UNSHRINKABLE

An invitation to women to live authentically and embrace their strengths.

In this debut self-help book, Bonomi draws on both her personal history of growing up in a dysfunctional family (“I grew up trying to make sense of a world that didn’t make a lot of sense”) and her professional experiences as a psychoanalyst and sports psychologist who rides horses competitively and advises other riders. The book is targeted at female readers and encourages women to give up on perfectionism, recalibrate their internal critics, acknowledge their accomplishments, and embrace ambition. The author illustrates many of the book’s concepts with her own stories, describing how her volatile parents’ reactions taught her to deny her emotions and mold her behavior to meet their expectations—which resulted in psychological damage that she was able to overcome with the techniques and mentalities she shares here with readers. Bonomi writes with an assured tone, embodying the strength she encourages readers to develop and presenting topics lucidly and concisely, with action items made clear. The book is a quick and engaging read that offers thought-provoking possibilities and requires readers to do the heavy lifting to apply the author’s lessons to their own lives. Readers familiar with horses (and, specifically, dressage) will be best positioned to appreciate the equine-centric material that makes up much of the text, but non-equestrians will be able to follow along as well. The book is likely to appeal to fans of Katty Kay and Claire Shipman’s The Confidence Code (2014), Amy Cuddy’s Presence (2015), and Alexi Pappas’ Bravey (2021).The women featured in the book’s anecdotes are generally successful professionals, driven athletes, or both, and while those groups do make up much of the author’s clientele, the book’s thesis could have been strengthened by demonstrating how it applies to women who face structural limitations other than gender. On the whole, however, Bonomi does an effective job of showing how women often create their own roadblocks, presenting herself as one who has learned to be unblocked and is passionate about teaching others to do the same.

A thoughtful and empowering approach to helping women overcome psychological limitations.