The Others (Book 1 in the Council Trilogy) by Evette Davis; Blue by Charles Keatts; The Blind Smith (Book 1 in the Forge Trilogy in The Shadow Guardian Series) by G. Russell Gaynor; Eveningstar: Awakening by Samantha Curl

 The Others (Book 1 in the Council Trilogy) by Evette Davis; Blue by Charles Keatts; The Blind Smith (Book 1 in the Forge Trilogy in The Shadow Guardian Series) by G. Russell Gaynor; Eveningstar: Awakening by Samantha Curl 

The Others (Book 1 in The Council Trilogy) by Evette Davis

The entire review can be found on LitPick.

Evette Davis’ The Others is an intriguing concept that is illustrated with intrinsic copious details that fully explores it.

Political consultant Olivia Shepherd is suffering from a professional crisis when she encounters Elsa, a spirit called a Time Walker. Elsa informs her that her rival, Stoner Halbert has made a deal with a demon and is using that influence to grab power. As if that's not enough there is a hidden society called The Others: vampires, fairies, witches, ghosts, and other creatures. They live alongside our own and affect the human world around them. Olivia has some untapped abilities and must use them and her newfound friendships within the Others community to make some important political changes of their own, ones that will benefit humans and Otherkind not dominate it as Halbert wants to do.

The Others Society is captured brilliantly because it seems so much like the normal 21st century human society. The Others live in houses, have regular jobs, and go about their daily lives.

Once she is introduced to the concept, Olivia realizes that she is surrounded by The Others. Her best friend Lily, a teacher, is a fairy. William, a musician whom Olivia begins a relationship with, is a vampire. Gabriel, a multi billionaire who mentors Olivia, is a witch and so on.

There are also some other interesting facets to the plot. William and Olivia begin a tentative romance that is conflicted by differing views but a strong emotional and physical connection.

The political landscape is adequately explored and has some very timely relevance in an already eventful Presidential election year.

The Others takes a fascinating concept and lets the imagination run wild with it.

Blue by Charles Keatts

Blue by Charles Keatts is not an easy book to read. It's confusing, rambling, and disjointed, but it is also honest, introspective, and real. It shows the mental decline of a creative artist who is losing himself to addiction, depression, disconnection, and the despair felt by the people around him.

The Narrator mostly ruminates on his struggles and those of the people around him. They are highly artistic and highly troubled. There's Robert, a music critic, who falls into addiction and various love affairs. His painter friend, Ann soothes herself with heroin. The Narrator, a novelist and poet, has flashbacks of his unhappy youth and is overcome with depression, manic thoughts, and alcoholism. Other names and situations float through the book and disappear quickly as the Narrator’s sanity spirals.

This book is not an easy read. The narrative is confusing, repetitive, jumps from one point of view to another, and rambles on with little to no point. At times it comes across as boring. It tries for a stream of consciousness narration ala James Joyce or Virginia Woolf and sometimes it works but often it doesn't.

Blue works by capturing the slipping sanity of a brilliant but unraveling mind. The Narrator can't keep his thoughts together so it shows in the chapters. He repeats himself, tangles his thoughts, forgets names and places. Even his descriptions of Robert and Ann are causes for concern because The Narrator purposely leaves information out. It is unclear who Robert and Ann even are in his life. Are they friends of his? Is he Robert? Are they parts of his psyche? Fictional characters whose conflicts bleed into his own? We don't know and it is left to interpretation.

At times however, the narration is too complex and pretentious for its own good.

Blue contrasts with another recent book, blue: season by Chris Lombardi which also captures a stream of consciousness narration but does it better than Blue. blue: season is also narrated by a character who is a genius but has a fractured mind but this is a book with a character and plot. It doesn't lose focus so it can tell a good story along with a smart introspective narrative. We care about the characters and want to explore this strange journey into one woman's struggle with mental illness and traumatic memories of her past.

Blue on the other hand is more concerned with showing off the narration than putting it together in a book. It's hard to understand who the Narrator is or who the other characters are partly because of the limited perspective. We only see everyone through the Narrator's eyes. They all live miserable lives and that's it. The bleakness overpowers and since The Narrator jumps around, we can't really know the characters beyond mere sketches. The misery just piles on them without any full understanding of who they are as people or a reason why we should care about them when they reach rock bottom.

Blue is hard to comprehend and sometimes hard to care about, but it is an introspective and honest book about a brilliant mind that is falling apart. As those around him suffer from their own problems, he has to deal with his own heartaches and disappointments. The Narrator lives inside his own head and finds solace in his writing. If in fact, Robert and Ann are fictional characters that he created, he is perhaps using their addictions and psychological problems to confront or even avoid his own. 

As his life and the other's collapse, The Narrator who once found solace in his own mind can no longer trust it. He completely retreats into the fragmented remains in his mind as they slip away into nothingness. 

The Blind Smith (Book 1 in the Forge Trilogy in The Shadow Guardian Series) by G. Russell Gaynor

Note: This book was not selected because of current events. This schedule was made beforehand. Use caution when reading this review.

Even though G. Russell Gaynor’s The Blind Smith is 112 pages, it is a tightly wound and taut thriller about betrayal, revenge, and using one's own abilities and power to get that revenge.

An assassin blinds teen tech billionaire John J.J. Moore and kills members of his security team. He is taken in by Bob, a mysterious figure who teaches the young man how to be an assassin. Within a few years, J.J. excels in his training and recruits some new assassins to help him plan his revenge on the people who attacked him and killed his friends.

The opening chapter begins with a violent attack and there are some other subsequent action oriented chapters. However, the emphasis in this book is on gathering intelligence and planning strategies. Fighting harder takes a backseat to fighting smarter.

J.J. is particularly skilled in the whole “fighting smarter” mindset. He fits the description of someone who “plays 3D chess while his opponents play checkers.” In the beginning of the book, he is taught to use his other senses to become a formidable fighter ala Daredevil.

This style not only sharpens his physical strength but his mental strength too. He almost obtains a second sight and awareness into his allies and opponents's thoughts and actions.

With J.J.’s physical strength and analytical prowess, he is more than formidable against his enemies. Half way through the book only a few years into his training, he is already recruiting and leading his own groups. He picks into his protegee’s desires for revenge and anger at being wronged.

He helps his new recruits channel their anger into being a fighting team that makes up for the deficiencies that he lacks. They will be his force for revenge over the enemies who attacked him and the traitors that allowed it.

The Blind Smith is a brilliant game between a genius who is conditioned to fight and those who he is conditioned to fight against.

Eveningstar: Awakening by Samantha Curl 

Samantha Curl’s first Eveningstar novel, Awakening, skillfully tells three separate stories with the same characters. Curl then entwines them into one wide reaching expansive Epic High Fantasy that passes through three universes.

Alethia Eveningstar is the daughter of The God of War and Queen of the Stars and is destined to defeat Kakaron, God of Chaos before she can inherit her father's title. Kakaron seduces and betrays Alethia before making an escape. The Goddess-to-Be has to live ten or eleven lives encountering and fighting Kakaron before their final battle. Most of the book is set during two of those lives: Our Realm, where she is a high school girl in modern times discovering magic powers while dealing with new friendships, romance, and studies and the Other Realm, a Medieval like forest where her powers manifest as she is involved in a love triangle between her betrothed and a handsome and familiar stranger.

For a short novel of 178 pages, a lot is accomplished in an impressive manner. Curl devotes enough time to all three universes to give us ideas of the plots, settings, and characters and how they overlap and interact with each other. 

With time and interdimensional travel and the decision to set alternating chapters into different worlds, Awakening can be a very difficult book to follow. But thankfully many plot points parallel each other enough so if it already happened in one universe, the Reader will expect it to happen in another.

The key is to make each universe unique from the others and Curl does this superlatively. We know that Alethia and Kakaron are destined to encounter each other in each universe. 

There are also friends, relatives, authority figures, and romantic rivals that carry over in amusing ways. It gets to the point where the Reader goes “Okay there's this character in Our Realm. She should appear in the Other Realm right about..now.” It becomes an interesting game to see how quickly the characters' doppelgangers appear and in what way plots shift in the various worlds.

There are some interesting twists to keep Readers from expecting or assuming too much. One character strangely can jump from universe to universe so instead of being a reincarnated soul or a double, he's the same person in all three worlds and is able to teach Our World Alethia this ability so she can see what her Other Realm counterpart can. The circumstances of how Alethia and Kakaron meet, what forms they take, who seduced who, and how they discover the truth are different each time. Different enough that in one universe, Kakaron’s reveal is a genuine surprise. It keeps the momentum going in this strange novel.

Eveningstar: Awakening has a lot of fun playing with the laws of time and space and taking the Reader along with it.

 

New Book Alert: Fool, Anticipation by Robert Polakoski; Brilliant Historical Fiction About a Woman's Exploration of Her Talent and Sexuality

 New Book Alert: Fool, Anticipation by Robert Polakoski; Brilliant Historical Fiction About a Woman's Exploration of Her Talent and Sexuality 

By Julie Sara Porter

Bookworm Reviews

Spoilers: It doesn't need to be said how appropriate it is to review a historical fiction about a lesbian poet struggling against restrictive gender roles and the lack of understanding towards her sexuality. It doesn't need to be said how SCOTUS' boneheaded, archaic, self-serving, underhanded, homophobic and misogynistic decisions to overturn Roe Vs. Wade, protections towards same sex marriages and gender affirming care, and recently permission for people to use religious freedom as an excuse to deny services, goods, and care to LGBTQ+ people make a book like Robert Polakoski's Fool, Anticipation even more relevant. (And that ending Affirmative Action and not legacy acceptances and hiring practices shows their true racist colors, mostly white, as well). It doesn't need to be said that such rulings and laws created and encouraged by Conservatives, especially Fundamentalists, are set to roll back women and LGBT+ people's statuses and protection back several centuries (or worse forward to Handmaid's Tale's Gilead). None of that needs to be said but it's being said anyway. Fool, Anticipation by Robert Polakoski is a book with a character who says all of that and more. It is a brilliant historical fiction about a woman who explores her talent and sexuality to find her own voice and independence.

Like with many Historical Fiction novels, we start with the protagonist, now older, looking back on their lives, perhaps writing or dictating their memoirs. In this case, poet Edna Rose Doyle is being interviewed by a reporter for a French publication. She gives some interesting hints that her life was a troubled one before we get to the narrative proper.

Rose Doyle was born in Jersey City to an Irish-American family given to abuse and alcoholism. To escape her unhappy home life, Rose turns to poetry, particularly that of Edna St. Vincent Millay. In fact, Millay becomes such an ideal that Rose calls herself Edna in the poet's honor. She wants to live her life the way Millay did, openly flaunting female lovers, writing frank and honest poems about sex, war, and social injustice, and living in Greenwich Village surrounded by other artists, writers, and intellectuals. 

Edna ends up working at Great Eastern Electric as a telephone tester during WWII. After the war ends, she and a few female friends go out for a few drinks when she encounters Tommy Prosky. Edna and Tommy have differing opinions about the war (Tommy was for, Edna against) but go on a second date. It is on this second date where Tommy rapes Edna, leaving her pregnant.

The pregnancy leaves Edna devastated and is left even more devastated when a doctor refuses to give her an abortion. She has a brief affair with another woman, Elle Rochfort before Edna returns to the reality of her situation and is forced to marry Tommy and endure an unhappy marriage rocked by abuse, addiction, and a mental breakdown.

Edna's intelligence and sardonic nature really shine through in her first person narration. I cannot stress this enough how well written this female perspective is, especially considering that Fool, Anticipation was written by a man. Polakoski captures the complexities of this character and makes her identifiable and understandable as she questions her life, sexuality, and place in the world as a woman of deep intellect and desires that society tells her that she should not have.

Edna has a definite idea of how she imagines her life. During adolescence, she stood outside the home of Millay, imagining herself as a poet surrounded by arty intellectuals, writing verses about how she really feels, and taking female lovers openly. However, the dreams are dashed by reality. She sends poems to publications that are rejected (though she admits that she is happy to even receive a rejection letter). At 19, she gets accepted to Vassar on a scholarship and saves money for the opportunity, but her rape, pregnancy, and quickie marriage end that plan.

On her jaunts to New York, Edna looked outside the Women's Literary Society,  longed to be a part of it, and also saw Elle looking at her through a window. She would have loved to enter the society and have a relationship with Elle but knew that society would never allow such a pairing. Ironically, during one of the lowest points of her life after her rape, Edna works up the courage to introduce herself to Elle. The two women have a very passionate and emotional night that could have meant that they were lovers and soulmates. Unfortunately, it only lasts for one night but sustains Edna through the loneliness of her marriage that she still thinks of and dreams about Elle.

Edna's sarcasm is never in doubt. When she compares herself to her female coworkers, she realizes how different her aspirations are from her friends. "It did bother me some that I wasn't like them," she said. "What they wanted was a man so simple and so obtainable. What I wanted-a woman-seemed so out of reach. I even confess to being a bit jealous on Monday morning, listening to (her other co-workers) discuss all the guys that they met while I spent my weekends staring furtively at women in storefront windows in Greenwich Village." Like Dorothy Parker, Edna uses her sarcasm, self -deprecating humor, and wisecracks to cover up her insecurities and vulnerabilities.

Sometimes Edna's narration shows an older woman discovering other things with the virtue of hindsight. For example, when she seeks the abortion she reflects that even though technically illegal, it was widely known and practiced in the 1930's. ("Everybody knew someone who could give one or knew someone who knew someone who could give one.") However, when Edna tries to get hers in 1945, she is a victim of the Baby Boom push.The goal of producing more babies to create good little Americans. Being someone who is fervently anti-war, Edna seethes at the hypocrisy of a government that didn't care if Japanese children were napalmed or atom bombed to death (and certainly didn't care enough about Jewish children to accept them into the country or African American children that they kept them separated from white children) and are now on their soapboxes about protecting the "Sanctity of Life." (It really makes you look at the Baby Boom differently). With a lifetime of reading and studying history, Edna understands the circumstances and far reaching regulations about why she was put in such situations that affected her individually.

That elderly voice also shows why the people around her acted the way that they did. She doesn't like them any better but she recognized people like her mother and Tommy had circumstances and standards that they had to live up to and led to the choices that they made for themselves and Edna. 

Her mother for example was in an abusive marriage and after her death was unable to survive on her own, so retreated into drink. She also had a sister Flossie who, like Edna, was raped and left pregnant so she was sent to the Magdalene Laundries (a deplorable institution in which so-called "fallen women" prostitutes, women who were raped or victims of incest, or the mentally ill worked in laundry facilities for mere pennies and were subjected to torture and abuse). Edna's mother is told what women are supposed to do to maintain respectability and she forces that thinking on her daughter. However, her mother does show some maternal kindness with her grandson, Tommy Jr.bonding with him in a way that Edna is unable to.

Tommy is also seen as victimized by societal expectations of men. A childhood bout with polio left him disabled and unable to serve in the military. Because of this, he is desperate to prove his masculinity and virility. He deals with desperation by doing violent and unconscionable things. Shortly before he rapes Edna, soldiers make fun of his disability. He also tries to prove his status as a wage earner by not only being a police officer, but a corrupt police officer who is on the take so he can earn more money. He has been told what a man should be and has completely given into the toxic masculinity image (even before it was an actual thing). He later confesses to Edna that he likes seeing shopkeepers and citizens fear him when he takes their money.

Edna's emotions are expressed most thoroughly through her poetry. Throughout the plot, Edna offers a poem that expresses her inner thoughts and conflicts reflecting her real feelings for a situation contradicting how she outwardly behaved during that time. For example, during her wedding to Tommy, she daydreams stopping the show with a zinger and walking off leaving everyone stunned. Instead, she meekly acquiesces to this no-win situation.

However, her poem "The Prisoner" shows what she really thinks about this not so joyous occasion:

"So Tommy married me and,

Obliterated from history

Washed from the shores of time 

Like a tide, passing

No mention is made again 

Of his rape

Except by me…"

Edna's poetry is confessional, similar to the works of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Edna's mental and emotional states become worse after her son, Tommy Jr. Is born. She doesn't feel bonded to him because he is the child of her rapist and keeps her attached to him. She is clearly suffering from postpartum depression and has no one to confide in except her poetry.

Shortly after Tommy Jr. is born, she writes "What Truth Gives" reflecting about how the truth is skewered about why children are born and how his birth makes her even more disconnected from life:

"What is lost

What is gained

When truth obscured

From view

Becomes a tool to use,

Or a drug to take

That makes

What a wish to see

Or hear,

Or know,

Go away…"

As her marriage and motherhood drags on and weighs her down, Edna's mental and emotional state continues to deteriorate. When she first discovers Tommy's kickback money she compulsively shops for things like wrapping paper, rubber bands, and other useless items. She has vivid frightening dreams like the Hiroshima bombing, being surrounded by American soldiers that congratulate her on adding to America's plan, and her father hovering over her like a specter. She gets pregnant a second time after having a terrifying flashback when Tommy startles her, reminding her of her rape. She miscarries and feels like she is being punished. 

All of these feelings are cast aside for the "new normal" of post-war prosperity. Edna is so disconnected from her life that she can't feel anything when her friend gets married to a nice guy. Not surprisingly, Edna falls right into the Feminine Mystique "Problem That Has No Name" that Betty Friedan spoke of. She is prescribed and becomes dependent on Oxycodone and later speed.The addiction only fuels her depression, loneliness, and paranoia. She hallucinates arguing with the housewives on TV and has continuous mood swings that last for days. She overdoses, eventually collapses, and is institutionalized.

Edna's institutionalization is terrifying as she is forced to recount many troubling aspects of her past like her rape and childhood trauma that finally resurfaces. However, it ends up helping her and becomes the first step of living a fulfilled life. She realizes that she is as much to blame as her mother and Tommy are for her mental state because she let her fears and insecurities get in the way of living a life for herself.

She is encouraged to write. In that time she realizes that she found her poetic voice. She writes the poem that becomes her greatest success, "Fool, Anticipation."

"Fears 

On a glacier or a tide

Ride away your dreams

They say goodbye

To the life you thought you'd lead

Fool, anticipation

Now there's only dreams

Of what there could have been 

Of what there might have been

And the fear and anger

All directed at him

You didn't get a chance…"

Even though she reunites with Elle before her hospitalization, Edna reconnects with her afterwards and allows herself to have a real relationship with her, one without her fears, emotional baggage, and societal standards getting in the way. She eventually finds the courage to make a clean break from her old life and make way for a new one.

Edna finally has the keys to change her life and become the person that she was meant to be: a talented and published poet, an intellectual surrounded by artists and freethinkers, a lesbian in a loving relationship, and an independent strong free spirited woman unafraid of life.