Maya Radelis has spent the last seven months running from herself. After the death of a patient, she abandons her pediatric residency in New York City for the jungles of Guatemala and the Family Health Volunteers Mission. However, after exhausting her six-month leave, she still cannot bring herself to return to New York. Instead, Maya ends up in Edinburgh, Scotland, where fate intervenes.
In a small antique shop, an inscribed ring somehow “calls” to her. Unwilling to part with it, Maya purchases the ring and traces its history. She has seven days before she must return to the university and face the consequences of her absence, as well as the investigation of her patient’s death. Fearing she will no longer be allowed to pursue a medical career and dreading the meeting where her fate will be revealed. Maya wants to make the most of her search for the ring’s previous owner, especially after she begins to have strange dreams and memory-like episodes of the woman she thinks owned the ring. Enlisting the help of Pauline, her French friend, she traces an odd, twisting path through Paris then Bern, Switzerland. The more she discovers, the more she begins to question her destiny.
With its alternating narration, Elena Mikalsen’s Wrapped in the Stars shows two women’s worlds, so far apart and yet so similar. Maya Radelis, an American medical student, is shown in parallel with the life of a Swiss medical student in the years leading up to World War I, Rebecca Miller. Though the obstacles for Rebecca are vastly different than the ones facing Maya, their feelings of uncertainty and their love of medicine are very much the same. Rebecca’s desire to become a doctor comes from a family heritage of medicine and, in some part, from the death of her brother, Karl. Maya is also following a family legacy while hoping to somehow erase the guilt she feels for the childhood death of her twin sister, Ella. Both of these accomplished women have this need to “[e]arn [their] right to be alive” and somehow validate their own existence through medicine.
Both women share a Jewish ancestry, and neither woman sees the need to marry, desiring instead their independence in a world they have built, instead of the one handed to them through family ties and marriage bonds. While fearing the lonely paths before them, Maya and Rebecca doubt their abilities and often wonder if their sacrifices are truly worth the pain of disappointing others. However, each find men strong enough to understand them both and love them eternally.
“Synchronicity,” or “meaningful coincidences” plays an enormously important role in the novel. Readers will enjoy following Maya’s story, the twists and detours that create such an interesting plot as her history and future entwine. A tactic Mikalsen skillfully employs to make one wonder just how much we choose for ourselves and how much the universe decides for us.
Eternal love is the most touching aspect of Maya’s and Rebecca’s stories. The German inscription Maya finds in Rebecca’s ring says it best with its message of living within the heart of another and being forever “therein.” It’s a beautiful message, a love strong enough to defy death and reclaim the lovers a century later. Something is reassuring and peaceful in believing love cannot die. And when all is said and done, what lovers wouldn’t want such a legacy?
Wrapped in the Stars received First Place in the CIBAs 2018 CHATELAINE Awards for Romantic Fiction.
Camille Crossan appears to be living an idyllic life in Claire Fullerton’s poignant, evocative novel, Mourning Dove. Living in a superbly appointed mansion in “magnolia-lined and manicured” Memphis during the 1960s and 1970s, Camille’s family life shimmers with Southern charm. Her mother, Posey, usually outfitted in a Lily Pulitzer shift, Pappagallo shoes, and a signature shade of pink lipstick, is a beauty with the wryest sense of humor and steel determination.
Secrets buried at sea have a grave tendency to resurface in time. The incident happened twenty years ago. A Naval exercise has gone wrong at a rocky point near San Diego. Not just wrong, it was a complete Ballast Point Breakdown. Butch Fleetwood participated in that Naval exercise. He was a rebel. After so many years, Butch Fleetwood is an urgent problem for P.I. Rolly Waters now, even though Butch Fleetwood is dead.
Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragedy of Edward the Second (1592) and Derek Jarman’s film (Edward II, 1991) fans will want to sit up and take notice of how Anna Belfrage navigates her way through this installment of the Under the Approaching Dark, the third book in The King’s Greatest Enemy series. With a vast cast and two kings from the same family to deal with, the challenges were immense. And she’s succeeded.
Five young friends from then-English Newfoundland and Ireland together join a regiment to serve in the war, as does a young nurse from Dublin. At first, a reader might be lulled into thinking this is a light-hearted Irish dialect-filled romp a la Finian’s Rainbow, but the novel takes us deep into the lives of its characters as they serve in the bloody trenches, convalesce, and try to live normal lives despite the physical and emotional damages they suffered.
Ruth Hull Chatlien’s historical novel Blood Moon: A Captive’s Tale shines a light on two worlds trying to coexist in the 1860s Minnesota, that of Westward Expansion and white settlers, and that of the complex network of Sioux tribes dealing with starvation and disease. We follow her protagonist, Mrs. Sarah Wakefield, as she is thrust unwillingly into the midst of the Indian Wars.
Texas transplant Franki Amato has only lived in New Orleans for only a year and a half, but she has already seen some pretty strange things. As a private investigator for Private Chicks, she has had her share of oddball cases and clients, but this one is blood-curdling – a vampire serial killer is stalking The Big Easy. With Halloween only days away, the initial robberies of local blood banks by a caped figure seem more prank-like than serious until a fraternity member of Delta Upsilon Delta is found drained of blood in one of the city’s above-ground crypts with the message “Campari Crimson” scrawled on the wall in his own blood. Franki wants nothing to do with the cryptic case, but when a psychic gives Franki a chilling impromptu reading from a restless spirit who claims someone drained and drank his blood and then warns her the same thing is going to happen to her brother Anthony, Franki fears she will be drawn in anyway. Her fears are confirmed when Josh Santo, a multi-millionaire millennial, hires Franki to find the real culprit after he is accused of the thefts. Josh’s bizarre behavior of dressing up as infamous self-proclaimed NOLA vamp Compte Jacques de Saint Germain – all while living in the house belonging to the bloodsucker – attracts the attention of Detective Wesley Sullivan and Franki thinks Josh may be more guilty than innocent. As the case escalates with yet another killing, Franki faces danger at every turn and finding the killer becomes entirely too personal. The Crescent City on the eve of a blood moon Halloween, what could possibly go wrong?
