Three Days of the Armadillo

Fair warning: you cannot unsee what you're about to read.

Slyder Stone doesn't ask you to trust him -- he just asks for half a cheek on the bench couch and your willingness to come along for the ride. Three Days of the Armadillo is a collection of wildly candid, laugh-out-loud, occasionally gut-punch personal stories from a South Dakota kid who joined the Marines, got cuffed and stuffed in the back of a San Diego police cruiser before he turned twenty-one, and spent the rest of his life figuring out what came next.

From a house that burned to the ground with no insurance, to a stretch of self-medicating with weed and bipolar highs, to the moment the Lord "tapped him on the shoulder" and told him to wake up -- Slyder holds nothing back. This is a memoir about hitting rock bottom in the most human, occasionally hilarious ways possible, and finding faith not in spite of the mess, but somewhere in the middle of it.

Irreverent, profane, and unexpectedly tender, Three Days of the Armadillo takes its name from Slyder's spirit animal: armor-plated, impossible to stop, and completely devoid of fear. Written with the voice of someone who has genuinely been through it and lived to joke about it, this book will make you laugh before it sneaks up and makes you feel something real.

We are, Slyder reminds us, incredibly insignificant -- but it still matters what we do with the time we've got. So buckle up, and don't say he didn't warn you.

-- Slyder Stone