This author participates in the Readers' Favorite Free Book Program, which is open to all readers and is completely free. The author will provide you with a free copy of their book in exchange for an honest review. You and the author will discuss what sites you will post your review to and what kind of copy of the book you would like to receive (eBook, PDF, Word, paperback, etc.). To begin, click the purple email icon to send this author a private email.
Antoinette Truglio Martin is a speech therapist and special education teacher by training but is a writer at heart. She is the author of Famous Seaweed Soup, and was a visiting author in schools for several years. She was formerly a regular columnist for Parent Connection (In A Family Way) and Fire Island Tide (Beach Bumming). Personal experience essays and excerpts of her memoir have been published in Bridges (2014), Visible Ink (2015), and The Southampton Review (2016). Martin proudly received her MFA in creative writing and literature from Stony Brook Southampton University (2016). As a Stage IV breast cancer patient, she does not allow cancer to dictate her life. She lives in her hometown of Sayville with her husband, Matt, and is never far from My Everyone and the beaches she loves.
Reviewed by Christian Sia for Readers' Favorite
Hug Everyone You Know: A Year of Community, Courage, and Cancer by Antoinette Truglio Martin is a heartwarming memoir that follows a woman’s struggle to cope with breast cancer. Antoinette Martin had always thought she was a healthy and strong woman until the day she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Her world would crumble as she went through the denial phase to sheer stupefaction, through anxiety to embracing the reality. The long hours of waiting at the clinic that seemed like forever, the solitude that enveloped her in the dire hours of the night, and the sense of fear about the painful reality are things that Martin learned to deal with. But how does one wake up from a nightmare like Stage 1 breast cancer?
For Antoinette Truglio Martin, the answer was in her community — her family, friends, and close “everyone.” In this memoir, she documents how staying connected with the people in her life helped her to find the courage to embrace her reality and to transform it into a life-giving experience. Here is a book that will bring tears to the eyes of readers — tears of pain and empathy, but also tears of joy at contemplating the wellsprings of life that are hidden within us, waiting to burst forth through our experience of pain. Antoinette Truglio Martin writes with natural humor and readers will find a lot of encouragement and hope in her writing.
This book will show readers the power of human connectivity and how sharing our experience can become an inspiring journey, not only for those who listen to us, but for us who live it. Hug Everyone You Know: A Year of Community, Courage, and Cancer is a painful and empowering journey, a book that will speak to those undergoing any hopeless situation; it’s a gift to receive, use and pass on. This book will give readers the strength and the inspiration to name their suffering and to triumph over it. It’s exciting, informative and, above all, entertaining.
