Blog Tour Book Review: Hug Everyone You Know by Antoinette Truglio Martin

Hug Everyone You Know

by

Antoinette Truglio Martin

Publisher: She Writes Press
Publication date: 3rd October 2017
Genre: Memior
Pages: 325
Format read: eBook
Source: Courtesy of Women on Writing blog tours

 

Antoinette Martin believed herself to be a healthy and sturdy woman—that is, until she received a Stage 1 breast cancer diagnosis. Cancer is scary enough for the brave, but for a wimp like Martin, it was downright terrifying. Martin had to swallow waves of nausea at the thought of her body being poisoned, and frequently fainted during blood draws and infusions. To add to her terror, cancer suddenly seemed to be all around her. In the months following her diagnosis, a colleague succumbed to cancer, and five of her friends were also diagnosed.

Though tempted, Martin knew she could not hide in bed for ten months. She had a devoted husband, daughters, and a tribe of friends and relations. Along with work responsibilities, there were graduations, anniversaries, and roller derby bouts to attend, not to mention a house to sell and a summer of beach-bumming to enjoy. In order to harness support without scaring herself or anyone else, she journaled her experiences and began to e-mail the people who loved her: the people she called My Everyone. She kept them informed and reminded all to 'hug everyone you know' at every opportunity. Reading the responses became her calming strategy. Ultimately, with the help of her community, Martin found the courage within herself to face cancer with perseverance and humor. 

I don’t know of anyone who hasn’t been touched by cancer in some way.

Antoinette Truglio Martin has written a heartfelt memoir of her journey through breast cancer treatment.

Right when life was at its busiest; the Martins were selling their home, their youngest was going off to college and Antoinette was contemplating changing jobs, she gets a call that her recent mammogram showed something suspicious and she needed to have it checked. And so starts Antoinette’s journey!

Antoinette decides to journal her treatment as a way of getting all her pent up feelings and emotions out. These journal entries along with emails to and from family and friends form part of this memoir.

Antoinette explains the different levels of cancer in an easy to understand language but it’s not all medical procedures and jargon. Antoinette lightens the book with family memories, weekends with friends and antics of her dog Petie.

Antoinette has some sound advice for others undergoing treatment; keeping your close group of friends to lean on if needed, sending updates by email so you are not continually explaining your treatment, don’t let the cancer define you, speak up if you are not happy with something.

It feels strange to say ‘I couldn’t put this book down’ for a memoir (they are not usually my preferred reading) but that is how I felt. I kept saying ‘I will just read for a bit longer.’ Antoinette’s voice is inviting and friendly. It’s as though she is there with you having a conversation.

Hug Everyone You Know is a story of friendship, hope and love. A story of survival and strength in the face of adversity.

If you know someone who is or has undergone cancer treatment I urge you to read Hug Everyone You Know.

                          🌟🌟🌟🌟

My rating  4/5

 

Photo credit: Goodreads

Antoinette Truglio Martin is a life-long Long Islander, teacher, wife, mother, daughter, and friend. She is the author of Hug Everyone You Know: A Year of Community, Courage, and Cancer—a memoir chronicling her first year battling breast cancer as a wimpy patient. Personal experience essays and excerpts of her memoir were published in Bridges, Visible Ink, and The Southampton Review. 

Martin proudly received her MFA in creative writing and literature from Stony Brook/Southampton University in 2016. Antoinette had also written the children's picture book, Famous Seaweed Soup (Albert Whitman and Company), and was a regular columnist for local periodicals Parent Connections (In a Family Way) and Fire Island Tide (Beach Bumming). 

Her blog, Stories Served Around The Table, tells family tales and life's musings. She lives in her hometown of Sayville, New York with her husband, Matt, and is never far from her “Everyone” and the beaches she loves. Since being diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer in 2012, she strives to not let cancer dictate her life. 

Please stop by the other posts on the Hug Everyone You Know Blog Tour 

 

 

Guest Post: Corella Press publishing intern, Joy

What's it like to be an intern for a publishing house? Joy gives us a behind the scenes look at her time at Corella Press.

Today's guest on The Burgeoning Bookshelf is publishing intern, Joy. Here Joy tells us the ups and downs of working in a high paced field.

Guest post:

Hello, and thank you so much for having me on this wonderful blog! My name is Joy and I'm an English Literature and History major at the University of Queensland. 

Today I would love to share a little of my experience as a publishing intern, and what I learned throughout this unique and exciting, industry-focused journey. I also hope it inspires you to go and grab yourself copies of the new releases from Corella Press!

At the beginning of this year, as I was considering my academic journey so far and where I wanted it to go from there, I knew I wanted to get some real-life industry work experience in the arts and literature, which would also be creative and innovative and outside the classroom scene (much as I truly love it). I had not heard anything about Corella Press until I was contacted by one of my university academics, Dr. Kim Wilkins, inviting me to join as an intern for the semester. Being committed to developing my creative writing and professional editing skills, the prospect of getting training in a publishing organisation had a strong appeal, especially as it was a UQ not-for-profit small press “committed to making beautiful, collectable editions of recovered Australian nineteenth-century crime and mystery stories”. 

It was the bringing together of both my academic interests with the creative areas I was most passionate about. I became more thrilled by the opportunity of being trained with the team at Corella Press, as well as interning and doing research at AustLit for the duration of my internship (AustLit is a literary bibliographic and research organisation at the University of Queensland).

My first supervisor meeting, where I first met with Ms. Kerry Kilner, Dr. Catriona Mills (of AustLit) and Ms. Meg Vann (of Corella Press), helped me appreciate the process of cross-organisational collaboration and partnership on a project. While this was at times a time-management struggle for me during my internship, I observed and appreciated the professional respect and consideration shown between AustLit and Corella staff on this project, based on a mutual love for uncovering great authors and literary treasures of the past. This conversation about nineteenth-century feminist women writers inspired me in investigating these unknown dynamic female authors but I didn’t know how I was going to do that.

On my first day at the office, I gained fundamental research skills, such as using the “Advance Search” on the AustLit database and on the National Library of Australia’s Trove. It was fulfilling to gain the skills to do more in-depth research, and learn to dig-up articles, stories, family news and history in digitised Australian newspapers. There is a vast array and depth of material from Australia's literary past, and it is just waiting to be uncovered—or as I like to say it fancily, unearthed! 

In the first few weeks of my internship, I learned about how the AustLit website functions and observed the intensive bibliographic, research and administration tasks the AustLit team do on a regular basis. Learning the basic principles of the expression and manifestation of a work (FBR) gave me insight into the importance of accurate bibliographic record-keeping and critical analysis of data. This is essential both for preserving and uncovering Australia’s literary traditions past and present in their diversity and complexity. An example of a time when I felt enabled as a contributor to this recording and preserving process was when I found on Trove the digitised stories and articles published by Leontine Cooper under her nom de plume Onyx and added external links to all of the AustLit entries of Onyx’s works connecting them to Trove.

Similarly, there was a special feeling in contributing to the bibliographic database when I was able to discover a new unrecorded story for our Corella Press by author, Jeannie Lockett, called “An Awfully Sudden Death”, and added it as an entry in the author’s works page.

My experience as an intern at Corella Press was dynamic but also different from my normal academic work and studies. Our team met up in weekly meetings held on Thursday from 2:30-5pm led by our supervisor Meg Vann, where we broke down our production schedule systematically over thirteen weeks to achieve our goal of transforming a nineteenth century Australian piece of fiction into a beautiful collectable book. 

I initially struggled to connect my work at AustLit with the weekly responsibilities and tasks required at Corella Press. This was largely due to the academic vs. creative and industry-focused approach each role required. However, eventually I was able to separate the roles in my mind, and gained insights in my research that aided me in working on both projects. This enhanced my ability to multi-task and take on responsibility as a researcher for the Corella team, and writing the first draft of Jeannie Lockett’s biography.

I was passionate as an AustLit intern at Corella Press to bring my research skills to the role as an editor and team member, do my best, and prove my ability as a creative industry professional.

The Corella Press meetings each week differed in focus, depending on the work required weekly for the project, with the aim of developing our practical skills and work ethic. Some weeks our focus was on learning how to edit and proofread, which we then had to apply in tasks across the semester through several rounds of editing The Millwood Mystery by Jeannie Lockett (the second book we are launching this year!). Through this hands-on process I gained confidence in my ability to transcribe, edit and proofread manuscripts, finding it a particularly rewarding experience. 

In week 4, we learned the rhetoric of an acquisitions meeting within a bigger publishing house, before developing our own acquisitions proposal that we delivered to the Acting Director, Dr. Richard Newsome.

This gave me insight into the publishing technicalities and also our role in making authors of the past relevant and engaging for modern readers today. This included the process of identifying the genre of our manuscript and pitching it for a reading audience to Dr Newsome.

One of the things I found beneficial for my development at Corella Press was the opportunity to hear and connect with professionals from Australia’s wider publishing industry, with guest speakers from IngramSpark, AustLit and UQ Press. 

A particular instance that had an impact on me was in week nine when Sally Matthews from the Marketing Team at UQ Press came and shared with us the work involved in marketing and promoting a new release, with consideration to sales, meeting the vision of the organisation and supporting their authors. She used a book of poetry, The Lost Arab by Omar Sakr, as a case study of the process involved in employing social media and contacting influencers and reviewers to get the book in the hands of the reading public. Hearing her speak of her professional journey and her work in UQP’s marketing team positively shaped my attitude about the possibilities I could pursue in publishing. Recognising in myself a passion for this aspect of the industry, I was able to bring my personal love of blogging to the team with the idea of hosting a blogtour launch ahead of our Corella Press book-release—so hey pursue your hobbies, guys!

Having Meg approve and assign to me this task of co-organising the blog-tour with the wonderful Eva encouraged me to take on responsibility in my team and feel empowered as a young industry professional.

Truthfully, my professional practice at AustLit and Corella Press has been transformative in helping me develop my industry skills and confidence as a young writer and publisher in training. It has provided me with experience to apply my academic and theoretical knowledge into practical real-world outcomes as a researcher, editor and writer in the related industries. 

I feel privileged alongside my fellow interns to have been involved in the cultural contribution of AustLit as a key information resource and record of Australia’s publishing history, and be a part of the legacy of Corella Press in preserving and uncovering unique voices from Australia’s literary past. I am beyond thrilled to see these two nineteenth-century works by some genuinely marvellous Australian female writers get relived and loved by a new generation of readers.

Joy is a third-year UQ student majoring in English Literature and History. She is thrilled, as a Corella Press intern, to see the works of nineteenth-century Aussie female writers like Mary Helena Fortune and Jeannie Lockett, see the light of day again and be read by passionate readers like herself. 

The  books the interns were working on are:

                                        Bridget's Locket and Other Mysteries

                                                      The Millwood Mystery

 

 

 

Book Review: Gravity is the Thing by Jaclyn Moriarty

Gravity is the Thing

by

Jaclyn Moriarty

Publisher: Pan Macmillan Aust 
Publication date: 26th March 2019 
Pages: 480
RRP: $29.99AUD 
Format read: Paperback
Source: Courtesy of the publisher

Abigail Sorensen has spent her life trying to unwrap the events of 1990.

It was the year she started receiving random chapters from a self-help book called The Guidebook in the post.

It was also the year Robert, her brother, disappeared on the eve of her sixteenth birthday.

She believes the absurdity of The Guidebook and the mystery of her brother's disappearance must be connected.

Now thirty-five, owner of The Happiness Café and mother of four-year-old Oscar, Abigail has been invited to learn the truth behind The Guidebook at an all-expenses-paid retreat.

What she finds will be unexpected, life-affirming, and heartbreaking.

A story with extraordinary heart, warmth and wisdom.

Abigail is a single mum trying to get on with her life and recognise her desire for love whilst bringing up her child, as best she can. Always doubting herself. Everyone she had loved had left her.

Abi’s mind was always running around in circles and it always came back to Robert’s disappearance.

The mystery of Robert’s disappearance compelled me on until I discovered the relevance of the Guidebook and then this became another part of the story I was intrigued by and eager to find out where and if the two plots would join.

Moriarty’s writing is clever, witty, calm, erratic, whimsical and chaotic changing as the writing reflects Abi’s moods. She breaks all the rules of writing and pulls it off beautifully.

Gravity is the Thing is a story that explores grief and loss and just trying to do your best. It’s about human connection, coincidences and fate. Moriarty is a keen observer of people and their foibles.

This is a thought provoking read that will definitely open up more contemplation on a second reading.

I liked the double meaning in the title, which becomes apparent as the story progresses.

Gravity is the thing that prevents us from flying, literally.

Gravity is the thing that prevents our spirit from flying and attaining happiness.

Moriarty has written a story that is tender and uniquely original.

                           🌟🌟🌟🌟 

My rating   4/5

*this review is part of the Book Lover Book Review Aussie author challenge

and book #21 in the Australian Women Writers challenge

 

Jaclyn Moriarty is an Australian writer of young adult literature.

She studied English at the University of Sydney, and law at Yale University and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where she was awarded a PhD.
She currently lives in Sydney.