Live Your Dreams

Published 2003. 288 pages. Good secondhand condition with inscription.

This is the story of a family that many New Zealanders will identify with, its beginnings similar to thousands of others. But Lynne Thompson's family was one that 'lived its dreams', a family that aspired and achieved. Lynne Rudkin grew up - and the book is particularly evocative about Christchurch in the 1940s and 1950s - the daughter of a director of Lane Walker Rudkin, one of New Zealand's largest clothing manufacturers. She nursed in the 1960s, and paints a memorable word picture of hospital life 40 years ago. She dreamed of living in the country and having six children. As Lynne Thompson, and the mother of five children, she has farmed in partnership with her husband on Banks Peninsula and, more remotely, on the Wairarapa coast. So Live Your Dreams is also about the challenges and satisfactions of building two successful farming enterprises and watching and observing the changes to rural life in New Zealand since the 1970s. If Live Your Dreams is mainly about the land, water is also an important part of the story. For this family, as for so many New Zealanders, rivers and the ocean - the Marlborough Sounds, Banks Peninsula and the Wairarapa's rugged coast - have been an important part of their lives over several generations.