Title: Remembering with Moana
Author: Moana Leanne Kirikino
Publisher: BalboaPressAU
ISBN: 979-8-7652-0375-0
Pages: 41
Genre: Spiritual Memoir / Self-help
Reviewer: Gabriella Harrison

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Remembering with Moana is author Moana Leanne Kirikino’s unconventional memoir which she uses to share her spiritual awakening and what she hopes will remind readers of the power already in them, hopefully ending that feeling of not being enough and ceaselessly looking for answers outside the self. Kirikino writes in a simplified and straightforward way using emotionally driven language to make the book suitable for different age groups and demographics. Plus, it only has thirteen short chapters. In the first chapter, Kirikino makes a piercing statement that captures the weight of the book’s message: “Sometimes the bravest thing you can do is choose your soul over your security.”

What I like about the book is that it remains warm and welcoming, even as she takes on an earnest and authoritative tone. As someone who has worked within institutional systems, that is, until she eventually became irreversibly disillusioned, she expresses that she was completely convinced there was no other choice but to walk away from these structures, which she believed prioritized compliance over care. Evidently this was a bold decision which marked a turning point in her life, as she decided to stick with her intuition and focus on spiritual integrity instead.

Every chapter contains a deep longing for truth which creates a genuine and resonant feeling of emotional intensity, especially in chapters such as “A Mother is Born.” In this chapter, her son is born. Kirikino states that this profoundly life-changing event became a mirror for her and served as a spark which forced her to confront inherited trauma and break generational cycles. The birth of her son and her resolute decision to confront existing trauma began the difficult work of emotional and spiritual self-reclamation.

While I found that the book is very easy to relate to on an emotional level, I also felt that there was a slight feeling of incompleteness due to the lack of real-life detail. Otherwise, even with this slight sense of incompleteness, Remembering with Moana, while not a traditional autobiography, as this was never the author’s intention, remains sincere, capturing a spiritually reflective mind.

Remembering with Moana is a book which encourages everyone who will dare to look inward and see what is already there, rather than searching for missing pieces and trying to become someone else. Kirikino encourages everyone to be true to their original selves and break negative and false templates that have been established as the way everyone must live. Anyone who enjoys inspirational nonfiction and works where authors get candid will find something worth holding onto in this book, especially trauma survivors, self-help readers, and spiritual seekers.