Pilgrim Wheels
Neil M Hanson
Neil has taken on the challenge of riding across the USA, sometimes with a friend, and sometimes without. He quickly learns the challenges and rewards of doing it on his own, as well as enjoying some time with old friends. Let me clarify here: He’s riding a PUSH BIKE across the desert.
This novel covers only part of Neil’s journey! It is astounding how much he has travelled on his trusty bike. I can’t believe it, but then I think of other people who have cycled around the exterior of Australia and straight across the middle. Still though, its amazing what one man on a tiny bike can do if he is determined.
I interviewed Neil quite some time ago (I’m too afraid to look at the date), but the novel simply hadn’t taken my fancy to read until lately. I’m on a mission to get through all the novels authors have sent me personally – if you’ve sent me a novel and I haven’t reviewed it, pop me an email please!
This is non-fiction, and as such I’ll not be giving it any stars. That being said, I think this novel would be good for people who have a passion for a ‘singular’ sport – one like cycling or running where you spend a lot of time with the scenery.
This novel is a bit of a mix between memoir, textbook and examples. It doesn’t profess to provide any concrete answers. Instead it explores the history of OCD, different interesting cases of OCD and indeed the almighty DSM-5 that is used for categorizing mental illness everywhere.
Wow. This novel. Non-fiction is winning at the moment. This was fantastic and well-written. I felt myself at Tara’s side, and I absolutely empathised with every situation she found herself in, likely or not. We are walked through her childhood and highschool years, and then her ‘career’ after that. There are so many situations that Tara found herself in, and it feels like she has done justice to describing them in this novel.
Honestly, this novel wasn’t quite right for me. It’s history, written in a sort of fictional, accessible format. Unfortunately I’m not interested in history at the best of times. I was hoping that this novel would pull me in a bit, but it wasn’t quite powerful enough to overtake me. I read selections of this, and enjoyed those. I made sure to just pick those ones though, English history bores me silly (but I can totally go for the Berlin Wall).
For me, this had a lot of backstory of each of the midwives so that you got a good feeling for who they were as people, as well as within their jobs. I would have loved to have more about the actual mothers and children. Every birth story is different, and I have a strange fascination with reading about them.
Some lines were truly funny, and required sharing with my partner, my workmates, the wider world! But others were thought-provoking and hard to take in. It reminded me in some way of 
I could hardly put this novel down, which was surprising because its basically a memoir. I’ve never heard of her though, so it was all new to me. I did enjoy the ‘journey’ right from the beginning of her life.
Most of us want to hope that we won’t fall for a Con. Who would get into a pyramid scheme? Hell, I was almost pulled into one as a kid, but it didn’t work in Australia because we don’t have $1 notes to post. The deal was that you post $1 to each person on the list, then you add your name to the bottom of the list. Then the more people you send it to, the more you make back. Now it costs a $1 to send the damn letter, so you wouldn’t even break even!
This was impressive because Petraitis had obviously done her work well (as she has in her other books, which I now want to get my hands on), and she places the emphasis on the human touch. Humans are fallible, and criminal ones even more so. The book also highlighted the impact on police officers’ family lives in the days after a crime.
It could be quite a heavy book but Lal makes an effort to keep the action moving and to always have a bit of humour. If not, there was a profound insight being shared, or expanded upon. I particularly enjoyed the notes from her brother’s journal.