Manipulated Lives by H.A.Leuschel.

                      Manipulated Lives by H.A.Leuschel.

"My emotions felt like they had tumbled from a great height, crashing onto sharp, rough rocks below. I started to doubt my own intuitions and judgements and there were some days when I was feeling like an empty shell."

This is a collection of five short stories conveying a message that manipulation can ruin lives. Themes of deception and untrustworthy testaments distort the truth and it results in mayhem.
Sophie, the narrator was tall, blonde with green eyes. She epitomises beauty. She worked part-time at a P.R. firm writing literary reviews for women's magazines as a freelancer. The story is set in London with a relaxing break to Brighton. It was when Sophie was visiting her private sports' club that she noticed a small and delicate boy who seemed to have been abandoned sitting in the children's play area.

"He looked like a beautiful, fantastical character who'd walked straight out of a children's picture book."

She wondered if there was something wrong with him? She did notice that he seemed to be desperate for love and affection. The maternal side took over and there was an instant bond created between them. In the beginning there's a sting in the tale: "life can deal you a difficult card" and before the story develops we are told that Leo no longer features in her life.
David, ten years older than Sophie, tall, broad and good-looking, a consultant for a big marketing firm, was juggling fatherhood with a demanding job. Sophie was appalled at his negligence in abandoning his son. The story was set around a time where child abductions were real with tragic consequences. Her fondness for Leo resulted in trusting David more than she would have normally done to a complete stranger.


She soon became a "professional childminder" then started buying toys for him, then taking him to school. Inevitably a growing intimacy developed with David and to outsiders they seemed like the perfect family. There are warnings though with Sophie's parents and siblings having reservations about her relationship with David, mood swings and criticisms about her frumpy appearance. He liked to be in control. Leo soon became the centre of her life and he took priority over her friends. However, Sophie was naturally curious about Leo's mother and is fobbed off by David with the intensity of his hatred towards his ex-wife. "If someone tells you only part of a story, you will wonder, and not always in their favour." A number of incidents start to alarm Sophie and she questions David's honesty over his alleged victimisation by a female manipulator, the "deluded lunatic" of his ex. Was the mother in fact the injured party rather than the father? In becoming almost philosophical, Sophie is forced into considering the meaning of truth.

"What if we are all creating our own truths, as we often need to, on a daily basis?"

Spring turns to summer and they rent a cottage near Brighton. Sophie has a creepy encounter with an odd-looking woman who seems to be stalking her. Leo disappears in a bookshop and Sophie feels utterly devastated: "I felt like my child was gone, my flesh and blood violently ripped away from me." Thoughts of Madeleine McCann and James Bulger flood her thoughts with anxiety.

Overwhelmed and exhausted, Sophie returns to London. She needs a bit of space although she doesn't want to be separated from Leo.

It all proves too much for Sophie after being stalked and threatened. She reflects on the loss of innocence, presumably her own and likens herself to a fish in her pursuit of truth; truth is "like a slippery wet fish that we normal humans are unable to catch with bare hands." For a short while she felt as if she was that fish. What is sad is the knowledge that Sophie is unable to have children. We discover towards the end that she had been in the early stages of aggressive cervical cancer and had to have a hysterectomy. Losing Leo must have been devastating for her but it's consoling to note that she does hear the other side of the story and she makes the right decision even if it's a painful one.

Publisher: Helene Leuschel Publishing.

REVIEW it by Carol Naylor.

COPYRIGHT 2017. Permission must be obtained from the author before any of this article review is reproduced.


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