The Zen of Learning to Ride a Motorcycle tells the author’s story, from childhood through to present day. With links to how learning to ride a motorcycle also taught her important life lessons for her mental well-being. 

This was a mixed read for me. I absolutely loved Leslie’s raw honesty about her life experiences. There were many parts that I could personally relate to and I found such solidarity in that. Seeing someone who had similar experiences felt so validating. I will never fail to be astounded by the pure bravery in publishing a book like this. I loved that Leslie was able to reflect all parts of her life, good, bad and ugly! I want to make it very clear that my issues with the book were not in the story itself. I really liked the connection to Zen and mindfulness and have adopted some of the ideas into my life.

However, I feel this book could benefit from some heavy editing. The timeline jumped around so much that I gave up trying to follow it at all. Because of this jumping around, some sections were repeated across multiple chapters. The first couple of times this happened I thought my ebook copy had glitched and thrown me back to an earlier chapter. I did not like this repetition and jumpy structure at all. It really hindered my reading experience. I can understand that it jumped around in order to fit into the different Zen practices but it made it difficult to read. That being said, I’m still glad I read it and will be taking some of the lessons forward in my daily life.

I would recommend this book to fans of non-fiction and self help books. I want to thank Voracious Readers Only and Leslie Reyes for allowing me to read a copy of this book and give my personal thoughts.