Guest blogger: Helene Young

Love for all ages

I do love a real-life fairy tale romance like Prince Harry’s and Meghan’s, but as each birthday passes the more I want to read stories about older women dealing with life and all its messy glory. Many of my friends are women embarking on a second, or even third, chance at love. Or they’re breathing new life into a love that’s decades old.

Older love is different to a young love with all that wide-eyed optimism. It’s more cautious, yet liberating. It’s careful yet wild. It’s passionately sexy yet respectful of bodies that have borne children, changed shape, been broken and healed. An older love is all the more powerful for knowing how much it hurts to lose love, for knowing that it takes time to build a love that outlasts the initial surge of attraction, a love that will endure heartbreak and weather the erosion that time brings.

Some of my favourite movies have love story arcs for characters no longer in the first flush of their twenties and thirties. What’s not to love about Liam Neeson’s character in Love Actually, or Tom and Meg in You’ve Got Mail, or Katharine and Henry in On Golden Ponds?

Writers like Barbara Hannay, Fiona Lowe, Liz Bryksi and Anna Campbell all have characters who’ve lived, loved and lost and who’ve found love is possible again. There’s something reassuring about it. Just because I won’t see my forties again doesn’t mean that I don’t want to know love can still strike hard and fast no matter our age. (And for the record I’m not planning on ever trading in Capt G!!)

I do enjoy the escapism of a story by KM Golland or Kylie Scott or one of Annie West’s Sheiks, because they make me smile and give me a great big shot of endorphins—and that’s always welcome. Yet I find it’s the older characters who stay with me longest, who I worry about and empathise with and perhaps that’s an inevitable part of ageing.

Friends have just celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. It’s beautiful to hear them finish each other’s sentences, to see them almost dance as they move around their boat galley cooking dinner together, to watch them bicker over something then laugh about it. Their love struck early when they were teenage neighbours and it’s never wavered, which just goes to prove that fairy tales do happen and love can endure a lifetime.

What do you prefer? Reading a romance about your own age group, someone younger, older or doesn’t it matter, provided the emotional journey is satisfying and the ending is uplifting?

Join in the discussion to go into the draw for a copy of Return to Roseglen. The giveaway will close on 24 June. (The giveaway is now closed. The winner was mchriste33.)

Happy reading,

Helene

You can find Helene here: Website | Facebook | Twitter

Return to Roseglen

At times like these families should be coming together, not tearing each other apart.

On her remote North Queensland cattle station, Ivy Dunmore is facing the end of her days. Increasingly frail, all she holds dear is threatened not just by crippling drought, but by jealousy and greed—and that’s from within her own family.

Can Felicity, who’s battling her own crisis as her fiftieth birthday approaches, protect her mother and reunite her family under the homestead’s faded iron roof? Or will sibling rivalries erupt and long-held secrets from the past break a family in crisis?