But with the amount of work that is involved in your final year of high school, and the amount of pressure placed upon you to do well, (if you have greek parents you know what im talking about
) you cannot help but sometimes whinge and complain and quite often go to bed at night with not such a "peaceful mind".The other week i finally went to the library to do some work and thought that i hadn't read for a very long time and decided that it was a habit i wanted to get back into....so i left the work for a moment in search of a good book, and it didn't take me long to come across "Willow tree and olive" written by Irini Savvides, a greek-australian author / teacher of english and drama.
I know what you're all thinkning....hurry up and get to the point....so here it goes...
Olive is HSC student, who seems to be quite normal, she is good at school but sometimes lacks a little motivation and needs a little push from her teachers to reach her full potential, to deal with her stresses not only from school but from a lifetime of dealing with racism and knowing that she is different to the other kids, she has her best friend Kerry and her beloved brother who understand everything she is going through, whom she can tell everything...
But in all the confusion and stress from her school life and social life, instead of looking ahead, Olive stumbles across a dark memory of her past that will not let her move on. At the tender age fo 5, Olive Alexandropoulos was raped back in the village in Greece, and as she remembers more and more each day, Olive enters a state of regression, and after a few councelling sessions decides to go to Greece, where it all happened, to perhaps confront her past and hopefully move on.
The book is set up so that it engages the reader on a personal level, there are extracts of diary entries, letters, things that Olive says and things that Olive really thinks, it is almost like the reader is taken into her past at the scene of the crime and is then taken with her on her journey to recovery.
Oilve is one of the most inspirational characters I have read about, who is very brave and forced to mature at a young age because of her experiences in order to move on, which is why i beleive the book is suitable for an adult audience, not just a teenage audience.
I give this book 9/10....it also made me realise "what the hell was i complaining about"
