Review Of It Was The Devil All Along By Avalon Soulette Brown
In It Was The Devil All Along, Avalon Soulette Brown shares her firsthand experience and addresses many of the concerns related to the politics of the nursing field, prejudice, attitude, faith, love, resilience, struggle, and racial discrimination. Consisted of 284 pages, this memoir's revised edition was published by MEP Publishing in 2018.
Just like most of the human beings, Avalon is dealing with the life management issues: work-related, social, mental, and religious conflicts. At work, she is industrious, smart, and she accomplishes her tasks with less supervision. However, she gets easily upset every time the devil in her is stirred by her colleagues. Whenever she feels enraged, she realizes that the devil won over her. Against all odds, she tries her best to suppress and win over the influence of the devil inside her. Her ultimate goal is to serve God with all her mind, heart, body, and soul. With God whispering in one ear and the devil in the other, which voice will Avalon follow? Reading the story made me agree that It Was The Devil All Along. Even though some of her colleagues didn't find anything good in her, this was Avalon's evaluation of herself: "I knew I was a good worker. I never really needed the praise of the supervisors. When those patients said thank you and I left smiles on their faces, I knew I had done something good. " I was touched by Avalon's good heart, strong character, and resilience that can be depicted in her own reflection in this quote. On top of that, she was not someone who can be stepped on.
Avalon's writing style was clear and concise. Redundant words were used for emphasis. She shared most of her experience at work, at home, and at the church. With the competition and prejudice at work, she highlighted her struggles in fighting for the devil which stirred up hate and revenge within her. Most of all, she recognized and thanked God for being there, never leaving by her side, and fulfilling her needs. I empathized with Avalon for the hardships she faced. She was almost killing herself at work, but there was not a drop of appreciation. Despite her diligence, she received negative evaluations from her superior. I was glad she realized that her enemies were not her colleagues and definitely not her own self but the devil himself.
There was nothing I disliked in the contents of the book, but the punctuation, grammar, and typographical errors prevented me from giving it a perfect rating. After a thorough round of proofreading and editing, I could bump the score up to the highest rating. I would like to suggest having a glossary at the back page because of the presence of the acronyms (i. e. , NICU, GI-GU, DVT, RQM, etc. ), which do not exist in my country. Given the expansions of those acronyms, my reading flow had been smoother.
My final rating of Avalon Soulette Brown's It Was The Devil All Along is 3 out of 4 stars. I recommend this book to the lovers of biography, autobiography, and nonfiction genres. Those who are not into hearing complaints from colleagues and work-related issues are free to bypass reading this book.
