After my infant twins died, I couldn’t find anything on the shelves at the bookstore that was actually honest.

I found books about grief, sure. Books written by psychologists on the stages of grief and books that assured me that I would find my answers in prayer. This isn’t meant to replace those. Those books are necessary, but in the raw, emotional weeks and months after losing my twins, what I wanted to know more than anything was that I was not crazy.

Christy, a fourth-grade teacher, and her husband, Brian, are raising two adorable children ages 4 and 7 in Onalaska, WI. But Christy has two other children–twins–who died shortly after being born at 21 weeks.

Christy’s captivating memoir about her hopes, her dreams, her loss, her grief, and ultimately, her healing, is a poignantly powerful and brutally honest account of what happens when tragedy hits. We never think it’s going to happen to us. We never think it will happen today. But it does, and it happened to Christy. In an effort to find solace, Christy tried Googling, What do I do when my baby dies? Unfortunately, there just aren’t any good resources out there–at least not any that are truly honest, not sugar-coated with cliches. Almost a Mother is Christy’s way of reaching those out to those who have experienced a horrible loss of any kind, of any magnitude, in the hope of building a community of support and love.

And, in her words, I just wanted to know that I wasn’t crazy because I wanted to punch the pregnant lady at Target in the face.