Book Review & GIVEAWAY! A Song for Tomorrow by Alice Peterson

The Blurb
Tom fell in love with Alice the moment he saw her. He realises that being with her will not be easy, but she is a force of nature, a burst of sunlight in his otherwise ordinary world. 

Some people might look at Alice and think she has everything, but Alice knows she is not like other women. Her life is complicated, unpredictable, difficult. Alice does not like pity. All she wants to do, has ever wanted to do, is sing.

Alice has been told not to follow her dreams. So has Tom. But when fate has already dealt a tough hand, it’s time to stop listening to everyone else and only follow their hearts.

My Review

Thank you so, so much to the publisher, Simon & Schuster, for an advanced reading copy of this inspirational, amazing book.

A Song for Tomorrow is an incredible story based on an incredible young woman, Alice Martineau, who wants to be a singer. 

She is beautiful, kind, has a fabulous voice, but there's just one thing in her way. She has cystic fibrosis. But Alice is an unstoppable force...

The story is told from three POVs; mostly Alice, but the occasional chapter from Tom, who falls in love with her at first sight in the opening of the book, and also Alice's mother, Mary, via her diary entries. I found these diary entries heart-rending; as a parent we can feel so helpless in protecting our children, so proud of them, and so very frightened for them.

Alice won't let herself be defined by her disease; she hates it when anyone calls her brave or pities her, but she bites her tongue and is patient with them, even when one vacuous girl envies her for being 'so skinny'. She is haunted by the words of school tormentor Daisy, 'She'll be dead soon!' and teacher Miss Ward 'You will never be a singer', and this drives her on to fulfil her dream.

Alice is supported by her wonderful family, doctor and friends, including the fabulous anti-support group. She convinces music mogul Peter Harris to help her, but will her determination to ignore her condition get in the way of her dream?

Seriously, you have to read this inspirational book. I'm desperate to get my girls to read it; to show them there is so much to live for. Life is precious, it's a gift. Don't throw it away.

You can buy A Song For Tomorrow from Amazon or Waterstones or other retailers....

OR

I'm giving away one beautiful brand spanking new copy of this amazing book! To be in with a chance of winning, follow @alicepeterson1 and me @Vikbat on Twitter AND follow and leave a comment (a nice one!) on this blog (it'll be worth it, I promise!). Entries close at midnight on Friday 17th February 2017.

About the Author 

'I have published two non-fiction books, and eight novels, including the bestselling title, Monday to Friday Man. My latest novel, A Song for Tomorrow, published by Simon & Schuster, will be released in paperback 9th February 2017.

My writing is funny, romantic, powerful and emotional. At the heart of each novel is a love story but I always will include hard-hitting and thought-provoking themes within my storylines – such as addiction and disability. My protagonists often have to overcome adversity, based on my own experience of a professional tennis career cut short at the age of 18 when I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. I have never played tennis again, a sadness that will always be with me, but I have very much filled that void with writing. I am drawn to true stories and aim to write with deep compassion, empathy and humour about issues that resonate with my growing readership and that I believe have the potential of reaching and touching millions more.

I live in West London with my handsome Lucas Terrier, Mr Darcy.'

Book Review: Second Time Around by Colette Caddle

After a freak accident and eight weeks in a coma, Suzie Connors’ family are elated when their adored mother finally wakes up absolutely fine. Except she’s not.

Blissfully unaware of her children’s shock at having to deal with the changes in their mum, Suzie has had a wake-up call and intends to live life to the full, with or without their approval. Then her youngest daughter, Sharon, is faced with some major issues of her own and the one person she would have turned to – her mother – is no longer there for her.

An emotional story about family, second chances and what happens when, in the blink of an eye, life changes forever …

Thank you to Simon and Schuster for my copy of this book.

It's quite a well-known fact that head injury can result in personality changes, and this affects not only the injured person but also those closest to them. The effect of the change in Suzie's behaviour causes shock and upset to her family and friends in different ways. 

Colette describes the horror and torment suffered by a family when a loved one is in hospital very well. That feeling of being in limbo, of not knowing if your loved one will die, or to what extent they will be affected. It is exhausting, both physically and mentally. Then when Suzie does wake up, the torment isn't over by any means as they all have to learn to adjust to the 'new' Suzie.

The story is told from multiple points of view, which shows how each person is affected by Suzie's injury to great effect. 

Suzie has lost her ability to filter her thoughts and what comes out of her mouth, often to quite humorous effect. She is struggling with her memory - who should she trust to tell her the truth about her past? 

Jess feels she has to carry the responsibility of looking after her mother; but she has problems of her own when her love life and work life collide. 

Jess's sister, Sharon, has it tough - her husband cannot connect with their son, Bobby, and now Suzie, who always adored her grandson, makes her thoughts on Sharon's mollycoddling perfectly clear. So clear that Bobby thinks his granny doesn't like him - a heartbreaking thing for any child. But deep down Sharon knows there's more to Bobby's behaviour than naughtiness - she just needs to admit it. Caddle's writing deals with this with a great deal of empathy.

Suzie's son, Noel, has the struggle of uni exams to cope with as well as his mother's erratic behaviour. He can't even confide in his best friend Cal, who is bewildered by Noel's distance.

Cal is my favourite character - he brings a lot of sense to everyone around him, not least Jess and Bobby.

As for the worst character - it has to be a toss-up between Suzie's sister Mandy, a conniving, jealous woman - no one else can believe it when she claims to be a loving sister, helping Suzie; and Jess's lover/boss Louis, who just makes my skin crawl!

Second Time Around is a heart-warming read about second chances, family and friendship. I loved it.

You can buy Second Time Around here (other retailers are available...).

Owl Song at Dawn - Author Q&A

I'm proud to be on the Blog Tour for Owl Song at Dawn today, with a Q&A with author Emma Claire Sweeney. You can read my review of the novel here.

Emma Claire Sweeney has won Arts Council, Royal Literary Fund and Escalator Awards, and has been shortlisted for several others, including the Asham, Wasafiri and Fish.

She teaches creative writing at New York University in London; co-runs SomethingRhymed.com – a website on female literary friendship; and publishes features and pieces on disability for the likes of the Guardian, the Independent on Sunday and The Times.

Owl Song at Dawn is inspired by her sister, who has autism.

V: Hi Emma, welcome to my blog, and thank you for the opportunity to ask you questions about your fabulous new book, Owl Song at Dawn.

I've read that you were inspired to write this book by your sister, who has cerebral palsy, and also your Grandma, who provides the inspiration for the main character, Maeve. The story of Maeve's life, dominated by her family's determination to care for her 'severely subnormal' twin sister is heartbreaking. Though the quality of the way the authorities care for people like Edie has, one would hope, changed for the better, in what way is Maeve's life similar to your own in caring for your sister?

E: The positive aspects of the relationship between Maeve and Edie are quite similar to those shared by my sister and me. Lou has an amazing capacity for happiness, which rubs off on other people. Just the other night, after the northern launch party for Owl Song at Dawn, Lou persuaded three of my friends, my parents and me to parade around the living room in a human choo-choo train. Her lack of inhibitions gives the rest of us a great excuse to shed our reserve too.
Some aspects of care tend to get over-emphasised in narratives of disability. I’m thinking particularly of toileting. Most people who support someone with disabilities don’t feel defined by this aspect of their role, nor do they see it as a demeaning part of their loved one’s life. In my novel, I have tried to show that these aspects of care are simply a small part of a much richer and more complex relationship, which involves listening with the heart.
One of the things that I have learnt from Lou is that there can be dignity and kindness for all of us in seeking and accepting care.

 V: Do you think society has changed that much from when your book is set (in the first half of the 20th Century) in the way able-bodied people look at those with disabilities? How would you like to see it change, and do you think it ever will?

E: Maeve and Edie were born in 1933, the year Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. Before long, the Nazis had begun trialling methods of mass murder on people with disabilities. These deaths have never been adequately commemorated. What’s more, Britain played a role in this shameful history since the Nazis were inspired in part by some of the eugenicist ideology prevalent in the UK. When a forced sterilisation bill was debated in parliament in 1931, it was successfully opposed only in favour of incarcerating people with learning disabilities in asylums. One of those who spoke out against forced sterilisation, nonetheless described people with learning disabilities as having “infantile and puerile minds, with perversions, with anti-social tendencies”.

On many levels we have clearly come a very long way since then. People like my sister can grow up in loving families, surrounded by supportive friends. People with learning disabilities and autism have achieved high-profile positions as actors, for instance, and as social activists. Couples with learning disabilities have married and some have raised children of their own.

Yet, these are the exceptions. Even now, learning disability is under and misrepresented in the media. Most people with such disabilities still face great opposition from family and state if they try to forge romantic and sexual relationships. Young people with disabilities are three to four times more likely to be sexually abused than their non-disabled peers and disability hate crime rose last year by 41%. Only 6.6% of adults with learning disabilities have any kind of paid employment. These are troubling indicators that we have yet to learn the lessons of the past.

Even on the more benign end of the spectrum, our attitudes to learning disability can be damaging. When I mention my sister’s cerebral palsy and autism, I am usually offered sympathy on the assumption that her life must be miserable and my childhood must have been tough. This is hardly surprising given that as recently as 1983, when Lou was diagnosed, the doctor told my parents to focus their love on her twin, Sarah, and on their eldest daughter, me; put Lou in an institution; forget there had ever been three.

Sarah and I are both profoundly grateful that our parents ignored the doctor, daring instead to share their love and attention between all three of their girls. Far from a miserable existence, Lou has a compelling joie de vivre that defies preconceptions about disability, and even calls the term itself into question.

V: Maeve comes across as a very strong character, but her life doesn't seem to have moved forward for years, including the denial of her own chance to have a family. Was she punishing herself through guilt at being able-bodied, or guilt regarding the incident in the bath?

E: Good question! If the lives of the twins had panned out differently, I suspect Maeve would have come to terms with her guilt at being born the non-disabled twin. Her situation taught her that life is unfair, so she would have learnt to accommodate this knowledge. It’s her feelings of guilt at her brief yet devastating neglect of Edie that really cause her life to stall. I wanted the novel to speak of how a life may be damaged and restricted by forgivable mistakes and wrong beliefs – a few moments of inattention, a poor choice of boyfriend, a misperception of the reasons why he deserted her, an excessive self-blame.

V: Have any other writers influenced you? Is there one you'd consider to be a mentor? 

E: Two writers in particular spring to mind: one a mentor and the other a peer. 

Jill Dawson taught me at UEA well over a decade ago, and I’ve considered her a mentor ever since. She played a hand in pretty much every positive development of my early writing life. Nowadays, Jill runs Gold Dust mentoring scheme, so lots of emerging writers get to benefit from her refreshing combination of warm encouragement and tough straight-talking. But, more than anything, it was Jill’s writing itself that influenced me. I’ve always admired the way she writes technically ambitious novels about complex subjects, and yet does so with a deceptive lightness of touch. Wild Boy was a particular influence because it is also a novel that questions stereotypes of disability. Set in eighteenth-century France, the novel is inspired by the real-life story of the wild boy of Aveyron. Through the portrayal of both this child, Victor, and Doctor Itard, who attempted to educate him, Jill Dawson explores the varied faces of autism with nuance and insight.
The ethos of Jill Dawson and Michèle Roberts, who both taught me at UEA, centered around collaboration. As a result, I have a fantastically supportive circle of writer friends. One of these friendships actually has its roots in pre-UEA days. Emily Midorikawa and I met during our early twenties, when we were living in rural Japan, working as English teachers by day and scribbling stories in secret by night. Back then, we were so shy about our ambitions that we could not even speak of them to each other.

After almost a year of friendship, over plates of Japanese pasta in a garlic-themed restaurant within a small-town shopping mall, we finally ‘came out’ to each other as aspiring authors. In the decade-and-a-half since then, we have shared every one of the uphill struggles and celebratory moments of each other’s creative journeys: offering encouragement, critiquing work-in-progress, sharing news of publication opportunities, being there to empathise when the going got tough.

Our own experiences as writer friends prompted our interest in the female alliances of our favourite authors of the past. We set up a website, Something Rhymed, on which we post our findings and now we are writing about the subject in greater depth. It is a particular pleasure that my next book, A Secret Sisterhood: the hidden literary friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë. George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, will have both mine and Emily’s names on the cover. 

V: How hard did you find writing Owl Song at Dawn, with it being linked to your own circumstances?

E: There were certain areas that I couldn’t let my imagination inhabit: sexual or physical abuse, for instance. It was just too painful for me to bring to life such a scenario. However, I came to feel that there were perhaps some benefits to my reluctance to write about this subject. Sometimes a novel’s depiction of abuse in asylums can overshadow the primary trauma of incarceration itself. 

I discovered that even at the height of institutionalization from the 1930s-1950s, only one-third of people with learning disabilities were ever sent away. This sparked my interest in the two-thirds who tried to remain together as families, and the pressures that might have been brought to bear on them. Such matters were difficult but therapeutic to write about because I was rehearsing various scenarios about my own future with Lou – some of which I hope might come to pass and others that represent my deepest fears.

V: You describe the setting for the book, Morecombe, very fondly. Have you lived there, or do you have fond memories of it as a seaside resort?

E: My story began to emerge when I could hear the voices of my main characters: twin sisters born in 1933. Maeve is fêted as the cleverest girl in town and Edie is diagnosed as ‘severely subnormal’. But they both spoke with Morecambe dialects. This posed a problem because I had never set foot in the town. 

Since I hail from Birkenhead, I tried to relocate my novel to the Wirral’s coastline. But, try as I might, Maeve and Edie refused to morph their Lancashire dialects into Scouse.

At this point, I accepted that I’d simply have to put in the hours, investigating Morecambe’s history from 1933 to the present day. No more excuses: I’d simply have to get it right.

I had been drafting and redrafting for some time before the reasons behind my fascination with the town finally dawned.

My sister had spent a few years at Beaumont College in Lancaster – a college for people with cerebral palsy and associated disabilities – and they used to take trips to the seaside. On some subconscious level, Morecambe is a town that I associate with my sister and her disabilities: a welcoming place where she experienced the happiest of times.

V: I love the way the book is told through Maeve, as if she is telling it to her sister. With the switching between telling their story in the past, and the present day, did you plan the majority of the story out or did you find yourself developing the story and characters as it went along?

E: I’m so glad that you liked this aspect of the novel because I really wrangled with the structure. I always knew that I wanted to piece together a patchwork narrative because I feel that our minds are made up of fragments of memories, reflections, visceral experiences and the voices of others that we’ve internalised. I did plan the story out first, but, as I wrote, the characters’ lives evolved and I had to change the plan radically with each of the novel’s many redrafts.

V: Are you writing a new book now?

E: I am in the midst of writing A Secret Sisterhood: the hidden literary friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë. George Eliot and Virginia Woolf with my own writer friend, Emily Midorikawa. 

After that, my next book will be another novel. But it will bring together both my fascination with female novelists and my interest in disability. I discovered that the sister of one of my favourite authors was diagnosed with ‘imbecility’ and written out of the family history. My next novel will be narrated by her.

Thank you, Emma, for a fascinating insight to your writing!

Book Review: Owl Song at Dawn by Emma Claire Sweeney

In addition to my Author Q&A with Emma Claire Sweeney on the Blog Tour for Owl Song at Dawn, here's my review of this fabulous book. Thank you to Lucy at Legend Press for the advanced reading copy.

Blurb:

Maeve Maloney is a force to be reckoned with. Despite nearing eighty, she keeps Sea View Lodge just as her parents did during Morecambe's 1950s heyday. But now only her employees and regular guests recognise the tenderness and heartbreak hidden beneath her spikiness.

Until, that is, Vincent shows up. Vincent is the last person Maeve wants to see. He is the only man alive to have known her twin sister, Edie. The nightingale to Maeve's crow, the dawn to Maeve's dusk, Edie would have set her sights on the stage all things being equal. But, from birth, things never were.

If only Maeve could confront the secret past she shares with Vincent, she might finally see what it means to love and be loved a lesson that her exuberant yet inexplicable twin may have been trying to teach her all along.

Owl Song at Dawn is a heart-rending, beautiful story, set in the present day, narrated by Maeve, as if she is talking to her 'severely subnormal' Edie. Maeve's life has been hard and lonely, and we learn gradually what brought her to be desperately trying to keep a run-down Sea View Lodge as a welcome holiday retreat for people with special needs.

Her tale is interspersed with glimpses of her younger life with her family, as they provide full time care and love for Edie along with the support of Maeve's friends, Vince and Frank. We learn of the battles with the authorities, who just want to institutionalise Edie. We've all heard of the old barbaric institutions; but we never really hear of the strength of the families determined to support their loved ones.

Vince is a gentle, caring character who obviously cares a great deal for both Edie and Maeve, but it is Frank who steals Maeve's heart. But life never happens as we plan it. Maeve has subsequently devoted her life to others, providing care, support and employment to two lovely young people with Down's Syndrome. These two, Len and Steph, are gorgeous, innocent characters, with a wicked sense of humour and a sensibility about them that many 'ordinary' folk would not afford them.

Maeve has dedicated her life to caring for others, to the detriment of her own quality of life. She has no surviving family of her own, and when a face from her past, Vince, turns up bringing sometimes painful memories, she is reluctant to let him back into her life

She's a great, feisty character, and the author has depicted this sometimes cantankerous octogenarian with a great deal of warmth and empathy.

It's a beautiful story, wonderfully written and well worthy of 5 stars.

You can buy Owl Song at Dawn here (other retailers are of course available!).