Singing Magic: Memoir of a Girl Who Thought Singing Was Life

by Lucretia E. Pretorius

Overview

Reminiscent of the spare, lyrical voice of Isak Dinesen (“I had a farm in Africa . . ."), Singing Magic is the painfully frank while poignant memoir of a girl raised in the farmlands of Ontario and French Canada in the 1940s and 1950s, who then moved to South Africa in the late 1960s and witnessed the tumultuous dismantling of apartheid. Throughout are rich descriptions of people and places in rural Canada and remote regions in South Africa. (“'You’ll eat dust,' my friend predicted. . . . She knew I hadn't the slightest idea of what lay ahead.”)

The child with the beautiful voice finally found the lyrics to the wild, gypsy music that possessed her, in the strong, pitch-perfect lines of this strangely compelling book.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940151847278
Publisher:	Lucretia E. Pretorius
Publication date:	03/29/2015
Sold by:	Smashwords
Format:	eBook
Sales rank:	422,084
File size:	374 KB

About the Author

L.E. Pretorius was born in Toronto, Canada and raised in the farmlands of Ontario and French Canada during WW2 and its aftermath. She’s a graduate of Montreal’s McGill University. In the late 1960s she moved with her South African husband, a geologist, and their infant daughter to South Africa, where she accompanied her husband on field trips to San (Bushmen) country, exploring for diamonds for his employer. (Happily, he didn’t find any.) They were tempestuous years, as apartheid was rapidly unraveling and, as it turned out, her marriage. Even so, Lucretia resolutely pursued her formal voice training and performance of opera — her passion from earliest childhood. She writes with the drama and passion of a diva, in spare, beguilingly simple prose reminiscent of Isak Dinesen (“I had a farm in Africa . . . ).