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Description
What if the first place you called home was broken beyond repair?
In Mud and Mercy, Wren Rowan rips open a childhood shaped by violence, abandonment, and silence. She takes readers into a trailer where the floor sagged, into nights when fists and bottles replaced lullabies, and into the quiet that swallowed secrets no one dared to name. By her teens, she was running on survival alone -- learning to go still until the rage burned out, desperate for love and belonging in a world that kept turning away.
But the story doesn't stop there. Survival followed her into adulthood -- through the fragile hope of adoption, the unraveling of a marriage hollowed by silence, and the weight of betrayal and illness that nearly broke her body for good. Each chapter shows what it means to keep moving when life keeps breaking.
Threaded through it all was the one constant that never abandoned her: the wild. In the cypress swamps and bayous of Louisiana, among dragonflies, floodwaters, and moss-draped trees, Rowan found the language of healing when human words failed.
Refusing to flinch yet shot through with resilience, Mud and Mercy is both a testimony and an invitation. It's for anyone who has ever felt unseen, abandoned, or undone. It's for daughters navigating broken homes, for women rebuilding after betrayal, for mothers and adoptees who know both loss and love. It's for every survivor who has ever wondered if the story could turn---or if they were alone.
Readers of Educated, Know My Name, and Hunger will find themselves at home in these pages -- but this memoir pushes beyond comparison. Rowan's voice is jagged and honest, her story both devastating and defiant.
Early readers have called it "raw and breathtaking," "a survival song," and "a memoir that refuses to look away."
It doesn't promise neat endings. It offers something more: the shock of recognition, and the reminder that life still claws its way toward mercy, even from the mud.
Why This Book Now
At a time when conversations about trauma, resilience, and healing are more urgent than ever, Mud and Mercy adds a voice that is both deeply personal and universally resonant -- an unforgettable trauma memoir about resilience, survival, and healing through nature. Rowan's journey refuses to sanitize survival -- it reveals the jagged edges, the unbearable silences, and the unexpected places where strength is born.
Who This Book Is For
This memoir is for the ones still carrying childhood scars. For the daughters who grew up too fast. For the mothers who chose to stay and the ones who chose to leave. For adoptees searching for where they belong. For anyone who has ever tried to rebuild after betrayal, illness, or loss. And for every reader who has found solace in the arms of the natural world.
What Critics and Readers Are Saying
• "Breathtaking. Both brutal and beautiful."
• "A survival story that refuses to look away."
• "For fans of Educated and Hunger, but with its own defiant voice."
Rowan's writing does not promise comfort -- it promises truth. And in that truth, readers may discover what so many survivors forget: that broken ground can still grow wildflowers, and that mercy waits even in the mud.
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