The Girl on the Bathroom Floor: Held Together When Everything Is Falling Apart

Smith, the wife of country music singer Granger Smith, debuts with a wrenching account of finding her faith in the wake of her son’s death. After three-year-old River drowned in the couple’s pool in 2019, Smith endured public criticism and weeks of unbearable pain while grappling with her other children’s grief. Those days of “laying on the bathroom floor, feeling so alone,” she writes, allowed her to fully process her feelings and question why God had let the tragedy happen. She slowly realized how God uses trauma to “fulfill his eternal purpose in our lives.... What we might see as unbearable, He sees as the very tool He uses to bring about His perfect plan.” Much of her advice entails familiar I’ve-been-there reassurance that recovery happens in its own time, though she also shares complex reflections on the limits of grief, recalling a moment several years after her son’s death in which “God revealed an uncomfortable truth: I had made River an idol in my life. My pain, my longing for him, my constant thoughts of him—they had begun to eclipse... the Lord.” Christians seeking healing will find honesty and hope. (Oct.)