FOUND ART by Leeana Tankersley - BOOK REVIEW

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"Found Art: Discovering Beauty in Foreign Places" is a memoir of the year author Leeana Tankersley lived in the Middle East with her navy SEAL husband during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  As the story unfolds, Leeana finds her life and her soul have been changed forever.

With an artist's eye, Tankersley uses each chapter to piece together moments and memories from her journey to create a work of unexpected beauty; a handwritten note from Kuwait, a braid of fringe from a Persian rug, an original poem, a bit of basting thread, a swatch of black silk from a borrowed abaya, a mesquite leaf, a navy SEAL trident, a receipt from the Russian-Georgian restaurant on Louisiana Street.

Found Art emerges, a literary collage created from salvaged stories of loss, hope and belief ."- taken from back cover copy.

Found Art is an amazing book by a debut author.  Leeana's writing puts into words what many of us feel, but often cannot express.  Leeana takes us along with her to a part of world which most of us will never experience, and yet she enables us to engage all our senses as we journey with her.  We feel with her as she learns what it means to be in a foreign place, and she helps us see that all of us have 'foreign places' in our own life experience.  The truths about which she writes go straight to the heart and soul in a redemptive process which only God could orchestrate.  Leeana's journey resulted in transformation.  She says "We can resist the beauty the beauty that is waiting for us (in foreign places), but if we will enter the frightening place - if we will engage ourselves in the context of this new culture - we will see that there is no shortcut to transformation."  I was deeply moved by Leeana's writing, which caused me to look for 'found art' in the collage of my own life's experiences.

Leeana's book is published by Zondervan, and is available through http://www.amazon.com/ and wherever fine books are sold.

Thanks to Zondervan for providing a copy for review through the http://www.blogspottours.com/ program.

For more information, see Leeana's blog at http://www.gypsyink.com/.