Unfinished Business: How You Can Build Your Dream, Lose it, and Still Survive

Lorraine Lush 
Blue Ibis Books, Inc. (2005)
ISBN 0976549506
Reviewed by Beverly Pechin for Reader Views (8/06)

This is not your typical "self-help" book.  This is not your typical "auto-biography".  But then again, Lorraine Lush is anything but typical.

Lush opens her heart and soul to bare all, simply to tell her story so others may learn.  A woman who has fortitude above any other person you will ever meet, Lorraine stood up against all odds to defeat the big guns and be defeated by them.  Never once do you join her in a pity party.  When the going gets tough, Lorraine gets tougher. 

An entrepreneur long before anyone really knew what the word was, Lorraine Lush opened doors for others while literally giving everything of herself.  Her dreams, pursuits, and hopes were met but not without pain.  A single, divorced mother of two, Lorraine trudges through every imaginable situation you can imagine and some you cannot, simply to create a dream of giving the youth of her hometown the option to further their education and become employable.  The first to ever open a successful private post high school academy, Lush risked everything and battled every governmental block she ran into.  With the help and blessing of her family she created one of the biggest and best private trade schools in Canada.  As she faced challenge after challenge, beginning with the infidelity of her husband and a traumatic divorce she somehow pulled herself up by the bootstraps and moved on.  When so many others would have simply accepted the answers she was given and walked away defeated, Lorraine Lush made it her mission to change the ways of her world in order to be able to obtain her dream.

The stories behind the school, known as the Newfoundland Secretarial Academy (later to become the Newfoundland Career Academy) and the closeness of not only Lorraine herself and the students but of the entire staff and the students.  Created with a "home away from home" atmosphere in mind, Lush opened the doors as a Secretarial Academy in a large house that she and her family renovated.  Growing faster than she could ever imagine her life changed by leaps and bounds.  Creating new courses and new career choices, Lush needed to not only change the name of the Academy but change locations.  Oddly enough as the Academy grew larger and larger with the battles fought by Lush, she also opened doors for competitors.  It was no longer unheard of to have a private school available to the graduating high school students.  What once was a governmental monopoly was quickly becoming a thriving new business adventure for many, all because of Lorraine Lush's battles fought to obtain her dream.

As she shares the adventures, stories, trials & tribulations and heart aches of her life you see deep inside the person that makes Lorraine Lush who she is.  She shares the good, the bad and the ugly with her readers.  At no time does she apologize for making the mistakes she made.  Instead of apologies she gives lessons in life to those who will take the opportunity to take them in.  Literally becoming an outcast in her own town as her dreams fall apart, she shares the world of being a public figure.  She admits her own mistakes and also makes it hard for those who were wrong and fighting against her to honestly say they were not wrong.  As she is thrown to the lions, watching her dreams fall apart she reaches a point where she truly does crumble.  Falls apart and hides from the world.  But that's not the Lorraine Lush everyone knew and loved.  That Lorraine Lush had to come back and face the music. 

Sharing excerpts after each chapter explaining what she did and didn't do correctly makes Lush's book not only an autobiography but a self-help book.  Showing others the mistakes she made and openly admitting to them she helps one realize what not to do.  Sharing her successes, she also shows the reader what works and why.

Truly one of the most touching, honest and real stories of our time, you cannot walk away without learning something about life in general.  A woman who not only succeeded but failed, and still kept her head held high in the end.  And as she says, her life is not over.  She simply has some unfinished business to take care of.  Don't miss this heartfelt story and life lesson.

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