by Lech Blaine

reviewed by Wendy Tucker

Lech Blaine spent eleven years researching and writing his family’s story. He had access to his mother’s diary, thousands of official documents, and letters. He interviewed hundreds of people to ensure this work of creative non-fiction was balanced and nonjudgmental. It’s difficult to review this hilarious, heartbreaking memoir without making it sound like a potboiler about an Aussie battler family overcoming the odds. It is so much more.

This is the true story of the Blaine and Shelley families. Lenore and Tom Blaine are working class publicans, moving from pub to pub in county Queensland. Lenore hasn’t been able to have the children they long for and they decide to foster the damaged children that nobody wants. Michael and Mary Shelly have abandoned their privileged former life to become evangelical Christian fanatics. Michael is the Messiah and Mary is the archetypal mother. Michael despises his follow Australians with their ‘… reckless indulgence of alcohol and obsession with idiotic ball sports’.

All four of the Shelly’s children, three sons and one daughter, are removed by Child Services and placed with the Blaines. The growing Blaine family of five foster kids, and a number of Dalmatians, is raucous, egalitarian, atheist, loving and sports obsessed. This family is everything the Shellys rage against. The surprise arrival of a biological son enlarges the family and that baby, our author Lech, is embraced by all with no acknowledgment of difference, except he is not good at sports in which all his siblings excel.

Michael and Mary Shelly are deluded, irrational and frightening. They have also been diagnosed with various mental illnesses. Yet we have sympathy for them, largely because of the skilful writing. It would have been easy to cast them as villains and the Blaines as heroes. But Lech Blaine is far more subtle, witty and empathetic than that. The Shellys are totally driven to retrieve their children. Kidnapping, stalking and abuse follow, and the loving household is subjected to violent harassment. Truth is indeed stranger than fiction.

Lech Blaine tells this almost unbelievable story with compassion and wit. He makes room for all the characters to tell their own story. I absolutely love this book.