Lithia resident and writer Bronwyn Best Jardin published Light Through Broken Pieces: Memoir of a Storm Survivor in October 2021. The book is available at Amazon Books in paperback and Kindle. An audiobook is in the works.
Jardin has lived in Lithia since 2018. She and her husband returned to Florida 2014 after 22 years of Air Force life and 16 years in Georgia.
Light Through Broken Pieces is about Jardin’s experience of living through Hurricane Andrew in 1992. Jardin and her family lost everything. She was an eyewitness to the destruction of Homestead Air Force Base.
According to Jardin’s description of the book, “There, a life-changing encounter compelled her to confront the tempests she had survived for years, including those inside the walls of her home.”
According to Jardin, “Writing this book was a long process. At first, shellshocked, I scribbled journal notes. I mostly wrote for therapy to process grief. My family’s experiences of preparing, sheltering and salvaging after Andrew became short stories. Through fellowship at George Mason University’s Northern Virginia Writing Project in 1994, I workshopped the foundational chapters for a longer story but put the personal writing aside while teaching full time and raising teenagers. With retirement, I turned back to my writing and the memoir began to take shape.”
Jardin has been a poetry lover since childhood. Her first published piece was called “Surviving Andrew.” This landed in the top 100 poems list of Writer’s Digest. Her poems also appeared in the National Library of Poetry, American Poetry Annual and Musings. She has written poems and articles for other publications as well.
In 2018 Jardin’s first book, Soft Trades, Hard Blows: A Poetry Collection debuted on Amazon Books.
In Light Through Broken Pieces, you get Jardin’s mingle of comedy and tragedy as she takes you through her lifelong journey of longing for love and unlocking faith that conquers fear. In the book, Jardin reveals the pathway found out of the wreckage of storms to find indestructible treasure.
Jardin added, “The book includes a few hurricane preparation tips some readers may have never encountered, such as how to ready your home should you have to evacuate. My hope is that readers realize we are all surviving something in life.”
You can follow Jardin on both Instagram @bronwynjardin and Facebook (Bronwyn Best Jardin).
