At less than 200 pages, you’d think I could get through Cheryl Anne Gardner’s latest book in a day. Having read and reviewed her two previous novellas, I knew I better clear at least a week from my reading schedule to devote my time and attention to her work. Logos took two weeks, as I devoted one single evening to each chapter. Each page is packed with detailed prose, and poetry even, that reads like Psalms from the Bible. I believe her protaganist, Selena, says it best in the first chapter:
It is ironic, is it not, how everything seems so poetic in death, yet we rarely see the poetry in life?
I couldn’t think of a more truer statement than this, spoken by a God-like king on the first page of Cheryl Anne Gardner’s book, The Splendor of Antiquity. True, we’d expect our Gods to say such profound things and the narrator of this book does not disappoint with such expectations. After all, he has been dead for centuries and our lead female, an archaeologists named Joliette Deneauve, is about to dig him up.
Ever lived in an apartment where the walls were a bit too thin and you often overheard music from the next apartment? Did you ever wonder who was listening to that music and why? What did the music do for them? How did it make them feel? What were they doing while listening to it? Did you ever overheard too much of a conversation? Or maybe you just heard bits and pieces and you were left to fill in the missing pieces?
