Category: book review

When the Brain Hears Danger: Auditory Processing, Trauma, and the Story Behind It

Sound is supposed to be simple. A phone rings, someone speaks, music plays in another room, or a door closes somewhere down the hall. We hear it, recognize it, and move on. But the act of hearing is far more complicated than sound entering our ears. The brain has to separate competing noises, recognize patterns, attach meaning to words, decide what deserves attention, and discard what doesn’t. When something interferes with that process, a perfectly ordinary sound can become confusing, exhausting, overwhelming, or quite possibly, even threatening.

That territory fascinated me while writing my newest novel, Call Waiting. In the novel, Londyn Andrews begins hearing voices when she’s placed on hold. Doctors attempt to explain what is happening to her as auditory processing trauma. In Londyn’s world, that explanation seems almost reasonable. Until the voices begin saying things they shouldn’t possibly know.

Before talking about the fiction, though, I wanted to explore the very real science underneath it. First, an Important Distinction: Auditory processing trauma isn’t an established medical diagnosis. I use the phrase fictionally in Call Waiting because it describes the intersection I wanted to explore: trauma, memory, attention, fear, and the way the brain interprets sound.

There are, however, several very real conditions and phenomena that overlap with this idea. One is Auditory Processing Disorder, often called APD or Central Auditory Processing Disorder. A person with APD may have normal hearing on a standard hearing test but still have difficulty making sense of auditory information. The problem is not necessarily whether the ears can detect the sound. It is what the nervous system does with that sound afterward.

The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association describes central auditory processing as involving the brain’s ability to discriminate sounds, determine where sounds originate, recognize auditory patterns, process timing information, and understand speech when competing or degraded sounds are present.

Trauma introduces another layer. Research involving post-traumatic stress has found differences in sensory and cognitive processing, including heightened responsiveness to threatening or unexpected stimuli, exaggerated startle responses, hypervigilance, difficulty filtering irrelevant information, and altered responses to auditory stimuli. In other words, sometimes the problem isn’t simply: Can I hear this? It can become: What does my brain think this sound means? That question became central to Call Waiting.

How Many People Are Affected? This is where numbers become complicated. Because diagnostic criteria for APD vary considerably, prevalence estimates vary too. Reviews have estimated APD at roughly 0.5–1% of the general population, while some estimates among children fall around 2–5%. Prevalence also appears to increase substantially among older adults, although estimates differ depending upon how auditory processing difficulties are defined and tested.

A 2026 review emphasized an important problem: there’s still considerable disagreement about diagnostic criteria, particularly in children, and APD symptoms can overlap with language disorders, attention difficulties, dyslexia, and other conditions. Adult prevalence is even harder to pin down. Research has produced widely varying estimates, and standardized information for adults younger than sixty remains limited.

There also isn’t a reliable prevalence figure for “trauma-related auditory processing problems” as one unified condition, because that isn’t a single diagnosis. Trauma may instead appear through PTSD symptoms, hypervigilance, sound sensitivity, tinnitus, hyperacusis, concentration problems, or difficulty filtering sensory information. That uncertainty interested me as a novelist. There are experiences people can describe very clearly even when medicine doesn’t have one convenient label that explains them all.

When Does It Begin? Auditory processing difficulties can have different origins. Some appear developmentally during childhood. Others may emerge or become more noticeable later in life. Acquired auditory-processing problems have been associated with neurological illness, aging, and traumatic brain injury.

ASHA notes that auditory problems following traumatic brain injury can include difficulty listening in background noise, maintaining attention, remembering spoken information, and following multistep verbal instructions. Importantly, those symptoms may arise from auditory-processing deficits, broader cognitive effects of brain injury, emotional conditions such as PTSD, or some combination of them.

Psychological trauma presents a different mechanism. Someone with PTSD may become unusually alert to environmental cues associated with danger. A sound that another person barely registers—a slammed door, footsteps, an alarm, a particular tone of voice—may trigger an intense physiological response because the nervous system has learned an association between that sound and threat. Research into PTSD has repeatedly documented exaggerated startle and hypervigilance, including heightened responses to unexpected noises. The ears may be functioning normally, but the brain is simply no longer treating the sound as neutral.

What Can It Feel Like? Auditory-processing difficulties don’t look identical from person to person, but commonly reported problems can include:

* difficulty understanding speech when several people are talking
* trouble following rapid speech
* needing people to repeat themselves
* difficulty following lengthy verbal directions
* struggling to understand conversation in restaurants or other noisy places
* confusing similar sounds or words
* feeling mentally exhausted from listening
* difficulty determining where a sound came from
* remembering only portions of something that was said

APD can exist even when standard hearing thresholds appear normal. Trauma-related auditory reactions can feel different. Hypervigilance may cause someone to continually scan the environment for sound. Unexpected noises may produce an exaggerated startle response. Certain sounds may become emotionally loaded because they are associated with previous experiences.

There are also separate sound-tolerance conditions such as hyperacusis, in which ordinary sounds can seem painfully or intolerably loud; misophonia, involving intense reactions to particular sounds; phonophobia, involving fear of sounds; and broader noise sensitivity. These terms describe different experiences and shouldn’t be treated as interchangeable.

Researchers have even documented persistent sound hypersensitivity following head trauma, accompanied in some patients by concentration problems, memory difficulties, anxiety, and increased sensitivity to stress. That combination—sound, memory, anxiety, interpretation—is precisely the space where fiction began taking over for me.

The Belief That “I’m Hearing Things”: One of the most interesting aspects of auditory perception is how rapidly the brain turns sound into meaning. We don’t experience speech as a collection of frequencies. We experience a person saying something. The brain fills gaps, predicts, filters, compares incoming information with memory, and decides which sound matters and which can disappear into the background. That can create a frightening disconnect when someone knows that they heard something but can’t understand why everyone else seems to have experienced the same environment differently.

It is important, however, not to equate auditory-processing problems with hallucinations. APD concerns difficulty processing actual auditory information. Hallucinations involve perceiving sound without a corresponding external auditory stimulus. Trauma responses, tinnitus, hearing disorders, neurological conditions, medication effects, sleep deprivation, and psychiatric conditions can produce very different auditory experiences, which is why unexplained symptoms deserve proper medical evaluation rather than self-diagnosis. But as a novelist, I became interested in the terrifying question between those categories: What happens when someone can no longer determine which explanation fits?

Can Trauma Change the Way We Listen? Research increasingly suggests that stress can influence auditory perception. A 2026 review examining acute and chronic stress described evidence that stress can influence auditory processing through multiple neural mechanisms, including interactions involving auditory networks and brain regions involved in emotion and threat detection. The authors emphasized that chronic stress may produce longer-lasting changes in auditory coding and perception.

Research on PTSD has likewise found abnormalities in attention to auditory information and in the brain’s response to both trauma-related and neutral sounds. This doesn’t mean trauma routinely causes people to hear nonexistent voices. It means something subtler and perhaps more fascinating. Trauma can change what the brain notices, ignores, labels as dangerous, and how strongly it reacts.

How Are Auditory Processing Problems Treated? There’s no single treatment because there’s no single presentation. For diagnosed APD, ASHA describes three broad management approaches that are frequently used together: modifying the listening environment, directly training specific auditory skills, and teaching compensatory strategies that help a person recover information they may have missed. That might mean reducing competing background noise, improving the quality of the auditory signal, using visual information along with spoken instructions, requesting repetition or clarification, strengthening memory and attention strategies, or undertaking individualized auditory training. Treatment should be tailored to the person’s specific deficits rather than assuming everyone with listening difficulties needs the same intervention.

When trauma or PTSD is contributing to sensory hyperarousal, treatment targets the trauma itself rather than treating the experience simply as an auditory disorder. The VA/DoD clinical guidelines identify Cognitive Processing Therapy, Prolonged Exposure, and EMDR among the trauma-focused psychotherapies with the strongest research support for PTSD.

Someone experiencing new or unexplained changes in hearing, speech comprehension, sound tolerance, memory, or auditory perception should begin with a qualified healthcare professional. Depending on the symptoms, evaluation may involve an audiologist as well as neurological, psychological, speech-language, or other specialists.

And Then There Is Call Waiting. This is where I allowed reality to open the door for fiction. Londyn Andrews doesn’t hear the voices during ordinary conversation. She hears them when she’s on hold. That strange suspended place between dialing and speaking, connection and disconnection, and someone being there and no one answering.

At first, there are explanations: stress, trauma, and an auditory-processing problem. Something her brain is constructing from fragments of sound. Londyn wants to believe those explanations because they belong to a world she understands. Then the voices become specific. They belong to people in hospital rooms, accident scenes, motel bathrooms, near bridges and dark water, which are all instances where people may be suspended somewhere between life and death.

And eventually the impossible becomes personal. Londyn’s estranged mother, Georgia Bickford, enters hospice. While Londyn is waiting on another call, she hears a voice she knows immediately. Her own. Not the woman she is now. The girl she used to be. And that younger version of Londyn gives her a warning: Get the truth before your mother dies.

Suddenly, Call Waiting becomes about much more than mysterious voices. It’s about the things families refuse to say. The memories we reinterpret in order to survive them. The way childhood experiences can remain buried until some tiny sensory detail—a voice, a ring, a click, a few seconds of silence—brings everything rushing back. And the terrifying possibility that sometimes what we dismiss as noise contains the thing we’ve spent our entire lives trying not to hear.

The Brain Is Always Listening. The real science of auditory processing is fascinating precisely because hearing isn’t passive. Our brains constantly sort, prioritize, predict, interpret, and connect sound with memory. Trauma can complicate that process. Neurological conditions can complicate it. Attention can complicate it. Age, injury, stress, environment, and emotion can all influence the experience of listening.

The forthcoming fiction novel Call Waiting takes that reality and pushes it beyond the boundary of what science can explain. Because Londyn’s greatest problem isn’t that she hears voices. It is that eventually she has to decide whether they are symptoms or witnesses. And whether the one voice she has spent her whole life avoiding belongs to her mother, the dead, or herself.

Editorial Backlog Released

I’m announcing a backlog of titles recently released thanks to a clear in the editorial manuscript queue. Previously, I had to obtain a co-author’s approval before making edits and sending them forward. Now, I’m moving forward temporarily without a co-author (whose medical career has progressively come front and center over the past year), so I’ve sole decision-making over what gets approved and when. As of the end of last year, there were four titles in the pipeline awaiting publication.

Since Ghosted Buried Gone and Long Since Drowned, both from the same series, were written in tandem, they’ve been released from the draft inventory together. North of Ordinary is just a bunch of magazine submissions about Midwest small towns that didn’t go anywhere, compiled into a book of short stories for the content queue. And Echoes Along the Shore is a novel written last year, close to its series predecessor, that’s been waiting in the wings.

A Catalog of Small Cruelties was a NaNoWriMo monthly writing challenge that I got the idea from a mainstream news piece on a woman who woke up from a coma thinking she had children. Everything beyond the idea was imagination-based.

Also written simultaneously were Ships That Cross in the Night and In My Life, which share a similar grounding, as both came from teenage scenarios from a mishmash of diaries and imaginary connections that developed out of an angst-ridden late eighties Bismarck, North Dakota, adolescence and were then fictionalized and separated into two different plots. One is a soulmate’s story that will be the first in the series, and the other is a standalone novel about soulmates who met in their teens and reconnected later in life.

Those are going through edits at present and will be published as soon as they’re available. Be sure to check out ShadyOakPress.com for information on past books.

All book covers were done by the Ukrainian graphic designers at GetCovers.com.

 

A Catalog of Small Cruelties

A Catalog of Small Cruelties

Another one of my novels came out of editorial backlog, and I’m so excited.

She wakes from a coma grieving children who never existed.
A coma gives Violet Holloway three dead children—and a reason to punish the living.
Every victim has a secret. Violet has a catalog.

There are some griefs so complete they begin to invent their own evidence.

When twenty-eight-year-old architect Violet Holloway wakes from a coma after a devastating car accident, she remembers three dead children no one else believes ever existed. Not her polished attorney husband, Silas Holloway. Not her exhausted social worker sister, Piper Langston. Not the doctors, the police, or the photographs that insist Violet had been alone that night.

Back home in their affluent Midwestern suburb, Violet begins writing a private manuscript she calls A Catalog of Small Cruelties—a meditation on motherhood, memory, neglect, and the terrible things people allow to happen to children when no one is looking.

Then the bodies begin appearing.

A disgraced foster parent abandoned in an orchard house.
A father left on a frozen trail.
A woman discovered beside a riverbank.
A corpse arranged inside a library after closing.
Another found at a campground swallowed by fog.

Each victim shares a chilling connection: somewhere in the exhausted late-night conversations of Piper’s child welfare caseload, their names had once surfaced beside accusations of neglect.

As detectives close in and the city spirals into fear, Violet’s grief begins to look less like trauma and more like design. Because the deeper her manuscript goes, the clearer one horrifying truth becomes:

Violet is not simply documenting the tragedy.

She is curating it.

Haunting, literary, and razor-sharp, A Catalog of Small Cruelties is a psychologically devastating suspense novel about invented motherhood, moral obsession, and the stories people tell themselves to survive the unbearable.

“Whimsy and Bliss” by Angela Grey

 

Shady Oak Press (2025)
ISBN: 978-1961841468
Reviewed by Stephanie Elizabeth Long for Reader Views (09/2025)

Abigail Whimsy and Lainey Bliss have been best friends since the second grade. Like yin and yang, their opposites somehow fit together like errant puzzle pieces. Whimsy exists in a world of vibrant dreams and imagination, while Lainey is pragmatic and even-keeled, which anchors Abigail. Because nothing good can last forever, the girls have one final summer together before Lainey goes off to a fancy college, leaving Abigail behind.

Before Lainey leaves, Abigail has devised a plan. They will create a map (complete with a detailed legend) and explore all the mysteries of their town—dismantle the “thin” places, using her late grandmother’s journal (chaotic musings) as a guide.

As they delve deeper into the journey, Abigail’s reality becomes skewed, and Lainey’s attempts to keep her friend’s sanity in check become more difficult. The places they visit awaken a humming within Abigail, and the more they add to the map, the louder the hum becomes.

Whimsy and Bliss is a coming-of-age literary masterpiece. Angela Gray’s writing is known for its vivid imagery and deep metaphors, and this novel is no exception. Readers will quickly be immersed in Abigail’s world of wanderlust, where magic and realism become blurred. Beyond that, the character-driven story explores themes of friendship, self-discovery, and bridging the transition from childhood to young adulthood.

Sometimes it can be hard to decipher the difference between imagination and illness. The author has done an excellent job of illustrating Abigail’s unraveling—the whispering of nature, the ebb and flow of the hum, and the excitement turned obsession. With every place Abigail and Lainey traversed, I fell more in tune with Abigail’s frequency, at times questioning what was real and what was fictitious—this is the type of story that makes you see the world differently.

Whimsy and Bliss certainly highlights the plight of mental illness, particularly hypomania. Still, at its core, the novel’s overarching message is one of connection and trust—it’s the impenetrable sisterhood between two young women on the cusp of adulthood. In a world that is often stuck in the me-versus-you mentality, the solidarity between friends is refreshing, teaching us that we don’t have to suffer alone; we can lean on others for support.

For readers who love young adult books about friendship and adventure with a focus on mental health, this literary gem will appeal to you. Angela Gray’s exquisite prose is unmatched, and the multilayered characters are memorable. Abigail and Lainey’s map of thin places will forever hold a special place in my heart.

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Of Laughter & Heartbreak book trailer

This is the summer of locked doors, fragile rituals, and the ghosts that keep count.

I’m Stevie Matthews—almost sixteen, the kind of girl people whisper about. “Bat-shit crazy,” they say. Maybe they’re right. This summer, the order cracks. Obsessive thoughts tighten like barbed wire, rituals multiply, and the only way forward is a hospital stay I never asked for.

Behind those doors, I meet strangers who feel both broken and familiar, each carrying their own secret galaxies of fear and hope. Together, we make a kind of map—messy, jagged, stitched with laughter, unraveling with heartbreak.

This is the story of how I learn that friendship can be born from accident, that healing isn’t neat or pretty, and that sometimes the bravest thing is to stay.

This book is a tender, unflinching portrait of adolescence, OCD, and the fragile alchemy of survival—equal parts bruised and luminous, like a diary written in ink and ghost light.

Angela Ellen Grey anxiety bipolar disorder book review chronic mental illness coming of age delusions depression grief group therapy hallucinations healing how to write a memoir intrusive thoughts Journaling literary suspense memoir writing tips mental health mental health fiction mental illness mindfulness OCD phone anxiety psychological suspense psychological thriller psychosis psychotherapy PTSD schizophrenia self-harm social anxiety disorder social withdrawal stress reduction suicide support group work writing writing for healing writing for mental health writing suggestions writing therapy YA fiction YA fiction about mental illness YA novel YA novel about mental illness YA romance

Interview for ReaderViews.com

MEET THE AUTHOR! A conversation with Angela Grey, author of “The Cartography of First Love”

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Read our review of “The Cartography of First Love.”

The Cartography of First Love

Angela Grey
Shady Oak Press (2025)
ISBN: 978-1961841444

Angela Grey is an Indigenous novelist, poet, and painter whose work explores the intersections of memory, identity, and healing. She studied creative writing as well as spirituality and healing at the University of Minnesota, where she deepened her commitment to storytelling as both art and medicine. Alongside her writing, Angela finds balance in yoga and mindfulness practices, particularly Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), which shape the reflective quality of her work. She lives in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, with her husband, one spirited pup, and four cats. When she’s not writing, she enjoys camping, budget travel to places like Maine, Oregon, and the coastal Carolinas, and gathering with family around a BBQ grill.

Welcome to Reader Views, Angela. What is The Cartography of First Love about, and what was your inspiration behind the story?

Angela Grey

The Cartography of First Love is about two teens who fall for each other in a psych ward and, years later, collide again by chance, discovering that first love leaves the deepest coordinates on the heart. I drew inspiration from my own first love, Timothy, and the way certain people map us forever, no matter how much time or distance passes.

The book uses the language of geography, such as maps, coordinates, fault lines, and grids as a recurring motif. What drew you to this metaphor, and how did it shape Zibby and Nico’s story?

I’ve always believed that first love is like a map that’s messy, unfinished, and yet it guides you long after you’ve left that place. With Zibby and Nico, the metaphor became their heartbeat: every moment they shared, every scar and smile, became a kind of coordinate. Even when life pulls them apart, the map they drew together continues to shape the routes they take back to themselves and, ultimately, to each other.

What did telling the story from both Zibby and Nico’s perspectives allow you to show that might have been missed if it came from only one of them?

Telling the story from both Zibby and Nico’s perspectives allowed me to show how first love is never just one-sided; instead, it’s a dialogue of hearts, where each carries their own fears, hopes, and unspoken longings. Their alternating voices reminded me of my own first love with Timothy, how two people can remember the same moment differently, yet together those memories form a map that’s more complete, more tender, and more true.

Zibby’s eating disorder and Nico’s depression are handled with both honesty and sensitivity. What guided you in portraying these struggles in a way that felt true to teen readers?

What guided me most was the memory of my own teen years living with an eating disorder, anxiety, and depression. I remember how isolating it felt, how every day was a negotiation between silence and survival, and how desperately I wished to see characters who mirrored that reality without judgment or cliché. Writing about Zibby and Nico, I drew from those struggles, but also from the fragile beauty I found in connection during that time, such as the way even small moments of kindness could feel like lifelines. I wanted teen readers to feel seen, to recognize themselves in the honesty of the pain, but also to believe in the possibility of love and healing that can grow even in the hardest places.

The ward setting with its sterile walls, tiled floors, and glass windows defines Zibby and Nico’s daily life. What guided your choices in bringing that environment to life on the page?

The ward setting came from a very personal place, my own hospitalization as a teen for an eating disorder. I remember the way the sterile walls and glass windows could feel both suffocating and strangely safe, how the rhythm of medication rounds and group sessions became a backdrop against which fragile connections bloomed. I wanted Zibby and Nico’s world to carry that same duality: a place of restriction and routine, but also one where small rebellions such as passing a note, planting something green, laughing at the wrong moment, could feel like acts of freedom. Writing those details was my way of honoring how, even in the most controlled environments, first love and hope find a way through the cracks.

Zibby and Nico’s bond is often expressed without words—through touch, puzzles, and greenhouse afternoons. Ordinary activities also take on extraordinary meaning in the ward. Why did you want their connection and healing to grow out of these quiet, everyday moments?

Because in a place where everything is monitored and spoken words can feel heavy, it’s the quiet, ordinary moments that become extraordinary. For Zibby and Nico, healing wasn’t about grand declarations; it was about finding love in the small spaces where hope could breathe.

The plant named Atlas is one of the most powerful recurring images. What does Atlas symbolize for you within the story? For me, Atlas is both a burden and a prayer in that he carries the gravity of pain, yet in his fragile leaves and quiet growth, he shows how love can turn even the heaviest weight into a living map toward hope.

“Absence” becomes a theme Zibby confronts throughout the story. How did you want readers to think about absence, loss, and the presence that lingers behind?

I wanted readers to feel that absence is never truly empty because it leaves a shape, a breath, a lingering presence that continues to guide us, like a map traced in negative space. In Zibby’s world, loss becomes its own kind of presence, reminding her, and us, that love endures even in what’s missing.

Many young adult romances end when the couple parts ways, but you carried the story through separation, silence, and even a ten-year reunion. What compelled you to extend their map beyond the hospital walls?

Because first love doesn’t end at goodbye; instead, it lingers, shaping every road we take afterward. I wanted to show that Zibby and Nico’s map wasn’t just drawn inside the hospital walls, but continued through distance, silence, and time, proving that some coordinates remain etched in the heart until fate brings you back to them.

The epilogue introduces a “map legend” with entries like “Tiles,” “Cracks,” and “Coordinates.” How did you envision this legend as a closing note to the novel?

The legend is a map of absences as much as presences, where even cracks and silences become markers or proof that love leaves traces long after the moment has passed.

Readers might see Zibby and Nico as ‘two broken kids,’ yet your story shows another side of what it means to endure. How do you define strength in the context of their relationship?

For me, the strength in Zibby and Nico’s relationship isn’t about being unbreakable; instead, it’s about choosing to reach for each other even in their most fragile moments. They teach us that endurance isn’t the absence of pain, but the courage to let love in, to share the weight of what feels unbearable, and to believe that two so-called “broken” hearts can still map out something whole together.

Family, whether present or absent or in the background, shapes both characters deeply. How did you decide how much of their family lives to bring into the novel?

I wanted family to be like a shadow in the story that’s sometimes heavy, sometimes faint, but always shaping how Zibby and Nico move through the world. By showing just enough of their families, I could reveal the fractures and absences that made them vulnerable, while leaving space for the found family they create in each other. In that way, family becomes both the wound and the soil from which their love takes root.

The Cartography of First Love is lyrical, often more like poetry than straightforward prose. What role does style play in how you tell such a tender but heavy story?

The lyrical style lets the story breathe by turning silence, touch, and small moments into poetry, so Zibby and Nico’s love feels as tender as it is heavy.

You dedicate the novel both to your husband and to your first love. How did your own experiences of love influence the emotional landscape of this book?

 My own experiences of love gave the book its emotional compass. My first love taught me the intensity and fragility of being truly seen for the first time and the way those early feelings etch themselves into you forever. My husband has shown me what it means for love to endure, to grow deeper with time, and to hold both joy and struggle. Together, those experiences shaped the novel’s landscape: the passion of first love, the ache of loss, and the hope of finding a love that lasts.

Art in the form of sketches, puzzles, and drawings, along with movement such as counting tiles, tracing cracks, or standing in an airport, gives the story texture. How do creative expression and place tie into your idea of recovery and love?

Art and place are the coordinates of healing, like each sketch, crack, and step is a reminder that love maps itself onto the world as we learn to recover.

Young adult readers often look for themselves in fiction. What do you hope a teen facing struggles with mental health or belonging might take away from Zibby and Nico’s journey?

I hope a teen reading this story feels less alone. Zibby and Nico are proof that you don’t have to be “fixed” to be worthy of love or belonging and that even in the middle of struggle, you can still laugh, create, connect, and dream. My wish is that readers carry away the sense that their story isn’t over, that healing isn’t linear, and that the coordinates of first love, friendship, and hope can guide them forward no matter how heavy things feel.

There’s something unforgettable about the emotions of first love. How did you work to capture that fleeting intensity on the page?

To me, first love feels like a spark that lights up everything around it, even if only for a moment, and I wanted the language to carry that same glow. I leaned into the fleeting intensity: the way a brush of a hand can feel seismic, or how a single glance can echo louder than a thousand words. By writing with that kind of urgency and tenderness, I tried to bottle the impossibility of first love like the way it vanishes and yet marks you forever.

The book closes with a kind of map legend, almost like a guide to memory. What do you hope readers carry with them after finishing the story?

I hope readers carry away the truth that first love is never lost because it simply becomes a compass, guiding the heart forward.

Do you have another piece of work in mind after you finish promoting The Cartography of First Love?

Yes, while I was writing The Cartography of First Love, I was also working on another novel, Whimsy and Bliss, over the span of ten years. In some ways, the two books grew up alongside each other: Cartography carries the raw intensity of first love, while Whimsy and Bliss leans into memory, family, and the thin places where the ordinary brushes against the extraordinary. Now that Cartography is stepping into the world, I’m excited to give Whimsy and Bliss the attention it deserves and to share how the two stories, though different, echo each other in the ways they explore love, loss, and belonging.

Is there anything else you’d like to add for our readers today?

Only that I’m deeply grateful to every reader who picks up The Cartography of First Love. This story was born out of my own struggles and first love, but it belongs just as much to anyone who’s ever felt fragile, out of place, or overwhelmed by the intensity of their heart. If readers walk away feeling seen, less alone, and reminded that love, whether first love, lasting love, or the love we’re still searching for, can guide us forward, then I’ve given the book all I hoped it could be.

Angela Ellen Grey anxiety bipolar disorder book review chronic mental illness coming of age delusions depression grief group therapy hallucinations healing how to write a memoir intrusive thoughts Journaling literary suspense memoir writing tips mental health mental health fiction mental illness mindfulness OCD phone anxiety psychological suspense psychological thriller psychosis psychotherapy PTSD schizophrenia self-harm social anxiety disorder social withdrawal stress reduction suicide support group work writing writing for healing writing for mental health writing suggestions writing therapy YA fiction YA fiction about mental illness YA novel YA novel about mental illness YA romance

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@authorangelagrey

Hello, I’m Angela Grey: a writer, painter w/4 grown kids, nana w/2 bobtails 2 Manx, Cocker Spaniel/Cavalier King Charles pup, that enjoys both spirituality and yoga classes and is a staunch mental health advocate. I read and write YA, mystery, memoir, and romance, and I am currently working on a YA fantasy series.

Book review: How to Know God by Deepak Chopra

The Soul’s Journey into the Mystery of Mysteries

This is another book in that same first class in Spirituality & Resilience about which I had to lead a discussion. The book was rather intimidating at first because I questioned the existence of a God. Despite growing up catholic, I strayed from religion and sought something more intellectual. So, this book challenged me.

The author begins by going into telling us that our search to find God is narrowed down to a response of the brain which Chopra calls the “God response.” It falls into seven definite events taking place inside the brain and are much more basic than your beliefs, but they give rise to beliefs that bridge from our world to an invisible domain where matter dissolves and spirit emerges:

  1. Fight-or-flight response: we turn to God when we need to survive. You fulfill your life through family, a sense of belonging like to a community, and material comforts.
  2. Reactive response (this is the brain’s creation of a personal identity): we turn to God because we need to achieve, accomplish, and compete. You fulfill your life through success, status, and other ego satisfactions.
  3. Restfulness awareness response: we turn to God because we need to feel that the outer world isn’t going to swallow us up in its endless turmoil. You fulfill your response through peace, centeredness, self-acceptance, and inner silence.
  4. Intuitive response (the brain looks for information both inside and out): we turn to God for him to validate that our inner world is good. Outer knowledge is objective; but inner knowledge is intuitive. The God that matches this response is understanding and forgiving. You full your life though insight, empathy, tolerance, and forgiveness.
  5. Creative response (the human brain can invent new things and discover new facts): we turn to him out of our wonder at the beauty and formal complexity of nature. We call this inspiration, and its mirror is a Creator who made the whole world from nothing. You fulfill your life through inspiration, expanded creativity in art or science, and unlimited discovery.
  6. Visionary response (a form of pure awareness that feels joyful and blessed): we need such a God to explain why magic an exist side by side with ordinary mundane reality. This contact can be bewildering because it has no roots in the material world. You fulfill your life through reverence, compassion, devoted service, and universal love.
  7. Sacred response: we need him because without a source, our existence has no foundation at all. You fulfill your life through wholeness and unity with the divine.

These seven responses form the basis of religion whether the God is absent or non-existent or one of pure love and light. Each religion projects a different view of reality with a matching God. Only the brain can deliver the vast range of deities that exist in human experience. We select a deity based on interpretation of reality, and that interpretation is rooted in biology.

I enjoyed how the book went into the power of intention and what makes life spiritual. Also diverting was how the author explored the mysteries and complexities and wove them together to open new doors for us to ruminate. If you want to read it in its entirety, get it here.

Until my next post, why not check out my YA novels about mental illness, memoir writing, novel in verse, or even my Native American mystery series on Amazon, or follow me on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Goodreads, LinkedIn, Bookbub , BookSprout, or AllAuthor.