I had the privilege of reviewing the first novel and I enjoyed it immensely so with great anticipation I opened to the first page of the sequel.  Ian Finn Mortgenstern’s, the hero in the first novel, life has not improved much since we last saw him in The Dryad’s Kiss.  His father is residing in the mental institution, Shady Oaks, and so is his best friend’s sister, Jen.  And Finn feels responsible for both of them.  In the last book, Jen lost it when she touched a magic crystal that Finn had.  Something in the crystal possessed her mind and now she believes that there is a war waging against an evil enemy and that only Finn can save the world.  Her father, Mr. Washington does not believe Jen and thinks Finn has harmed her.

The situation with Finn’s own father isn’t much better.  After saving his father’s life with his powers, Finn altered him permanently.  Now his father doesn’t crave human food, but he craves people.  However, since biting a nurse landed him in Shady Oaks he has to curb his appetite.

To make matters worse, the psychiatrist of Shady Oaks, Dr.  Anderson, who is treating both Finn’s father and Jen enlists Finn’s help against the shadows.  One of Finn’s new traits is that he can see people’s auras and black shadows.  Many of Dr. Anderson’s patients are haunted by these shadows and the doctor believes that Finn can help them.  If he agrees, Dr. Anderson will let Finn’s father come home.  Dr. Anderson can’t see the shadows himself, but he knows there is something different about these patients.

While all this is going on, Finn’s enemy and former schoolmate, Erik Parmely has killed his abusive father and is now on the loose and is murdering those who have betrayed him.  Finn is at the top of his hit list.  And it appears that Erik has acquired evil powers.

The one good thing that Finn has on his side is the loyalty of his friends.  Even with all of the craziness going on in Finn’s life, his friends never stop believing in him.

While I thoroughly enjoyed the first novel in the series I had some issues with the sequel.  This series introduces a lot of concepts that aren’t usually thrown together, such as dryads and Indian burial mounds.  The first book merged all of the elements together.  However, the execution in the sequel falls short.  The concept of the shadows and evil is interesting, but not fully explained.  Also, he relies heavily on the reader to remember all of the complicated elements from the first novel.  Sometimes it would be helpful to provide reminders of why certain things are important and how they are connected.

Also I was surprised that the author let go of one of the main ingredients that worked so well in the first novel, which was Finn’s problem of holding everything together without telling everyone about his special powers.  This added an interesting and fun dilemma.   Instead of keeping his secret he lets a lot of people in and their reactions are hard to believe.  If Finn is a superhero, like his friends believe, wouldn’t it be more fun if not everyone knows.

I believe that VanKirk, with a little work, can create a wonderful sequel to The Dryad’s Kiss.  He proved to me with the first volume that he can take a second look and work out the kinks.  It would be a shame if he didn’t since I read a snippet of the third installment and it holds much promise.

As the novel stands now, I would give it 3 stars out of 5.   If the author does take a second look at the plot development, I think he would have a real winner.

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They built the mound layer by layer, with each layer accepting more of the bones of the fallen. Finally, on top, facing the south and east, they interred the remains of Wahkoceethee the Eagle and Sheshepukwa the Cougar. They buried the fallen warriors with ceremonies of respect and thanks along with their totems. When Anakthepeuke the Rattlesnake died, he would be buried facing the west and the strongest of them all, Mactequeta Bear, in turn would be buried facing the terrible north.  They would take their totems with them so their spirits could tap the power of their totems in death to keep away any who would disturb the prison of Wendigota. It was a great blow to the power of The People to lose their spirit warriors, but it was a necessary sacrifice.

That sacrifice eventually proved too much for the people to bear. It left The People open to attack and mere generations later, foreigners, who had lost their fear of The People, over-ran them and scattered The People to the winds. Their language and their culture were swallowed by the the darkness of time. Lost along with The People were the names of the spirits of woods and air and the terrible knowledge of Wendigota and the sacrifices required to defeat it.

Only the spirits remained to guard their dark prisoner, and over time, even spirits grow weary.

In The Dryad’s Kiss, by R. Scott VanKirk, Ian Finn Morgenstern is a young man in his senior year of high school in a small town in Ohio. He’s a nerdy boy who is awkward around girls and most people outside his circle of friends.  On Friday nights, he and his buddies play a fantasy role-playing game that Finn has created.  He is a good kid, who has a heart of gold. He isn’t the best student, but gets decent grades and he comes from a well-adjusted family. And to round out his geeky status, he has a pet hamster named Squiffy. In the fall he plans on going to college.  At night he dreams of a sexy dryad who seduces him.

Finn sounds like a typical nerdy teenager.  Wrong. In fact, he is anything but typical.  It all starts when he comes home and finds his dad in the back yard with a chainsaw.  His father wants to cut down an oak tree that Finn loves since it is dying.  “The tree stood in our backyard. Its branches extended to my bedroom window. It was large and gnarled and ancient looking with wrinkled bark filled with faces, beings, and places. It was perfect for climbing, and it was mine.”  Finn promises to nurse the tree back to health and if he fails, he will help cut it down in a year.  The tree gets a reprieve and Finn’s life changes forever.

First, the dreams of the dryad, who Finn has named Spring, become more frequent and intense.  How can they just be dreams when they feel so real?  Second, while on a camping trip with his father and uncle, they discover an Indian mound with bones and artifacts that seem to be possessed.  And they unearth a misshapen skull.  Finn is convinced that the skull is evil.  Third, the school bully, Erik Parmely is trying to kill him.  Last, his friend’s sister, Jen, likes Finn.  This should be the least of his worries. However, the dryad is jealous of Jen and attacks her.  Jen ends up in the hospital and everyone looks to Finn for answers to what happened.  However, Finn doesn’t know how to tell his parents and the authorities that his dryad who visits him in his dreams is responsible for the attack and not him.  “The panic was gaining.  Nothing I could say would help.  There was no way my dad or mom was going to believe me if I told them I was being loved to death by a mythical creature who lived in a tree.  They’d put me away for certain.  Either that or think I was covering for worse things.”

How will Finn regain control in his life?  And more importantly, what forces were causing all the chaos and destruction in his life?  A few weeks before, his life was normal.  Now it was anything but ordinary.

This is my second reading of this novel.  The author submitted a previous draft of The Dryad’s Kiss for review.  After receiving comments from several sources he decided to rewrite his novel.

After reading the first draft I was impressed by the different elements that he was attempting to put together, but the execution was not quite there.  When I started reading the second draft I knew from the start that he put much time and effort into rounding out the story.  In fact, he rewrote the entire introduction even though he admitted that he liked the first introduction he wrote.  Deleting his first introduction may have been difficult for the writer but it worked. His new intro works and helps frame the story right from the beginning.

Furthermore, he tied together many of the loose elements I noticed in the first draft.  The final product is a winner.  I found myself deeply immersed in the story and plowed through it to find out why Finn’s life was out of control.  Was the dryad evil?  Was the tree the source of the chaos or the Indian artifacts and skull from the mound?  What was the driving force behind all of this madness and how many innocent people would get sucked into it?

The Dryad’s Kiss is the first in a series.  While not all of the questions above are resolved by the end of the first installment, he successfully hooked me as a reader and now I’m dying to know more.

I am thrilled that the author took the time to work out the kinks of the previous draft.  He shows much promise as a fantasy writer and I can’t wait to see how this series turns out.  I give this novel 4 out of 5 stars.  If a future draft of the novel was free of some niggling grammar issues, such as missing punctuation marks or misplaced words, I would give it 4.5 stars.

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Eyes Behind Belligerence

Eyes Behind Belligerence is essentially a story of families and how they come to terms with loss — whether of people, life as they knew it, or the ability to make their own choices.  Americans whose ancestry is not Japanese may look at Japanese-American families and see homogeneity.  The book shows that the cultures within the Bainbridge Island families are diverse, though as the families move to Manzanar, with its lack of privacy and depressing environment, some aspects of their lives are forced to be more similar.

There are dozens of points of view, but the story eventually becomes that of Goro (Russell) Hamaguchi and Jimmu (Jim) Yoshimura, two very different high school boys who share anger at being interned but appear to have little else in common.  They struggle to develop and maintain a friendship, and sometimes it tears so badly it is hard to imagine any recuperation.  The most recurring emotions are frustration and anger, but there is humor.

I have read several books set at least in part in internment camps, but none portrays the environment as well.  It does more than describe the crowding, heat, and barren quarters.  The utter boredom is palpable.  The book also shows that families were not simply forced into the camps, they moved more than once and splintered as some members were allowed to leave (if “sponsored”) to work in another part of the country, or were forced to move to another camp if there was friction or they refused to sign a loyalty oath.  The irony of having some characters help liberate Dachau is impossible to miss.

Eyes Behind Belligerence deals with the ordinary and profound, from falling in love to standing up to bullies to trying to reconcile support of the war effort in a country that imprisons its own citizens.  The book’s primary timeframe is late 1941 to 1945, though an epilogue of sorts shows how some of the main characters moved into the 1990s.  (No spoilers here.)

There are a lot of characters to keep in play and Kollenborn does it well, although the many points of view are distracting at times and leave little room for discovering anything with the characters.  However, Kollenborn develops her main characters very differently than one might anticipate, which keeps a reader turning the pages.  And there are secrets.

A number of times emotion is shown through winking, chuckling, pinching brows, and biting lower lips.  When one character has such a habit it tells you something about that person, but when many characters do these things it appears that the author is trying to convey emotion in a somewhat clumsy fashion.  In Eyes Behind Belligerence, the character’s actions and words largely speak for themselves; winks are rarely necessary.

Eyes Behind Belligerence is fascinating, and it shows the World War II period from a different perspective than most American history books.  It is worth four stars.

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Author Martine Racine is a Jungian psychoanalyst and ordained minister. In The God Within, she describes how the divine lives in all of us.

Racine posits that our center of power, creativity, and morality doesn’t come from extrinsic sources. Rather, they reside in our being and are tapped into when we feel from our hearts. All of the destruction in the world, according to Racine, comes from the unhealthy imbalance of putting too much emphasis on the mind. The mind is a tool that should be used only through the guidance of heart because our heart is what is connected to our inner god. Our god does not only know our own experiences, but is intertwined with the collective consciences of the world.

Racine divides the book into 12 chapters. Each chapter describes a different lens from which the god within can be viewed. For example, she discusses nature, children, and love as different ways that our inner divinity can be expressed and seen.

While her premise is intriguing, Racine’s chapters lack organization. She meanders through lofty ideas and falls back on cultural assumptions, rather than showing readers evidence for her claims. For example, she maintains that children are “seedlings” who don’t try to “control or overpower anyone.” Anyone who has spent time with a two year old knows this romanticized version of children isn’t exactly accurate. She also fails to expand on her ideas in ways that help the reader fully understand her logic or see the world from her perspective. She states, for instance, that while we sleep, “other dimensions of ourselves are active,” but never explains this statement further.

Racine’s book touches on many interesting ideas. But in tackling this large spiritual concept, she fails to draw the reader in. The result is a lackluster read that leaves her audience with more questions than answers.

Right from the start, the reader is thrown into the bloody world of mobsters.  The opening pages depict a horrific killing.  The murder scene is not for the faint-hearted.  At first I was uncomfortable.  But fear not, this is not a novel that centers primarily on acts of violence.  Giammatteo switches gears deftly and tells the story of how we ended up at the murder scene.

Nicky “the Rat” Fusco, Tony “the Brain” Sannullo, and Frankie “Bugs” Donovan are best friends in Wilmington, Delaware.   During their younger years they rely on each other to survive.  They are bound by a code of friendship and honor that they swear to uphold forever.  This code is challenged when Nicky rushes to a gang fight that Frankie and Tony are involved in.  Nicky gets a tip that the other gang is bringing a gun.  He enters the fray and saves Frankie’s life by shooting two members of the rival gang.  He ends up in prison for ten years.

While Nicky is in prison, Frankie and Tony both move to New York City.  Frankie joins the police force and becomes a homicide detective.  Tony embroils himself into the mob world.  When Nicky gets out of prison he learns that the woman he loves has married another man and now has a child.  There is nothing left for him in Delaware so he moves to New York City.  He believes that if he can make it big he can go back and impress his former sweetheart.   However, making it big as an ex-con is no easy feat.  He turns to what he believes is his only logical solution: Tony and the mob.

The mafia and murder go hand in hand.   Soon Frankie is involved investigating a string of mob killings and all of the clues lead back to either Tony or Nicky.  Frankie is torn between the code and doing his job.  The closer he gets to the answer the more he fears what he will have to do.  He has to decide: is he a cop or a gangster?

The story switches back and forth between Frankie’s battle with his sense of duty as he investigates the murders and Nicky’s recollection of his childhood and his bond with Frankie and Tony.  As I mentioned above I was fearful that this novel would lack any depth after reading about one of the grisly murders.  My fears were soon soothed and I began to appreciate the exploration of the characters to figure out how they all ended up in their own predicaments.

Giammatteo takes his crime novel to a new level and makes the reader feel for the murderer and the cop tracking him down.  As is so often the case in life, nothing is black and white.  The author explores the shade of grey and puts the characters through the wringer so the reader knows each one intimately.  Don’t fret though, if you are looking for a fast-paced novel with plenty of action, you will not be disappointed.  I thoroughly enjoyed Giammatteo’s first novel and I look forward to reading more works by him.  I give Murder Takes Time: Book 1 in the Friendship & Honor Series five stars out of five.

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Cephrael’s Hand is Book One in a series called A Pattern of Shadow & Light and is the first novel by Melissa McPhail. Our story is set in the mythical realm of Alorin, three centuries after a massive war which almost wiped out an entire race called the Adepts. A three-continent map of Alorin is included, as are a Glossary of Terms and Dramatis Personae.

I consulted the front matter frequently throughout my entire reading. The plot is lengthy and complex, which tends to be the case with epics. I’m not the least bit ashamed to admit I was half way through the book before I understood what was basically going on.

We have a trio of main characters. Prince Ean is tortured about making decisions of great consequence as he becomes a leader; Trell of the Tides from the desert wonders if his hidden past will reveal his true identity and purpose; and Duchess Alyneri has self-righteous, indignant retorts for anybody and everybody as she struggles to remain unmarried and professionally independent. These three are kept busy with their seriously serious tasks, so the narrative relies on their individual ‘sidekicks’ to provide diversion and humor, with dozens of additional characters of various races, talents, and motives to keep the reader engaged and the plot thick.

I enjoyed the symbolism McPhail employs, especially Trell’s relationship with the water goddess and his intriguing encounter with her daughters. Colors are mentioned often and let me tell you, their outfits are very important to the characters in this story. Magic is always a factor in high fantasy, but McPhail gets very creative here with a depiction of six types of energy work (it’s complicated).

In keeping with storytelling based loosely on Middle Age epics, the narration is in a formal voice and there were only a few minor slips. I thought the level of violence was appropriate to the story but found the third act pretty intense. I couldn’t agree more when, in chapter 49, Ean declares, “I’m tired of being bounced around from one near-death situation to the next, harassed and prodded and captured and freed like someone’s bloody pawn.” We are also treated to a bevy of arched eyebrows, leanings on one elbow, and shootings of withering looks.

Of course, no epic would be complete without a treatment of the themes of antithesis, death and immortality (with a reincarnation twist), loyalty, courage, fate and free will, friendship, and loss (there was one farewell scene that actually choked me up a bit).

An author doesn’t wave a magic wand to invent an imaginary realm. Thoughtful crafting of fictional geography yields descriptive data such as the physical challenges of particular mountains, rivers, deserts, and seas, and the made-up history provides plot lines and explains the goals, values, and motivations of the characters. Last but not least, the proper execution of high fantasy involves the selection of what language which characters speak and how important use of language is within the story (“In the desert, as in the language itself, there were nuances—huge disparities, actually—in what was said and what was understood”).

With all of this in mind, I pronounce Cephrael’s Hand a resounding success. Fantasy fans will want to read the entire series and Melissa McPhail deserves a round of applause for her achievement. Five stars.

About the Author

Melissa McPhail is a classically trained pianist, violinist and composer, a Vinyasa yoga instructor, and an avid Fantasy reader. A long-time student of philosophy, she is passionate about the Fantasy genre because of its inherent philosophical explorations. Ms. McPhail lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband, their twin daughters and two very large cats.

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The story of Sacrifices unfolds as it follows the lives of four female characters: Osondrous, Jezaline, Karalay, and Constance. They all have some gift that makes them special. The first three women are leaders of the Human species, known as Wards. Their stories diverge near the beginning, as Karalay and Jezaline set out on special missions, while Osondrous remains at the castle of the Wards to rule and protect their people. The King Ward has been missing for some time, and come to find out, if he dies and a new Queen or King Ward is enthroned, then the rivers that protect the Human borders will become weak and passable by the dangerous creatures to either side of the middle realm. With other threats such as the Grim posing to strike, a great sense of the end creeps into the mind while reading, in a land full of peril and enclosing doom.

The passion of the characters drove the story forward, and I liked that about Sacrifices. Each character is explored in detail. You get to really know them, and why they make the choices that they do, even if you don’t understand how anyone (outside the characters) would come to make the choices that they do. The Human interaction with the other species was fun, and Wolff definitely knows a thing or two about horses, which she flawlessly incorporates into her unique cast of Centaurs. Horse culture dominates the bulk of details in Sacrifices, and I was glad to learn more about the animals by looking up terms, such as the definition of a bay horse, which I did not know before.

Sadly, though, the book is riddled with errors. There are so many errors and inconsistencies, to the point I had a difficult time staying focused on the story the characters, as I tried to figure out what the author really wanted me to know. The errors pull the reader right out of the story, which is where it fails, and fails hard. There are so many sentences that run on without taking a breath to pause, you just want to give the author a bag full of commas and say: “Please use these!” There are sentences without subjects, as if Wolff didn’t want to start another sentence with ‘She did this and she did that,’ and didn’t know of another way to structure the sentence. An example that incorporates both of the above: “She poured herself a cup of milk and out of a floor cabinet she drew a wooden tray with a loaf of dark bread, butter and cheese. Sat down on the bed with it.” Commas are missing where there are natural pauses in the sentence, so the reader ends up just reading without any breaks, and this happens on probably every page.

Word confusion pops up often enough to make you put the book down. For instance: “Your destiny was changed by a prophet, Grim; now another prophet is trying to interfere. That much I can deduct.”—He’s not doing a math problem. And: “Some falling down, some laying down.”—The Centaurs are not being put down by anyone; they are lying down themselves. There are also strange sentences like: “Dragons attacked the towers like wasps.”—It becomes apparent that the author didn’t take the time to reflect, asking: does this make sense to the scene? Are these dragons using their tails like stingers? No. Are these dragons swarming the towers like a group of wasps might do? No, there’s only a baker’s dozen, which would be hard to argue is a swarm. There are even errors that a simple spell check would correct: “Made a clear cut across the corner, so she would would know which one was his.”

But the worst of the errors is the point of view violation. Wolff sets up Sacrifices like Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, with chapters titled after the character it is supposed to follow, but the chapters aren’t from those characters’ POV at all, as the whole book is written from an omniscient point of view, jumping into the heads of all kinds of characters in the scene, even the horses. One of the worst ones was a short, two-paragraph segment in part three entitled Osondrous, yet the whole thing is about Eikian the Centaur! It is cool to have an omniscient point of view, but if you write like that, then there’s no point in entitling chapters after characters, it’s useless, and eventually (and by eventually I mean very quickly) it becomes annoying.

If the sample of book two reads the same when it is released, I won’t bother continuing with the story. A decent plot with emotional characters, but it’s a hard read that could use another round of edits, probably from someone other than her aunt. I give 3 stars for the plot and characters, though it may more appropriately deserve only 2 for poor writing and editing.

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We are introduced in this novel to many characters, large, small, and interesting alike, including “The Wooten Bunch” of Water Wells, Alabama, consisting of six students. Most of the focus is on four particular boys in this bunch as they transition from sixth grade in 1954 through the end of high school in 1961. While The Player Piano at times a coming-of-age story, it’s more than that. This is a tale of the very survival of these boys, with great tension created between their individual actions when forced into situations and whether or not each will survive said choices of action.

Our story takes place in southern Alabama near the Florida border. Sounds, smells, geographical textures, and detailed physical sensations experienced by the characters are vividly portrayed in a variety of settings such as a corn whiskey still in the backwoods, a car speeding along a gravel road, or a rowboat gliding through a swamp. The writing and narrative styles of Mr. Cook lift these characters and settings from what the reader might think will be a simple depiction of rural life in olden times to a level of sheer literary enjoyment, while, at the same time, there is a distinct you-are-there effect.

One absolutely riveting scene, a car chase involving the delivery of some moonshine whiskey, takes place over the course of several chapters, and yet Mr. Cook is not what I would describe as long-winded. In fact, the scene is quietly hilarious, as is a classroom scene early in the novel involving a doomed Show and Tell exercise which also goes on for a few chapters.

The car chase episode also has a small diversion into history, a diversion that begins with the simple sentence, “The town itself was an accident.” This is not off-pace, however. One of the hallmarks of Southern life is that every event is connected to something that started a long, long time ago. Mr. Cook’s approach to flashbacks, as with the story behind the player piano, for example, is to present the past as part of the present.

Of course, tensions and collaborations between people of differing races must be included in a story of such a place and time, and our narrator is someone you can trust to be honest in the telling, but with a light enough touch to let nuanced meanings sink in on their own. There is bittersweet poignancy in some scenes without being overly flowery, wistful understanding at other times without colloquial condescension.

On the whole, use of dialogue balances nicely with background narration, description, and action sequences, with just enough figurative language to keep the reader engaged throughout. I appreciated the use of printer’s marks as I was reading and the paragraphs and chapters seemed to be just the right size. I liked the chapter titles so much that my chief disappointment in this book is that there was no table of contents to flip back to.

Whatever one’s interest level might be toward Alabama history, the shenanigans of high school students, adventures in moonshining and logging, country folk in general, or economic and racial difficulties during the mid-Twentieth century, this novel is an opportunity to relish the old-fashioned experience known as reading a book. Five stars.

About the Author

An author from the Deep South, G. Charles Cook writes of an era between the Old South and the New. A time when the races were holding suspicious hands and looking both forward and backward, a time when unlike personalities were thrown together and rare camaraderie developed. Charles holds a B.A. in economics from the University of Houston and an M.A. degree in literature and writing from the University of South Alabama. Having published essays and short stories elsewhere, this is his first full length novel.

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The setting for the three stories in Railway Confessions is a train ride from Paris to Geneva, during which three pairs of strangers share intimate details of their lives with one another, something they wouldn’t have done ordinarily.

The first story, “My Brother’s Keeper,” begins in a train station in Paris. It’s August, which means the entire city is heading for the countryside. This creates a full train and two good friends traveling together to Geneva now find they have to sit in separate cars. Lola Sanchez, a policewoman, and Ellery Roulet, an American ex-pat with a white collar career, are both in their late thirties. They come from working-class backgrounds and share an ambition to succeed; both are considered outsiders of a sort.

Once this backstory is set up, we find Lola sitting in a car next to a gorgeous older man, also an ex-pat (like Ellery). At first Lola is quite perturbed with this gentleman yet she soon finds herself trading personal confessions with him: “It’s the secrets that you keep that fuels the unshakable guilt.” Social class comes up for Lola quite a bit but the main conversation concerns the taking of human life. They conclude their conversation amicably with a bit of flirting and Lola teasing him by saying “you should meet my friend” (meaning Ellery).

The second story, “A Choice in the Matter,” begins as the train leaves Lyon for Bellegarde. This time we find two ex-pat American females sitting together: Emilie Scott, a young mother/gothic Lesbian with a baby girl, and Mira Delacourt, 45 years old, married for 20 years to a museum curator, with three teenage sons and no career (yet). These characteristics and the title of this story hint at the topics Emilie and Mira become engaged in while riding together.

As the train makes its way from Bellegarde to the final destination of Geneva, we are now riding along with Ellery, who, like Lola, finds herself sitting with a distinguished-looking older gentleman, Laurent Petit. Laurent witnesses Ellery having an erotic dream about her husband (whom she is very mad at). After some initial irritations on Ellery’s part, this pair of passengers also indulges in mutual confessional sharing. We learn that Laurent has had two marriages, lots of mistresses, and numerous affairs, and makes no apologies for any of it. Ellery confides to Laurent that she recently miscarried but told her husband Julien she’d had an abortion (continuing the thread of life-and-death choices running through all three stories). “Pretty Prison” is how Laurent describes Geneva to Ellery, who is considering a move there. Laurent also mentions a long-lost daughter he’s never seen whose first name is Lola.

In the Epilogue, Lola and Ellery reunite at the train station in Geneva just past midnight. I saved the Mini-Interview and Book Club questions for later and skipped to the excerpt from Geneva Nights because I was so involved in Moncel’s storytelling that I wanted more. In this clip from the forthcoming novel, Ellery, whose divorce is growing closer, goes apartment shopping in Geneva and runs into none other than the gorgeous stranger from “My Brother’s Keeper,” Kai McAllister, a photographer whose work she has seen.

I then read the blurbs for Encounters in Paris (featuring Ellery and her husband Julien) and 5 Ways to Leave a Lover (part of which continues the story of Ellery and Julien). I found both of these online as free downloads and greatly enjoyed further exploration of these and other characters. In all of her short stories, Moncel creates intrigue and weaves her plot elements to yield both psychological and emotional story arcs.

Although this level of sophistication in the writing was a pleasant discovery for me, the inexplicable presence of typos and grammatical errors in Railway Confessions forces me to give this collection a rating of 4 stars rather than 5. However, after reading these short stories, I’m convinced in advance that Moncel will be an excellent novelist and will be watching for the release of Geneva Nights.

About the Author

Carolyn Davenport-Moncel is also the author of Encounters in Paris – A Collection of Short Stories and 5 Reasons to Leave a Lover – A Novella and Other Short Stories. Originally from Chicago, she lives in Lausanne, Switzerland with her husband and two daughters. Two new works are slated for 2012:  Geneva Nights – A Novel, and Nearly Lost You, a Young Adult novel co-authored with her teenage daughter under the pen name Ella Swinton.

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Ironically, Clips & Consequences is in part what is known, by definition, as a confessional memoir. In other words, the book focuses on Beth’s interior journey as outer events unfold in her life. The thrust of Beth’s story is a custody situation in which she is coerced into signing away parental rights under threat of going to jail. As the jacket copy states: Beth muddles through a range of fear, shame, anger, and remorse, until she stumbles onto the path to recovery while immersing in Seattle’s Post-Grunge music scene and Poetry Slam, working with the skateboard industry, and reveling in her new-found sex goddess role. Ultimately she involves in a calling to regain her spirit.

The book as a whole is an organization of a wide variety of material from roughly 1995 through 1999, including journal entries, personal letters, original poetry, photographs, and photocopies of documents and pages from pertinent publications, in all more than 350 pages yielding what can only be described as stark emotional honesty.

Beth learns to live with the forced separation from her daughter while building her career as a sales rep, navigating the dating scene as a single woman for the first time in many years, and facing her personal flaws with honest self-criticism. “Sometimes I wonder if all people…review clips of consequence, analyzing…those frames that have strong impact,” she writes in an unmailed letter to her daughter. Beth’s questions of herself include her addiction to cigarettes, her personal use of alcohol, and her obsession with a local musician.

This memoir not only documents a personal journey, it also serves as social and political witness: Who gets to decide what a ‘good mother’ is? Are mistakes ‘wrong’? “It is not a rarity for a good person to make a wrong choice,” Beth writes. “Is twenty years in prison congruous with this act?” Through her journals and letters, Beth reconstitutes outer influences and inner motivations and by March of 1997 she realizes: “I am now changing my perception of this whole story.”

It’s not an easy process by any measure. Along the way, Beth suffers a couple of anxiety attacks and her father gets cancer. She continues to write in her journal, write letters, educate herself about marijuana laws, and generally live life her own way by “reading at Poetry Slams and other open mike venues, going out to hear music, riding my skateboard,” all the while continuing to work full-time for a hat manufacturer. Eventually she latches on fervently to the organized effort to legalize marijuana and hemp. In January 1998 she founds Purple Stripe Publishing (named after the purple stripe in her hair) and self-publishes a chapbook of her poetry.

By June of that year, her hemp activism begins in earnest with the first issue of the publication “Hemp Activist Times” (H.A.T. = hat) and her daughter Zoey graduates high school and is legally emancipated that summer. There is a preview of the sequel to this memoir at the end of the book which will presumably document a continuation of the relationship arc between Beth and her daughter as well as Beth’s progression as an activist.

Beth’s writing has clarity and her ability to organize all of this material is impressive but more importantly, she achieves what I believe was her goal with this memoir, to not only document a healing journey, but in addition, show herself as fully human. In this last regard, whether or not a reader enjoys this memoir will depend on how willing one is to be exposed to another person’s inside workings in minute detail, in writing. I give this book 4 stars.

About the Author

Beth still calls Seattle home but spends summers in Alaska and some winter in Mexico. She has been a member of the Pacific Northwest Writers Association since 2005.

Links

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Purple Stripe Publishing