Kaylene Scott falls in love with part-Aboriginal, Todd Wilson, in the South Australian desert, and they travel down to Victoria's Gippsland District to marry and refurbish a derelict caravan park in a coastal fishing village. They ignore a tribal Elder's warning of tribal revenge for flaunting the law in a mixed race marriage. Kaylene has learnt to adapt to her husband's Dreamtime Legends, but finds herself on the receiving end of racial prejudice from her Caucasian counterparts, and they are soon embroiled in murder and a kidnapping case, when Todd's past love, the beautiful Sapphire, invades their life, causing mystery and intrigue. Kaylene soon finds she has her own style of Dreamtime, surrounded by the forgotten past of the historical Port, where the first Governor of Victoria once resided, and history refuses to remain buried.
This story is a true account of one family's trials and enjoyment of fostering children; some names have been changed to protect the guilty. Our family didn't choose to foster; fostering was thrust upon us. It was a very gradual process that endured for fifteen years. The need to tell this story became an obsession and was exacerbated each time I read about adults receiving light sentences for destroying innocent children's lives. I hope that anyone contemplating fostering will read this and weigh up the consequences of being ill equipped to cope with emotionally unstable humans. There are good ad bad sides to caring; really caring, for other people's children. The most commonly asked question any foster-parent hears is, "How can you love them, then give them up?" My standard answer was always the same. If we can show just one child what being loved is all about, even for a short period of time, it will give him or her a dream to follow.
This story is a true account of one family's trials and enjoyment of fostering children; some names have been changed to protect the guilty. Our family didn't choose to foster; fostering was thrust upon us. It was a very gradual process that endured for fifteen years. The need to tell this story became an obsession and was exacerbated each time I read about adults receiving light sentences for destroying innocent children's lives. I hope that anyone contemplating fostering will read this and weigh up the consequences of being ill equipped to cope with emotionally unstable humans. There are good ad bad sides to caring; really caring, for other people's children. The most commonly asked question any foster-parent hears is, "How can you love them, then give them up?" My standard answer was always the same. If we can show just one child what being loved is all about, even for a short period of time, it will give him or her a dream to follow.
Kaylene Scott falls in love with part-Aboriginal, Todd Wilson, in the South Australian desert, and they travel down to Victoria's Gippsland District to marry and refurbish a derelict caravan park in a coastal fishing village. They ignore a tribal Elder's warning of tribal revenge for flaunting the law in a mixed race marriage. Kaylene has learnt to adapt to her husband's Dreamtime Legends, but finds herself on the receiving end of racial prejudice from her Caucasian counterparts, and they are soon embroiled in murder and a kidnapping case, when Todd's past love, the beautiful Sapphire, invades their life, causing mystery and intrigue. Kaylene soon finds she has her own style of Dreamtime, surrounded by the forgotten past of the historical Port, where the first Governor of Victoria once resided, and history refuses to remain buried.
Kaylene Scott is an innocent, but ambitious young woman who is cajoled by a budding entrepreneurial lover to become a partner in a project to convert a redundant Rocket-tracking Station in the Australian Outback, into a modern, Tourist Bus Stopover in the hope of gaining great wealth. She is sent to supervise the landscaping and conversion, with four tradesmen, in readiness for the opening. Whilst driving through the desolate outback to her destination, she stops to offer assistance to a family of stranded travellers. Here she meets Todd, an intriguing half-caste Aboriginal man who leads her through his world of Dreamtime Magic, as he searches for his identity. Little does she expect to become involved in the mysterious death of a stockman on her first night at Mirikata, involving conflict and an unknown world of Indigenous Dreamtime Legends.
Three Legs in the Evening comes from the Sphinx's riddle in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, in which Oedipus is asked what creature walks on all fours in the morning, on two legs in the afternoon, and three in the evening. The answer, which Oedipus gets right, is Man, who crawls as a baby, walks upright as a man, and leans on a cane in his old age. Received wisdom, in other words, can be unreliable. Enter the story of Sally B, an over-sixty widow about to retire from her successful greeting card business in the aftermath of 9/11. She has a devoted family who relies on her wit and wisdom. But suddenly all hell breaks loose — her best friend dies, she falls into an open grave and she breaks her ankle. As this is happening, her children’s marital lives are unraveling, her grandchildren are in turmoil, and a man she has known from a time before comes back in her life. Taking place over a year, this is a story of love in a time of horror, as well as the profound and surprising ways in which everything Sally thought she knew changes. Sexy, funny and heart-wrenching, and much like Kent Haruf's Our Souls At Night, Three Legs in the Evening speaks about people running out of steam, running out of time, and finding solace and wisdom even in the finality of all that. A life carefully built can crumble in a moment, but what happens then? Sally B. plays it out as best she can.
Stunning power and beauty abound in this book.' - The New York Times 'Howland recalls the short-story writer Lucia Berlin' - Harper's Magazine 'Honest, acerbic, alert, and always dazzling.' - Amitava Kumar, author of Immigrant, Montana Things to Come and Go showcases the incomparable talent of Bette Howland in three novellas of stunning power, beauty, and sustaining humour. ‘Birds of a Feather’ is a daughter’s story of her extended, first-generation family, the ‘big, brassy yak-yakking Abarbanels’. Esti, a merciless, astute observer, recalls growing up amid (the confusions and difficulties of) their history, quarrels, judgements, and noisy love, and the sense of estrangement and inescapable bonds of blood. The clamour of the city, both its threat and its possibility, are just outside the door in ‘The Old Wheeze’, as a single mother in her twenties returns to her sunless apartment after a date at the ballet. Shifting between four viewpoints – the young woman, the older professor who took her out, her son, and her son’s babysitter – the story masterfully captures the impossibility of liberating ourselves from the self. In ‘The Life You Gave Me’, a woman at the midpoint of life is called to her father’s sickbed. A lament for all that is forever unsaid and unsayable, the story is ‘an anguished meditation on growing up, growing old and being left behind, a complaint against time.’ (The New York Times) First published in 1984, Things to Come and Go, Bette Howland’s final book, is a collection of haunting urgency about arrivals and departures, and the private, insoluble dramas in the lives of three women. This edition features an introduction by Rumaan Alam, bestselling author of Leave the World Behind.
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