Grim tales of real life survivors
Beautiful Ashes — True Stories
By Natasha Whitewood (self published), $40 from natashawhitewood.com .. .. .. .. .. .. When Natasha Whitewood and her on-screen partner Hera Te Kurapa featured in the 2017 screening of My Kitchen Rules (MKR), the vivacious Whitewood was nursing a hurt — a huge hurt.
Her relationship of eight years had bitten the dust and left her broken. Whitewood found a solution for her hurt.
From cooking she turned to her second love, writing.
The result is her self-published Beautiful Ashes, subtitled True Stories, it tells how, like her, other women have found their way out dark tunnels of hopelessness.
Their stories are brutally honest and frequently confrontational. Take Sarah and Kylie’s.
Sarah is the product of a broken home. At 15 she partnered up with a man years older “who made me feel as I always wanted to feel”.
Fine until he turned brutal, ran with a gang, she was kidnapped and raped. Word on the street was her body was ‘sold’ for drugs.
Before she was 12 Kylie became caregiver to her wheelchair-bound father when her mother became too ill to continue the role. Male wha¯ nau molested her.
Grim to the max, Beautiful Ashes is not a pretty read, it’s not meant to be.
A common thread binds each of those featured — the deep Christian faith they share with Whitewood.
MKR is reality TV, Beautiful Ashes is the raw reality of the life far too many 21st century women experience; few have the sheer guts Whitewood’s contributors do to tell it like it is. — Jill Nicholas