I just received what every writer wants most: a terrific review of their book that wasn’t generated by friends or family. I’ve pasted the review of my coming of age novel, Wild Ones, by D. Donovan, Senior Reviewer with Midwest Book Review below this post. It will appear in the June 2014 issue.

What I loved most was that the reviewer really got the book. I was an Army brat and, along with my younger sister and brother, moved to a new town almost every year until my dad retired. I still feel the pain about leaving my friends where we lived in south Kelowna, B.C. when I was in Grade Five. I still wonder what my life would have been like if we’d stayed there, the only place I ever felt completely at home. At the time I deeply resented my parents for moving us, though as an adult I understand it. And so, in Wild Ones I tried to put in every bit of childhood angst about having your world torn apart, and being powerless to do anything to change it.

Now I realize that these moves shaped who I am. As a child I was a lonely, painfully shy introvert whose friends were books, horses, and music. We can’t change the past but we can learn from it, and share our feelings. And maybe in some way my writing a book that brought out so much of my own childhood pain will help other lonely children survive theirs.

Here’s the review:

Wild Ones

Leigh Goodison

Sheffield Publications, LLC

Publisher email: sheffieldpublisher@yahoo.com

0615981585 $10.00 220 pages

http://www.sheffieldpublications.com/books_and_dvds

Wild Ones centers on sixteen-year-old Breeze, who is the new kid at school. But the school is not your ordinary high school: it’s a state-run school for troubled teens and Breeze barely has formed friendships when she’s faced with the possibility of another placement in a foster home far away, in a remote Oregon area where there’s virtually no communication with the outside world.

Now, it’s not like Breeze has no experience with rural settings in general or Oregon in particular: before her mother died, they went to southeast Oregon for the annual wild horse roundup, and it’s there that she got a taste of the countryside and a respect for its offerings. So one would initially think that the new foster home setting would be a good match … and it would have been, had not Breeze just begun rebuilding her life in a challenging new environment, only to be torn away from yet another possibility of stability.

And so she resents the move, and once there she decides she’ll return to the only place that has offered her a measure of friendship: but she must make at least one new friend (in the form of next-door neighbor boy Jared) in order to successfully escape. And therein lies her quandary.

As Breeze comes to develop feelings for her new home – emotions that overlay the lure of her old/new school environment – she comes to face some difficult scenarios in which nothing is clear; especially when her newfound foster parents are arrested, forcing Breeze to take a stand.

Wild horses, wild children, and wild home settings all juxtapose in a well-developed, lively story with a spicy, spunky protagonist recommended equally for young adult to adult audiences, who will appreciate Breeze and Jared’s ability to develop positive paths out of challenging situations.

Leigh Goodison’s use of the first person to describe her protagonists’ struggles solidifies their personalities, closely involves readers in their lives, and succeeds in creating believable dialogue and responses to life: “It sounds sappy, but I couldn’t help wishing that one day I’d find someone to love me like that. Whether it was from a foster parent, or a boyfriend, or maybe just getting closer to my friends. The yearning inside me was so great my throat ached.”

In the end it’s the well-drawn, moving character of Breeze that brings her world and choices to life, and which makes Wild Ones a satisfying story of life’s evolution, the options people consider when facing adversity, and (ultimately) how to pick a path that leads to happiness and human connections no matter where ‘home’ lies.

D. Donovan, eBook Reviewer, Midwest Book Review