Publisher's Synopsis
Every now and then, someone will contact me (via internet, a friend or in person) and ask, "Will you read this for me, please, and tell me what you think?" Well, I'm about to share with you "what I think" of one of the most spiritually pleasurable reads I've had in quite some time. I'll probably say this more than once, but I urge you to get a slice of this. Patricia A. Johnson's Broken and Battered, Yet I Rise: A Synopsis through Poetry in the Life of a Battered Wife goes beyond the well-known Waiting to Exhale, Burning Bed, Enough, and The Diary of a Mad Black woman. Within the pages of Broken and Battered, Johnson gets in touch with your senses, makes her emotions your emotions, draws you a complete picture without ever adding an illustration. Without a doubt this book is a tear jerker. But your tears will be of trial and triumph. You will plead for the battered wife and you will pray for her husband. You will smile but not because of sarcasm or jokes. You will smile at her strength. A strength that Johnson declares is not of her own humanity. At every page, she will educate and remind you that all glory belongs to her God. Her endurance and eventual freedom, she takes no credit for. These pages house a testimony of struggle to remain faithful and obedient to her God, amidst the shame, embarrassment, bruises, and pain. Johnson has not written a one-sided story. In fact she hasn't written a story at all. She has found the courage to share her story without neglecting the well-needed story of her husband. Notice, I call her abuser her husband. That is what he was and that is how Patricia A. Johnson revered him. With the love of Christ, she respected and honored her vows to her husband. She'd made a covenant with God to love him for better and for worse. Broken and Battered is the account of how one wife remained faithful to her God and her husband when all of the evidence said, "Flee or die!"
