Some memoirs tell a story. Am I Good Enough Yet? Nebo Road Girl bears witness. Written with unflinching honesty and deep moral clarity, Shirley A. Jankowski’s memoir is not simply an account of survival. It is a record of endurance, faith, and the lifelong human struggle to believe one’s life has value after unimaginable harm.
From its opening pages, the book establishes the question that shadows Jankowski’s entire life: Am I good enough yet?
It is not posed as a rhetorical device, but as a lived reality, one shaped by abandonment, violence, poverty, and silence. The narrative begins before the author can even remember, with a birth marked by brutality and neglect, followed by abandonment and near death. What follows is a childhood shaped by trauma most people cannot fathom, yet the prose never veers into spectacle. Jankowski writes plainly, deliberately, and with restraint. That choice gives the story its power.
At the heart of Nebo Road Girl is contrast. Darkness is everywhere, but so are brief, fragile moments of light. An aunt who refuses to stop searching, a police officer who opens a cabinet door, a quiet mountain clearing where a frightened child speaks honestly to God. These moments do not erase the trauma, nor does the book suggest they should. Instead, they become the thin threads that keep the author tethered to life when everything else urges her to disappear.
The author’s memoir is especially compelling in its exploration of childhood trauma and its long shadow. Abuse, kidnapping, neglect, and betrayal are not confined to early chapters. They echo throughout adulthood in the form of night terrors, hypervigilance, depression, and a persistent fear of abandonment. The book refuses the comforting myth that survival equals healing. Survival, here, is only the beginning. Healing is shown as nonlinear, fragile, and often incomplete.
Yet this is not a book rooted in despair. What distinguishes Am I Good Enough Yet? is its quiet insistence on moral choice. Again and again, the author reaches moments where bitterness would be understandable, even justified. Instead, she chooses kindness, not because it is easy, but because it is the promise she made as a child when she believed she might die alone. That promise becomes the moral spine of the memoir. It informs her decisions as a student who works relentlessly, as a mother facing extraordinary medical crises, as a foster parent opening her home to high-risk children, and as a woman confronting depression while still showing up for others.
The chapters centered on motherhood are particularly affecting. Jankowski does not romanticize parenting. She presents it as both a source of fear and fierce love. Her children’s medical struggles, developmental challenges, and near losses force her to confront her deepest wounds while refusing to pass them on. In these pages, resilience is not abstract. It is physical, exhausting, and earned day by day.
Equally powerful is the memoir’s examination of the mask, the learned ability to appear functional while quietly progressing. Jankowski shows a reality many readers will recognize: being competent, reliable, and selfless while privately drowning. Her eventual decision to seek help, prompted by a sister who truly sees her, becomes one of the book’s most vital turning points. It reframes strength not as endurance alone, but as honesty.
Nebo Road Girl ultimately asks readers to reconsider what it means to be good enough. Is it an achievement? Obedience? Survival? Or is it simply staying, choosing to live, again and again, even when life has been brutal? Jankowski does not offer easy answers.
What she offers instead is something rarer: survival with compassion intact is itself a form of quiet heroism.
Written with clarity, humility, and emotional precision, Am I Good Enough Yet? is a memoir that lingers. It does not seek to inspire through platitudes, but through truth. For readers drawn to stories of resilience, faith tested by fire, and the long road toward self-worth, Shirley A. Jankowski’s story is not only worth reading. It is worth sitting with. Available Now!
