A solid debut layered with flashbacks, eroticism, and emotionally dynamic characters.
In this romantic fantasy debut, a young woman who can see peoples’ auras learns that she’s part of a larger clan, one a militant cult wants destroyed.
Megan Byrne can see the glowing auras of those around her. In downtown Kansas City, Missouri, she just glimpsed a man with a dark aura drain a young woman’s life force. Megan knows she witnessed the exact same scene 24 years ago, when she lived the life of San Francisco woman Kat Weiss. When Kat killed herself to escape this evil man, her hidden core identity of Rhiannon was reborn as Megan. This time, Rhiannon panics and ends up in the psychiatric ward of St. Michael’s hospital. After a brief stay, she’s picked up by her childhood friend Greg, who knows about her strange ability to push people into making decisions in her favor. Next, Rhiannon decides to visit Kat Weiss’ grave in California. Traveling through Kansas, she attends a lecture by author Zerik Denali, an expert on reincarnation with whom she forms an instant—and sensual—bond. Examining Rhiannon’s aura, Zerik reveals that she is an “aeternan,” one of Those Who Do Not Forget, and has lived many lives. Much later, at Kat’s grave, they encounter Dead Monks belonging to The Guard, a clandestine group focused on eliminating the powerful aeternans. Starting her series, debut author Elder draws readers into a complex hidden society, complete with its own language and sexual mores. Every element of the narrative is densely layered, from Megan’s traumatic childhood (in which she was molested by her stepfather) to the individual powers (called e’drai) of each aeternan. The prose often drifts into potent lyricism: “The universe was a puzzle, woven through with elegant conflicting threads, songs whispered within the heart of potentiality.” Though the opening points toward a thriller, the second half features a Rhiannon who’s comfortable among her extended family. The story’s main theme is that of enlightenment gained through open sexuality, but Elder explores this a bit too long before concluding the chase. A tighter pace would help the sequel.
A solid debut layered with flashbacks, eroticism, and emotionally dynamic characters.Pub Date: June 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9962074-0-9
Page Count: 420
Publisher: Radical Muse
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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