Grandpa's Wisdom
Secrets to the Good Life
This is a delightful little book about living a better life.
A sweet little advice book, J Blasiman’s Grandpa’s Wisdom: Secrets to the Good Life is a charmingly honest volume about love, life, and acceptance. Full of guidance, it also includes reflections on some of Blasiman’s own most difficult times.
Blasiman is a relationship and life coach and granddaughter to Wilbur. Wilbur was born at the very beginning of the Great Depression, was married to the love of his life for sixty years, and was his wife’s caretaker for more than ten years while she suffered from Alzheimer’s. Along the way, he learns the “secrets to the good life.” Always there for fair and genuine advice, or just to talk, Wilbur begins giving Blasiman guidance after her parents separate when she is a teenager. Many years later as an adult, Blasiman and Shay, her partner and the mother of her two children, also separate, causing Blasiman to reexamine and rebuild her life.
Her grandpa’s encouragement guides Blasiman to count her blessings, share her love, let bygones be bygones, and practice forgiveness. This advice also helps her to be a better parent, daughter, sister, and significant other. Her separation from Shay is a turning point, first bringing her down into depression, but ultimately working as a catalyst for improving her life and the lives of those around her.
With her grandpa’s jewels of wisdom and her own experiences, Blasiman has created a book about accepting oneself and learning to have a better life. She writes from the heart about her own separation in an up-front manner: “It was the hardest and most painful time of my life and yet it was the most rewarding because of all the growth and all the lessons I learned.” Her writing style is honest, simple, and often directly to the point.
Blasiman gleans the crème de la crème of her grandpa’s guidance and pours it onto these pages: “Grandpa’s wisdom is much like God’s love. It is in everyone and around everyone, if we choose to surrender to lessons and love.” The most significant advice given is basic but often easily forgotten in the chaos of everyday life: be honest and love unconditionally. This book differs from others in the genre because of the way the guidance is interspersed with stories from both the author’s life and the life of her grandpa.
Organized simply with one main idea from Grandpa’s advice per chapter, the book flows pleasantly. The ideas from chapter to chapter build upon one another, creating a cohesive text. A few grammatical errors regarding quotation marks are the one distracting point.
Blasiman has achieved her goal of writing an enjoyable advice book to help people. Love and forgiveness are the main themes of Grandpa’s Wisdom: Secrets to the Good Life, a delightful and graceful volume about living a better life.
Reviewed by
Beth VanHouten
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
