Spoilers: The Italian Coast Reunion by Dahlia Moore is a heartfelt and moving Contemporary Fiction novel about secrets and female friendship set in an eye-catching descriptive setting.
Recently widowed Kathleen decides that she wants to finally take a long overdue trip to Italy but doesn't want to go alone. She invites her former college friends Sylvia, Alina, and Lauren to come with. The quartet experience the country while confessing hidden secrets, painful revelations, and conflicts with spouses, children, and family members, and discuss the truth about what ended their close friendships all those years ago.
The book is practically a travel guide with richly developed fictional characters to experience the journey. The Italian setting is vibrant and captures the senses. Through Moore’s words, readers can vicariously see the ruins and art, hear the traditional music, smell the Mediterranean sea air, taste the delectable food and wine, and feel the authentic fabric in the shopping districts. Italy practically becomes a character itself as it invites the characters and readers to observe its historical past while living in the present moment.
As the characters observe the Ancient and Renaissance history of the country, their own histories are also painfully observed. The historical sites show places that were beautiful, symbolized progress and rebirth, but now are dead existing only to be observed. The ancient past that is long gone moves towards the Renaissance.
Similarly the four women have to observe and acknowledge the deceased but troubling ancient ruins of their own pasts before they can progress and renew themselves into their own Renaissance.
Each character speaks of family trauma and current struggles that sprung from it. Kathleen lived a childhood surrounded by loss and abandonment. That resonated with her marriage as she tried to avoid the truth behind her late husband's real character and childless status until she was forced to confront them.
Alina was traumatized by emotional abuse, sexual objectification, assault, and slut shaming. To escape that life, she threw herself into an unwise marriage that quickly turned abusive and traumatic.
Lauren, one of the few African Americans in her town and school, was the target of frequent racism. That ingrown caution and anxiety spilled into her relationship with her hostile daughter.
Sylvia left behind an Orthodox Jewish family that continued to trap her with their judgemental domineering views. That suffocating family environment compelled her to care for her invalid husband despite his increasingly morose and potentially volatile behavior.
The women are open, vulnerable, and honest as the reality of their lives are exposed. Each confession leads to another one until all secrets are laid bare in a heartbreaking confrontation when the temporary dissolution of their friendship is finally revealed. It was a time of trauma, bad decisions, hurt emotions, impulsive rage filled actions, and long time physical and emotional wounds that remained for decades afterwards.
Besides the honesty of their private lives, the four women show the warmth and support that drew them to each other in the first place and why despite the negative circumstances that ended their friendship in youth, they willingly reach out to rekindle it in the present. They provide solid advice, encourage walking down a different metaphorical path than the one that they are on, offer practical assistance, and put words and actions in the renewal of their friendship.
The Italian Coast Reunion captures the four characters’ physical journey to Italy but more importantly their emotional journey as daughters, sisters, students, workers, wives, mothers, divorcees, widows, travelers, friends, and women.
Spoilers: Not to be confused with Jennae Vale’s A Matter of Time (The Bridge Through Time Series Book 4) which I reviewed earlier this year.
I.P.D. Watts’ A Matter of Time: He Lost Twenty Years in a Moment uses one of the worst times in recent American history as a backdrop for this Science Fiction thriller about a time traveler who finds that his world is irrevocably changed by those circumstances.
On September 5th, 2001 Desert Storm vet and securities executive, Peter Collins left his suburban home, waved goodbye to his wife, Marie and three children Ashley, Tom, and Jake and went to work at his business Edwards and Collins Worldwide Securities Inc. on what should have been an ordinary day. On his way to the carport for lunch, he felt a strange sensation like he was walking through cold water.
When he comes to, the carport is changed, his Mercedes is gone, his offices are now run by the NSA, and most of his colleagues no longer work there. Oh and the World Trade Center that he used to see from his office? It's not there anymore. Peter learns that he has moved forward twenty years into the future. It is now 2021 and his family, business, colleagues, and the entire world have completely changed.
The science fiction aspects are introduced through the mechanics of time travel. The NSA experimented with a device called the Mag-Tron which creates a vortex in space and time with the present on one side and the past on the other. All someone has to do is walk through the vortex and they are in the past.
However, they have to reenter at a specific point in time or the vortex will close and that person will be stuck in time forever. An NSA agent from 2021, Jed Ryman goes backwards to investigate ties to 9/11 and Peter who was just in the wrong place at the wrong time in 2001 moves forward twenty years.
Of course with government agencies involved in a project like this, Peter inevitably finds his life in danger. People that he confides in are injured or dead. Sketchy figures follow him wherever he goes.
It gets to the point where Peter, and the reader, aren’t sure who to trust. Heather, a kind stranger, helps Peter but she raises suspicions with her sudden presence and involvement with this strange man and his even stranger story of time travel. After all, wouldn't most people be suspicious? Contact the psychiatric hospital? Not let the potentially delusional man sleep in their apartment?
There are some very heart tugging moments particularly when Peter reunites with his family. The reveal that his sons perished in the WTC during a field trip is a painful moment. It stops the book cold by exploring Peter’s shock and anguish when he mourns the loss of two boys who he saw only a few hours ago.
The grief is still a fresh wound for him while for everyone else it was a deep loss that healed over time. Peter doesn't have that luxury to mourn but adjust for two decades. To him, it recently happened and it is a wide gaping wound.
Peter also has to cope with how the rest of his family moved on from what they saw as Peter’s disappearance and the twins’ death. He alternates between jealousy and acceptance when he learns that Marie remarried after declaring him dead.
His daughter Ashley has grown into a young woman in her 30s without him being there to enjoy it. Most of the book is a high energy thriller but it also knows how to stop and savor those moments of real emotions.
The book flows pretty well but there are some maddening questions and plot points that are unresolved most notably the presence of Agent Ryman in the past. He gets very little mention and it is unclear what his experiences investigating 9/11 in the past lead to.
Ryman is a plot point that definitely needs more exploration. Perhaps Watts could write a companion piece exploring Ryman’s adventures in the past.
The book also seems to be of two minds when it comes to whether one can fight fate and change the past or not. Certain events play out to their inevitable conclusion and just when the reader is prepared to reluctantly accept that, something else happens that calls that into question. It’s kind of confusing that some things get changed but others do not.
The concepts that were introduced in the book are interesting to explore but it seems like Watts wasn’t certain about what he wanted to say about it and decided to split the difference between one idea and another.
A Matter of Time has some huge flaws and questions but mostly it’s a thrilling and dramatic work that is time well spent.
The Copulation Chronicles by Bexxy Mov is an erotic, sizzling, frank, and openly honest book about a woman struggling with her PTSD and sex addiction.
The main character is also named Bexxy Mov like the author but the description says that it is a semiautobiographical novel so it will be reviewed as a novel with possibly true elements inserted into the narrative. (The character will be referred to as Bexxy while Mov will be used for the author.) Mov portrays her fictional self as a vivacious but complex woman who recognizes her flaws, wants to change, but finds herself unable to.
Bexxy recalls early abuse, trauma, sexual assault, and betrayal. Those awful experiences created a desire to escape and gain control of the situation. If people were going to hurt her, then she was going to use her body and sexuality to hurt others.
The book explores one sex act after another where Bexxy uses various techniques and tools to entice her conquests. They think that they are getting the ultimate sex partner: a playful kitten, a femme fatale, a cunning prostitute, a bold dominatrix, a willing submissive. She can play any role expected of her by examining what her partners want.
Bexxy can reframe the damage that was done to her into something that gives her power and control over others. What takes her a long time to realize is that instead of controlling her partners, her sexual compulsions are controlling her.
There are moments when Bexxy hopes for something different from a partner beyond the usual one night stands but when she wakes up the next morning she gets more of the same disappointment, hostility, nonconsensual violence, and objectification.
Why try for anything if it's all the same? So she submits to her addictions and pretends that she doesn't feel any emotional pain or vulnerability.
Bexxy’s awareness of her addiction becomes a breakthrough for her. Through therapy and self-reflection, she views herself objectively and realizes where her sexual urges came from and how they ran her life.
The moment when she refuses to let her addiction define and run her life is the moment where she gains the control that she long sought. She can be an independent free woman who gives herself when she wants to not because she feels compelled to.
