Through the Looking Glass – A review

By Datuk Seri Azman Ujang

I have known Beatrice for a long time, and I have always had respect for her ability to do great PR and strategies for companies, but today as I flip through her book and read it, I am thoroughly impressed with her amazing writing skills. 

Good writing is not just about stringing the right words in structured sentences or having a perfect command of the vocabulary. Good writing is the ability to connect with an audience and resonate with their thoughts and articulate what they have been thinking about but able to articulate themselves. 

But you know what great writing is? It’s going deep into topics that no one dares to talk about and having the courage to meet it squarely and give a voice to it. To get out of comfort zones and chart new territories by talking about deep personal traumas and tragedies without shame, guilt or fear.

As a veteran journalist, I have rarely seen any writers daring to go that extra mile, especially when it comes to baring the soul and writing fearlessly, without holding back the punches.

My dear friend Beatrice has done this and even more, she has topped it with liberal doses of wit, wisdom, kindness, compassion and intelligence in this masterpiece of hers, ‘Through The Looking Glass’.

This book is a rare literary gem. 

Every page leaps out and wraps itself around your heart, and you are drawn into her world as she paints the pain, wonderment and simple joys of every man and woman, intricately woven into her story.

The journey of her life from a wide-eyed shy Ipoh girl from a lower middle-income family who gave up teaching Physics and Maths to build an empire of influence, with no mentors, no help, just her guts.

The crumbling of personal and business life, shattered to a million pieces with a heartbreaking betrayal and divorce.

Building back from ground zero again at the age of 46, engulfed with fear of the future.

And what we all need — a triumphant ending, as she finds her footing, reinvents her business, fortifies her confidence and then awakens to see the world with different eyes and a smile.

I remember her struggling to cope alone with her business and a multitude of matters after her divorce and not being able to sleep for days. 

She once told me, “I wish I had a ‘how-to cope’ guide with me during the darkest times of my life. A book or something that will give me hope that I can do it, that this too shall pass, because it gets so depressingly hard and frighteningly dark that I worry I will never be able to come out of this state of anxiety and depression.”

Well, she has written that book she needed. So that many others who walk through the valley of fear, anxiety and doubt that clouds their vision, as we all do at many stages of our life, can take solace in this book. 

This book IS a wonderful guide, thinly disguised under a myriad of delightful stories about her journey, entrepreneurship, life hacks, tips on how to change the world, the challenges of being a woman in a man’s world, her relationship with her children, and my favourite part … Happiness Is …, an entire segment that examines the simplicity of happiness and how we can all have it.

Everyone should have this book. It’s not just one of the best books I have read by a Malaysian author, I think this book has the potential to be an international best seller, for its universal feel-good theme of triumph over darkness in our lives.

In my humble opinion, Beatrice is just awesome in every sense. I have to thank New Sarawak Tribune for discovering her.

And Tribune Press for publishing her first edition. 

Editor’s footnote: There is a standing joke about Azman Ujang and it goes like this — No one has a DNA in journalism with a nose that can sniff out news even 10 kilometres away as Azman Ujang does.