This memoir follows one woman’s long, winding journey to finding herself.

Equine coach Mongait begins her remembrance by recounting the highlights of her impressive professional career; she worked as a full-time dental assistant, just out of high school, and later became an executive secretary for a National Basketball Association team's vice president. She went on to be an executive assistant for the New Jersey Nets’ general manager, and then a legal assistant to the head of the litigation department at a prestigious New York law firm. However, the memoir starts in earnest after she moves to Los Angeles to work for the Walt Disney Company in the early 1990s. Amusing stories—about quickly organizing a retreat for 250 Disney lawyers, for instance, or deciding to lock the back door of her boss’s office to prevent an entitled executive from gaining access—are interspersed with poignant memories of an unhappy childhood in the Queens borough of New York City and her decision to get help for alcoholism in 1994. After realizing, about a decade later, that the corporate life was not her “soul’s purpose,” she shifted to working with therapy horses, but she suffered a traumatic brain injury during training. Her time in an intensive care unit, as well as in a rehab center, made her question whether she could ever fully recover. Mongait’s emotional story of her path to healing is truly uplifting and culminates in her establishing her own six-acre horse ranch near the Rocky Mountains. Color photos, including heartbreaking images of her in the hospital, are scattered throughout the text, while her tone remains cheerful and conversational throughout: “I believe that certain circumstances, people, and animals come into our lives when we need them the most...I had to gather the appropriate knowledge and life lessons before I was ready and open to the healing gifts of Equus.” Although some of the more banal recollections of her various jobs slow the memoir’s momentum, Mongait’s stories of triumphs result in an affecting true story of perseverance.

A warm, inspirational read featuring accounts of some extraordinary events.