Download Your Copy Initiated: Memoir Of A Witch Originated By Amanda Yates Garcia Produced In EPub

book is in turns, ugly and resplendent, It will move you in some way, even if it's a way in which you didn't plan to be moved.
The author has done a lot of living, and she seems to embody this kind of brokenness that introverts have when they are pretending to be fearless.
To use a much overused word, it's fierce, I wish I had a daughter that I could make read it, A Bewitching Read! Garcia lives her life as a modern witch, She takes the reader through her journey of being Initiated onto this path, Garcia unpacks so much in these pages, Memories, Mythology, Trauma, SelfDiscovery, Empowerment and more! Her writing is strong and decisive.
This is one of thoes memoirs that really shows what the human spirit can endure and what it looks like to come out the otherside.


A reccomended memoir, and especially if you have ever been curious about the practice of modern witchcraft,

Thank You to the publisher for gifting me this book opinions are my own,

For more of my book content check out sitelinkinstagram, com/bookalong Its hard to explain exactly what this book is so I will just throw around some adjectives while I digest, having just finished it an hour ago.
It is: unique, brave, erudite, inspiring, raw, and real,

It is a feminist anthem from a daughter and a leader but that is almost a byproduct, It seems she set out to write memoir to share her experiences of learning her power through personal pain, But along the way, she learned to spiral herself up into the empowered witch she would eventually become through lessons in survival, as well as her studies of historical figures, both real and myth.
That knowledge becomes a rally cry to us all to climb our mountains alongside the heroines of the past, She is a wonderful example of how you can study the stories and use them practically in your life for energy or inspiration towards real change in your life.


She does not try to convince you that witchcraft has virtue or value, She explains how it comes into her life but she does not get very practical about it, She does quite a bit of demystifying of the art and practice but also that is a byproduct and not the point of the book.
I appreciated that.

I learned of this book because I listen to the authors podcast, Strange Magic, I can see why she elected to launch the book during Scorpio season but I also somehow feel like the timing was a gift just for me.
I needed something to help me find some control inside of my energy this week and this met that need and then some! Life is always going to be better if you believe in your own ability to practice magic! Beyond the sheer amount of trauma in this book suffering as initiation, it's written in lengthy paragraphs that meander.

For example, the author will start each chapter with a quotation and then talk about part of her induction into witchcraft and the growth of her practice, but it's not linear.
So she's walking us through her practice and what it means, how it developed, etc, . . but then she'll take a break to talk about her past, This is a little confusing, but what made it difficult for me to read was that she'd say something like "I'd do this for the next seven years," but then go right back to I think a few weeks after the events discussed I had a difficult time figuring out where I was in the timeline of her life and how her practice was developing during each phase.
Of course she's speaking from the present day with the benefit of hindsight, but it's tied together in a way that stands somewhat outside of time and reality.

At times it feels like the book is trying to be a howto and whyto be a witch, which is at odds with the very personal narrative she's trying to shape.
Overall, a book that could be one or the other but doesn't quite succeed at being both,
It's gotten rave reviews elsewhere, so shrug

Content Warnings: child molestation and rape, discussion of repeated rape and abuse of her mother by mother's father, sex work, drugs, pretty much every traumatic thing that could happen to a cis woman's body, mental illness

I received a copy of this book for review.
Such a privilege to have been gifted an early copy by Grand Central this book BLEW ME AWAY, INITIATED features a deft interweaving of Garcias vast esoteric and cultural knowledge with her captivating personal story of trauma, selfdiscovery, empowerment, and metamorphosis.
I was astounded by Garcias spellbinding, nimble, gorgeous prose particularly its supernatural ability to carry me away from a crowded Friday night Amtrak car with broken air conditioning.
This is THE memoir for all the witches and witchcurious folks whose spiritual engagement and magical practice cannot exist in an apolitical vacuum by virtue of their experiences  Garcia refreshingly unpacks the covert toxicity inherent in a certain sort of New Age detachment from the socioeconomic and political realities surrounding spiritual engagement, and instead shares her fearless journey of confronting the shadow aspects of our world headon.


Just preordered another copy as I desperately need a hardback of this, and strongly encourage you to get in on the action early INITIATED is guaranteed to empower you, hypnotize you, transform your perspective on your own darkness and the underworlds that you encounter, and will no doubt serve as a catalyst to the genuine empowerment, liberation, and personal transformation of the many readers who need Garcias inspirational story of rebirth.
I found this book to be “ok” as I didnt feel myself connected to her path, her witchcraft I dont consider myself an Oracle tho so maybe thats why.
I didnt feel represented and that is why I feel I could not really bond to this book, I enjoyed the parts that touched on mythology as I love those stories and reading interpretations of them, Amanda Yates Garcia is an intellectual giant, This book is riveting and beautifully written and also acts as a guide for readers seeking to engage in magic as a route to personal empowerment.
I cannot recommend this book enough! I always feel weird reviewing memoirs that I didn't like it's too easy to take that negative rating as some kind of judgment against that person's lifeto be oddly contrarian or otherwise disagreeable.
Writingas with all creative pursuitsis a very personal activity at the outset, doubly so when the results are pointedly about the author's life.
It's made a bit easier when the author isn't on GoodreadsI don't feel like I'm yelling negativity in their directionbut it's never fun.


The focus of Initiated: Memoir of a Witch is on the author, Amanda Yates Garcia, There's a bit of a split focus thought: Major parts of her life and the way she grew in magical practice to become a witch.
The fact that I used the word "split" shows one of the Initiated's biggest problemseverything feels disjointed as she teeters between these two focuses, never quite able to bring them together into a coherent narrative.


I only speak one language, but I've heard from bilingual people that they think differently depending on which language they're using.
Maybe that's not true, much like the idea that someone who goes blind can suddenly hear and smell better, but I could see how different languages with their different grammars and lexicons could change thought patterns.
The idea illustrates how I feel like Yates Garcia is writting: Her life is one brain thought pattern, her magic is another.
They're two languages within this book that never gel together,

Maybe it's less a problem of thought, and more a problem of focus, She focuses on her lifeparticularly teens through twentieswithout making magic the guiding narrative, She has to bring it in around the edges, She values conveying the big moments that defined her life abusive childhood, sex work, major romantic relationships without intentionally defining how those moments affected her magical path.


Yates Garcia makes regular reference to her magical beliefs and practicesthe Goddess, some rituals, various covensyet she doesn't tell us how she reached the point of believing these things, doing these things.
For me, that should be the crucial focus of any memoir whose subtitle includes, ", . . of a Witch. " Instead the advancement of her beliefs happen behind the scenes, sometimes even requiring a quick "here's where I am now" type sentence at the beginning of a chapter to catch us up on these developments, rather than naturally leading us through them.


In the introduction she says that she wants this book to be for everyone, Women, men, nonbinary, trans, etc, etc, It's a great acknowledgment. However, she's doing unintentional gatekeeping because she regularly says things that anyone outside her particular branch of magical practice would find eyebrowraising, or at least befuddling.
Regular references to the Goddess, Her familiars. My favorite example, though, is this:

"Runes are the Norse divination tools from preChristian Scandinavia, often carved in stone or bone.
I'd created mine out of clay at summer camp and had them painted with my menstrual blood, Clearly one of the most existential runes, . . "

. What is the purpose of runes We are assumed to already know,
. What is the purpose of using menstrual blood Granted, the idea of extra power in menstrual blood isn't a foreign concept to me, but it was still pretty shocking to read her casually mention that without any kind of explanatory "here's why I use blood" and "here's why I use menstrual blood" context.

. The use of "clearly" highlights the assumption that the reader is already fully informed about runes and their place in magic.


While that's sort of a perfect storm of problems, those same assumptions permeate the rest of the book.


Because she's so casual about talking about things like the Goddess as though I have the same beliefs about the Goddess, and random mentions of her familiars, and things like spirits that inhabit buildings or towns which have a fancy name I'm too lazy to look up, that when she calls a particular woman a "fairy" and a particular man a "demon," I take her at face value.
She dated a fairy, she dated a demon, It wasn't until I finished the book that I decided that in those cases, she was using the terms

figuratively, not literally.
But that's the kind of faith it requires to read Initiated, You engage in so much suspension of disbelief that in the cases she turns figurative, you don't even realize it until later.


All of the above is, in my mind, pretty bad, But I could probably forgive it if the parts about her life felt like more than, well, major scenes in the life of Amanda Yates Garcia.
Towards the end we could argue that an interesting theme of her relationship with her mother, If that theme could be traced back to the beginning, this could have been pretty good, But again, as with everything else here, it's not intentionally integrated into the overall narrative,

There isn't any overall narrative, It's a slideshow. Every chapter is a slide, where Yates Garcia stands in front of her captive audience, talking about it,

I couldn't hate Initiated: Memoir of a Witch, It's very flawed, yes, but I still did a lot of highlighting, And while the overarching narrative doesn't really exist, Yates Garcia's crisp prose makes reading fairly consumable, Recommended only for people who are Yates Garcia fans, or already "initiated" themselves, .