiritual director, and former lawyer whose work explores healing after trauma, embodiment, and spirituality. Her debut memoir, Toward the Light: A Year in Paris, traces her search for meaning and connection in the months after a traumatic assault in Paris in her early twenties. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in bioStories, the Brevity blog, the Des Moines Register, and Ember & Vine Nonfiction Anthology. Her work has received recognition from Writer’s Digest, WOW! Women on Writing, and Memoir Magazine. Deborah writes The Spiral Staircase on Substack and offers workshops and presentations. She lives in Central Iowa with her husband, where she writes and accompanies others in their journeys of healing and story.

Website: https://deborahsveccarstens.com

Spiral Staircase Press, 308 pages.

Purchase Links:

Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, Books-A-Million.

I received a complimentary digital copy of this book through WOW! Women on Writing. My comments are an independent review.

(My star ratings: 5-An exceptional book, 4-Better than average, relevant and liked by me, 3-It is average, 2-It is below average and not liked by me, 1-It is practically unreadable.)