But in "The Bird Within Me" by Sara Lundberg, we find out what it must have been like for Berta Hansson - a swedish artist growing up - with her mother slowly dying and only a paternal figure, a farmer who did not understand her longing and yearning to express herself through beauty and art.
Berta longed to break away from the farm, and sought the bravery and inspiration to live her own truth, follow her own path and push back against her father's wishes to follow his farming life.
The main reason this spoke so strongly to me was for a similar reason, growing up with little or no encouragement to be a daydreamer, an imagineer, someone whose mind is too busy to undertake fairly menial and unimaginative pursuits so there's a bittersweet feeling of admiration tempered with a tiny touch of jealousy for Berta and the way her story ends (which I'm obviously not going to spoil, but she's well worth looking up - her work is incredible!)
Sum this book up in a sentence: A superbly inspirational book for anyone who feels like they have to justify having an active and expressive imagination that doesn't 'fit' with their world.
"The Bird Within Me" by Sara Lundberg is out now, published by Book Island (kindly supplied for review)