Wild Horses on the Salt by Anne Montgomery

Okay, so I have mixed feelings about Wild Horses on the Salt by Anne Montgomery. It was the blurb that appealed to me – I love stories about women who overcome adversity and find themselves after escaping a terrible situation. And this book has all the elements that I love – a strong ecological theme, wonderful attention to detail when it comes to describing the natural environment, and a cast of lovely supporting characters. And Montgomery is *almost* there in terms of pulling all the themes together, but it falls ever so slightly short of being a powerfully impactful story in terms of character development. I feel this book tries to do too much, and then doesn't quite hit the mark when it boils down to execution.

If there had been a firmer hand on the reins during the structural edits, these threads could have been tightened and developed better. As it stands, it feels as if the love interest is slightly tacked on, and Rebecca dealing with her abusive, erstwhile husband comes across rushed – the conclusion to this arc far too convenient and reeking of deus ex machina. Rebecca herself as a character, flounders along, not quite developing as a person to transcend her difficult past. What further marred the story for me was the occasional head hopping – not enough to make me want to put down the book, but enough for me to notice and get twitchy.

I feel that the author-narrator voice was not quite strong enough to present us with a credible omniscient viewpoint, so that the shifts, when they happen, feel ever so slightly jarring, and some of the dialogue falls into 'as you know, Bob' territory. When we read scenes from the point of view of animals, such as the stallion, the expression feels too much like a human explaining things about the animal, instead of immersing us in how it might feel to be the animal – that won't be using human terminology to explain things like roads or vehicles. Or maybe I'm just hankering after Elyne Mitchell's brumbies. (And if you've read those books, you'll understand what I mean.)

So, these were my quibbles. Wild Horses on the Salt makes up for it by offering a deep dive into the Arizona desert – and this Montgomery does well, clearly writing with immense love and passion for this beautiful environment and the threats it faces due to human encroachment. She foregrounds the plight of the wild horses, and humans' indifference or outright hostility to conservation efforts.

While the novel gets off to a promising start, I do feel as though the ending was dashed off somewhat, though this wasn't a complete dealbreaker – and a more rigorous bit of editing could also have helped, as the final offering was a little wobbly in places. However, if you're looking for an easy read and a bit of armchair travel, that will take you to a breathtaking destination, then this will be a pleaser.

Isle by Claire Robertson

Isle by Claire Robertson is one of those books that, even after much consideration, I find difficult to pigeonhole. And it's been preying on my mind awhile now, weeks after I have finished it. First off, it was the cover that got me – I admit I'm a sucker for striking covers. But also, in my mission to read more African writers, this was certainly intriguing when I cast an eye over the blurb.

It's not a novel, but rather two novellas that have been glomped together, with the only real connection being that both take place on an island and feature the lives of women – though they are centuries apart.

I – Forth from this Place takes up the bulk of the offering, and is the tale of a community of women living on the Isle of St Katharine. They are not nuns, nor have they sworn an oath of celibacy, but they do live as a community of nuns would – cloistered and independent of the world of men. Yet their Magistra Lutgard is well aware of the fragility of the equilibrium their liminal space inhabits. She is anxious not to agitate the church or nearby community too much – for in her time witch hunts are not uncommon. It doesn't help that one of her women, Mechthild, is restless, striving to be more, do more. Find her own way in the world in a manner that is unconventional for its time.

None of this is helped when a Moorish peddler is rescued from a near-drowning, and serves as a muse for Mechthild in her artistic aspirations. She makes a book of hours, but instead of following conventions, her lifelike representations of the people around her surprise and astound those who are not accustomed to seeing representations of their faces laid down on paper. This act of hers has far-reaching consequences, not only for Mechthild, but for the lives her work touches.

II – Uxo brings us to a post-WWII setting where Lily Kinsella, who is higher-ranking than her fellow officer, John Burge, are tasked to recover or destroy old ordnance. Yet from the start, it is clear that all is not well with Lily, nor her relationship with Burge. Their work takes them to remote places, and it's clear  this unbalanced relationship between the two, carries equal parts resentment and reverence on Burge's part in the face of Lily's seeming indifference to him. 

Their travels bring them to an unnamed island that serves as a penitentiary, where Lily's interactions with teenage Iris and her prison warden father stir trouble, and eventually bring the issues between Lily and Burge to a head. Part coming-of-age story, part remembering of a shrouded past, this novella offers readers a careful dance between withholding and revealing in a way that exposes the fragility of human lives in all their ugliness and beauty.

Neither of these novellas comes to a head in a way that is satisfying – but then again, it's not for an ending or great denouement that one would read, but rather the savouring of each line of prose that is so exquisitely crafted that it is liquid poetry. And that's all I'll say on the matter. See for yourself.

Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

Every once in a while I'll read a book that afterwards I'll find difficult to quantify in one sentence. Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi is one such book, and I have absolutely no regrets for having immersed myself in her words. As a reader, I am a firm believer in stepping outside of the narratives that I prefer and that I am accustomed to. Transcendent Kingdom proved to be a delight.

In a nutshell, this is the story of a woman dealing with the long-term effects of her brother's tragic opiate overdose, and the crippling depression that drives her mother to her bed. Gifty stands between these two extremes, constantly searching for answers, trying to make sense of the world around her. 

To compound matters, her father's continued absence gnaws – he returned to Ghana and abandoned his family after they moved to the United States – and Gifty inhabits a liminal space. She was born in America but her roots lie in Africa, so in a way she is neither fish nor fowl. She examines her Self and her world minutely, as if she can somehow pick apart the reasons why things are as they are. While she looks towards her religion for comfort, she's nonetheless aware of the innate hypocrisy of the congregation itself. Yet the cognitive dissonance doesn't quite rob her of her faith – just that she seeks the divine on her own terms.

This story is not spun in linear terms and writing as Gyasi does is difficult, so I am in awe at her telling that seamlessly blends past and present in a tapestry that constantly shifts focus in and out, between past and present in a way that nevertheless hangs together beautifully. I can well imagine that I am sitting in a room, listening to her musings as she tries to figure things out. Her observations of people are frank yet sympathetic, and we see two sides of Gifty – the daughter and sister, as well as the scientist who hopes for her research to offer the answers that her religion never gave her. Her empathy for her subjects, the mice that she must harm in order to complete her research, lessens the horror of the experiments that she conducts.

In the end, Gifty seeks synthesis, for a deeper understanding of the events over which she had no control. About finally being able to reach out and be part of something greater than herself. Transcendent Kingdom offers a textured telling, filled with empathy, bittersweetness, and hope.

Green Lion by Henrietta Rose-Innes

Green Lion by Henrietta Rose-Innes is one of those books that languished for far too long on my TBR pile, and I'm so glad I've taken the time to rectify this unfortunate state of affairs. This story is told entirely from the point of view of Con, recently returned from working as a security guard in UK museums and trying to find employment.

The novel fluidly leaps between past to present as we learn of Con's troubled friendship with Mark, and the dysfunctional relationship Con shares with his late mother. His situation with his girlfriend Elyse is on shaky ground too, and their unequal relationship becomes more of an issue as the story unfolds. Con himself is remote, passive – he tends to immersion in his outsider status, incapable of ever truly connecting with the people around him, despite his desire to do so. His absent father haunts the periphery of his life, while Con himself gives the appearance of envying his friend Mark, who has it all when it comes to family and wealth. I'd hazard to say that Con's fascination with Mark may even have deeper roots – that he isn't willing to admit even to himself. Mark is everything that Con isn't, to the point where he feels that association with that which he desires most may create a form of sympathetic magic to enrich his own life.

Green Lion is richly textured, flavoured with evocative alchemical imagery, and it's also a story that is hard to pin down – providing one hallucinatory, dreamlike scene after the other in a Cape Town that exists as a might-have-been. It is also a tale as unreliable as its narrator, who throughout the chapters is stalked by the idea of the predator rather than a flesh-and-blood lion that we can see and trap. And in the end it's the lion that exists as placeholder, a menacing, inescapable fate that awaits Con that he projects his fears and desires onto Sekhmet, the lion in the zoo where he works.

This is also a story about identity – seen in how Con to a degree is a parasite who attempts to assume aspects of self that don't belong to him in an effort to establish an authentic identity. In the end, he is mired in the very illusions he seeks, settling for the facsimile than the real, that is forever outside of his grasp.

I suspect also that this is the kind of story that is so laden with metaphor that you can pick it apart on every read-through and find further nuances. I need to go back and give this one another shot at some point. In the meantime, I remain in awe of Henrietta's writing.

City of God by Cecelia Holland

Okay, City of God by Cecelia Holland is a book I'd meant to read ages and ages ago, but have only just managed to finish. I do have a soft spot for historical fiction, and to be quite honest, I went into this one expecting more than what I got out of it.

I must mention here that I had a Kindle version that was a bit oddly laid out. There were no chapter or scene breaks, so the text really just flowed in one clump, which I found both annoying and somewhat disconcerting, because I had to catch myself figuring out when scenes shifted.

The setting's great – Rome during the reign of the Borgias, and Holland does a passable job showing us the day-to-day workings of the ancient city. Our viewpoint character is one Nicholas Dawson, an Englishman whose ex-pat parents died in Spain, where he was raised in a monastery. Somehow, he attached himself to the Florentine ambassador, where he has a nose for intrigue.

And intrigue there is aplenty in Rome, when Nicholas gets tangled in the schemes of Valentino, who has a mad scheme to unite the Italian city states under one crown. Plus we have the meddlesome Spanish and French.

Nicholas as a character is incredibly bland, and I struggled to even like him. I don't know whether Holland has merely written him as someone who suffers great disconnect with his own emotions on purpose, or if she didn't do a good job to dig a little deeper with character development. Either way, I guess it doesn't really matter. Nicholas comes across a bit like a limp fish, a man of little power and great ambition, who overreaches himself amid the power struggles of his betters ... Or rather I wouldn't even say they're his betters, because everyone in this novel is awful in one way or another, and they all do awful things.

Dear Nicholas's attempts at stringing a web of his own are rather dismal too, and while he struggles along, it's clear things are going to get worse before they're going to get better.

But.

I wanted to like this story, and it had its moments when it held my interest, because I really do love the time period, but I need to have my emotions engaged. The prose all felt very workmanlike, with Nicholas carried along as more of an observer rather than an active participant. In addition, I'm not quite sure whether the proofreader was asleep, but there were quite a few obvious typos – the kind someone would make if they were typing out this entire document from a physical copy ... or using type recognition software but then they just didn't quite get round to employing a human proofreader afterwards. Considering that this novel was first published in 1979, this may very well be the case, which is a pity. And hells, I'll say it again: chapters and scene breaks WOULD BE LOVELY.

I've seen Holland compared to the likes of Mary Renault ... but I feel with this novel in particular that there just isn't the spark or the lushness and regal poise that Renault's writing has. Or perhaps it's just Nicholas, and therein lies the rub. The Englishman isn't exactly the most effervescent individual, and the character does the story no favours.

Kamphoer deur Francois Smith

Kamphoer deur Francois Smith was vir my nogal 'n moelike boek om te lees. Die storie self is nie lineêr nie, en skuif tussen die hede en die verlede, soos dit aangaan. Daar is distansie in die hede, terwyl die herinneringe meer persoonlik, onmiddelik is.

Dit is gebaseer op 'n ware verhaal van Susan Nell, wie se familie bywoners was op 'n Vrystaatse plaas gedurende die Anglo-Boereoolog. Toe sy in Winburg se konsentrasiekamp beland het, was sy verkrag deur twee Engelse soldate en 'n joiner, en toe so wreed aangerand is dat hulle haar byna doodgemaak het. Haar liggaam het van die lykswa afgerol en 'n Sotho man, Tiisetso, het haar ontdek. Al was se erg beseer, het hy en sy vrou Mamello, vir haar gesond gemaak en toe vir haar Kaap toe gestuur, waar die fotograaf Jack Perry vir homself oor haar ontverm het.

Ek gaan nie die hele verhaal oorvertel nie, maar gaan maar net uitskets hoe Susan se belang in psigoterapie vir haar gely het om te werk met die wat deur drie oorloë van bombskok gely het. Sy het ook twee van haar verkragters weer ontmoet, maar dié roman handel meestal net met haar tyd by die psigiatriese hospitaal in Engeland.

Kamphoer is 'n ongemaklike storie, en omdat dit op die waarheid gebaseer is, is daar nie 'n bevredigende einde nie. Die tema is die van die stories wat 'n mens vir jouself vertel, en hoe die lewe eintlik maar niks beteken nie – net 'n leë, oorgroeide graf iewers in die veld.

Vampires suck…in all the right places

Despite annoyingly fertile sparkly vampires, I still love these creatures of the night. While Meyer’s creations are a bit tame for my liking—I prefer my critters with fangs and a knack for wolfing down tender young things—there are some fictional greats that stick with me.

The first vampire novel I read, ironically, wasn’t Interview with the Vampire or Dracula, for that matter. I was fourteen and a mate at school totally spazzed over Poppy Z Brite’s Lost Souls, which she lent to me. Please bear in mind that up until that point, I had subsisted on a steady diet of Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern. The world of Nothing was an, erm…considerable departure from the norm.

But something struck a chord. Less than a year later I stopped listening to Queen in favour of Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral, started wearing black…and convinced my mother to buy me my first pair of Doc Martens.

So, here’s my favourite fictional vampires in a rough sort of chronological order, who push my buttons.

Baby Jenks appears briefly as a very messed-up young vampire in Anne Rice’s Queen of the Damned. Out of all the characters in Rice’s stories, she’s the one I felt for the most. No. I’ll be the first to admit it. I don’t dig Claudia. She’s tragic, but not as tragic as Baby Jenks. Sure, she never asked for any of the bad shit to happen, but it did. And Baby Jenks had no mercy shown to her. I always felt that here was the beginnings of a decent character who could have grown into someone worthwhile reading about. Yet Anne Rice has never been in touch with youth culture in her novels, as much as her prose is pretty. Louis whines too much and Lestat has an ego the size of a small planet.

I reread Poppy Z Brite’s Lost Souls every five or so years. I love the way she describes settings. The prose is lyrical and visceral, though the plots sometimes don’t deliver to their full potential. But I spaz out over her writing. No really. If I could write only a tenth of the beautiful words Brite puts out, I’ll die happy. Out of all the vampires in Lost Souls, I have a soft spot for Christian, the tall, gloomy New Orleans barman. He’s a killer, yes, but he shows a softer side when he looks after Nothing’s mother during her pregnancy. I love characters who show this kind of dichotomy in their natures, the merciless tempered with consideration. Christian is the epitome of goth, sad as that may be, but I love him for it. He too longs for a beautiful death.

I must be the only urban fantasy author who has never watched a full season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer or True Blood. I haven’t even been able to gel with Charlaine Harris’ writing. I tried. It didn’t happen. She’s not a bad author. She’s just not for me. Twilight, I must admit, I gobbled up all four books in a week. They’re like candy floss for the brains, leaving great big holes in the grey matter. Don’t even get me started on Laurell K Hamilton or Christine Feehan. Show me one of those and the book has the same effect on me as garlic and crosses on traditional vampires. I’ve watched Blood Ties, a series based on the Tanya Huff books, and felt mild palpitations whenever Kyle Schmid stepped onscreen as the rather nommy Henry Fitzroy.

So that’s me and contemporary vampires. But I’d like to mention, at least, two fresh literary vampires who are blowing my hair back, by two authors you need to look out for.

When Sonya Clark submitted Mojo Queen to me, I fell so deeply and irrevocably in love with Roxanne Mathis and her vampire sidekick, Daniel Rambin, I wanted to recommend the novel for contract before I’d even finished reading the first chapter. Daniel is a real Southern gentleman who lives in one of those old antebellum mansions I have wet dreams about. He loves music, especially country, and sings really badly—which embarrasses Roxie no end. Most of the time he defers to Roxie, and it is very clear that he cares deeply for his distant relative, but we are left in no doubt that he is dangerous. It is like being friends with a very large and often hungry lion. Little quirks Daniel displays, like being a total thwarted foodie and blogger, round him off. He’s a delight: both civil yet feral. I love Daniel’s contrasting issues and the way he becomes overprotective over the willful Roxie.

What’s not to love about Xan Marcelles? He’s 6’5”, is part Native American, has long black hair down to his arse and plays bass in a band called Crooked Fang. I’ve been following some of his blog episodes for a while now, and just love the way trouble seems to find this often deadpan vampire who, as far as I can tell, just wants to play music, drink whisky and enjoy a bit of female company. The brainchild of Carrie Clevenger, Xan’s story will be officially published later this year with the added bonus of a soundtrack, which is a value-added offering of note. Part of what makes me get all wobbly-kneed over Xan is his attitude. I get the idea he just wants to get on with his existence without any wangst. Then there's the grit. Oh. My. Xan’s world is brutal and often bloody. If you like badass vampires with serious fangs and a penchant for muscle cars, look no further.

In case you were wondering, yes, I’m also writing vampires when I’m not dabbling in black magic or erotica in my fiction. But more on that later. You can get a small taste here: http://www.lyricalpress.com/store/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=96&products_id=394

Follow me on Twitter: @nerinedorman or go like my Facebook author page. C’mon. You know you want to… http://www.facebook.com/pages/Nerine-Dorman-author/173330419365374?v=wall

Call for submissions: Titanic-inspired line

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Call For Submission: Titanic themed line

Genres: All

Sensuality level: All

Length: short (15 000 words) to novel-length (90 000 words)

Key characteristic: Must focus on the tragic maiden voyage of the Titanic

Deadline: November 30, 2010

Please follow Lyrical Press’ guidelines found here: http://www.lyricalpress.com/submissions when submitting. Send submissions to nerine@lyricalpress.com

Who among us hasn’t watched Titanic? Or at least heard about the ill-fated White Star Line passenger liner which sank four days into her maiden voyage on April 15, 1912? Harking back to the romance of a past age, the RMS Titanic was, at the time of her construction, the largest and one of the most luxurious passenger steamships in her time. More than 1 500 people perished when she struck an iceberg and sank—one of the greatest peace-time maritime disasters in history.

This event has been brought to life in film and fiction, a human drama that has captured the imagination of many. Each person aboard that ship had some story. Perhaps a down-at-heel Irish immigrant seeking a better life in America? A rich German countess enjoying a pleasure cruise with her lover? Or, what about an idealistic young steward proud of the start of his career aboard this Olympic-class liner? Whether they survived or perished, each person aboard that ship was part of a story, and we invite you to share your vision. Delight us with your tale of true love triumphing against all odds or share the despair of inescapable horror set against this dramatic backdrop playing out on the frigid Atlantic.