Sci-Fi, Romance, and Starting Over

 

Image copied from NetGalley

Thank you to NetGalley, Hyperion Press, and Emily Jane for allowing me to read a free eGalley of this novel in exchange for this honest review.

Here Beside the Rising Tide by Emily Jane Is an interesting mix of genres and themes. It reads sort of like a season of Stranger Things if Nancy became a romantic suspense novelist instead of a reporter and was stuck on one of the small barrier islands along the southeastern seaboard with a sea monster while having a middle-life crisis. There is a lot going on in this novel, and it is definitely unique in all that is tries to accomplish.

At first, it started off really strong for me as a reader. I was excited to see how things unfolded. The novel opens with Jenni as a ten-year-old, enjoying life on Pearl Island where she lives with her single mom. Reading about her childhood at the start of her summer vacation was nostalgic for me as Jane paints a very rich and fully developed world with her depiction of Jenni's island life. It put me squarely in this setting and had me reminiscing about family vacations on similar islands to Pearl Island along the coastline of the Carolinas or Georgia. We know from the first, as well, that things will suddenly change once Jenni meets and befriends Timmy Caruso who is on Pearl Island on vacation with his family. It isn't a spoiler to say that things do take a turn for Jenni when her new best friend disappears. From there we jump ahead to Jenn, now a successful writer, facing the end of her marriage and the possible loss of custody to her children. In response to this, she decides to return to her childhood home and spend the summer there with her kids to try and reconnect with them and also to escape the dumpster fire she feels her life has become. Shortly after her arrival, a boy shows up in the ocean at night near her vacation rental. The boy claims to be Jenn's long-lost best friend Timmy Caruso. The kicker is that Timmy is still the same exact age he was when he disappeared. He's even wearing the same swim trunks, goggles, and flippers that Timmy was when he vanished.

There are many things that this novel does well. The way the author vividly paints the setting of this island at the beginning of the novel and later when Jenn returns makes it easy to visualize this place through the character's eyes. It was also fun to read some excerpts of Jenn's popular romantic suspense series throughout the story as Jenn comes to terms with so many things in her life that she's tried to avoid, such as the loss of her mother, her waning interest in the character that has made her a bestselling author, and her dissolution of her marriage and in some regards her relationship with her kids. The introduction of the strange sea life that Jenn encounters on Pearl Island as a child and later with her kids as an adult is also well portrayed. We aren't sure at first how benevolent some of these alien sea creatures are or how they are tied to the scarier sea creature that has shown up in the depths near this island. There are also some really beautiful moments where the author portrays Jenn's almost existential struggles and ties them to the reappearance of Jenn's best friend Timmy, still as a ten-year-old boy, and these sci-fi sea creatures. As with this quote here:

"...as a woman on a beach, feet in the sand, sun on her face, hair blown back by the ocean breeze while the weird squids sloshed along the shore, ....; as the future of a girl with a best friend and a pair of shovels and the dream of a hole in the sand, big enough to sit in for a picnic lunch. It didn't matter that the ocean would wash the hole away. She could find herself down there, the small pearl of her deepest small self. Smooth around the edges, like a piece of sea glass. Not new, but still bright."

As the story unfolds, Jenn's grief is inextricably tied to the disaster of the sea monster that wants to destroy the world, and Jane portrays this with some lovely and heartbreaking prose such as in this moment when Jenn discusses the loss of her mother with someone who knew her:

"Not close. But I knew Maureen. She was lovely. I'm so sorry--"

"Thanks. Me too."

"And so young. I--I guess you never know what will happen. You try your best and have hope, but sometimes, no matter what you do--"

"The unstoppable beast shows up."

All that being said, I found the midpoint of the story, once Jenn returns to the island, to drag on. She spends much of the novel from that point, continuing to avoid her problems while also obsessing over them and questioning everything she's doing. And while this was marketed in part as a romance, I didn't see much romance developing throughout most of the story until almost the very end. I feel like there were many missed opportunities for character development for both the adult Jenn and for her love interest Dax. For instance, one of the things that becomes clear is that she has buried her grief at losing her mother and has never really processed that. As a reader, I was expecting to have more of this happen with Jenn as she decides what to do with her mother's empty home. But we only really see her breakdown and acknowledge how much she misses her mom in one brief scene and then near the end of the novel. So, that thread isn't given the full development it could have been. As for Jenn's relationship with Dax, he's described by her mainly as the hot contractor that she calls on for help whenever she doesn't know who else to turn to. In most of the book he is the equivalent of eye candy who is a last resort source of aid and not much more. They sort of develop a friendship, I suppose, but it's a surface element more than an actual romantic plot point. I also think the pacing of the story would have been better if it had been a shorter novel. So, while I did enjoy the beginning and found the ending to be a satisfying conclusion, I struggled to get through most of the story in between. For that reason, I only rated this one a 3 out of 5 stars. After reading the reviews of others, I had really hoped to enjoy this more.

Still, if you like novels that have crossover elements, in this case sci-fi, light romance, and starting over, components, then you might give Here Beside the Rising Tide by Emily Jane a try.

My next review for the beginning of February will be a middle grade contemporary fantasy, Amari and the Night Brothers by B.B. Alston. I'm really excited about this one as I'm hoping it will make for a good mentor text for my current work-in-progress, which is an upper middle grade urban fantasy. Check out the cover and blurb, both copied from Goodreads, below.

Quinton Peters was the golden boy of the Rosewood low-income housing projects, receiving full scholarship offers to two different Ivy League schools. When he mysteriously goes missing, his little sister, 13-year-old Amari Peters, can’t understand why it’s not a bigger deal. Why isn’t his story all over the news? And why do the police automatically assume he was into something illegal?

Then Amari discovers a ticking briefcase in her brother’s old closet. A briefcase meant for her eyes only. There was far more to Quinton, it seems, than she ever knew. He’s left her a nomination for a summer tryout at the secretive Bureau of Supernatural Affairs. Amari is certain the answer to finding out what happened to him lies somewhere inside, if only she can get her head around the idea of mermaids, dwarves, yetis and magicians all being real things, something she has to instantly confront when she is given a weredragon as a roommate.

Amari must compete against some of the nation’s wealthiest kids—who’ve known about the supernatural world their whole lives and are able to easily answer questions like which two Great Beasts reside in the Atlantic Ocean and how old is Merlin? Just getting around the Bureau is a lesson alone for Amari with signs like ‘Department of Hidden Places this way, or is it?’ If that all wasn’t enough, every Bureau trainee has a talent enhanced to supernatural levels to help them do their jobs – but Amari is given an illegal ability. As if she needed something else to make her stand out.

With an evil magican threatening the whole supernatural world, and her own classmates thinking she is an enemy, Amari has never felt more alone. But if she doesn’t pass the three tryouts, she may never find out what happened to Quinton.

Rereading an Old Favorite

 So, before getting into my first book review of the year, I just want to say that I am planning to keep things for this year pretty much the same as last year in terms of how I handle my reviews. I am hoping to keep my reviews a mix between upcoming releases I read off NetGalley and physical books off my TBR pile that I'm continuously working through. Also, I believe that I mentioned in my last book review that I'd be discussing this book second and my NetGalley read first. But I've decided to switch my review order around as Here Beside the Rising Tide by Emily Jane doesn't come out until the end of this month and I like to keep my reviews close to when the books are going to be released as much as possible. I also plan to only review books from NetGalley this year that I really enjoyed. Last year, I reviewed all my NetGalley reads on here and while I enjoyed the majority of them, I think I could have skipped reviewing a couple. Anyhow, enough about that. Let's get into my review of A Vision of Light by Judith Merkle Riley.

Image copied from Goodreads

I can't honestly remember how old I was the first time I read this book. But I want to say it was around my senior year of high school or my freshman year of college. Considering it had been out a few years when I discovered it at the local public library that sounds about right. What I do remember clearly is that I loved it! I also remember the ending taking me by surprise as I did not see things for Margaret, the main character, and Brother Gregory ending the way they did. Of course, at the time when I originally read this book I'm not sure if the other two books in the series had been published yet. If they had been, I probably would have known to expect the resolution for this one. All that being said, how did this book that I read so long ago end up on my current physical TBR pile? Well, a friend of mine, who I'm also friends with on Goodreads, mentioned Judith Merkle Riley on that site a few years after she passed away, relating how much she loved her books. That brought up some real nostalgia for me, because I remembered reading all of Riley's published fiction. I immediately went to my library's webpage and searched to see which books, if any, of hers they might have. To my surprise they had all of her later novels but did not have this one, which is the first in the only series Riley wrote and published before her untimely death. That prompted me to ask for the series for Christmas a year or so ago and this December I finally revisited A Vision of Light.

It was the perfect time of year to reread it, too. The story begins on the Feast of the Epiphany and ends right after New Years. But what is this book about and how did it stand up to my early memories of it? Well, let me tell you. It is a work of historical fiction set in fourteenth century England when as the blurb says, "wealthy, young, twice married" Margaret of Ashbury is spurred on by what she calls "The Voice" to hire a scribe to help her write her memoirs. For a contemporary reader that may not sound all that intriguing. But in 1355 England the idea of a woman writing a book is scandalous and verges on being heretical. This becomes very obvious when Margaret is turned down by every scribe she seeks out and laughed at, as well, by some. But Margaret is nothing if not savvy and when she encounters Brother Gregory, she finds the perfect way to entice him to work for her, through his nearly starved stomach. In this way, Riley takes a familiar turn of phrase and makes it into a sardonic and humorous plot device that sets us off on our adventure with Margaret and Brother Gregory. 

Soon after he begins to transcribe for her, we and Brother Gregory, are swept up in the unexpectedly astonishing and suspenseful events of Margaret's life. From her first arranged marriage to a cruel and much older man, to her survival of the Black Plague that leads her to a career path into midwifery, I was captivated once again by the story of this remarkable and resourceful woman. I was also struck by how humorous this novel is from the very beginning. When the Voice tells Margaret that she must write a book about her life, she argues with it, even though it is implied this is a heavenly entity talking to her. She even tries to ignore it for a time, unsuccessfully of course. It is such a human response to being ordered by a higher power to do something. Anyone familiar with the Christian Bible could relate, as it is full of similar tales where someone is told they need to do something or to carry out some task and they either try to turn it down outright or they try to avoid it by some other means, Jonah and the Whale, anyone. This response from the very first page sets up Margaret as a very relatable and three-dimensional character for me. Then her manipulation of Gregory into helping her by feeding him and offering him a warm and comfortable place to work is just so, so clever. All of this is just the tip of the iceberg though in terms of the sardonic wit and humor present throughout the story. This added to the very engaging plot of Margaret's adventures and the mystical aspects of the story, namely her miraculous vision of heavenly light that in turn gifts her with the ability to heal others, makes this book a one of a kind read that I once again thoroughly enjoyed and could read again and again. I plan to definitely continue the series as I cannot honestly say I read the last one that wraps of this trilogy. For anyone interested, the other two books in the series are In Pursuit of the Green Lion and The Water Devil.

Really all of Judith Merkle Riley's novels are very good if you enjoy historical fiction that often incorporates some aspect of mysticism into the story. Her other novels are stand alone books and cover a range of eras from 14th century England with Margaret, to the Tudor period with a different character, to 16th and 17th century France during the reigns of Catherine de Medici and the Sun King, Louis the XIV, respectively. I will say though that her Margaret of Ashbury series is the most lighthearted of her books. The others can get quite dark, though they are no less interesting. If you enjoy strong female heroines who are set in intriguing historical periods and plots that have some paranormal aspects mixed in, I highly recommend this book and Judith Merkle Riley's other novels. 

Up next on this blog in book reviews is Here Beside the Rising Tide by Emily Jane. I have not read any of her books before, and this one sounds like an interesting mix of mystery, romance, and sci-fi. Check out the book cover and blurb for it below both copied off NetGalley.

 

 

From the author of On Earth as It Is on Television...

At age ten, Jenni Farrow and her new best friend, Timmy Caruso, enjoy a glorious summer on Pearl Island filled with fireworks, beach days, and carnival rides (not to mention that strange sea creature they rescue from a tide pool). Then, one late summer day, Timmy disappears.

Thirty years later, Jenni—now Jenn Lanaro, bestselling author of the Philipia Bay action-romance series—is desperate to escape the fatigue of her career and her soon-to-be-ex-husband. With her Pokémon-obsessed kids in tow, Jenn rents a summer house on Pearl Island. But shortly after she arrives, a boy emerges from the nighttime sea. His name, he says, is Timmy Caruso. He’s ten years old. He’s on a mission to save the world, and he needs her help.

In the days that follow, as Jenn grapples with work deadlines, spirited children, and her burgeoning interest in a very sexy contractor, alarming and mysterious events unfold along the coast. And when a terror appears in the deeper waters, Jenn begins to wonder if, just maybe, Timmy is onto something.

This second book by the author of On Earth as It Is on Television continues her voice-driven, genre-bending multiverse of fiction that is just flat-out fun.