Where Lions Roar at Night

I am a wife and homeschooling mother of six children, living in rural New Zealand. My passion is to encourage and inspire others. Over the years I have been able to communicate this passion through songwriting and singing, and public speaking. For the last twelve years I have discovered the thrill (and effectiveness!) of writing – my books travel far further afield than either time or money enable me to go myself. Let me tell you a bit about myself and the wonderful family I have been blessed with…

We are eight Booms living on a small homestead in Whangarei, New Zealand. Chris and I have been married now for nearly 25 years. I met him in New Zealand shortly before I went to Borneo to be involved in missionary work. Some months later he came over for a visit and declared his love. When I returned to NZ a year later our romance blossomed and we married in 1987. We have been blessed with six beautiful children! Now I am a full time home-schooling mother.

I spent some of my childhood in Papua New Guinea, where my parents were missionaries. It was a fantastic childhood – weird and wonderful pets, jungle clubs, huts by the river…

We came home to NZ when my twin sister Penny and I were ten. I went on to do my nursing training and worked for the next ten years in both public and private hospitals and as a practice nurse in a doctor’s surgery. I finished nursing when our oldest son was born, and since then have swapped my nurse’s uniform for my teacher’s garb. I have been homes-chooling now for 20 years and it has been my ‘magnum opus’. But whenever I get a spare moment, I love to write!

Chris and I are also singer/songwriters (in our spare time!), and have been travelling around New Zealand now for 25 years, singing at churches, camps, conferences etc - most anywhere we’re asked!
In 2007 we made the big move and bought 11 acres of land, complete with river and a ninety-year- old barn which was to become our home.
I never dreamed that the next four years would hold so much fun and so many memorable moments. We knocked the barn into some semblence of order, evicted the resident possum, put in a few windows and best of all, set up a Homewood stove which was to become the heart of the barn – cooking our food, heating our water and keeping us warm through the cold winter months. In the first six months, we survived two ‘one hundred year’ storms. The barn creaked and shook and groaned, but outlasted the onslaught. Those were exciting, nerve-wracking days and nights of gale force winds, rain so loud on the tin roof that we couldn’t hear ourselves shout, rescuing animals and anxiously watching to see if the barn roof would lift off.

In our second year I began writing Where Lions Roar at Night, a family read-aloud book telling all the fun and adventures we had in our first year of living in the barn. The second book in The Barn Chronicles, Where Arrows Fly, was published in 2010 and the third book in the series, Where The Crickets Sing,was released in May 2012, and the fourth book is on its way!