Pearl A. Gardner's Blog, page 3

Goodreads Giveaway

Take a break from the Christmas preparations and enter the Goodreads giveaway for Ingrid's Mission.




Ingrid's Mission

This is the third book in the series, "WW2 Women of Courage."

Full of action, adventure and romance, this series will give you a taste of life for Jews living in Europe under Hitler's rule.

Available in ebook and paperback from all Amazon stores, or enter the Giveaway to win one of two paperback copies. Closing date 30th December.

Merry Christmas and happy reading
Pearl

FREE eBOOK

I’m busy writing, editing, marketing and generally getting myself into a tizzy but I wanted to give readers a heads up on my latest FREE promotion.

I don’t do these often, so take advantage while I’m feeling generous!





Evelyn's Fight

Evelyn’s Fight, the first book in the series, Women of Wakefield, will be FREE in all Amazon stores for five days from 18th to 22nd November.

This 2 book series follows two Yorkshire women as they love, learn and try to survive in a war-torn world.

Each book can be read as a stand-alone novel but might be better enjoyed when read in sequence.

Take advantage of this FREE offer. Scroll up and click to begin the emotional adventure now!

Audio Books - Opinions please

Do you listen to audio books?

If your answer is yes - when and where do you listen to them?

If your answer is no - what is your reason?

What do you like / dislike about them?

I would love to hear readers' opinions, please leave your comments. Let's start a discussion

Happy reading
Pearl

Ingrid's Mission available for pre-order

At last my long awaited third book in the series, 'WW2 Women of Courage', is now available in all Amazon stores for Pre-Order.

Publishing date is 25th November. Order your copy now and be one of the first to read this exciting holocaust romance story.

Paperback edition comming soon - watch out for the Goodreads giveaway.

Ingrid's Mission by Pearl A. Gardner








View all my reviews

Holiday price slash

I just got home from a long vacation but I don’t feel rested. Disney’s Magic Kingdom is not designed for relaxation.

Spending time with three of my grandchildren in Florida has been very rewarding, exciting and thoroughly draining on my energies. If I never see another wet and wild roller coaster it will be too soon. (Secretly, I loved every minute, even when I got soaked, which the children found hilarious.)

Now I’m back and ready to start work, if only to earn enough money to get away again. (Next time I’ll make sure I go to a secluded sandy beach with a gripping novel and no children in sight - but only for a week or two, I'd miss them terribly.)

I know lots of people love to read whilst on holiday. Personally, it’s the only time I have to indulge in a good book as most of my working days are filled with trying to write some!



Evelyn's Fight






Belle



With this in mind, I decided to lower the price of two of my books for the last two weeks of August. If you’ve not read these yet, please take advantage of the £0.99p or $0.99c promotional eBook price for Evelyn’s Fight, and Belle. Both are available in all Amazon stores.

Happy holidays
Pearl

Link to Evelyn's Fight, Amazon UK



Link to Belle, Amazon UK

Thank you

Thank you to everyone who entered the Goodreads Giveaway for Hannah's Conflict, Part Two in the WW2 Women of Courage Series.



Hannah's Conflict


Congratulations to Marissa in Ontario and Ian in Washington, you are the two lucky winners. Your books have been ordered and will be in the post before the end of today.

Happy reading
and
Best wishes
Pearl

Update to my memoir, 'It's Penguin Shooting day.'

My daughter is currently visiting with her family. They live in Australia and I live in England. My loyal readers will know the emotional story behind our special relationship, but for those who may never have heard of, 'It's Penguin Shooting Day', here is a taster, which is also an update in my daughter's own words.
My daughter's real name is Sonja. Her husband is Steve. I called them Natalie and Simon in the book and changed other names, dates and locations to protect their identities at that very trying time. However, Sonja doesn't want to hide away now. She posted this on facebook two days ago.

1st July 2017
Today is a very special anniversary for Steve and I and we are celebrating. Ours is a story about how real, everyday, imperfect love can get you through the most horrifying periods of your life. Our celebration today is about the love and strength you never knew you had and about working bloody hard for happiness!
Ten years ago today on the 1st of July 2007 at around 5:45pm Steve was pulled from the carcass of the car in the picture. That car was almost his coffin. The SES and fire services took almost an hour to extract him from the crumpled remains after he veered from the road and hit a very large tree following the actions of another driver who didn’t want to let him pass.
He was pulled from that car alive, but almost not. He was pulled from it himself, but never again to be or know who that person was. At the hospital I was introduced to the chaplain and told to prepare for the worst whilst my 14 month old daughter played with a toy phone in the ‘quiet room’ where they had brought us to deliver the news.
There was a broken femur, two smashed feet, one of which was very mangled, broken teeth, spinal processes but luckily no internal injuries that they had found. There was also a very severe head injury. He had been placed in an induced coma to reduce the pressure on his brain. I first saw him unconscious, looking like my husband, but not. Looking very much broken. He was flown to Sydney that night from our little home town in Lismore, Northern NSW.
We spent three harrowing months in Sydney. My wonderful, amazing mum flew over right away from the UK to be by my side and be the unwavering support that I so badly needed in a strange city with a small daughter and a very sick husband who couldn’t remember me or much of anything for that matter. She diarised that time and has since turned it into a successful book called ‘It’s Penguin Shooting Day’ by Pearl A Gardner available on Amazon/ Kindle for anyone who wants a window into the terrible aftermath of brain injury and those first weeks and months of recovery.
But this is not an account of the gory details of that day or of the time that followed that life changing moment in time. This is a story about not giving up and it’s about gratitude. About gritting your teeth and getting through the shit because you KNOW the good times are coming back around and might be just around the corner.
I am first and foremost grateful to my mum for being there when I needed her most, for dropping everything to be by my side for four months of her life away from her own husband, job and life. To the SES, Fire people, paramedics, countless doctors, nurses, specialists, therapists and councillors who all helped us through in the ways that they could. Grateful for my very supportive mother’s group friends and to our small community in Corndale who banded together in support. In particular to Mick and Sue, our neighbours who took care of my daughter when I was in no fit state to do so and rallied the neighbours to help with all the mounting tasks around the house that we couldn’t take care of. To Eva, Steve’s sister for talking with me for hours in some of the darkest times in the months that followed and to every single person that offered to help, to listen. Thank You!
I am now, with hindsight, grateful for the hardest times in my life dealing with Steve’s new personality, his lack of comprehension that anything was different or changed between us and for the chance to eventually fall in love with my ‘new’ husband again.
In the end no matter how much support there is, the recovery from something like this is about two people learning to cope, in private, both individually and as a couple with the ‘new normal’. And for that I am grateful for Steve being Steve, for eventually finding his way back to me.
As someone who was always so strong and self confident to the point of being described as ‘cocky’ this period of our lives knocked him flat, destroyed his self confidence and left him extremely bitter about the unfairness of life. For a while it was so hard for him to even accept that this event (of which he had no memory) should rip everything good about life away from him and his hatred of everything extended to me on very frequent occasions. His defiance of the situation gave him a tenacious but almost violent drive to recover and quickly. He refused to accept that he would be ‘injured’ forever and gritted his teeth to get every single little piece of ‘normal’ back that it was possible to attain at every stage of his recovery.
Through those first couple of years when the cognitive deficits were large and the filing cabinet of his mind lay strewn over an area the size of the sky we struggled to hold the fabric of our marriage together. I described it to one therapist like we were wading through thick mud, trudging daily through the hardness of it all, but we were travelling on different paths, each forging our own way instead of working together to make a path. I constantly wondered if our relationship was strong enough to get through this. As time progressed it seemed our paths were drifting further and further apart. This wasn’t what I signed up for, he was a different person, he wasn’t coping with it in the way that I wanted him to, the anger seemed like it would never settle and life just kept throwing us lemons. Does the promise to love in sickness and in health still apply when you are no longer married to the same person? I started to lose respect for him, to hate him for his way of coping, even to blame him for the accident. We had frank discussions in which we both agreed things would have been so much easier had he not survived that day. Not better, but certainly easier.
Shortly after the birth of our second daughter, I finally broke inside. Our marriage crumbled and I felt there was nothing left worth salvaging. We separated for a short time each struggling with the enormity of it all. After a period of disbelief and then the inevitable rage, Steve began a rebirth of sorts. He suddenly realised what was important to him and vowed to himself that it would not be this way. Diminishing resentment gave way to gratitude. He sought help; a wonderful councillor who told him what he needed to hear and gave him the tools to find his way back to peace, back to me. Here was a man who wanted to fight for US, for himself and for his children.
I saw something in him then that I had never seen before, even from the ‘before’ time. He convinced me to give it another chance and because I loved him so much I had to believe it was possible. And he worked! He worked and worked and worked to find acceptance and to learn to be happy as his new self, to show me what we meant to him and how he was prepared to do whatever it took to make us right again. He inspired me to work harder for us too, to be the wife he needed me to be and to learn to live compassionately with his deficits, to listen and really hear him talk about his fears and to pull him up when he stepped out of line. I grieved bitterly for my husband lost, but became thankful for this new man and the lessons he was teaching us both. I won’t pretend it was all easy after that but it was a huge turning point and we finally started finding each other again.
Now here we are, with two beautiful daughters, our dream property, making ends meet and navigating life as a team. We are not a perfect couple, we fight regularly, as all couples do and there are issues relating to the brain injury that we deal with on a daily basis. Steve lives with constant pain from the physical injuries and that can understandably affect his mood. The injury and its effects are familiar now, we know what to expect and we can laugh about some of the side effects.
The lack of a filter from his brain to his mouth leads to some interesting and eye roll worthy conversations. I try to let go of my inner linguistic nazi when he incorrectly uses words or substitutes words with quite a different meaning than was intended. We are both more allowing and forgiving of the occasional emotional rollercoaster he must ride. The years have certainly calmed the storm but that one moment in time still ripples through our lives.
We are both so very grateful that we were able to navigate that incomprehensibly long road to recovery and that the degree of recovery we enjoy is so much more than many brain injury victims get to claim. His memories have slowly returned, at least the important ones, though he still doesn’t remember our wedding day or our eldest daughter’s birth, but over the years he has slowly become more ‘Steve like’ and for that I am grateful.
So it’s our 10 year anniversary, we’ve been married for 14 years this October, but this is the anniversary that counts, because 10 years ago I met my new husband in a hospital bed in the worst moment of my life. To celebrate we are in the UK with my family. Next week we are taking a few days away by ourselves to celebrate us, to celebrate our enduring love and yes to celebrate the enormous struggles that brought us here, because from the burned out landscape after the rage of fire has passed, our fresh green shoots are flourishing. From the bleakness of the past, the dazzling beauty of the present and the promise of the future is so much more brilliant and for that, and for each other we are hugely grateful.

It's Penguin Shooting Day: A True Account of the First Weeks Living with Brain injury

Please forgive me, I'm taking a break

I’m taking a short break from writing because I have family arriving very soon from Australia. They will stay with me for a month and I’m so excited to see them. I can’t believe three years have passed since the last time we were together.

This is the family I wrote about in one of my earlier books. ‘It’s Penguin Shooting Day’ tells the story of when my son-in-law had a horrific car accident. I flew to Australia on the first available flight to help look after my baby granddaughter so my daughter could be by her husband’s side during his long fight for recovery from a traumatic brain injury, (among many other injuries he sustained.)



It's Penguin Shooting Day: A True Account of the First Weeks Living with Brain injury

Those heartbreaking times are behind us now, but I’m sure you’ll understand why I want to spend quality time with these very special people. If you read their story, know that we all came through as better and stronger people, with a greater love of life and each other than we had before.

My eldest granddaughter, whom I formed a very close bond with during my time as her surrogate mum, is now 11-years-old. I can’t believe 10 years have passed since that fateful day. The family has grown and my little angel now has a 7-year-old sister, who is just as adorable. They can’t wait to meet their English cousins, and I am looking forward to having my whole family around me - a very rare treat!

Please forgive me if I don’t write for a while. I’ll be enjoying lots of cuddles and playtime with all my precious little ones.

Hannah's Conflict pre-order

I'm pleased to announce that my latest WW2 novel is ready for pre-order on Amazon.




Hannah's Conflict

After escaping Europe before the outbreak of WW2, Hannah’s passionate response to the oppression of her fellow Jews leads her back to Germany.

Working with a group of partisans, she helps to rescue Jewish prisoners from their places of hiding, from labour camps and from certain death.

Living with danger, and in constant fear of discovery, she learns her lover is not what he seems. With no-one to confide in, she lives with the oppressive menace of his secrets and lies. If the truth gets out, it could threaten the safety of the whole operation.

Happy reading
Pearl

99p sale

Emerse yourself in history through the eyes of two of my favourite heroines.

I'm putting two of my kindle books on sale for .99p (.99c in USA) for the British Bank Holiday Weekend.

The Scent of Bluebells is my personal best seller and tells a moving love story set in the Second World War.





The Scent of Bluebells

Belle is the first book in a series, but can be read as a stand alone novel. This story is of love and betrayal, set in France in the late 1900s.





Belle

You can read more of Belle and her family in the series, Women of Verdun.

I hope you enjoy the holiday, whatever you choose to read.