My Search for the God of the Big Book is part memoir, part spiritual argument, and part ministry manual. Hadassah Roach begins in childhood chaos, moves through alcoholism, AA, and her immersion in Reiki, then builds toward a hard-won conversion experience in which sobriety, for her, is no longer the end of the story but the threshold to Christian salvation. Along the way, she revisits the language of the Big Book, argues that its real destination is the God of the Bible, and closes with a devotional and a twelve-week study guide that turns her testimony into a framework for others in recovery. The result is a book that moves from private wreckage to public mission with absolute conviction.

What stayed with me most was the nakedness of the personal narrative. The early pages have real hurt in them. Her descriptions of growing up in fear, of becoming a mother while still feeling half-feral herself, of trying to care for Kevin through his disabilities while her own inner life was collapsing, carry a bruised immediacy that doesn’t need polishing. The scenes that linger are intimate and oddly quiet: her mother teaching her Reiki hand positions as a form of closeness, the bleak humiliation of being years sober and still wanting to vanish, the small human absurdity of pizza plans turning into a rainy doorway conversation that changes two lives. In those moments, the book feels most alive to me, because the prose becomes less declarative and more inhabited. She is trying to tell the truth as she has come to see it, and that gives the book emotional force.

The author’s central claim, that AA has drifted from explicitly Christian roots and that the steps are incomplete without Jesus, is stated with certainty. At times, I found that bracing, even moving. Her distinction between being sober and being free has real moral and existential weight, especially because she has earned the right to make it through lived anguish. The testimonial sections and study-guide material deepen her sense of mission, but they also shift the book away from literature and toward witness. I admired the book’s fervor more consistently than I admired its subtlety.

I found this book affecting, earnest, and at times surprisingly tender. I don’t think its power comes from stylistic refinement so much as from the intensity of a life reinterpreted through faith, grief, and service. When Roach writes about cutting the rope of bitterness with her father, about the ache that remained after years of outwardly successful recovery, or about building “a place for the unfinished,” I felt the book opening into something larger than argument, something wounded and generous at once. I’d recommend it most strongly to readers in recovery, especially Christians or spiritually restless AA readers who feel unconvinced that sobriety alone has answered the deepest question in them.

Pages: 175 | ASIN : B0GHZM5PDW