A Hero's Heart - Book Review

Truth is not only stranger than fiction but can be more terrifying. A Hero’s Heart, a biography/memoir, by Tiffany Fenton, is her real-life story that sounds unbelievable. She identifies a hero as someone like her mother who suffered physically and emotionally with an alcoholic second husband, lived in poverty and shame, and often went hungry to feed her children. Tiffany says, “I was her buffer to grief and buried anger, a tiny bit of light in a dreary, endless day since whether I lived or died rested in her hands.” Mom was her first hero. 

Tiffany spent her childhood just trying to survive. She “was born into a perfect town. But perfect looking towns have their dark secrets”. Her father was a charismatic salesman. “It was said he could convince the Devil to give him his pitchfork for free and then would turn around and sell it back to him for a small fortune.” Abandoned by her birth father, her mother withdrawn and distant, and desertion by her sisters left her in terror of the horrible abuse heaped on her by her step-father. She endured physical, mental and sexual abuse and an attempted drowning. Just a young child, she felt powerless to affect change.

Her battered neighbor’s suicide continued the string of tragedies she faced. At last away from home, her twisted abnormal: smoking, alcohol, and drugs, became her normal. She writes the uncensored truth of a montage of the crisis she’s faced: deaths of loved ones, illness, hospitalization, suicide attempts, a house fire, cancer, a critically ill child of her own.

The chilling disclosure of her experiences, “Can one person endure this much?” captures the reader’s empathy. Tiffany learns that there is no way out of her string of tragedies and miracles until she begins to pray “Tiffany’s way”. She found inner strength that she called her hero within. After dealing with crisis after crisis, she says that nothing could damage the essence of who she is or take away her spirit.

Not only a true story of personal survival, but this mesmerizing faith journal is also an excellent young adult story that could be shared in books groups or in counseling sessions. Readers may find themselves in the losses and victories of Tiffany’s struggles and be encouraged to overcome. Readers will find their own hero’s heart within themselves.

Tiffany concludes that “Life’s greatest lessons are often learned during life’s greatest challenges and the rewards in life, along with great happiness, are not always wrapped up with a pretty little bow.