A Legacy of Strength
Sandi Young
Outskirts Press (2025)
ISBN: 978-1977276728
Reviewed by Demetria Head for Reader Views (12/2025)
A Legacy of Strength: My Story on Paper by Sandi Young is a powerful story that opens with 14-year-old Sandi’s life being turned upside down. She is no longer living with her parents. Instead, she’s in the basement that belongs to strangers, in a make-shift bedroom, and she’s scared. But she recounts her early childhood years, and I was immediately struck by the heartbreaking contrast. She paints those early years in detail and makes me feel like I was right there standing in her pink-flowered bedroom. She had loving parents who went to church. Her mom never drank, smoked, or cussed. Her dad rarely drank and only had the occasional cigar when golfing. Sandi’s vivid memories become an emotional anchor because it was devastating for her to have her life disrupted and displaced. This opening chapter sets up the emotional stakes of a life that has been unexpectedly overturned.
Young tells her story in the most raw and emotional form that touches the core. When she’s only eight years old, she sees her mother collapse, and she’s denied that instinctive last kiss before the ambulance door closes. I could just feel the physical ache from that. Later, at the funeral, she’s not prepared to see her mother’s cold, made-up face. The loss turns even more complicated. And instead of a comforting goodbye, her last kiss becomes a memory she dislikes, replacing her mother’s warmth and scent. As a child, she’s absorbing this new reality and watching her grandmother cry, and her father fall apart. Many readers will be able to relate because this touches home with many families. Readers will also have a deeper sense of how grief shapes lives, especially when it’s not fully processed. Young’s explanations of choices, validation, and void to fill are all very powerful. She turned her personal losses and tragedies into a quiet but powerful call to action for others to pay close attention to children who may seem fine on the surface, but to know that the grief doesn’t disappear just because they don’t talk about it.
I enjoyed the reflections Sandi Young took the time to add at the end of each chapter. It’s a nice touch to guide readers, and anyone who has gone through or is currently going through loss, tragedy, and grief. By the time we get to chapter six, where “things happen in threes,” I felt exhausted for her. It was so sad that at the age of twelve, she was already conditioned to brace for tragedy. The saying that “things happen in threes” seemed less like superstition and more like a curse looming over her childhood. Two senior-center friends, Anne and Marie, are tragically taken when a drunk driver hits them. It showed how quickly the joy they brought to Sandi was snatched away after she began to attach to them. Then she had to watch her great-grandmother slowly decline, become disoriented, yell at her own daughter, and then have to be put in a nursing home. When she passes away, Sandi shares the experience of having the funeral director come to the house to tell them that they accidentally dropped her great-grandmother. The reason the detail is so haunting is that the family has already been fractured by grief, and this woman achieved a feat in the 1920s by divorcing an abusive husband, and now she’s been dropped on a cold floor. I cried for them.
Readers will be fully invested in Sandi sharing her story. It can be cathartic for those in need of hearing her story to help them navigate their own experiences. She’s sharing something heartfelt, but she’s also sharing hope at the end of it all. As readers continue to follow her story, they will empathize with her, having a child at age fourteen with an older boy who was seventeen at the time. Her father would not allow her to live in her grandparents’ house for fear of what the neighbors would say about her having an illegitimate child. She ends up at St. Agnes Home with other teen moms-to-be. Compound all of this with her situation involving the older boy, as she refers to him. She endured an emotionally and verbally abusive relationship with him and, over time, found the courage to leave an unsafe situation for her baby. This adds another layer to her life that I think will resonate with some readers. But to also see her relationship with her father fractured was painful, and I could feel her heartbreak.
The beauty of Sandi’s story is not to have a pity party, but more so to show where she had to learn to draw her strength from to be able to share her story. I cried when she shared how she ached and was depressed about having to give her little girl up for adoption. I also found myself angry at the older boy for manipulating her and skirting his responsibility because he felt he was missing out on life, and to find out he was physically abusive as well. It reminded me of so many young women and girls who go through the same thing, and I think some readers will feel the same toward him. But the one thing that I really thought was so beautiful was the yearly letters Sandi would write her daughter and put in her adoption files for the next eighteen years, hoping and wondering if her daughter would ever access them. The rest of the story focuses on those letters to her daughter. Readers will find themselves shedding just as many tears as I did down to the very last page.
Readers who enjoyed or felt connected to stories like In Herschel’s Wake by Michael Wohl, or Libby Cataldi’s It Takes a Lifetime, will find A Legacy of Strength right at home for its tender and heartfelt moments.