~ A Book Review: A Tale of Magic, Chris Colfer ~

Posted: May 23, 2024 in Authors, book review, Book reviewing, books, children's writing, creativity, Fantasy fiction, Fiction, Middle Grade, readers, Story, traditional publishing, Writing
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I have finished reading my ninth novel for 2024, A Tale of Magic by Chris Colfer. The cover looked nearly edible, a dream confectionary of colours and imagery. The child reader would grab and devour it, no doubt. This is the first book in the middle-grade Tale of Magic trilogy and sets the stage for the world and storyline. In the oppressive Southern Kingdom, magic and everything to do with it is illegal. Brystal Evergreen has had the misfortune of being a girl – females are denigrated in this society and expected to go to school to learn how to be good housewives. Burdened with a misogynistic, overbearing father whose behaviour towards his daughter is bordering on tyrannical abuse, Brystal is in a bad situation. To make things worse, as with all these fickle heroines, she wants more than the meager prospects of the conventional life. She is smarter than both her brothers yet is not allowed to read books or go to school like the males in her family.

Brystal is desperate to read, and in her desperation, she takes on a job at the library, which must remain a big secret from her family. The reader starts to get scared and with good reason. Brystal quickly discovers that she is capable of magic and is a fairy! When she gets caught and declared a witch, she becomes sentenced and taken to the Bootstrap Correctional Facility for Troubled Young Women. After she has suffered horribly at the facility, the marvelous Madame Weatherberry rescues Brystal transporting her to an academy for magic. There Brystal meets other students, Tangerina, Skylene, Xanthous, Emerelda, Lucy, and the cook, Mrs. Vee. The girls become friends as they learn more about the world of magic and how to control it.
All is swell until four witches come to the academy asking for Madame Weatherberry’s help, and Brystal learns of the threat in the Northern Kingdom and the Snow Queen witch. When Madame Weatherberry goes missing, Brystal and her classmates travel to the dangerous North Kingdom in search of her. However, their confidence in their teacher slowly erodes as they discover that Madame Weatherberry has been telling lies. Upon entering the North Kingdom, Brystal and her friends find themselves in a battle and have to start to use their magic powers for the first time.

A Tale of Magic is a reasonable story and would hold its own on the bookshelf in any kids’ section. As an adult, I read this book trying to figure it out: everything was amped up to the nth degree, the characters’ traits were laid on thickly with trowels, browbeating the reader with how evil or good they were, and the extremes of every situation were hyped on steroids. I almost couldn’t breathe reading it. We Kiwis would say that it was too “on the nose.” Every fact is handed to the reader with a spatula. Not knowing the author or the series, I looked him up, curious. I was surprised to learn the author is the American actor, the achingly young Chris Colfer, who became famous for playing Kurt Hummel in the musical Glee (2009–2015). Colfer was offered a book deal with Little, Brown, and Company to write two novels for children. The penny dropped.

The first book in the series, The Land of Stories: The Wishing Spell, was released in 2012. The second, The Land of Stories: The Enchantress Returns followed in 2013 and reached number two on The New York Times Best Seller list by the end of 2013.
A Tale of Magic…, is a prequel to The Land of Stories series and was released in 2019. Colfer came out with the next book, the sequel, A Tale of Witchcraft…, in 2020, and the final book, A Tale of Sorcery…, was published in 2021. This prolific young man already has fifteen novels to his name and he’s in his early thirties. He’s killing it! I say all power to him. If Colfer can make this style work, he should keep doing it. The style is a little OTT for me and I would hesitate to pick up another title by the same author. But, I respect his fiction is filling a need, and I say more power to him. Anything that gets kids reading wins my vote every time.
My rating is two stars

Talk to you later.
Keep reading!
Yvette Carol
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The girls giggled and eyed the paranoid king, as if they were looking into his soul and found it laughable. ~ from A Tale of Magic, Chris Colfer


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~ A Book Review: Changeling, Delia Sherman ~

Posted: May 16, 2024 in book review, Book reviewing, books, children's writing, creativity, Fantasy fiction, Fiction, Middle Grade, readers, Story, traditional publishing, Writing
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I have finished reading my eighth novel for 2024, Changeling, by Delia Sherman. This is a book I put into my basket purely because of the cover. Sometimes, you feel compelled to buy for that reason alone – no need to read the first page or check the blurb on the back. Physically it was a nice-sized book – neither too big nor too small. Won over by the supernatural hullabaloo on the front and the hardcover, it had the triple whammy of a knockout title. Changeling.
According to the definition in my Brewers Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, A changeling is a peevish sick child. The notion used to be that the fairies took a healthy child and left in its place one of their starveling elves, which never thrived. The word means ‘little changed person’

I have always found the concept of changelings or fairy children strangely intriguing and sinister. Therefore the idea of telling the story of a human child who was switched out and following her life in the fairy realm seemed a cool premise for a middle fiction story.
Changeling is the story of Neef. She is a young girl who is the human child changed over for the fairy child. While the changeling is growing up in her place, Neef is being raised by her fairy godmother, a white rat called Astris.

Life in the New York Between has been sweet, despite the fact the fairy realm boasts some scary creatures and the Wild Hunt terrorizes the fairies in Central Park. All the magical folk in the between depend on the protection of The Green Lady, the Genius of the Central Park. Neef spends her days studying Folk Lore and going to the Between’s Metropolitan Museum. Yet, it’s not enough for Neef. She constantly wants more, nothing is ever good enough. Her life is boring she craves adventure and wastes time wishing more would happen.
We readers brace ourselves for the boot to fall. We know the story tropes of the unsatisfied protagonist, and that of ‘curiosity killed the cat’, and we know Neef is asking for it. Before long she ends up breaking Fairy law. Yup. Knew it. Now on the wrong side of the Green Lady, Neef is to be banished from the park to be hunted down like an animal by the Hunt. Neef and her friends strike a deal with the Green Lady. If Neef can obtain three impossible objects, she will be allowed to return home. She meets the changeling, the fairy child being raised in her biological family’s home, and the pair learn how to work together to achieve the goal.

Changeling is another excellent example of tight world-building. Sherman thinks of everything from the mythology of this world to cleverly mixing in the traditions of fables (such as brownies and selkies), and fictional characters (such as Shakespearean fairies). I liked her sense of play. Sherman is like a kid in a sandbox using a bit of everything, throwing in bits of classic fairy tales and tweaking them to fit modern life like Jack and the Beanstalk became Jack and the Extension Ladder. She explores the idea that the immigrants flooding into New York brought their stories and therefore ‘Little Folk’ with them. It made me laugh when she made the tough mercenaries lording it over places like Broadway and Wall Street the fairies, turning our expectations on their heads. It’s fresh and lively. Good stuff for kids.
One special mention must go to the subtle way Sherman brings the vagaries of Autism into the story without making it overt. The character differences are presented to us as perplexing, frustrating, and unique traits of Changeling, however, because we see them through Neef’s innocent eyes, we don’t judge this character. In the end, it’s a nice touch that Changeling’s attributes make her useful and complement those of the levelheaded Neef in every challenge. They could not get through the quest without each other.

Delia Sherman was born in 1951 in Tokyo, Japan. She is an author of Science Fiction & Fantasy, Young Adult, and Short Stories, winning the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for her novel The Porcelain Dove. She earned a PhD in Renaissance studies at Brown University and has also written the novels Through a Brazen Mirror and Changeling. She co-founded the Interstitial Arts Foundation, dedicated to promoting border-crossing art genres. She lives in New York City with her wife, Ellen Kushner.
My rating is three stars

Talk to you later.
Keep reading!
Yvette Carol
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Your precious babe is hence convey’d,
And in its place a changeling laid. ~ JOHN GAY: Fables (1727)

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~ A Book Review: Sanctuary, Kate de Goldi ~

Posted: May 9, 2024 in book review, Book reviewing, books, creativity, Fiction, Kate de Goldi, readers, Story, traditional publishing, words, Writing, Young Adult
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I have finished reading my seventh novel for 2024, Sanctuary, by Kate de Goldi. Whenever I am browsing through secondhand bookshops, which is quite often, there are certain authors I will always buy. I returned to my favourite haunt The Hard to Find Bookstore and chanced upon this slim volume by my favourite Kiwi author. Sanctuary is Kate’s first full-length novel. I thought, what a find! With no idea what the book was about I started reading it, most curious to see what would transpire.

Straight away I loved the South Island setting. Sanctuary is firmly within the heart of Kate’s fictional empire – Christchurch – her homeland, the land she knows best and writes about often. I remember her telling us once in class, “Sometimes I try to set my stories elsewhere but even when I do it’s still the scenery and terrain of Christchurch” (where she grew up).
There is the immediate introduction of the endearing awkward and hurting character I am coming to recognize from Kate’s other books. In this case, it is Catriona Stuart a young woman who has been through something terrible and is trying to recover. The fresh take is that it’s about what happened while at the same time, the story is being told by Catriona herself to her therapist, Miriam. The tragedy at the heart of the book has already unfolded and brought this girl to arrest by the police and through her talking to a trained therapist about it, the picture of the tragedy slowly and painfully unfolds.

It was like driving past a serious car accident when you slow down and don’t want to stare but you do anyway and can’t tear your eyes away. That’s how I felt about this story. I couldn’t stop reading and needed to know what was next. Short. Punching above its weight. For a first novel, I thought it must have impressed readers – and impress it did – by winning the NZ Post Book Awards in 1997. It was clever to bring in the conversations between Catriona and Miriam during their counselling sessions. It gave the book a winning flavour of sober contemplation and deep thought, highlighting the intrinsic value of deep conversation with another human being. The characters were alive in my mind’s eye, especially the old couple running the Sanctuary, the Salters, with all their quaint interactions over time-honored traditions of feeding folks, making tea, and the sort of minutiae I would expect from Kate laid on, bringing the scenes vividly to life.
I read with interest every day until it was finished. A great read, with extra brownie points given for the inexorable build-up to a truly startling, earth-shattering climax. It’s one of the books you talk to fellow book lovers about. I wanted to pick it apart to see how she had done it!

There are many times I’ve had the pleasure to see Kate de Goldi speak at public events. As the keynote speaker for the Spinning Gold Children’s Literature Conference in 2009, Kate referred to the directive by Thoreau, ‘Know your bone’. She said, “Circle your preoccupations and recurring motifs, bury your bone, dig it up, sniff it. The great writers always have their story, their palette, driven by something they find interesting that they can’t explain. The best stories arise out of the writer’s need to explore their drive. Your fascination, your idiosyncratic fascination, is why you were made and set here.” Kate has her signature palette, familiar scenery, and crazy characters – she knows her bone! – yet in every story, she still has the power to surprise me. A great find, indeed.
Kate De Goldi is a writer, reviewer, and tutor who grew up in Christchurch and now lives in Wellington. Her first book, Like You, Really was published under the nom de plume Kate Flannery. She has won the American Express and Katherine Mansfield Awards for her short stories and numerous literary awards for her other novels. In 2001, Kate was made an Arts Foundation Laureate.
My rating is four stars

Talk to you later.
Keep reading!
Yvette Carol
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If it hasn’t been written yet, it’s up to you to write it. ~ Kate de Goldi

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~ IWSG: The Impact of Distraction ~

Posted: May 2, 2024 in art, Authors, books, creativity, FAMILY, Family stories, Fiction, gratitude, growing old gracefully, home, Insecure Writer's Support Group, IWSG, memories, Middle Grade, perseverance, personal evolution, Story, Writing
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It’s time for another group posting of the Insecure Writer’s Support Group! Time to release our fears to the world or offer encouragement to those who are feeling neurotic. If you’d like to join us, click on the tab above and sign up. We post on the first Wednesday of every month. Every month, the organizers announce a question that members can answer in their IWSG Day post. Remember, the question is optional!!! Let’s rock the neurotic writing world!
Our Twitter handle is @TheIWSG and the hashtag is #IWSG.

May 1 question – How do you deal with distractions when you are writing? Do they derail you?
It’s changed a lot over the years. If you’d asked me forty years ago, I would have said yes distractions derail me big-time, and I lose my rag at friends and family because everyone/thing is barking for my attention when all I want to do is write. When I was young, I had a low threshold of patience for disruptions. Story writing was something I was “trying” to do, to learn, to understand, and it required a great deal of concentration. There was a deep longing for solitude and quiet – if only I could get things quiet enough, I might have been able to hear the muse, and I might have been able to produce a work of near genius. But I couldn’t go away far enough or attain enough peace of mind to get fully underway with my writing.

So what did I crave? More distance, more peace. It’s like that old yearning for the quiet mountaintop or being able to retreat into the wilderness for perfect serenity that can never be filled. You can take holidays, stay in the country for years, and escape from everyday life for periods that never seem long enough. You eventually find your still center, and the words flow. But, it can never last. Sooner or later, you have to go back to your life.
Looking back on that early period, I realize now that I was still young, a person undergoing construction, with elements of my personality and belief system that had yet to coalesce into any kind of sense. To write fiction, I had to travel out of town and stay by the seaside for extended periods of solitude and find myself before I could work. Just having a person enter the room when I was writing was enough to break my flow. My link with the craft was flimsy. Tenuous.

But as I say, it’s changed a lot over the years. If you ask me that question today, I would say I’m no longer as easily distracted.
The older I get, the less I need my environment to be a certain way, and the less I need to leave town or ‘retreat’ to produce the copy. My workstation is at the kitchen table. I live here with my two grown-up sons in a small house. The boys have friends over, and there is constant music and chatter. Sometimes, I’ll be sitting at my computer working with a crowd of teenagers two steps away from me playing Mario Kart on the Nintendo in the living room, and my middle son sitting six steps away from me watching WWE (wrestling) at top volume on his tablet. It’s a constant barrage of babbling, boisterous, bombast, and coming at me in surround sound. I have learned how to zoom in with more focus on my story and close the mayhem out of my mind. I ignore them. A cone of silence drops.

The result, the work gets done. And I don’t have to spend a fortune and hightail into the countryside. There are so many blessings about getting older. I am happy to say that in my old age, I’m discovering the truth, that there is nowhere to rush to, nothing to change. I can write wherever I am, no matter what else is going on. My old age has taught me I’m not in charge. The stories come from the muse, the ether, ‘the inspired whatevers’ as my dear friend Meg used to say and percolate through my mind, my life, my gathered knowledge and experiences and understanding, and all I have to do – as Julian Fellowes once famously put it – (is) “let the words trickle out.”
Sit at my desk. That’s what I’ve learned after 40+ years of writing. Show up.
Then you can write – even with noisome boys near and in your ear.
How do you cope with all the distractions of modern life?

Talk to you later.
Keep Writing!
Yvette Carol
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“Within you, there is a stillness and a sanctuary to which YOU can retreat at any time and find peace.” – Hesse

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I know I’ve mentioned this story from my past before, but it bears repeating here. That of a run-in I had with one of my first writing tutors, Maria Stuttard, where she asked me at one point, “How old are you?”
I responded, “Seventeen.”
Maria said, “My advice to you is to put down your pen.”
I was aghast. What?
She went on. “Go out, live your life, pack into it everything you possibly can, and then come back to your desk and write.”
There was no way I could stop writing stories – it was my form of stress release. But, I did ‘go out into the world and live my life.’ My storywriting continued in the background of my adult life and has been my ongoing hobby for more than forty years.
What I see now is that Maria was right. To write well for the erudition of others, an author has to have lived. At our Fabulatores writing group today, the girls and I were saying that we use tidbits from our whole lives in every story, snippets of conversation, turns of phrase, personality quirks, funny and or distressing situations, stories we have heard, things we have witnessed – that we draw on this rich reservoir when we write fiction. Maria was right. I regret doubting her, as the older I get the more I feel I have to offer my writing.

~ Getting Over Artist’s Block ~

Posted: April 25, 2024 in art, books, children's writing, creativity, Do-it-yourself, Fantasy fiction, Fiction, Independent Publishing, Middle Grade, personal evolution, Story, Writing
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I am working on a new children’s series, which will be seven books in total. I have been writing this middle-fiction fantasy series since 2021. You may notice I never mention the title or concept. It might be six or seven years before publishing the first volume, so it’s best to keep things under wraps for now. However, there are aspects of book creation that can be shared without giving too much away.
Alongside editing the second volume in the series, I am illustrating the first book. I have a whole history with writing and illustrating which I won’t go into in this post. Suffice it to say I had determined to focus on the writing, perhaps working my way back to the sweet spot of writing and illustrating someday in the future.
Then a friend who is an English teacher and had edited the first book in the series suggested illustrations would be ideal for these stories. Long story short, I decided to illustrate the chapters myself. But it’s funny how once you make a challenging decision, it seems as if life conspires to prevent you from doing it. While I wanted to haul the pencils and pens out and get started, life intervened more than once or twice. Things kept coming up. Legitimate things. But at some point, I started inventing excuses. After a couple more weeks of ignoring the artwork, I realized I might be procrastinating. I was having the artist’s equivalent of writer’s block – artist’s block.

The following weekend, I did the same thing I do whenever I have writer’s block. I made myself sit down with tools of the trade in hand and start anyway. As soon as I struck a free day on a weekend I picked up my tray, stepped outside to the picnic table, and finally broke the ice by picking up a pencil. The first step was taken. Whew!
Ever hopeful, I had prepared for that moment. A few weeks ago, I read through book one in the new children’s series and took a note every few pages of moments or characters that would lend to illustration. So, to kick the boat off from the shore, I consulted my notebook. For the first sketch, the quote was, ‘A group of boys slunk out of the shadows, blocking the path, hunched over in hooded sweatshirts.’

Once I started, I had to employ trust to keep going. However, the reward of putting pencil to paper is the excitement of seeing that first image emerge. I felt like, oh yeah, that’s cool, it does add to the story, and then I began to feel even more deeply connected to the story, more moved to want to create more. That’s the essence of what writing/illustrating is for me – it’s an ever-regenerating cycle of inspiration. And so I found the strength to keep going. I kept going with the sketch until I more or less had the grouping of the gang the way I wanted it.

Once I had the outlines in pencil, I picked up a medium-sized tip black ink pen and followed those same pencil lines in pen.

Then, I added lines for shading, contours, and extra details. I always enjoy seeing the image come to life when the light and shade become emphasized and deepened.

I used black watercolor paint and a fine paintbrush to fill in larger areas of shadow. Then I also took a white gouache (watercolour but more potent saturation of colour) to add white highlights in places.
The result was I finished the first illustration for the interior pages of book one. Woohoo! We are out of the gate. What a relief to be underway. One done…many more to go!
Have you done anything creative lately?

Talk to you later.
Keep reading!
Yvette Carol
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There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. If you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself and your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. (There is) no satisfaction whatever at any time. Only a queer divine dissatisfaction. ~ Martha
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~ A Book Review: Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell ~

Posted: April 18, 2024 in book review, Book reviewing, books, conflict, creativity, Fiction, grief, loss, love, mortality, readers, Story, traditional publishing, Writing
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I have finished reading my sixth novel for 2024, Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell. A riveting read, this novel my eldest sister handed me for Christmas with the words, “This is my favourite ever book.” I had never heard of the author before, though I noticed it had won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, in 2020. I didn’t put it at the bottom of the to-be-read pile of books – oh, no – I started reading Hamnet immediately. From the first page, I was drawn back into the past – into the murky days of medieval England – to the days of Shakespeare (I love it when an author can take us there and make it feel authentic). What a neat idea to have the story concern this intriguing historical character without focusing the spotlight on him. Shakespeare is referred to as “the father” or “the Latin tutor,” he appears mostly as the frustrating love interest or the absent parent.

The story starts from eleven-year-old Hamnet’s point of view. I truly felt gripped by the intense stomach-churning desperation of this poor little boy searching the dark wooden houses for his mother, Agnes – or any other adult – who could come to the aid of his twin sister, Judith, lying abed, feverishly ill, and near death.
The unthinkable happens. A child dies. Although I wouldn’t normally mention a spoiler of this magnitude, in this case, it is part of the historical record and it’s also mentioned in the promotional material therefore permissible.
The book jumps from Hamnet to the head of Agnes (his mother). There is a local story about her mother not being human – so Agnes and her twin brother, Bartholomew, are regarded with uncertainty by their local community. Agnes has become the village herbalist. She grows/gathers herbs, keeps bees, and flies her hawk, and can’t seem to fit in with what society and her family expect of her. As fate would have it, she falls in love with the intelligent, restless, foppish “Latin tutor,” which upsets the families on both sides. Bad juju ensues.

I lapped up this fictional account of a little-known part of Shakespeare’s life, which explains so much about him. It is a believable retelling as if we were seated around the fireside, listening to Agnes tell us the tale of her unsupported love affair with the young tortured artist, William. The Latin Tutor is suffering under the thumb of his authoritarian father. He is a frustrated artist trying to follow his father’s footsteps into a career and life he doesn’t want.
In short, it’s heavy. The characters are tortured, to begin with, which is why our insides fill with dread, primed for worse to come. And come it does. In the saddest way possible for young parents.
The story deals in a visceral, heartrending way with loss – a family tragedy – then goes back in time to the beginning to where it all began, where it all went wrong. It’s an evocative, involving tale. We’re so curious and keen to see more of Shakespeare from this unusual point of view, that of his wife, that we can’t stop reading.

Life was tough and taut in those days. Everyday medieval life is rendered credibly. The tragedy unfolds and there is the unbelievable pathos of the heartbreak driving his loving parents apart; sending Shakespeare running away to London where he finds the stage and starts writing his plays, while forgotten in the background, still keeping his home, family, and community together is his neglected wife, Agnes, despite nearly losing her mind with grief.

Hamnet is a sensitive, immersive story about pain – the relentless nightmare for parents who lose a child – and what happens when that child is the progeny of William Shakespeare. Granted such a kick-ass premise, it has to be delivered perfectly to work and it is and does. Sometimes, there is an almost dreamlike quality to O’Farrell’s storytelling, and you feel transported. Even though the material is sombre, it is the human experience written in a way that makes it feel revelatory.
It’s an emotional rollercoaster that I did not want to get off so exquisitely were the characters and scenes drawn by the indomitable Maggie O’Farrell. However, I imagine it would not have been an easy book to write. It’s an excellent sign when I finish a novel and immediately buy the next title I see written by the same author – I have The Vanishing Act of Annie Lennox lined up to read soon!

Maggie O’Farrell, born in 1972, is an Irish novelist who hit the ground running, winning the Betty Trask Award with her first novel, After You’d Gone. Then, her novel, The Hand That First Held Mine won the 2010 Costa Novel Award. She has been shortlisted twice more for the Costa Novel Award for Instructions for A Heatwave in 2014, and This Must Be The Place in 2017. Her novel Hamnet earned her the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2020 and the Fiction Prize at the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Awards. No two ways about it, this girl can write!
My rating is four stars

Talk to you later.
Keep reading!
Yvette Carol
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A portrait of unspeakable grief wreathed in great beauty. ~ New York Times

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~ HOW TO MAKE My Most Popular Dessert CHOCOLATE MOUSSE ~

Posted: April 11, 2024 in childhood, Christmas cake, cooking, dessert, Do-it-yourself, FAMILY, Family stories, Food, Food preparation, Grandparents, homemade, kids, memories, time, warm fuzzies
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My two younger boys have always been interested in cooking and learning how to bake. I think it runs in the family. It’s a well-told story that my father’s mother would spend time with my two elder sisters (when they were little) in her kitchen, teaching them how to bake. Gran was an excellent cook! Her cheese and onion pie was her own recipe and legendary. Her husband, Granddad was famous for never taking Gran out to dinner, “Why should I pay to eat out when I can eat better at home?” Gran taught my sisters to bake in her kitchen in Sussex, England – all three garbed in aprons – with the girls working at a smaller table in the middle of the room. Epic cuteness, no less.

Echoes of that legacy have continued in our kitchen for the last fifteen years, as my two youngest sons have shown interest in all things culinary. I’ve therefore learned to include them every time I am baking. We have tackled the baking of the giant Christmas Cake together each year – the three of us in the kitchen – and it has become our little tradition that rings in the festive season.
The sweet treat the boys prefer, however, is chocolate mousse. Lately, I’ve been giving the youngest son lessons on how to make himself simple dinners (in preparation for him going overseas soon), and he asked if we could make the mousse. This was followed soon after by a request from my sister for the same mousse recipe. I thought, well, the heat is on – might as well share it online with everyone else. Prepare to melt hearts with this one…

Ingredients List:
300 ml cream
2 Tbs Demerara sugar
Extra cream, usually ‘thickened’ is the easiest
4 eggs, separated
150 g dark chocolate, roughly chopped
grated chocolate/ cocoa powder
fresh strawberries (or other soft fruit)

Here’s how to make your mousse:
I always prepare the other ingredients before the chocolate. I beat the 300 ml cream until thick. Then, I also prepare the egg mixture. Beat four egg whites until firm and slowly add the sugar until the mixture looks glossy.

Break the chocolate into the top of a double boiler and heat, stirring constantly until melted.

Take it off the heat and allow it to cool for at least five minutes – but take care – if you cool it too much the chocolate congeals and becomes hard to mix. Cool it too little and the chocolate cooks/curdles the eggs. Once your melted chocolate has cooled with dignity intact, add the egg yolks and whisk together.

Then quickly fold this mixture into the whipped cream. Fold half the egg whites into the chocolate batter and blend the rest of the egg whites. I always marvel over the marbling effect and never fail to find it pretty.

Combine and serve in individual dessert bowls—dust with sifted cocoa. Chill until set. Decorate to your heart’s content with dollops of thickened cream, sliced strawberries (or any soft fruit you have available), and grated chocolate.

My son put it best, when he said, “I can’t get over it. Mousse is the easiest dessert we ever made, and it tastes the best of everything we’ve ever made!” LOL. I couldn’t agree more.
Enjoy!
If you try it, let me know what you think…

Talk to you later.
Keep creating!
Yvette Carol
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“There is nothing better than a friend unless it’s a friend with chocolate.” —Linda Grayson


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~ IWSG: Blogging or No? ~

Posted: April 4, 2024 in Authors, Building brand, gratitude, Insecure Writer's Support Group, IWSG, life-changing experiences, Marketing, Mindfulness, personal evolution, Self-promotion, Social Networking, Writing
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It’s time for another group posting of the Insecure Writer’s Support Group! Time to release our fears to the world or offer encouragement to those who are feeling neurotic. If you’d like to join us, click on the tab above and sign up. We post on the first Wednesday of every month. Every month, the organizers announce a question that members can answer in their IWSG Day post. Remember, the question is optional!!! Let’s rock the neurotic writing world!
Our Twitter handle is @TheIWSG and the hashtag is #IWSG.

April 3 question – How long have you been blogging? (Or on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram?) What do you like about it and how has it changed?
It was 2014. At that stage, blogging was new on my radar, although it had been around as a medium for a while and had been taking off in the public eye for a few years. Enter the incredible Kristen Lamb, author and social media expert. I read one of her books, We Are Not Alone, about social media for authors (*I think this book is out of print, but contact the author). In her book, Kristen advocated authors should have blogs. She said that it is another form of writing and a discipline and that it helps us as authors to have to write an 800-word article a week. It flexes our writing muscles differently from writing fiction, and it’s good for us. At the same time, it’s building our brand and a fan base who, one day, might hopefully buy our books.

The idea of flexing a different writing muscle made sense to me. But there was a big problem; I was too scared to start. There was always a reason why not. Every time I considered the idea of blogging, I would put the brakes on by asking myself, what would I say each week? Who would care? Would it end up being another commitment I didn’t need? There were so many ways I could fall flat on my face. It was stepping further out of my comfort zone than I was used to.
For several years, I watched other writer friends start blogs without feeling any closer to starting my own.
Then, in 2014, for some reason, I leaped off the side of the pool and started posting, and I have posted every week ever since. I loved it instantly. I remember there was one week when I didn’t and that was when my computer system got hijacked by scammers. My poor sick computer went away to be cleaned of viruses and rebooted. I could not put out a blog post, and I felt bereft of my way of communicating with the world. What had started as a writing exercise had become a fully integrated, enjoyable, relaxing, satisfying, and creative part of my week.
By 2015, the blog was just one of seven social media sites I juggled, including Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, and Slideshare. I felt I had to be everywhere, building my digital footprint.

Apart from my website, Facebook Author Page, YouTube channel, and LinkedIn, I was also building my email list and putting out a monthly newsletter to subscribers. It was a lot.

But in the last few years, I have changed as has the entire landscape of my involvement with social media. I think COVID-19 was a big part of that. Building a brand and selling books has taken a back seat in my mind – it’s no longer what’s most important. Life these days is about connecting with flesh and blood friends and family, writing stories, and living a creative life. I have closed nearly all my social media sites, including the Facebook Author Page – which I deleted last week.

I have retained my personal Facebook page for friends and family, my weekly blog, and my monthly newsletter for public content. The rest of my time is free for creative fiction and family life. There’s a greater sense of calm as if I’ve stopped chasing something.

There is a lot to like about social media. It is a necessary marketing tool for artists and entrepreneurs, more today than it ever has been, but by the same token, I believe it’s more vital than ever that we keep a healthy balance between our virtual and actual lives. We need to be the master of social media and not let it become the master of us.
What do you think? How do you feel about blogging/Instagram/Facebook?

Talk to you later.
Keep Writing!
Yvette Carol
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“It’s a new season – a perfect opportunity to turn a new leaf and begin something wonderful! ” – Siabhan

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~ Wicked Little Letters, not a film review ~

Posted: March 28, 2024 in art, Friends, gender equality, morality
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I’m not qualified to write film reviews which is why I don’t write them – this is the first – but Wicked Little Letters is a film that, once seen, you feel compelled to talk about. A water cooler talk for days, kind of film. It was honestly so good. It is the sort of British movie that kicks your front door down, headbutts you, and says, Yeah, this is how it is and whatcha gonna do about it?
Last week I went out with friends on a girl’s night to see a movie. I learned the name of the film as we climbed the stairs – Wicked Little Letters. The 2023 British black comedy written by Jonny Sweet, surprised us by turning into a mystery film. Directed by Thea Sharrock, the film stars Olivia Colman, Jessie Buckley, Anjana Vasan, Joanna Scanlan, Gemma Jones, Malachi Kirby, Lolly Adefope, Eileen Atkins, and Timothy Spall.

The first message on the screen told us the movie was based on a true story. The film opens – your classic British period piece – set in the seaside village of Littlehampton. In the 1920s, life was simple and tough, man. The stage is set for a typical, conservative small village, with working-class folks living cheek-by-jowl under strict rules of conduct, toiling daily to make ends meet.

We are saturated in cozy English old-timey-ness.

Then in the middle of the pastoral feeling, an obscene letter arrives at Edith Swan’s house, like a filthy bomb going off in a clean chicken house. The explosive ripples continue outward. Edith’s parents are exquisitely drawn, Victoria her mother is frail, freaking out over the letters, and her uptight father, Edward, explosive. The devoutly religious family appears respectable on the outside, but indoors, they live on a razor’s edge – Father Edward is an abuser ruling his home with an iron fist. The worst example of an out-of-control narcissist, Edward, is backed up in his tyrannical control of his family by the social mores of the time. The way Olivia Coleman portrays the mental debilitation of a daughter being severely disciplined psychologically, and emotionally abused by her overbearing father is sometimes hard to watch and yet ultimately uproarously hilarious and uplifting.

Into the chaos of the letters and the police being brought on board, Edith’s neighbour Rose blasts onto the screen dropping the f-bomb every five minutes and rips us out of our comfy seats propelling us at speed into the unknown. I was most discomfited by her character. I’ve never heard so much swearing in a movie as this one and most of it comes from Rose. The daughter of travelers tells us that she grew up stealing things for a living with her father. She is unashamedly who she is – something very much frowned upon at this time in history.
It turns out an unlikely friendship had developed between the two neighbours, the subservient, pious Edith Swan, and the foul-mouthed, alcohol-swilling Rose Gooding. But after the saccharine, holier-than-thou Edith starts receiving obscene letters, the finger of blame gets pointed at her chainsmoking neighbour, Rose. Some crazy court scenes ensue. I loved all the facial close-ups in this movie.
Rose is a rough-as-guts, rowdy, young solo mother who is hard to like, however, her honesty, bravery, and fierce love for her equally foul-mouthed daughter, Nancy – the scene-stealing Alisha Weir – win us over by attrition. Toward the end of the movie, we are on Rose’s side, completely.

The characters were engaging. The emotion felt real. Coleman as Edith was luminous even when she was being obnoxious. Jessie Buckley as Rose was an honest arsehole – a woman who doesn’t give a sh.t about the rules or the establishment (a free thinker), which makes her the target of a lot of judgment and therefore punishment. Set against the backdrop of the burgeoning suffragette movements, it is at heart a mystery movie – while also managing to be about equal rights – and a darned funny one at that.
Some critics felt the plot wasn’t strong enough, however I disagree. There was a full story arc that came back around and answered all the questions. We were taken on a lovely ride of not knowing and fascination, where we started to ask quite early on, huh? What was going on? Something didn’t seem quite right. Our senses tingled. We were intrigued.

The story unfolds with a curious crew of women pulling together to solve the case and free an innocent woman, in the process uncovering the surprise revelation of the actual culprit. The true story that stunned 1920s England is still astonishing today, though it got mixed reviews including this from reporter Robbie Collin, “this British chocolate-box period comedy thinks that excessive swearing works as a substitute for a good plot – but it really doesn’t.”

Okay. At first, I was affronted by the foul language too, but then it began to fit the tone of the story and become an integral part of the characters, including defining the radical change in Edith’s character as the movie goes on. Then it is foul language that caps off the ending in the funniest way possible that kept us laughing after the credits rolled.
The entire theatre of women filed out of the cinema, cackling with laughter and chattering in animated groups. Talk about a lively atmosphere. The film transported us into other people’s shoes and then delivered us home, slightly altered, looking at the world in a slightly different way. And that is the function of art. So, mission accomplished, Wicked Little Letters. A small-budget movie – afflicted with wall-to-wall cursing – about the insidious results of familial abuse, and yet I was left feeling transformed. It was so funny we came out with our cheeks sore from laughing. Quite the feat.
I highly recommend this quirky film. Have you seen any great movies worth talking about, lately?

Talk to you later.
Keep reading!
Yvette Carol
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Thanks largely to a strong cast that leans into the story’s humorous side, Wicked Little Letters is a diverting comedy even if the mystery at its core isn’t particularly clever. ~ Rotten Tomatoes


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~ A Book Review: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith ~

Posted: March 21, 2024 in book review, Book reviewing, books, Family stories, Fiction, memories, positive thinking, readers, Story, traditional publishing, words, Writing
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I have finished reading my fifth novel for 2024, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith. What a book! The first time I read it, I was 12 years old. Many aspects went over my head then, but I remember bonding with the main character, Francie, because we were alike in many ways. It was one of those novels that stays with you after you read it for the rest of your life. When I saw a secondhand copy in a charity shop recently I grabbed it. Curious, I started reading, wondering if it would enchant me again as it had as a child. I was not disappointed.

The debut novel by Betty Smith tells the life story of Francis Nolan, born in Brooklyn in 1901, to desperately poor parents, Kate and Johnnie. Francie and her little brother, Neely, suffer heartbreaking hardship yet it is lovingly rendered through Francie’s innocent eyes. She tells each part of her life through the child’s lens nonjudgmentally, depicting their family’s struggles, the unpredictability of life with her handsome, charismatic, drunken father, and the earnest striving of her harried, hard-working mother who wears gloves to hide her ruined hands. Kate can find five different ways of rehashing stale bread to make five different meals. But some nights when there is no food, Francie tells how they play a game that they are on an expedition to the North Pole, stranded without supplies, keeping a record, “Expected rescue did not come” and so on. By using their imaginations they learn to survive without food.
Fierce, determined Kate, wants her kids to have an education. She makes the rule they must read a page of the Bible and a page of Shakespeare each night before they go to bed, and she arranges to do extra work as a janitor for piano lessons from two old women living downstairs. She and the kids save a few coins each week in a tin can bank nailed to the floor in the closet, in the hope that one day they might buy a plot of land – the dream of all immigrants. Their spirit is indefatigable.

The book moves through decades as Francie and Neely grow up, describing oftentimes incredible minutiae of life in Brooklyn in the early 1900s. As a child – and still today – I find that sort of historical info fascinating. This book is a real vehicle to another era, a literary time machine. Smith does an impeccable job with her historical detail.
Francie starts work at a factory to earn much-needed money to help out at home, and Kate works harder than ever to feed and house them. The story is about the evolution of a family from the point of view of the daughter. It follows the family fortunes and nearly all the scenes involve scenes we can all relate to, the competitive goodnatured sibling fighting between Francie and Neely, the sisterly chats between Katie and her sisters Sissy and Evy, and then as Francie grows older, the female talks about life with her mother and aunts. It’s about the bitter, remorseless, soul-destroying realities of life and simultaneously how to face obstacles and overcome them with the right attitude, and an imaginative positive approach. A sometimes startling, heartwarming, sometimes uplifting, haunting family saga. I loved it and still do. You know a book is great when you fill it with post-it flags while you are reading it.

Betty Smith was born in Brooklyn, New York, on December 15, 1896, to German immigrant parents. She grew up poor in Williamsburg, the same era as the main character of her first novel, and she used her life as material. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was published in 1943 to great acclaim and has become an American Classic. It proved so popular upon release that it went into a second printing before the official publication date. Throughout her life, Smith worked as a dramatist. During her career, she earned many awards including the Rockefeller Fellowship and the Dramatists Guild Fellowship for her work in drama. Her other novels include Tomorrow Will Be Better (1947), Maggie-Now (1958), and Joy in the Morning (1963).
My rating is four and a half stars

Talk to you later.
Keep reading!
Yvette Carol
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The last time of anything has the poignancy of death itself. Oh, the last time how you see everything; as though a magnifying light had been turned on it. And you grieve because you hadn’t held it tighter when you had it every day. ~ Francie ~ A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
“I can’t explain the emotional reaction that took place in this dead heart of mine… A surge of confidence has swept through me, and I feel that maybe a fellow has a fighting chance in this world after all.” ~ One Marine wrote to Smith, after the release of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn as an Armed Services Edition, in paperback.


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