Last Christmas I asked for memoirs and I got a plethora of them from my brother. My favorite one was The Girl Got Up by Rachel M. Strauss, but I’m not writing about it today. Instead, I am writing about A Year of Biblical Womanhood: How a Liberated Woman Found Herself Sitting on Her Roof, Covering Her Head, and Calling Her Husband “Master” by Rachel Held Evans.

I heard about this memoir a couple years before on NPR. Then, I misinterpreted her intentions and thought of her as a woman who was playing into outdated notions of the subservient and house-keeping woman. When my brother gave it to me, I sadly still held that position and so refused to read it at the same time as I devoured the others.

Last weekend however, I needed something to read on a plane trip and I picked it up.

To my surprise, I fell in love with it during the introduction. Her language is extremely witty and near perfect. Her experience of living a year of trying to live like a biblical woman would have is well executed and researched heavily. Ethos and logos down. Now for pathos: her experiment, or journey if you will, and her struggles on that journey are surprisingly relatable and are at some times profound.

I don’t feel myself changing with every book, but I did with this one. I didn’t change dramatically, but I now have a different view of many of the women of the bible and I have an even greater appreciation for the different cultures she encounters.

I will not say much about this amazing, spectacular, and beautiful book because it deserves to be read instead of written about.

I will share my favorite quote from the end of the book after she attended a Quaker meeting: “In silence, I had found a reservoir of strength that, If I could just learn to draw from it, could make my words weightier. In silence, it seemed, I had finally found my voice.”

I hope that like her, I will find my voice. I hope that like her, I will undergo a project/experience that will change my life as thoroughly as her journey did for her.