Blog Tour- Review & Giveaway of This Bird Flew Away by Lynda M. Martin

Welcome to the blog tour for This Bird Flew Away by Lynda M. Martin!

What is real love?

The whole world wants to know…

They should ask Bria Jean, because she has it all figured out. Opinionated, stubborn and full of woe, Bria would tell you real love is having one person you can always count on through thick and thin. For her, that’s Jack. And it doesn’t matter to her that she’s nine and he’s twenty-three — not one bit.

When, at the age of twelve, Bria disappears, Jack and his Aunt Mary search for her,  and  when she surfaces, injured, abused and traumatized, he fights to become her guardian with no idea of the trials ahead of him. By then, Bria is thirteen going on thirty, full of her own ideas on how her life should run and with some very fixed notions about who is in charge.

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Lynda M. Martin-

Lynda was born in Dunfirmline, Scotland in 1953, emigrated to Canada with her parents as a young girl. She grew up on the vast prairies of Western Canada, and loved the open wide spaces of that wild land. She was educated in Medicine Hat, Alberta, a town in the southeast corner of that province, and spent most of her time riding horses, barrel racing and hanging around rodeos and cowboys.

In 1968, the product of a troubled youth and a dysfunctional family, she found herself on her own at the age of fifteen, two thousand miles from her home, and knows first hand the dangers facing girls on our streets and the predators that prey on them. She was one of the lucky ones. She survived.

Later in life, she went east to Montreal for her education, graduating from the University of Montreal with a degree in Business Administration, which provided a fine income, but little in the way of personal satisfaction. Still in her twenties, she became a volunteer with social services to work with troubled teen-aged girls, and took every course the social agencies offered.

Soon, she became an outreach worker who worked with police, social agencies and charities, becoming a respected front-line worker, often initiating first contact with recovered abused and exploited children. Over the years, and in many different jurisdictions, this second career became the driving force of her life, which often took her into law-enforcement, child welfare agencies, prosecutors offices and the courts.

You can read more  about her career in child protection on her popular and widely read article The Rape of the Innocents. This article is one of many she’s written, posted on her publishing site and accessible here.

The picture you see above is not a true image of Lynda Martin, but the avatar she uses as her alter-personae  in the public world, as to use her true image would perhaps leave the histories of some of ‘her girls’ exposed.

Lynda and her husband Jim make their home in the sunny state of Florida, and in her beloved Alberta. She has two daughters and four grandchildren.

Now retired from child protection work, Lynda is a full-time writer, editor, writing teacher and coach.

Check out the review and giveaway after the page break:

Review:

Bria has had a rough life. Her mother has taken her from relative to relative. Bria is torn from people she loves that aren't technically related to her, and she now lives with a cruel aunt. After running away, Bria is
missing, and when she's found they know something traumatic has happened. Bria must learn to live with what as happened while making a new life for herself. This may prove harder than Bria ever expected.

The beginning of this book was not an easy read at all. Bria has an awful life made even worse by what she has to go through. I wanted to just rip her out of the pages and take care of her. The author's knowledge really shows through. In the middle part of the book, I found Bria to be a bit of a know-it-all. This was not very appealing. Then in the last part of the book, I fell in love with her. She was such a self-assured and fantastic woman. I think this evolution of her character throughout the book was so great.

I wasn't so excited with some of Bria's decisions involving her life in the later parts of the book. I felt she needed to share information more than she did. Overall though, I thought this was a great book. The beginning may be rough to read, but in the end you have a great sense of hope for Bria. She is a survivor, and you just know that she is going to do great things for people.

Book provided for review.


For this giveaway, I have one e-book up for grabs. To enter, just put in your name and e-mail. Bonus entries will be given for following the Lynda M. Martin on Twitter or liking the book's Facebook page. 

For more info about this tour, check out the tour page. Make sure and visit all the stops for more awesome posts and giveaways. Thanks for stopping by!

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