Robin Nolet’s book starts out with a very applicable quote from Anne Morrow Lindbergh.  Out of the welter of life, a few people are selected for us by the accident of temporary confinement in the same circle.  We never would have chosen these neighbors; life chose them for us.  But thrown together on this island of living, we stretch to understand each other, and are invigorated by the stretching.  In The Shell Keeper, the island is the Colorado skiing town of Blue River and the shells tossed on the beach are Gwen, Claire, and Del.  Thrown together by tides they cannot fathom, the women find a common thread that brings them together as friends despite their best intentions to remain strangers.

The book lets us spend time with each of them alone, and as a group.  Like most people who have spent any time at all in the sea of humanity, all three have the bumps and bruises from being caught in the surf of relationships.  Del’s emotions are the most raw, her marriage is crumbling and the whole town seemed to know of her husband’s infidelity except her.  While Del struggles openly with the collapse of her marriage, Claire internalizes her feelings of betrayal from a long-ago cheating husband and an inconsiderate friend.  Gwen is the rock of the group, but also not without a philandering ex and some baggage that occasionally boils to the surface.

The scene is set mostly in the bakery that Gwen attempts to keep in the black with the help of her new husband and college-age son.  The walls of the bakery are adorned with her water-color paintings, not of the town’s inhabitants, but of the town’s inhabitants – if they were seashells.  Her one brush with the sea when she was 12 has given Gwen a perspective of humanity as hermit crabs, trying on this shell or that, trying to make one work as a permanent identity.

Nolet’s writing is direct and to the point, but it doesn’t lack for charm.  In this paragraph, Del has taken a new job at a women’s shop and I enjoyed the detail of this description:

Del wrapped the cardigan in Imagine’s trademark powder blue tissue, sealed the tissue with a white sticker embossed with a pearlescent “I” and tucked the package into a beautiful, powder-blue lacquer-finished bag with powder blue ribbons for handles.  Across the front of the bag was another pearlescent “I”.  She inserted the customer’s receipt into a small, matching envelope and added it to the bag. 

The women aren’t as well sketched as the shopping bag.  We get some clues to their physical appearance, but not a full picture.  Nonetheless, we can picture them; the somewhat matronly Gwen, the pretty but slightly severe Claire, the tussled Del who is stronger than she thinks.  We may even know them, or people very similar to them.

The book explores love, betrayal, redemption, friendship, and family in a way that is very relatable.  By the end, you can’t help but think about the shells you’ve tried on yourself, the ones that never quite felt right, the ones that looked good but didn’t fit, and the ones that ultimately felt like home.  In The Shell Keeper, Robin Nolet paints three compelling portraits of realistic women leaning on each other to get through a rough patch in their lives.

I selected The Brevity of Roses to review based on the Amazon preview. It intrigued me because it was well written and made me wonder what happened next. I wasn’t disappointed once I read the whole book, it remained well written and hard to put down.

One thing I like about independently published books is that they often defy rigidly defined genres. While I would never go out of my way to read a genre romance, I enjoy love stories. In The Brevity of Roses, Lewis gives us not one love story, but two.

Jalal is a man at war with himself when we first meet him. A strung-out womanizer who is over the go-go lifestyle of a Wall Street broker, Jalal moves back to the west coast to be closer to (but not close to), his family. A man who has always had a proclivity for older women, he meets Meredith who is many years his senior. Their love burns bright and hot, but we don’t get to see much of it when her life is cut tragically short. Now Jalal must piece himself back together… enter love story number two.

I liked some of the quirky touches to this book. Jalal and his family are Persians who emigrated from Iran when he was young. The Persian family is close, but Jalal has always had conflict with his father due to sibling rivalry and a misunderstanding. They give a colorful counterpoint to the brooding and emotion of the love story. In fact, the theme of ‘daddy issues’ is a recurring one among all of the main characters in this book. All of them have strained relationships with their fathers, although it is left up to us as readers to determine if this is part of the attraction they feel for each other.

I’ve told you what I liked about the book, now I have to tell you my only gripe. The characters in The Brevity of Roses aren’t very relatable. Jalal is an independently wealthy poet. Meredith is an independently wealthy heiress. They spend a lot of time traveling, drinking wine, and dining out when they aren’t circling each other warily or falling into bed together. I guess that’s the fantasy this type of book is supposed to represent, allowing the reader to be someone with nothing to worry about but finding love. To me though, it had the opposite effect and threw me out of the story a bit.

If you like books without a single serial killer, police detective, hot shot lawyer, or vampire to be found but lots of romance and (sometimes messy) inter-personal relationships then The Brevity of Roses should definitely be on your reading list. Linda Cassidy Lewis is a virtuoso with the English language and this book is a joy to read.

Here is the recipe for False Witness:  Add two parts action novel to one part John Grisham courtroom drama, mix in vicious Chinese gangsters and deceptive government agencies, sprinkle liberally with Christianity and stir until well mixed.  What you end up with is a hot mess, but not in a bad way.

As the curtain goes up, we are stowing away in the laptop of an Indian mathematical prodigy who is in possession of the magic algorithm, a key to factoring prime numbers which would render useless all of the cryptography used to secure the internet.  When he attempts to sell the formula to security experts, we quickly learn that this isn’t going to be your father’s Christian fiction novel.  He meets his bloody demise at the hands of the Chinese mafia who wants the algorithm and will stop at nothing to get it.

The prodigy was just the messenger though, the true developer of the formula is his mentor, Professor Kumari, who intended to use the proceeds from the sale to help his persecuted caste (the dalits, formerly known as the ‘untouchables’) find hope through Christianity.  That’s about as much religion you will have to grapple with if you’re worried that this book is going to be ‘preachy.’  It’s not.  God is in the details here, not the main theme.

Enter Clark and Jessica Shealy, bounty hunters.  Clark is pulled into the search for Professor Kumari by the desperate Chinese mafia who kidnap his wife to gain access to his shadowy connections in the bounty hunting world.  With less than 24 hours to find Kumari and save his wife, Clark begins a whirlwind manhunt that finally nets him the prize.  Can he trade the professor for his wife and live to tell about it?  End Act 1.

In Act 2, Clark and Jessica are no longer Clark and Jessica.  They are part of the witness protection program but their identities have been compromised and again they are being hunted.  They turn to a group of legal students to sue the government to be re-instated with new identities.  However, before Kumari was handed over to the Chinese mafia, he gave Clark the encrypted formula and a promise that he would get the encryption key at a later date.  Now that he has the formula, the government feel that he has welched on their deal and they aren’t going to re-instate the couple until they’ve turned it over.

For me, the legal part dragged a bit but Randy Singer is truly in his element here and I’m sure Grisham enthusiasts will find the courtroom drama riveting.  I’ll fast forward a bit.  Clark and Jessica head to India, find the encryption key and enlightenment, then return to do battle with the nefarious head of the Chinese mafia.  He is finally taken into custody and as the dramatic finale unfolds… well, you’ll just have to read for yourself, won’t you?

False Witness is a fast-paced thriller or maybe a courtroom drama, or perhaps just about good versus evil.  However you slice it, it will keep you guessing until the very end.  Although it has Christian underpinnings, anyone should be able to relate to the characters and enjoy the twists and turns as we follow the magic algorithm from hand to hand to hand.

You might look at the words “Historical Fiction” and “Young Adult” and decide to pass on The Raven Girl by Kathy Cecala. I almost did, there are other reviewers who typically review the young adult titles and historical fiction isn’t necessarily my thing. I’m glad I didn’t though, because it turned out to be a delightful book; very hard to put down and a quick but interesting read.

The Raven Girl is set in Ireland circa 1488. A strange girl washes ashore on a small island near Galway. Her skin and hair are dark and around her neck is a large pearl from a far-away sea. She is rescued by a young boy, the son of the local priest, who hides her away knowing that the villagers would probably kill her out of superstition. He names her ‘Marra’ meaning ‘of the sea’ and tends to her needs. She convalesces but has brought with her a fever that quickly spreads throughout the village.

Meanwhile, in a small church in the city, a young man named Aedan studies for the priesthood. He is the son of a Spanish wine merchant who had an affair with a woman from the town where Marra has appeared. The woman died in childbirth and Aedan was brought to live with the priests. Although he has recently come to know his real father, he feels closest to the priest who took him under his wing when he arrived at the church.

While Aedan tries to be a dedicated student, his heart calls him to adventure and discovery. When word of the maiden reaches him, he sets off with his priestly ‘father’ to disprove that she is a witch or a mermaid and perhaps to convert her to Christianity. He does find her, and with her the trouble that follows her everywhere. Together they must fend off the pirates from whose vessel she escaped, Aedan’s biological father who would sell her to be a slave, and the villagers who are sure that she is a witch.

In her query, Kathy Cecala mentions that she tutors English classes, and her mastery of the language is evident in this book. While it is clear that she researched the book extensively, she weaves the historical details into the book subtly, not making them the central point of the story, just the colorful backdrop. At its heart The Raven Girl is a good story. As readers, we connect with the characters and cheer them on. Here, Marra explains a bit of her story to Aedan:

She told him of how she had been a pearl-fisher with her father, of her gentle little lagoon and her gentle people, but also of the fierce tribes who lived south, the tribes who killed her mother and brothers. She told him of her father, who she had loved so much, and how he taught her many things. How she and her father had been fishing together far out in the ocean beyond their lagoon, too far, and how Urraco’s ship had come from nowhere, dragging them up out of their canoe. How Urraco killed her father, so quickly. And then the terrible voyage, and the drift of the ship into ice. The fever that had raged aboard the ship. But also, how she had learned Basque, by carefully listening to the sailors.

While this book will appeal to older teens because of the young main characters who persevere against tall odds, it might be disturbing for younger readers due to some depictions of violence and death. The technical details of the book are top notch, I didn’t find a typo until page 85 and that may be a record for the self published books I’ve read.

You won’t know you’re reading a self published book. You won’t know you’re reading a young adult book. You won’t know you’re reading an historical fiction book. All you’ll know as you read The Raven Girl is that you’re reading a good book.

Lulu
Copyright © 2008
ISBN 978-0-6151-9772-2

After I had finished reviewing I Miss Your Purple Hair (Review 136), Robert Chandler offered to send me Minus the Imple. He warned me that Minus was a different book entirely, less fiction and more fictionalized auto-biography. As soon as I started reading though, I was hooked just as I had been with Purple Hair. Chandler’s writing is just compelling to me, it ebbs and flows with a calculated stream-of-consciousness feel.

As we join Bobby or Robby or Robert, he is in a mental ward doing a very poor job of killing himself. So poor, in fact, that he lives and has to come to terms with what brought him to this point. Turns out, he has always been different and it bugs him to no end. Whereas most of us are only dimly aware of our aura, his has a mind of its own and likes to pop out for a visit during times of stress. His aura even merits its own name… Minus. Minus is an Imple, as auras tend to be. Here Chandler describes a sighting of Minus, one of the few times that he really gets to see the little guy:

The second time I saw Minus was the day after Christmas. It’s still nearly impossible to accurately describe him, all these years later. I woke up in the middle of the night again, and my little TV set was still on. It was so late that all that was on was static. I sat up on the side of the bed and leaned to turn the TV set off, when I saw him out of the corner of my eye. My arm was just frozen in place, barely touching the on/off knob. I couldn’t move a muscle. First I thought I was seeing things, so I blinked my eyes very quickly and then I realized it was real. There, at the foot of my bed, was a blue glow of a pleasant hue I had never seen before, just hovering in mid-air.

While Minus is the title character, he’s a relatively minor character in the book. He stops in once in awhile to keep things interesting, but most of the time Robert struggles to keep him hidden so he’s not seen as the weirdo. The rest of the time, we follow him from a young boy through adolescence and then into his adult years. We watch as he struggles to define Minus and even to look for help from the medical community which, as it turns out, isn’t quite ready to admit the existence of imples. We are brought along as he is blessed with a daughter, Violet, who goes on to feature prominently in Purple Hair. We continue on through heartbreak, lost jobs, lost desire to live, and on down into the darkest depths of the human psyche.

90% of Minus is a descent. With the opening scene setting the tone, we are shown what it takes to bring a man to this point. If I had any complaints with the book, it is that the 10% that deals with the ‘back up’ part of life speeds by in the last two chapters. We get heavily invested in the main characters’ struggles and, naturally, would love to experience the ups with him as well. Unfortunately, we don’t really get to, we hear about them, but we don’t get to celebrate them.

Do yourself a favor and climb aboard the Robert Chandler express. I’m convinced that it won’t be long before he is a household name and the author of many mind-expanding books. You won’t believe every word of this book but it will leave you with enough ‘what-if’ moments to make it seem very plausible indeed.

Preview Minus the Imple

There’s good confused, and there’s bad confused. As I read John C. Stipa’s No Greater Sacrifice, I was good confused. If you’ve read any of the Dan Brown novels you know the confused I’m talked about, where the characters leap to the right conclusion time and again when presented with sketchy puzzles while you’re left in the dust.

It helps that our heroes are super-hot Renee D’Arcadia, an archeologist running from her leukemia diagnosis and David Arturo, ex-special forces history professor running from his past. They’re good at these puzzles where I would still be trying to figure out the first one. When they are summoned to France for the reading of a will, they are given the first few pieces and thrust into a circle of ne’er-do-wells who, as fate and plot development would have it, are trying to give them just enough rope to hang themselves.

As we learn more about our protagonists, we discover that they have met before and the meetings were not necessarily good ones. This time, however, romance blossoms as they must lean on each other to solve the puzzles and find the next clue. A small but strong supporting cast gives them assistance in sorting through the centuries-old mystery. We are dragged along into under-ground caverns, crypts, and cathedrals as the pieces slowly start to fall in place.

Stipa’s dialogue is crisp and the pacing of the novel is unrelenting. It bogs slightly as the heroes gather to work through most of the ‘thinky’ parts of the puzzle, then speeds off again once we’re given enough pseudo-history to explain why they’re getting shot at, stabbed, and chased. While the action parts are fast paced and well described, the characters also dive into their emotions and motivations with dialogue such as this:

David rocked back and rested on his heels. “People are raised thinking relationships require a certain level of deception, as if it’s some sort of psychological game. And they think it’s normal! We learn the ploys and tricks as early as middle school. Girls play hard to get, boys tease them instead of showing emotion. I never got it. I wasn’t smart enough to keep up with a lie. It was easier to be truthful.”

This slow building of sexual tension between Renee and David doesn’t detract from the story. When a misunderstanding temporarily divides them, they (and we) quickly realize that they are much better together as a team. Still, the hook of this book is the action and that is where Stipa’s writing shines. As the heroes close in on their final objective they are being pursued by a killer and we get this description as he climbs across a rope with bleeding hands in chase:

Dropping to the ground, he braved a glimpse at the ragged peels of skin and shredded rope mixed with dirt and blood. He dabbed the seeping mess against his trousers. Pulling out his pistol, he stole into the chamber and hid below one of the outer stones. The man and woman were talking, something about a Telesterion. He closed his eyes and said a silent prayer. ‘For the Lord has sent his angel to show his servants what must soon take place.’ Like fog creeping in a cemetery, he moved to the inner circle.

Technically, the book was a treat. Well edited with great cover art and some helpful illustrations inside (I would have loved to have even more), it feels like a polished and finished piece. More importantly, I enjoyed the writing and the story of No Greater Sacrifice. Even if most of the history and puzzles left me confused, it was a good confused. The good guys solve the puzzle, prevail over the bad guys, and find each other in the process. In the end, that’s what a good romantic thriller is all about.

The Curable Romantic
Katharine Miller
ISBN 978-0-557-06535-6
KLM Design
Copyright 2009
100 Pages
Paperback
$17.50

The Curable Romantic is an amusing and insightful look at relationships and the people silly enough to have them. It’s harder to write humor than just about any other genre. Humor has to connect to an absurdity that other people can relate to and find a common ground. Luckily human relationships are imbued with enough silliness that poking fun of them usually strikes a chord.

In her book, Katharine Miller does a great job of not only writing funny essays, but also illustrating them with clever pictures. Her essays reminded me of the insightful humor of Erma Bombeck and I found myself turning the page to see what the next illustration would be.

The book started life as a series of articles and blog posts that Miller penned over the years, starting in her High School days. Loosely assembled as a “How To” book for navigating the rapids of dating and mating, the book also contains lists such as ‘topics to avoid on the first date’ (quantum physics, your sister’s failing marriage) and a guide to pet names (good – tiger, bad – dodo, questionable – platypus).

Throughout the book is an undercurrent of cynicism as seen in this introductory paragraph to considerations about moving in together:

After an unspecified amount of time – and countless walks of shame – you’ve finally decided to try living together. But cohabitation is more than being able to tolerate his morning breath and no longer needing to slather on a face full of makeup before dawn. There are things to consider before loading up the moving truck.

Most of the articles are written from the perspective of a female who is dating a man. Although Miller says right up front that she isn’t a professional therapist or psychologist, she does offer up nuggets of common-sense wisdom. Here, she gives advice about how to get to the second date:

Keep the conversation current and relevant. Don’t delve too much into your past and do not discuss previous relationships. It is common to have a first date with someone following a breakup, but your new beau doesn’t need to hear all the gory details of the old one. He does need to hear how his shirt complements his eye color.

Practical snippets of advice, humorous observations of the human condition, and clever illustrations combine to make The Curable Romantic a quick but enjoyable read. I recommend it for anyone who is in a relationship or may be at some point. In other words, just about all of us.

I Miss Your Purple Hair

I Miss Your Purple Hair is a good book and I enjoyed it thoroughly. I’ve read 100 page books that felt like they’d never end, but this was a 300+ page book that was over before I knew it. I became invested in the characters and was genuinely curious how they would overcome their dilemma.

As dilemmas go, this is a big one. As our heroes and heroines visit the zoo one day, the world ends. Earthquakes and Tsunamis wipe out most of the coastal regions of the earth and 3/4s of the earth’s population is wiped out. Instead of taking a holistic view of the carnage and destruction, Chandler gives us a snapshot of 14 individuals caught in an undamaged valley surrounded by newly formed mountains, volcanoes, and more than a few newly released zoo animals. When the bottled water and animal crackers give out, it becomes obvious that no one is coming looking for them.

So what would you do? I can almost guarantee that you wouldn’t handle it as calmly as these folks. They pitch in, take each setback as it comes, and … well, you’ll have to read the book to find out the ‘and’. There is an undercurrent of new age philosophy that pervades this book, but it’s not overdone. The main characters are Mateo and his 15 year old daughter Veronica, or Violet as she is also known. As we meet more individuals, we have to piece together how they all fit. All is eventually revealed.

Better than the story is the story telling. Chandler’s writing is fluid, smart, and literate. In this short paragraph, a character named Mia leads a group to explore their surroundings:

They moved on, with Mia in the lead. The stainless steel walking stick she employed had been acquired from the wreckage of the snack bar. A distasteful hint of sulphur merged with the pleasant aroma of indigenous foliage to create a unique scent. It had become oddly familiar, this mixture of perfume and poison, stinging the sensitive tissue around their eyes, noses and mouths and irritating their throats. It laced the breeze that snuck in from the northwest, passed over the rocky barriers that formed the perimeter, and then swooped down across the basin they traversed.

I had several pages earmarked to share with you because this phrase or that turn of a word amused or delighted me. This description of aftershocks begins chapter eighteen:

The tremors arrived unannounced, and like a band of oafish trespassers, rudely left chaos in their wake. Obscured behind the sound of the rolling thunder, they caught the huddled survivors off guard, sending them reeling across the concrete floor. While they were flung about the room, the tremors did what they were designed to do. Succinct and purposeful, the seismic waves reshaped the geography, continuing the work initiated by the earlier quakes.

The mechanics of this book are excellent. Often self published books feel raw or a little rough around the edges. This one isn’t like that. Each chapter starts with a quote, be it from Jung or Ayn Rand or Albert Schweitzer. Unlike some books where these quotes feel like an afterthought or distraction, I found myself reading them for hints about the upcoming chapter. The cover looks professional, the editing is impeccable, and even the business cards Chandler stuck in with my copy were well done.

At $17, this book also points out the down side of self publishing. The more pages, the more cost. To produce a substantial work of fiction and to make a couple of dollars from your hard work, the price is high. Still, I Miss Your Purple Hair is worth the price of admission, and I look forward to reading more books from Robert Chandler.

It took me awhile to warm up to This Night Wounds Time. Shawn Sutherland takes a look into the disappearances of two Texas teens on a night in 1988 in this very personal book. Sutherland attended the same High School a few years prior and had met one of the girls in passing shortly before their abduction. It took 20 years for the posters that blanketed the town of Carrollton Texas to spur him to action.

Unlike many books I’ve read, this wasn’t a vanity project or even done to make a profit. Sutherland is selling this book at cost simply to publicize the case and, hopefully, to re-energize the investigation. To me, this is a great use of self publishing. While he doesn’t turn up any new leads or solve the case, he does make a compelling case that perhaps not enough has been done to solve it.

As a bit of a synopsis, the case is still open as a missing persons case because the bodies of Stacie Madison and Susan Smalley have never been found. While they were well known and popular, they seemed to simply disappear into thin air on that fateful March night. Stacie’s Ford Mustang was found locked in the parking lot of a popular hangout and there was no sign of foul play. Their movements that night are hard to document and full of holes. Were they abducted by a scorned boyfriend and his brother? Did they meet up with some friends from Dallas? Or was it something else entirely? The problem remains simply that no one knows. Or more accurately, someone knows but isn’t saying.

The book is extremely well researched. Sutherland talked to virtually everyone associated with the case that would talk to him. This included parents, friends, police detectives, and even the most likely suspect, the ex-boyfriend of one of the girls. The book is liberally interspersed with pictures of the town, the girls, the car, and anything else that helps to illustrate what is being discussed. All references are painstakingly referenced.

So, if it’s such a noble cause and a well researched book, why was I slow to warm up to it? The formatting was a little distracting. Every few paragraphs gets its own subheading. The footnotes also get repetitive. There is not only a Preface, but also a three page list of acknowledgments and even an explanation of the Title (words on a King Crimson album cover) before the book gets going. As the book comes to an end, it has three chapters that could potentially be considered a conclusion. And in the middle is the somewhat formal, fact-based writing that is clearly Shawn’s writing style in his ‘day job’ in a legal field. This excerpt is pretty typical:

Accordingly, we must presume Stacie and Susan parked their car at the intersection of Webbs Chapel Road and Forest Lane in order to accept a ride from someone they knew to one degree or another.
In any event, based on the above assertions, the presumption can only be that the girls entered a vehicle owned by someone they knew. More than likely, they knew the driver of this car very well.

Once I got past these little quirks and indulgences, the story really was gripping and every parents’ worst nightmare. I can only imagine how my life would change if my teen were to go missing, with no explanation and no closure. Sutherland does take the time to detail the aftermath including how the families have dealt with it.

When everything was said and done, I was glad I had read the book and that Shawn Sutherland had written it. I got past my hang-ups with formatting and got drawn into the narrative. By the end, I was truly invested in the case and Sutherland had done his job. Even if you’re not a fan of true crime, you’ll find yourself trying to figure out ‘who done it.’

I’ll admit it, the frenzy over the 2012 movie convinced me to check out this book. For those of you who have been living under a rock, the year in question was predicted by one of the Mayan calendars to be the last year. According to alarmists, sometime in December of that year, something is going to happen. It may be solar radiation or an asteroid or fire ants and kudzu, but SOMETHING bad is supposed to happen. In 2012: The Last Entries, we follow the last agonizing months of 6 people through their journal entries.

Damon Wakefield is the first character we meet, and the one best prepared for the end of everything. He is a survivalist living in a bunker that he’s constructed in the Northwest. Christine Ashworth is a spoiled college-aged socialite from New York, convinced that her money will protect her from whatever is heading her way. Judith Garbe is an Oklahoma newspaper columnist who loses her job and pines for her children. Joyce Carter finds herself living on the streets in California after losing her job as well. The Reverend Robert Miller is from Atlanta, and his thriving TV ministry is his love in life. Finally, Zoey Ragan is a Nebraska farm wife who is forced into seclusion by the government when her husband contracts smallpox.

Here is a sample from Joyce Carter’s journal:

I knew this was going to happen. My Mother would have called in a “premonition”. Whatever it’s called, I knew I was going to be laid off from my job. I don’t believe it’s anything supernatural or that I psychic abilities at all, the factory I worked in was going under, and so many people had already been laid off. Sooner or later, I knew my turn would come, and it finally did. There is no help for the working people…

The end of the world in this book is an apocalypse of biblical proportions. Plagues, swarms of locusts, meteor strikes, earthquakes, and the accelerating deterioration of civilization are seen through the eyes of these characters, chosen because they are close to the ‘action.’ Month by month, each character logs a journal entry telling us what is happening around them. I honestly found many of the entries to be chilling, because the fabric between civilization and anarchy isn’t as thick as many of us think.

The book is very readable however I kept waiting for the stories to converge, somehow tying them together but they don’t. They are distinct threads that you have to follow from month to month. Some of the characters are pretty self absorbed, others more believable and sympathetic. The book is short so it’s a very quick read. What happens when the last sand spills from the hourglass is left up to our imagination, but the run-up to the end is a prophecy that I very much hope never comes to pass.