Blue Wolf Reviews

Tag: chickens

  • Mama’s Chickens

    Mama’s Chickens

    Statistics advise us that 28,000 Australians living with Dementia today, are mothers under the age of 50. As the author is one of those mothers, she wanted to find a way to reassure children that their world although different, was still filled with love.

    Mama’s Chickens is a special story.

    Mama wasn’t interested in getting chickens. “They are noisy, and they poop everywhere.” When the chickens arrived at the house, she felt quite differently about them. She loved their feathers in the sunlight and their individual personalities. They followed her around the yard and became familiar companions. Each chicken was given a name and when it was time for them to be put away they pecked at the back door.

    Then Mama started to lose her memory. She loved sitting with the chickens and watching them scratch around in the yard. Mama still tucked up the chickens at night and her children. All were safe and warm. Chooky LaLa, her favourite, and the children got upset when Mama got cranky, neither understood what was happening. However, even when Mama could no longer speak, they knew they were loved.

    This is an extremely confronting story for adults but may help children who will experience this disease in adults. The simple drawings are gentle and warm. They show the children and the chicken together trying to make sense of the gradual changes they see.

  • Bottlebrush Creek

    Bottlebrush Creek

    When an irresistible fixer-upper captures the heart of Angie McIntyre she believes that this is the way forward to build a lasting relationship, a real family, with her fly-in fly-out partner Rob Jones and their gorgeous three year old daughter Claudia.

    Maya Linnell’s latest sparkling country romance, Bottlebrush Creek set in the splendid coastal region of south western Victoria captures the real challenges of family, life, love and learning to cope with the unexpected; especially when moving into a new town, a new lifestyle with family right next door!

    Rob has been a fly-in, fly-out worker since well before he and Angie met, fell head over heels in love and had their baby daughter. He is now facing retrenchment and wants to re-establish himself as a tradesman. Angie is finding life in the fast lane as the owner of a beauty salon, mother of Claudia and all-time sucker for a helping hand in the community, exhausting, let alone trying to live in the run-down house they are renting.

    She is cautious when Rob takes her to see this amazing cottage, at an all to affordable price, not too far from a small beach and a sizable town, but wonders why the real estate agent seems very familiar with Rob, and why the price was so good it was not even discussed! She soon discovers this charming cottage with 200 acres of good land, just happens to be right next door to his parent’s dairy property.

    Angie and Rob’s mum have already set up some serious history and it is not long before she discovers there is far more history to the Jones family than Rob had ever mentioned, but despite all of this she agrees to go ahead with purchasing the property.

    As the story unfolds, Maya Linnell captures the emotions of a young mother settling into a new community, a young man moving back into a community he has always known and the tragedy that can be created when relationships begin to breakdown and trust is lost.

    Heart-warming, funny and poignant Bottlebrush Creek will capture your heart and imagination as Angie faces up to the surprise present of a crate of chickens, her feminist standpoint with a rather ‘old school’ tiler, confrontation when she discovers her ‘friend’ was not her friend at all and learning that sometimes you simply need to take a step back to hold on to and treasure, the things you love the most.

    An absolutely delightful and enjoyable read.

  • Chicken Mission: Chaos in Cluckbridge.

    Chicken Mission: Chaos in Cluckbridge.

    A dastardly, actually several dastardly plots, are being hatched to do away with all the chickens of Cluckbridge and further afield, led by the queen of all horrors Cleopatra, the queen cobra who has once again escaped from the Zoo. She is looking for a safe place to lay her eggs, but as she is also mean and nasty, she wants to create as much trouble as possible once the eggs hatch.

    Those wily foxes Thaddeus E. Fox and Snooty Bush have also created a plan so cunning that they have entered it into the Society of Annual Foxes Awards for the most Enterprising Fox. They consider that their idea is so good it will win the prize.

    To their surprize,  they are in the finals and the judge is none other than Cleopatra, who, although the word on the street is that she is on a boat heading for India, she is not.

    Meanwhile Professor Rooster has given his elite chicken squad a few days off from crime fighting and the three girls, Amy Cluckbucket, Boo and Ruth are excited about going home to their families for a few days. That is until Professor Rooster is informed that Cleopatra has escaped and there is a terrible plot to capture all the chickens and use them as fresh chicken for the city foxes.

    James Pond is also called in to help the elite squad deal with this terrible threat, but as always things do not go according to plan, with Amy and her friends landing in terrible trouble and James Pond being hypnotised by Cleopatra.

    The elite squad do eventually win the day but not completely as, although they manage to fool the dastardly plans of the Foxes, find all of Cleopatra’s eggs and recapture Cleopatra, when the Zoo keeper counts the eggs they find one missing!

    Join in the fun and games as the chickens of Cluckbridge fight great evil in their own fine feathered manner, making their parents and relatives as well as Professor Rooster proud of them and their achievements.

    A great, fun read for young readers who enjoy a rather zany adventure without any of the truly gruesome details, just snakes, and foxes and flying machines and sewers and…………