Chanticleer Book Reviews

Tag: Chanticleer 5 Star Book Review

BINGE by Anne Pfeffer – Addiction, Contemporary Fiction, Romance

Twenty-seven-year-old Sabrina “Bree” Hunter has the chance to grasp her dream of being a published author, but will her binge eating spell the end of that dream?

After years of working for a demanding B-list talent agent in Los Angeles, Bree earned a publishing deal with Fast Track Books. She should celebrate, thrilled that her life will finally go down the right path since her graduation from Dartmouth. However, Bree has a problem that isn’t easily fixed. Her publisher expects the skinny beauty on her webpage, a picture taken many years previously.

Since the days of the photo, Bree has become a compulsive eater. She spends every moment of her day obsessing over junk food. Bree turns to food to comfort her, console her, and to bring her joy. This addiction has caused her to gain forty pounds since college. Finding dieting on her own harder than she expected, Bree agrees to attend a support group meeting. Her sister, Lena’s, boyfriend has recently found success in breaking his addiction to drugs and alcohol.

Bree just doesn’t believe the sharing and belief in a higher power will help–until she meets Daniel. A successful lawyer and recovering over-eater, Daniel now strikes the figure of a hunk with blue eyes, as if right off the pages of her own novel. With a three-month deadline looming, an unappreciative boss, and her own doubts, Bree must find a way to overcome her compulsion.

Sabrina’s addiction provides amazing insight into an area most people ignore.

Compulsive eating is as much an eating disorder as bulimia or anorexia. However, many choose to see it as a choice rather than a real issue. Even Bree herself has a difficult time properly naming the truth of her overeating–as an addiction. The depiction of her compulsion will be a revelation for most readers. From hiding food in her desk to digging in the ladies’ room trash for candy, Bree shows her compulsion. Her behavior mimics that of a drug addict to a sad and astounding degree. Bree cannot see that she loves comfort food like a user on a bender.

The extremity of Bree’s disorder will affect the reader. The burden of secrecy becomes overwhelming, crushing Bree’s spirit and her willpower at times. Her need to diet on a deadline only serves to enhance her cravings and creates a time crunch sensation. She struggles under the sense of an inevitable disaster with an impending, unavoidable culmination.

Setting the novel in a place where image rules and only the skinny succeed highlights Bree’s struggle. Bree sinks to shocking depths to fulfill her urges. She must hit that metaphorical bottom before she can admit her addiction and begin to climb away from it. Readers will celebrate with her as she finds her true self in the land of Hollywood fakes.

The reasons behind Bree’s addiction define part of her story, her growth into a confident, accomplished woman.

Bree began associating comfort with food when her mother left Lena and her with their absentee father. At only nine years old, Bree raised her baby sister. They waited hungrily for their father to bring home food for them after he finally left work. Lena became both sister and pseudo daughter to Bree, who continues to bail her out even at the age of twenty-three.

Bree has lost her vibrancy and her confidence, cowering behind her love for and addiction to sweets. Though she has accomplished more than Lena, Bree can only see her sister’s slimness, her perfect ease, in comparison to Bree’s own self-labeled corpulent incompetency. She will do anything, even considering bulimia and fasting, to achieve the same perfection in herself.

She knows her weight causes her doubt and unhappiness, but she cannot overcome it alone.

Through the insistence of the sister who works on her own issues, Bree attends a support meeting and begins the program that will change more than the numbers on the scale. When she meets Daniel, she has a hard time believing someone like him could like someone like her. However, spending time with him and the other members of her group soon empowers Bree.

Bree’s recognition of the imperfection of others begins her metamorphosis. She learns that even those people who have seemingly flawless lives are far from that ideal. She stops bullying herself and being her own worst enemy. Eventually, she fully sees the time she has wasted in pursuit of the unattainable and finds satisfaction in who she is and the potential her REAL life holds.

January 5, 2022
REDLINED: A Memoir of Race, Change, and Fractured Community in 1960s Chicago by Linda Gartz – Memoir, Racial Segregation, Sexual Liberation

Author Linda Gartz tells of her childhood and early adulthood amidst social upheaval in the city of Chicago in her memoir, Redlined: A Memoir of Race, Change, and Fractured Community in 1960s Chicago.

Gartz grew up the second child of second-generation immigrants to the US. Her father’s father boldly made the trip to the land of opportunity at age 21. She spent much of her childhood in cramped quarters with her parents and her older brother, living alongside strangers. They paid this price for the “dream” – the couple bought a house in a decent neighborhood; keeping roomers, even living in the same flat with them, helped pay expenses.

Gartz’s grandmother, a talented dressmaker, helped out with childcare and other chores while her mother worked to manage all the finances, tenants, and repairs in their rooming house; she had to do this alone half the year while Gartz’s dad traveled for his job. But Grandma K suffered mental illness and abused Gartz’s mother and father, sometimes violently. Gartz’s father felt oppressed by her presence, which caused ongoing, if mostly unspoken, conflict in the home.

Chicago’s social and economic upheaval served as a microcosm for national change, and as backdrop for the Gartz family drama.

African Americans fled the dangerous and economically dead-end South for more promising prospects in places like Chicago. But majority white cities and regions resisted their incursion through restructuring and re-designating neighborhoods and school districts. All the while, the civil rights movement sought large-scale change amidst peaceful protests, riots, and violent reprisals from the law.

The influx of black workers into her own neighborhood affected Gartz’s choice of schools and friends. Civil rights struggles incited her sympathies while her parents expressed their older prejudice. They feared that all of their hard-earned investments would vanish if “the colored” came in. Still, the teen had black friends and neighbors. She felt touched by the spirit of rebellion in a new testing of societal limits: sexual freedom.

Gartz felt driven to compose this intelligent account of the changing times when she and her brother “found our gold” in the attic of their parents’ home: diaries, letters, cards, calendars and notebooks reaching back to the couple’s own youth.

The undercurrent of family tensions became clear. Grandma K’s psychosis put the house on edge. Gartz’s father struggled to balance his home and work life, needing to earn money with a job that required six months of travel across each year, and also supporting his over-burdened wife with the demands of their rooming house with as many as eleven tenants. Her mother saw her behavior in the sexual revolution as shocking. Gartz includes details of the subtleties of “redlining” that allowed cities and regions to keep African Americans down and poor by limiting their ability to own property. Family photos pepper her book, lending emotive touches. The result is a vibrant look at the coming of age of a nation through the eyes of a frank, freethinking woman.

Redlined: A Memoir of Race, Change, and Fractured Community in 1960s Chicago by Linda Gartz won 1st Place in the 2019 CIBA Journey Book Awards for Narrative Non-Fiction and Memoir.

January 3, 2022
ANNIHILATION: Book 2, Gehenna Series by Kaylin McFarren – Occult Fiction, Paranormal Romance, Occult Horror

Samara Daemonium tries to break free from her father’s control as the realms of Heaven and Hell prepare for war, in Kaylin McFarren’s erotic supernatural novel, Annihilation.

Lucinda, the daughter of Satan, rules Hell with an iron fist. She sits on the throne thanks in part to the angel/demon hybrid Crighton and his angel soulmate Ariel. However, power changed Lucinda. She no longer stands as a brighter future in Hell, but rather as a demagogue driving her demons to rise up in battle against the hosts of Heaven. Crighton struggles between his loyalty to Lucinda, and his responsibility for his family—especially his pregnant soulmate. He doesn’t yet know the depths of Lucinda’s deception.

Crighton tries to hold his family together by force, as Ariel gives birth to Cassius and a stillborn Caleb. But Samara chafes under her lack of freedom, kept in a secluded cabin to hide her from the forces of Hell. She turns to her uncle Tyrus for help, and when dark forces descend on her family, she steps up to defend them. While Samara can help to save her parents and brother, she doesn’t see the danger to herself until it’s found her. Lucifer, returned to physical form in the body of Samara’s first love, drags her to Hell and the palace of cruelty he prepared for her.

McFarren illuminates the fantastical stretches of Hell in tactile, colorful description.

Torture, sex, and supernatural powers mingle together in an otherworldly display. Witches take vengeance on the demon who killed their sister, Lucinda consumes the souls of magically gifted beings, and Samara learns of a bloodline with incredible abilities. But amongst all the magic and hell spawn, themes of family and identity ground the central characters.

Lucifer fights the political influence of the Knights of Darkness, strengthening his hold on the realm of demons. Meanwhile, a group of cambions calling themselves the Crows try to stop an apocalyptic war from breaking out. And the Daemonium family fall into the sights of them all.

Though Samara yearns for her freedom, she fears that she won’t have a family to return to. Has her brother Cassius taken her place, left her forgotten? When Lucifer abuses and assaults her in Hell, when she’s abandoned by her father Crighton for two months, she can rely on next to nobody. Only Tyrus, now imprisoned and tortured as well, keeps her sane.

From the depths of Hell, Samara will face a destiny laid out since far before her birth.

Can she really save the world—more than one world, in fact—from Lucifer’s power mongering? The great Red War looms on the horizon, and Samara finds that in the end, she can’t even be sure of herself.

Throughout this story, readers will reel at Lucifer’s horrors, cheer for the protection of the bonds of love, and anxiously await their answers as to how the multi-faceted story lines of the series many characters will come together. Annihilation proves a suspenseful read. The characters stand larger than life, their personalities remaining solid from beginning to end.

December 31, 2021
TOM SAWYER RETURNS by E.E. Burke – American Historical Romance, Historical Fiction Western, Western Historical Romance

Tom Sawyer Returns is the second book in The New Adventures series by author E.E. Burke.

Readers join a now grown up and far more independent Becky Thatcher as she maneuvers her complicated life in Civil War era Mississippi. Tom has long since left, and Becky is engaged to Union Captain Alfred Temple, who offers her all the safety and security she needs in such uncertain times. But does she love him? Actually love him?

Becky soon discovers that her heart may have other plans.

When an injured Tom Sawyer bursts through her door and collapses onto the kitchen floor, Becky and her father – Judge Thatcher – take him in, care for him, and find out that he may have stumbled into the house for reasons more than the simple rekindling of a lost flame. With Judge Thatcher caught up in a twisted ploy posed by the rebels, Becky must partner up with Tom in order to save her father. But with Tom’s memories nowhere to be found, and his aptitude for ending up smack dab in the middle of trouble, the two find themselves venturing down a twisting road of discovery, mystery, and uncertainty.

Set in a divided world rife with danger and history, E.E. Burke takes characters so close to the heart of Americana and gives them new life.

Fans of Mark Twain’s original work will appreciate the attention to detail and the care in which the story is crafted, paying homage to the original tales of Tom Sawyer and his wild adventures. But this continuation sees a deeper, more intimate portrait of Becky Thatcher – a girl grown into a woman, who’s come into her own confidence and whose sharp mind sees her through many perilous situations.

While the title of the book may be Tom Sawyer Returns, don’t let that fool you – Becky Thatcher is the heart of this book, the backbone, the brains.

Both her and Tom have grown significantly since their childhood days, and Burke expertly takes two kids written nearly 150 years ago and turns them into adults whose life experiences have been shaped by the Civil War; two individuals who are fiercely independent, yet whose attitudes and opinions have been molded by the world they live in. They jump off the page as not simply characters, but as fully realized people. People with complexities, fears, and failures.

Not only does Tom Sawyer Returns take the reader on an adventurous ride filled with plots and ploys, but it also provides a beautiful romance that blooms amidst the thorns of trouble.

E.E. Burke writes with a balance of delicacy and sharpness, showing the true nature of love – that it is something tangled and complicated. As the reader follows Becky and Tom, they’re never made to doubt the pair’s attraction, but to instead find comfort knowing that while their combined history may complicate their feelings for each other, love will still prevail in end. As it always does, and as it always will continue to do.

December 29, 2021
BEHIND the MASK by Dana Ridenour – Terrorism Thrillers, Police Procedurals, Women’s Crime Fiction

Like a high wire performer working without a net, Dana Ridenour’s captivating and provocative yarn, Behind the Mask, carefully treads that fine line between fact and fiction and does it with aplomb.

Between the covers of this contemporary, detective thriller, is a well-crafted plot revealing alarming aspects of animal enterprise practices, and militant animal rights advocacy. Set in Los Angeles, it is peopled with believable, engaging characters, and taps into sights, smells, and flavors unique to that area.

When 29-year-old, FBI Special Agent Alexis Montgomery, or Lexie, as she prefers to be called, reaches LA, she has one goal in mind—to make her bones. A fledgling undercover operator, newly trained and on her first assignment, she must infiltrate a militant ALF cell and ensure its terrorist members are brought to justice.

In her assumed identity as a vegan, animal-rights extremist, who drives a battered Volkswagen bug, and lives in a modest Venice Beach apartment, Lexie ingratiates herself with local activists. Over time, an unanticipated friendship with Savannah Riley, whom she meets at a vociferous demonstration, helps her nail it. Just as her FBI mentor predicted, she fits right in with those crazy vegans.

Savannah, raised in a traditional southern family, declined The Citadel, in South Carolina, in favor of SoCal, with one goal in mind— to exchange the same old, dull routine of Pawley’s Island, South Carolina, for the mystery and exhilaration of California life. In school, studying for a career in the film industry, her roommate introduces her to the world of animal rights activism. Meeting Lexie, a kindred spirit from the south is an unexpected plus.

As members of the local, militant cell, Lexie and Savannah learn hard lessons. After a night watchman dies in a liberate and destroy operation at the UCLA animal lab, their lives are changed forever.

During their ensuing months under the California sun, Savannah loses her love, her trust, her innocence, and comes close to losing her freedom; Lexie emerges from the dark side a wiser woman, tempered and honed, with deeper understandings of herself and the human condition.

Ridenour’s realistic portrayal of opposing worldviews, replete with tangible danger, and intense, fanatical emotion, in Behind the Mask challenges the status quo. It is a novel of the here and now. Its well-drawn characters, complex plot, and true-to-life setting will resonate with the reader long after the book is finished.

Behind the Mask by Dana Ridenour won 1st Place in Category in the 2016 CIBAs in the CLUE division for Thrillers and Suspense novels.

December 17, 2021
REMEDY for a BROKEN ANGEL by Toni Ann Johnson – Latino American Literature, Black and African American Urban Fiction, Mothers and Children Fiction

Remedy for a Broken Angel by Toni Ann Johnson is an intense examination of the troubled personal histories of two beautiful and talented women of color.

Their stories are told in alternating chapters which reveal the mother’s and her daughter’s attempts to reclaim and understand their broken pasts. Each chapter is a revelation into the pain and damage caused by unknown family secrets. Both women struggle with a legacy of shame and self-blame for the price they’re paying for never hearing the truth. Each must learn the lessons found in past years of failure to communicate.

The beautiful mother, Serena, is a successful Bermudian jazz singer and songwriter who is consumed by anger over feeling unloved as a child. Years later, her hurt and confusion over being abandoned by her family cause her to repeat the past by leaving her own marriage and abandoning her twelve-year-old daughter.

Artie, Serena’s lovely daughter, is an excellent photographer who constantly battles with the same destructive demons of abandonment, loss, shame, and betrayal as does her mother. She finds herself at age twenty-six in a psychiatric hospital in Malibu, California. There, she receives caring support from her psychiatrist, Dr. Phoebe Ligon, in trying to understand her rage and need for revenge against Serena.

Serena’s and Artie’s struggles through the years are a deep, painful journey as they each must try to learn to forgive the other. Somehow, they must bridge the chasm of mutual feelings of betrayal caused by misconceptions, falsehoods, and many lost years with no communication.

Remedy for a Broken Angel is an extraordinary novel about digging out from years of suppression to find forgiveness and to forgive. Johnson writes with authority about the world in which the characters in her novel live as they endure an endless struggle for the truth. She deftly exposes the many faces of patterns of abuse and how the “unseen hand” perpetuates and feeds the demons within in this literary work of contemporary women’s fiction from Nortia Press.

Remedy for a Broken Angel by Toni Ann Johnson was nominated for a 2015 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work by a Debut Author. She won the 2015 International Latino Book Award for Most Inspirational Fiction and is a winner of a Humanitas Prize for promoting human dignity for her screenplay, Ruby Bridges. Johnson’s professional experience in dance, music, film and stage production lends authenticity to the sonorous background and subtext of the work. As you read Remedy for a Broken Angel, you might just hear the strains of jazz composer Charles Mingus’ music seeping throughout Johnson’s novel in its refrains and riffs of the complications of relationships.

December 15, 2021
ABOVE THE DIN (Diary of the HepC Wonder Drugs) by Labar Laskie – Memoir, Hepatitis C Cure, Insightful and Transformative Non-Fiction

Labar Laskie closely explores the experience of chronic HepC in her unique memoir, Above the Din.

These days, Hepatitis C infection is curable with a simple treatment that lasts only a few months. In 1999, when author Labar Laskie receives her diagnosis, she sees no good option. The only possibility for a cure lies in a treatment with dismally low success rates and poses a significant danger. Not wanting to jeopardize her life, Labar embarks on a fifteen-year-long search for an alternative cure, hoping to find a wonder drug. Her waiting ends in 2014 when she begins her three-month-long treatment of two pills daily while keeping a journal of each day’s progress.

She goes through a string of doctors, many urging her to do the toxic treatment.

Labar tries every alternative treatment under the sun, but only if they don’t pose any known adverse effects. Eventually, she meets Dr. Right, who supports her choice to pursue other treatments. They work together on her care for over a decade. During this time, Labar and her young daughter become hooked on flying trapeze. The activity helps her manage the mental strain of her chronic illness. These precious moments with her daughter make the journey to recovery doable.

Above the Din‘s short, easy-to-read chapters come accompanied with illustrations by Lona Powell.

Humor and honesty abound in this story despite the grim topic of severe chronic disease. Labar’s years of research and connecting with people like her provide valuable insight and knowledge. Beyond that, she does an excellent job of including disclaimers about not being a medical professional herself and for people to do their own research. Her purpose for writing this story is to help others find strength, hope, and inspiration.

As Labar’s story progresses, the past and present intermingle.

Her early days dealing with shock and fear juxtapose her abundant present-day knowledge and wonder drug treatment. The best example of this comes in the chapter where Labar learns the extent of her liver disease. The treatment is working. This takes the uncertainty of the end of her Hepatitis C story away and enables her to focus on the journey itself.

Something positive comes out of her Hepatitis C diagnosis: through trapeze, Labar learns to overcome her fears and stand up for herself instead of just going along with the opinions of others to keep the peace. Hopefully, Hepatitis C will be outdated one day, but these critical lessons Labar learns along the way are universal.

December 10, 2021
The DEVIL’s BOOKKEEPERS: Book 1: The Noose by Mark H. Newhouse – Jewish Historical Fiction, Jewish Holocaust Fiction, Jewish Literature

Mark H. Newhouse has created an intense, harrowing, story of love and loyalty surrounding life within the Lodz Ghetto in Poland, established to control a sizeable portion of the Jewish population under Nazi domination in the first book in the series, The Devil’s Bookkeepers: The Noose.

The author’s viewpoint is focused through the lens of Bernard Ostrowski, an engineer who will join three other men chosen for their related skills to report on daily happenings in the ghetto while secretly codifying incidents that the Nazis would not have wished to have recorded. Ostrowski and his cohort – the distinguished but embittered Oskar Rosenfeld, a noted Zionist, Julian Cukier, a journalist, and Oscar Singer, the youngest of the crew and the most impulsive. As Ostrowski opines privately, “Two Jews are a debate. Three, an argument. Four? A war.” Yet the four will co-exist, all trying in their separate ways to fulfill their assignment and please their highly controversial boss, Chaim Rumkowski.

Rumkowski was the real overseer of the Lodz Ghetto.

Some hated him since the people under his sway were starving and dying in disproportionately high numbers even as he commanded them to work for the German cause in German-run industries. Others, like Ostrowski and his companions, did their best to obey him despite many strong reservations, seeing him as the only hope, if faint, for their people’s survival. In their workday, the four men would learn of ever-increasing horrors taking place in the home where they’d been consigned. From very young people shot by German police or Jewish police under Nazi dominance to more people brought in by the thousand when all within the ghetto barely survived, strange, disturbing rumors arose about urns of Jewish ashes being sent to relatives in the ghetto from the concentration camp at Buchenwald.

Ostrowski has other palpable worries as the story evolves in the chaos around him.

His young wife Miriam wants a baby, and her pregnancy makes their deprivations even more distressing. Though they love one another, she is suspicious, as are many in the ghetto, of Rumkowski and his motivations. As her husband willingly works for and accedes to Rumkowski’s wishes, a line between them grows. In his role as “the engineer,” Ostrowski believes he is helping to keep his co-workers more concentrated on hard realities from an objective, constructive viewpoint. Miriam’s criticism torments him. Singer secretly suggests to Ostrowski that he take Miriam, their new daughter Regina and flee the ghetto. As the “noose” tightens, this begins to seem like the only realistic plan. But carrying it out would risk their three lives.

An award-winning writer and educator, Newhouse was born in Germany, the child of Holocaust survivors.

Gifted by his mother with a considerable narration entitled The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto (translated and edited by Lucjan Dobroszycki, Yale University Press, 1984) and seeing that his parents had had a personal attachment to the account, he read it, and within a short time, he had begun this trilogy, of which The Noose is Part One.

Much of the Chronicle was composed by unknown scribes. Newhouse decided on a fictional treatment speaking for its many authors and encompassing its vital, often horrific, truths. His wide-reaching story of conditions in and feelings about the Lodz Ghetto is educated and realistic. Newhouse deftly combines historical fact with a vibrant portrait of high-minded human beings caught in the trap of being “chosen” – but for what? – and trying their best to fulfill religious and family expectations while suspecting their efforts will all be in vain.

The Devil’s Bookkeeper series won the CIBA 2020 Grand Prize for Series.

December 8, 2021
OH DADDY CHRONICLES: The Tasting by Barry Robbins – Political Satire, Political Humor, Political and Popular Culture Lampoon

For those of you who still have heartburn from the last administration, Barry Robbins, sharp-as-a-whip satirist, has come to our rescue with his new short work lampooning Donald J. Trump, #45, in his uproarious short story, Oh Daddy Chronicles – The Tasting.

This book draws from two earlier books, Oh Daddy Chronicles and Oh Daddy Chronicles 2: Return of Covfefe. These enlightening and downright hysterical parodies place readers squarely in the Oval Office and at Mar-a-Lago, respectively.

Oh Daddy Chronicles: The Tasting samples each previous book plus some new material. They come together in a hands-down, laugh-out-loud lampooning of #45 – and everyone else in sight. From Ivanka to Jared, Vladimir to White House staffers, Robbins pulls no punches and hits his target every time. Even Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are fair game along with Fauci and the Cheneys.

Robbins sees the funny everywhere, and thanks to him, so do we.

With episode titles like Hydroxy and Me, Billy Bob and Bobbie Sue, Cheneys vs. Trumps, to name a few, Robbins gives readers material in which we can frame those years and put them in a manageable perspective. We learn how much #45 hates the color blue – and why. Readers also learn why his special relationship with the Russian dictator may be more worrisome than any of us previously thought, and oh so much more.

Robbins’ unique and engaging short work will no doubt drive readers to the first two books.

Another way Robbins engages his readers is via a poll. Readers get to choose which answer they like best from a number of possibilities given by political figures mentioned in the book to the question of, “Why did the chicken cross the road?” Simply brilliant.

December 3, 2021
The CRYSTAL SKULL: A Sentinel 10 Novel by Daniela Valenti – Thriller and Suspense Action Fiction, Romantic Action/Adventure, Psychic Thriller

Med student Amanda Griffith can see the supernatural world in Daniela Valenti’s supernatural thriller, The Crystal Skull: A Sentinel 10 Novel.

Over a year ago, Amanda joined a secret group of people with similar gifts, becoming a Sentinel 10. They fight the evil that normal humans can’t see. As a Sentinel 10, she strikes fear in entities seeking to harm her world. With the support of her fiancé James, a fellow Sentinel, Amanda has defeated every challenge – until now.

Someone or something kills lower-level Sentinels around the globe, draining them of their powers and their lives.

Wrongly accused herself, Amanda debates whether she wants to help the Committee. However, when the entity attacks her and her mentor, Basil, Amanda knows she has to fight. She finds an unlikely ally who bears a striking resemblance to her dead fiancé, Alain. He makes Amanda question her feelings for her current fiancé.

With her emotions in tatters, Amanda has to protect her best friend, Lydia, a Sentinel 4, when she becomes the next victim. Uncertain whether or not she can win and doubted by those she cares for most, Amanda decides to take the fight to the one responsible. But will she be enough to save humanity?

The relationship between Amanda and James presents a strange duality, fraught and uncertain.

James, a war veteran with his share of emotional scars, has an innate need to protect. His physical strength belies a significant emotional weakness. The ravages of war in the Middle East have left behind a neediness that far outstrips his prowess.

He often projects this neediness onto Amanda and disguises his over-protectiveness as love. James wants a wife raising his children at home, not saving lives in the hospital or with her psychic power. He becomes upset when she saves him, threatening the traditional male-female roles.

Amanda, though not physically potent, wields abilities incomparable to any other Sentinel.

Though she has doubts at times, Amanda possesses a mental confidence in her power. She knows her role in the group and her duty to the world. However, she still needs to feel loved and comforted. She needs that from James even if he can never give her exactly what she desires.

With a shared loss of their first fiancés, Amanda and James understand loss in a way most couples do not. They both know that their current love can never reach that of first loves. For a time, the relationship between the two creates its own balance. The two lovers metaphorically complete each other, not soulmates – never that – but the “next-best” thing.

Betrayal becomes a major theme in Amanda’s story.

At every turn, Amanda feels that harsh sting. Her initial betrayal begins in the first novel of the series with the death of her fiancé, Alain. Alain and Amanda shared a unique, eternal love. He was the first man to show he loved and needed her, and his loss causes a resonating pain.

The darkness within Alain takes him from Amanda when he takes his own life. Her soul-deep love suffers, and throughout this novel, she continues to feel it.

When she reunites with a resurrected Alain, she again endures betrayal at his refusal to acknowledge her. He denies any memories of their life together and physically pushes her away. This resurgence of love for a dead man makes her feel as though she betrayed James, an arguably worthier partner than Alain had ever been.

She spends her days trying to force away a love that cannot be.

Worse yet, Amanda’s feelings of betrayal extend beyond her love life. When the monster attacks the Sentinels, Amanda becomes a possible suspect. Despite Amanda’s shock and disgust, her beloved mentor Basil does not defend her. In the short time that Amanda has been a Sentinel, Basil has become a father figure to her.

His lack of protection when others attack her integrity makes Amanda question her own loyalty to the Committee and its goals.

After she clears her name, Amanda’s fellow Sentinels betray her with lack of trust in her ability. Even James doesn’t think she can defeat the creature who attacked them. The Committee’s twenty-four-hour deadline doesn’t bolster confidence in the others. Only Amanda knows that she can defeat this evil and overcome this betrayal.

December 3, 2021