Blue Wolf Reviews

Tag: acceptance

  • Old Rage

    Old Rage

    SHEILA HANCOCK

    Old Rage is the fifth book Sheila Hancock has written and the fourth one to follow her life’s journey. In her 80’s, Sheila begins this story by sharing an invitation just received. It is an invitation for her to be presented for consideration to be a Dame of the Realm, for her contribution to the Arts. This shows the respect she has gained for a memorable career on the stage and screen. Indeed, she is a woman of great thoughtfulness, and unafraid to voice her opinions on politics, and social conditions.

    In January 2016, the actress began this diary. She has written her thoughts and memories down all her life and is now using the diary format to present this book. Her thoughts on aging disgracefully and unpredictably are memorable.

    Sheila’s opinions on her aging body and slowing mind are fierce and humorous. She bitterly resents her inability to complete tasks which once would have been easy. But she doesn’t give up without a fight. Climbing a mountain and sleeping rough for a film shoot is what you do at 80!

    Politically Sheila is aware of her country’s decline in political rigour and she laments leaving Brexit. She attributes her passion and thinking to her early childhood, growing up in war torn Britain, and playing as a child in bombed out sites. Her Quaker faith also dominates her thinking.

    Old Rage is often difficult to read, as Sheila grapples with an aging body, a political scene she abhors, and a family’s perception of her frailty. She is forthright in the appraisal of her life. An excellent, if somewhat challenging, read.

    Sheila Hancock.

    “Sheila Hancock is one of Britain’s most highly regarded and popular actors, and received an OBE for services to drama in 1974 and a CBE in 2011. Since the 1950s she has enjoyed a career across Film, Television, Theatre and Radio. Her first big television role was in the BBC sitcom The Rag Trade in the early 1960s. She has directed and acted for the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre. Following the death of her husband, John Thaw, she wrote a memoir of their marriage, The Two of Us, which was a no. 1 bestseller and won the British Book Award for Author of the Year. Her memoir of her widowhood, Just Me, also a bestseller, was published in 2007. She lives in London and France.” Courtesy Bloomsbury Publishing.

  • A Recipe for Family

    A Recipe for Family

    A Recipe For Family from Tori Haschka captures with aplomb, and a rather quirky sense of despairing humour, the very real world of the modern family, the working mother who somehow has to create magic daily to keep the family running smoothly, often with little or no help.

    Stella Prentice is drowning in a world of ‘working Mum’, mother, step mum and wife to a husband who is a part time Actor and full time entrepreneur, who is away more than he is at home.

    She has come up with a terrific idea to promote the Company she works for, Fresh is Best, for Mother’s Day and is wondering what she is doing wrong with her life, as she is simply not coping with anything at all.

    The Mother’s Day event proves to be the catalyst which sets off a train of events that rapidly escalates, and no matter how Stella tries to change the course of the tide, it simply makes little or no difference.

    When Stella’s friends talk her into getting the assistance of an Au Pair to help with the household management for four-year-old Natalie and teen Georgie, she feels some of the struggle may be over, but is it. Ava, young, impressionable and grieving for her mother, arrives into an already chaotic family, unaware of what she has really agreed to undertaking.

    As the days unfold, so too does a delicate thread of a Mothers love for her only child, through the medium of a wonderful cook book and a lot of little envelopes, each one marked for an occasion where she may need some help. The first one Ava found was labelled For when you are sad. Each one also contained a special recipe for something they had made together.

    Life in the Prentice household goes from bad to worse, with Stella’s contract failing to be renewed, Felix chasing funding for his latest enterprise, Georgie enveloped in full scale teen angst and Natalie, simply being four. What a mess.

    Elsie, Felix’s mother is also facing her own issues with job loss, downsizing and the return of Jock, a man she had loved desperately in her younger years, wishing to return to her life. Now she has been ‘retired’, she is also grappling with where she fits in to Stella’s world of working mother,

    When a real disaster happens, each one of the family has to face some very hard facts and begin to understand what is the most important thing to them, their family or some fragmented dream they are all chasing, each in their own way.

    One of the many charming aspect of A Recipe For A Family is the heading of each of the chapters with a recipe title: Pear and Blackberry Buckle’ which was cooked at the Fresh is Best Mother’s Day event, can be located at the end of the book, along with the other recipes are dotted throughout the chapters.

    A Recipe For Family is a slow burn for the first few chapters until you get events sorted and then gathers pace to become a very comfortable, easily relatable read. Great for an afternoon in.

  • The Burnished Sun

    The Burnished Sun

    Mirandi Riwoe has captured the essence of humanity in her series of short stories all based on the fragility of humanity in The Burnished Sun.

    Beautifully worded each vignette is a powerful look at people. From the artist’s muse in Annah, long removed from her beautiful Island of Java, she is pining for a life that is no longer hers. Held in captivation by poverty, language and the colour of her skin she is at the whim of French artist Gauguin at a time when the dusky south sea beauty was the artistic rage. She leaves, eventually gathering her courage and the poor little’ monyet’, like her held captive by bars in a cruel and careless society, a woman adrift, held ransom to the fates that will dictate.

    Through the eye of a child racism is seen as divisive where there need not be, when a child is deliberately left out of the invitation lists of class parties, time and time again. His mother grieves for a different life; a life where she and her family can be considered as a whole component of the society in which they find themselves.

    Reflective and immensely emotional, Hazel is forced, due to Covid, to share her family through a glass window, a captive of her surroundings in a care facility. How she longs for the human touch, the warmth of a hand, her son Chris sitting in the chair next to her. Through the glass she feels their love, the coldness of the day and slowly grieves for what once was.

    The casual carelessness a mother has to face when a foetus is recovered from a small child’s abdomen. The child finds it amazing and wants to take the foetus to school for show and tell, his mother is grief stricken at the life that never was.

    Two award winning novella’s grace this collection Annah the Javanese and The Fish Girl, both stepping back in time, both portraying life as it was and as it is now; nothing changes and yet everything does.

    Poignant and delicate many of the stories in The Burnished Sun capture an aspect of racism, or of trying to fit in, to find a place of acceptance, that is lived and experienced daily by many and y those who choose, for one reason or another, to live in a country and culture far from their birth country.  

    The Burnished Sun is a masterclass in the construction of simple and yet powerful prose which tells a story, paints a picture and leaves behind images that will not be forgotten any time soon.

  • Birds of a Feather

    Birds of a Feather

    It is always wonderful to read a story set in South Australia. Wallaby Bay is a thin disguise for Wallaroo, and the author’s knowledge of that area makes it very realistic. Birds of a Feather is set around the prawn trawlers and the fishing community in York Peninsular. Tricia has a feel for the weather and landscape and shows the effect it can have on the fishing, as well as the local community.

    The story though, follows three women who have vastly different backgrounds. They come together in a time of life changing events and challenges. There is Eve, who owns half of a prawning business, and is seventy-four. Her god daughter Julia, who is a scientific researcher in Adelaide, and Lucy, a young married mother, who lives nearby in Wallaby Bay. The three women come together when Eve hurts her shoulder, Lucy comes to care for her in her home, and Julia loses her job and comes to visit.

    Eve is fiercely independent, and not the easiest of patients. She must face the fact that life cannot go on as it always has, and changes must be made. But what will she do without her beloved fishing boats to monitor? It has been her life! Julia has been surprised by an end to the funding of her research. She will need to find a new job. She has also a need to sort out her relationship with Glen. Lucy had an uncertain childhood and is overwhelmed with protective issues regarding her children.

    As these women come together, their different personalities clash and it takes some time to make them realise that other people can often simplify issues with which one can become overwhelmed. Lovely characters are portrayed here and have been well expanded.

  • The Joy of Being Selfish

    The Joy of Being Selfish

    Why you need boundaries and how to set them!

    Michelle Elman is a life coach, who has over 3.000 followers on her social media site. She claims to be able to help you rid your life of drama and toxic relationships which will allow you to love yourself and others in the best way you can. The introduction to the book The Joy Of Being Selfish (when usually you settle back to get a feel of the contents) has quite a few eyebrow raising, Ah ah moments, certainly more than enough of them to make it desirable to continue.

    Michelle explains easily that by setting boundaries, we get our needs met first, without help from others, and once this has occurred we are ready to face challenges independently. We are free to reach out to others, secure in the knowledge that our safety barriers are set.

    In my generation we were taught to place others’ needs before our own which helps or encourages the idea of avoiding the thought and planning that needs to go into living a fulfilling life. Elman feels it is necessary to be selfish, reorder your priorities and make loving yourself your own job.

    Looking at the list to be considered, we find many questions with a true or false answer. If you answer true to such things as, “I find it hard to voice my opinions when I disagree with someone,” this book is definitely for you. The difference between building a wall and a boundary is quite explicit, and advice is given on how to build this. What Elman wants you to avoid is, “Closing you off to the world, keeping everyone out, and decisions made from fear or anger.”

    Michelle Elman, writing simply and explicitly, has outlined clearly how to go about setting your own boundaries and personalising the process. Despite its challenging title, The Joy Of Being Selfish is an important book for those who want to reflect on their own position in life.

  • Broken Rules and Other Stories

    Broken Rules and Other Stories

    A series of short and not so short stories make up this composite work from author Barry Lee Thompson in Broken Rules and Other Stories, capturing the often cold, callous world of homosexuality; the emotionally challenging journey of young men venturing into the world of clandestine meetings.

    Thomas has a gift for capturing people in their surroundings, whether it is leaning against a wall in the hope of meeting with a visitor to the school, seeking fulfillment in a chance meeting, or the almost sad inevitability of gathering spaces visited by men for the purpose of sex.

    Nuance, textures, sadness, the cruelty of life for marginalised people is delicately and clearly created with characters that, because of their marginalisation, their unfolding of their sexuality, remain in the psyche.

    Many of the short stories have been published previously as stand-alone pieces. The Americans is longer than most; receiving a special commendation from the Manchester Fiction Prize in 2009 it tells the story of a young boy fixated on a family of Americans staying at the Avenham, a family run hotel in Bournemouth.  Told with a sparsity of words, a limiting of names, summer love unfolds filled with desire but also a sense of sadness as the summer and the love affair draws to its inevitable conclusion.

    Captivating in its sparsity Broken Rules once again uses carefully selected language to paint a scene as intricate as a drawn breath, delicate and lightly balanced between the flouting of convention and the unrelenting rules of society.

    Throughout the collection, the skilled use of words makes a subject seldom written about in such a manner, form into the reality of the ordinary in a world inhabited by those already marginalised by their location, birth or family circumstances.  The hard working tough people who live in ‘working class’ areas of Britain are represented time and time again, in a world where  to be different is to set yourself outside the norm or standards of that society.

    Strange though it may seem, the elegance of Thompson’s words are strangely comforting, in a most unusual read, which will either be enjoyed for the immense skill and word craft of Barry Lee Thompson as he portrays a side of society seldom seen, or placed to one side, to be read another  time.

  • The Farm at Peppertree Crossing

    The Farm at Peppertree Crossing

    Roni is city girl through and through; her childhood spent in a series of foster homes, with little joy and happiness as part of her young life. A go nowhere job at a kiosk at Flinders Street station is her sole means of income, a down at the heel one-bedroom flat, her only place of residence. An occasional boyfriend, who it appears has managed to get her pregnant, certainly possess a terribly uncertain future.

    Her cat Scritches, a rescued street cat and Roni a understand each other very well; existing, trusting no one and with little hope of a different future. A letter in a very classy window envelop arrives, which Roni believes can hold nothing good, as those kinds of envelopes never do. She decides to return it to the address on the envelope, only to discover the letter was for her and has the ability to change her life, if she so chooses.

    As she is pregnant and facing eviction from her apartment, she makes the overwhelming decision to accept the legacy she has been offered by an Aunt she never knew she had, Marian Nelson. She is now the owner of considerable property in the wheatbelt area of South Australia, a car and a home more than one hundred years old, none of which she has ever had any experience with in her life!

    A series of letters from her Aunt is part of the legacy, the first of which she is given by the family solicitor Derek Prescott, to be read on her flight into her new future.  As the days begin to spread into weeks and months at Peppertree Crossing, Roni begins to find a certain kind of peace in her new life, learning to face and overcome many challenges.

    She begins to trust for the first time in a long time, discover the family she never knew, the mother who gave her up for adoption and the town in which she has somehow become involved. Her Aunts long-time friend Tracy, leads her along her new found pathway with wisdom, love, lamingtons and life lessons.  Eventually, Roni slowly begins to discover, with the help of her neighbour Matthew (Matt) Krueger, everyone deserves love in their lives.

    Leonie Kelsall’s professional life is one of a Counsellor, the ethos of which adds a genuine thread of everyday life to the story of Roni and her dysfunctional family. The story told is one all to easy to relate to from so many aspects.

    Kelsall has woven in her debut novel, The Farm At Peppertree Crossing, many life strands together to portray country life, populated t5he story with characters we have all met at times on our own life journeys to create a heart-warming, loveable and engaging story; our hearts break for Roni’s very dark childhood, rejoice at her courage to take on her new life and are filled with love as she discovers she can also have a very, very wonderful future if only she are brave enough to grab it with both hands.

    Leonie Kelsall’s skillful portrayal of life on the land and the people who live it, come alive in The Farm At Peppertree Crossing. An absolute gem of a book!

     

     

  • The Theory of Hummingbirds

    The Theory of Hummingbirds

    Originally released in 2017, this charming story of coming of age, believing in yourself and accepting other people, especially your friends, for who they are has lost nothing in the past three years.

    The Theory of Hummingbirds opens the door wide into world of young people that are not considered as ‘normal’ for one reason or another. Alba was born with a ‘club foot’ which she calls Cleo. She has had several operations on Cleo over her short life to try and repair her leg, allowing her to be able to run.

    Levi’s what could be called ‘nerdy’ as he has a scientific theory for everything, Stephen Hawking is his hero and he also has severe asthma, which makes it very hard for him to participate in many school activities.

    He and Alba have been firm friends forever, spending their lunchtimes hanging out in the school library; they are also both obsessed with Hummingbirds, those tiny, beautiful, creatures that do not ever run as their feet are too tiny. They just perch.

    One lunchtime Levi begins to act a little more strangely than usual and when Alba makes him explain what he is on about, he says he believes there is wormhole in the library, down which the librarian Ms Sharman disappears each lunchtime.  The facts don’t really support the theory but Levi is convinced.

    Alba has one more operation coming up and sets her heart on being able to run in the school Marathon, as she believes this final operation will make her foot strong enough to be able to complete; she won’t take no, or slow down, for an answer. Levi thinks she is dreaming big and won’t be able to run at all by then.

    The two friends fall out, with bitter words being spoken and much unhappiness created, before they both have to accept that friends are that, friends and that friends support each other even when they don’t necessarily believe in their latest ‘theory’.

    Not a long read, but beautifully crafted and presented, based on the young life of Michelle Kadarusman, the storyline has real charm, wrapped around a life lesson presented in such a way as to have a broad appeal to an age range that is beginning to come of age and often in need of greater understanding about the people and the world around them.

  • As Fast As I Can

    As Fast As I Can

    As Fast As I Can is much more than entertaining look at facing up to real life challenges, viewed through the eyes of ten year old Vivian and her family, as they struggle to cope with a devastating illness and the fall out that will mean Vivian will not be able to live her dream of representing Australia at the Olympic Games when she is older.

    Vivian was not one to give up lightly as she had a dream, a big, huge dream to follow, she just was not sure how she was going to make it happen, as in her family they had the belief that if you worked hard enough, you could achieve whatever you wanted!

    Her friend Olivia is pretty good at sport; they trained together using Olivia’s backyard, measured out a sprint track, but becoming a sprinter was not to be, neither was long jumping a success. Gymnastics was great, but after trying and trying Vivian realised that was not the pathway to the Olympics. Eventually cross country running for the school sports captured Vivian’s imagination and she began training like mad to be able to be the best possible on the day, maybe even to win.

    She had in the most unexpected way, discovered a sport she was really good at; one that could take her to the Olympics in 2016 if she trained hard enough and believed in herself.

    This absolutely gripping story from Penny Tangey looks at what happens when dreams come tumbling down, that life often comes with pathways already built in and that learning to dream big is wonderful, but sometimes those dreams need to change directions, even if you are only ten years old.

    From the first page Vivian and her determination to never give up, sets the scene for a heartfelt story that will captivate, as very carefully woven within is strong message to children everywhere to believe in yourself, to follow your dreams but when change comes, as it often will, to change course but keep on dreaming and believing.

  • Fool Me Once

    Fool Me Once

    Fool Me Once from much loved Australian author Karley Lane is guaranteed to be the perfect light read for the somewhat unusual times, we all find ourselves learning to manage.

    Spare a thought for Georgie Henderson, a young woman who, ever since she was a very small girl, dreamed of nothing else other than to become a farmer, Family circumstances were such that even though her dream of working family acreage was no longer an option, she had carved out a niche for herself as the manager of a cattle property at Stoney Creek, for crusty old bachelor Harry, who had reluctantly gone to Melbourne due to age and health reasons.

    Reluctantly agreeing to go with long time friend Shannon, to the local  B&S Ball (Bachelors and Spinsters), she is standing watching the dance floor, wishing to be anywhere but there, when she looks up and makes eye contact with a rather good looking, slightly older man, appearing to be the same as her, wondering why he was there!

    Michael Delacourt has a back history, as does Georgie Henderson, which at the beginning of what proves to be undeniable attraction, would not seem to be a problem, as surely this burning, almost addictive desire for each other, would fade into wonderful memories. Surely!

    As the days and then weeks pass, their attraction simply gets stronger and stronger. Michael, once he realises his family business interests are behind Georgie’s passionate commitment to buy back her family farm, faces serious conflict as to how much to let Georgie know about his stepfather’s business, and why he, Michael, is no longer is a part of the family business concerns. He also has to face up to the fact he should have told her right at the beginning of their relationship.

    Once things come to a devastating head, both Georgie and Michael find themselves estranged, damaged and deeply distressed about their lives, relationship and trying to rebuild if at all possible, a future together.

    Karley Lane began this story-line some years ago, leaving it to one side to embark upon another project. Rediscovered and now complete, she has woven a delicious tale of lust, love, betrayal, consequences and chasing dreams, which as time passes often need to be reconsidered.

    Georgie and Michael finally decide is what is important in their lives, but it is how they come to this conclusion, that will keep the pages turning until the final word.