FINISH LINE FEELING

A memoir of finding healing through running.

Ferro, the founder and CEO of Girls with Sole, an organization devoted to helping troubled adolescent women via athletics, shares the trials of her early years and how she overcame them after discovering the joy of running. She presents a devastating account of childhood sexual abuse by a neighbor and how her mother insisted on covering it up. Ferro speaks of how she felt insecure as an adopted child but also about the close relationship she later developed with her adoptive father. Mostly, however, this book is about how her athletic activity became a key form of self-care for her and eventually gave her the inspiration to found Girls with Sole. Ferro’s prose style makes for a pleasant reading experience overall. However, it can feel a bit long-winded and digressive at times; the writing is very stream-of-consciousness and has a tendency to skip around in time, which can be jarring; for example, she includes a long description of meeting her current husband while running a marathon after several other more recent references to him. She largely focuses on her raw, personal story, although some readers may wish for more detail about her organization, which is only a few years old and which she doesn’t discuss in detail until the end. It’s intriguing to speculate how the book might have been different if it were written a few years later in order to better show her organization’s effects on young lives. Still, Ferro has a way of pulling readers along and keeping them engaged throughout this account.

An often compelling remembrance but one that may have some readers wishing for more.