By: Skyler White
Publisher: Berkley Books
Publish Date: November 2010
Format: Paperback, 370pgs 5 1/2" x 8 3/4" - ARC read for review
Genre: Dark Fantasy
Series: The Harrowing Series, first book was and Falling, fly - Review HERE
Recommendation: If you enjoy Irish love stories, you just might enjoy this flash back to Victorian Ireland with lots to think on with the aspect of love.
Book Synopsis:
From a Victorian Ireland of magic, poetry, and rebellion, Ida Jameson, an amateur occultist, reaches out for power, but captures Laura Armstrong, a modern-day graphic artist, instead. Now, for the man or demon she loves, each woman must span a bridge through Hell and across history...or destroy it.
Every passionate man is linked with another age, historical or imaginary, where alone he finds images that rouse his energy.
--W. B. Yeats
Anchored in fact on both sides of history, the women are linked from the moment Ida channels Laura into the body of celebrated beauty and Irish freedom fighter Maud Gonne. When Laura falls - from an ocean and a hundred years away - passionately, Victorianly in love with the young poet W. B. Yeats, their love affair entwines with Irish history and weaves through Yeats's poetry until Ida discovers something she wants more than magic in the subterranean spaces between Laura's time and her own.
With her Irish past threatening her orderly present and the man she loves in it, Laura and Yeats - the practical materialist and the poet magus - must find a way to make love last over time, in changing bodies, through modern damnation, and into the mythic past to link their pilgrim souls...or lose them forever.
First Sentence:
When I'm old, I'll say I married in black today because I put cute ahead of lucky.
My Review and Summary:
We follow Laura through the pilgrimage of her soul by way of dreams to another body, Maud Gonne, in Victorian Ireland. Laura makes her first pilgrimage, believed to be a dream, on her wedding night when she falls asleep. Unknown to Laura, she is called to Maud's body by way of magic done by Ida Jameson. Ida is one who loves her friend Maud, but wants to be accepted in the magical society who rejected her, she will do anything to get there then falls in love and will do anything to get her love. On Laura's first night in Ireland as Maud, Laura meets the poet Will Yeats and falls madly and passionately in love with him. As Laura fights to be with Will every night in her sleep, she learns that as a day passes in her time months or years pass in Wills. Laura starts to question her love with Amit, her current husband, and her love with Will in Ireland hundred years past - learning about herself and live and love. Will they all find their life's love? Magic, conniving, and lots of love all mixed together.
There were times where I was confused trying to keep up with the passing time in Maud's live and what is happening. Or what the goal was for the characters. But I love how Skyler questions love and feelings in this book. It made me wonder if there are different levels of love we are willing to give, and why. Even relationships as a whole. Skyler tells a story from start to finish with answers but leaves me wondering in the end on the meaning in it.
Skyler has drawn a picture of different loves here, and how we can give into them, or not, in our mind. The one place Skyler creates here which I enjoyed was Hell, where the souls go in between when they are in their trances. And the way the souls journey here.
It took me a little while to get to know the characters. And with having a delay for me to become familiar with them, the sex scenes at the start where difficult for me as they felt forced and to early. But once I got to know the characters the scenes flowed together easily for me, yet I felt I didn't truly connect with these characters. But I did like the feel of wonder and thought on love I was left with.
I received this book for review from the Author.
This book qualifies for my Speculative Fiction Challenge hosted by Book Chick City.
