The Spirit of a Woman: Stories to Empower and Inspire

Filled with true stories of women from different professions, faiths, and cultures, László-Gopadze’s anthology is meant, as its subtitle suggests, to empower and inspire. Aside from a few of the 23 essays, though, this collection doesn’t manage to capture and keep the reader’s attention. Essays delve too deeply into destiny, faith, divine intervention, and the so-called feminine principle. In “No Apologies Necessary,” Colleen Haggerty recalls the car accident at age 17 that took her leg and the reconciliatory meetings she has years later with the driver who hit her: “I imagined seeing Harvey and running up to him, even though I can’t run, and hitting him repeatedly in the chest.” But during their conversation Haggerty realizes the intimacy shared by a tragedy and learns the true meaning of forgiveness. Unfortunately, other essays have less to offer. Neither Josefina Burgos’s “Encounter,” about imprisonment and torture in Pinochet’s Chile, nor neo-shaman S. Kelley Harrell’s “Telling the Bees,” about a bee-keeping grandfather, pulls a reader in the way they should, making an ambitious volume more of a chore to read than a pleasure. (June)