Author name: Sayling@@Away

I’m soon going to post the review of a novelette by D.L. Finn, which has angels in it! I love angels. Here is a very short story I wrote about my angel not long ago. &&&&&&&&&& The view from the roof’s ridge line is spectacular, he thought. I do love the colors of autumn in this part of the country. He settled back on his cloud cushion with a sigh. “Beautiful, yes?” said his companion, Dara. She ruffled her wings and spread them out to the setting sun. “I never get tired of it.” He’d been enthralled with the seasons for more years than he could count. He also stretched out his wings, and they turned to gold. “How did you get this assignment?” she asked. “HE gave me a vacation after the last one – it had lasted only twenty-nine years, and during the last four, my assignment had cancer. It was hard to watch him losing the fight. I made sure that his family was there to welcome him at the end of his last journey. It was a joyous reunion, but mentally I was drained.” “And this one?” She folded her feathers back into place. “Well, she’s a tough old bird. I expect I’ll be around a while more. I’ve now met the guardians of her children and now her grandchildren. A good lot. You remember I had some heated discussions with her son’s, though – the son was a tough nut, and it was Michael’s first assignment. He seemed ill-equipped to handle the son’s problems. He took my advice, though, and thanks to our combined efforts, the family worked through it. I think the son’s doing fine now. Have you met his daughter’s guardian?” “Not yet. Maybe on their visit this summer.” He settled his wings and leaned back again on his cloud. “It’s been nice having you around, all these years,” he said with a smile and a sideways glance at his companion. “I imagine we’ll be getting reassignments around the same time – how old is he?” “Seventy-nine,” Dara replied, “but still going. Does the Mrs. know you’re here?” “It’s funny,” he chuckled. “I think she’s always known – the church convinces them of our existence when they’re very young, but only lately have I figured in her prayers. It’s so nice to be thanked each night for being here for her. I try to make sure her sleep is restful.” “I hear dishes clattering in the kitchen, and the sun’s left us. Time to go down.”  Her diaphanous form slid slowly through the roof and into the house. Ezrael sighed. Sunsets never lasted, but there would be another one tomorrow. Maybe. He thought he sensed rain. 0 0

This is the second book by Carol Hedges that I have reviewed for Rosie’s website, but I loved the first book so much, I read every single one of them in this series. I always look forward to a new book in this series, and this one lives up to my enjoyment of the others. The author has a phenomenal knowledge of Victorian London – its sounds, smells, street life, and populace – and she brings all this into her vivid descriptions of the city. The story begins with the plight of a young Irish laborer, starving, jobless, and unable to find a place to spend the night because of the prejudice against the Irish. He finally slumps down in an alleyway, his dead body being discovered the next morning. The morgue physician calls in Scotland Yard because the cause of death is similar to the plague, which has brutalized London in the past. Responding to the request are Chief Inspector Lachlan Grieg and now retired detective inspector Stride, who is featured in the earlier books. When the orderly who brought the body to the morgue, dies of similar symptoms, Grieg, stride and Grieg’s assistant detective, Jack Cully, decide the cause of the two deaths must be kept secret, not only from the ravening press but also from the general population to avoid panic. Nevertheless, the news of a possible plague reaches the ears of smarmy Richard Dandy, the editor and writer of a daily rag, from the hospital porter, who found the arrival of Scotland Yard and the guarding of the bodies suspicious and gets paid for his information. When the bones of very old bodies are discovered at a construction site and are dumped by the site owners in the Thames, they end up at the hospital mortuary and the detectives deduce they were removed from a plague pit at the site, where the young Irishman worked. There is always a second line of investigation in Ms. Hedges’ mysteries and this one involves London’s only female detective, Lucy Landseer. She is visited by the elder of two Broxton sisters and asked to locate the daughter of the younger sister, who was born out of wedlock and left as a baby at the Asylum for Female Orphans. The family’s inheritance passes through the female line, and as both sisters are growing old, they need to find the daughter who will inherit. Across town, Jasper Broxton, a greedy and avaricious relative who doesn’t want the daughter found because then he will inherit, makes his income with increasingly disastrous Ponzi schemes. His wife stalks the Broxton sisters and has a spy planted in their house. Broxton’s large and fat daughter Johanna is in the same class with Jack Cully’s daughter Violet and is a merciless bully of Violet and her friends. The author builds these two mysteries like a spider weaving a web. She also does something unusual: she breaks the wall and talks directly to the reader at the beginning of the book (which is when it should be done, if at all), and the rest of the way takes you along on the investigations. In doing so, the reader find themselves personally immersed in a world of shadowy alleyways, filthy streets and squalid houses, and the flickering of gas lights. The characters are so well-drawn, that you can’t help feeling the author’s emotion in creating them. And as I’ve noted before, the author is at once humorous and heart-breaking in her character descriptions, never more so than in the plight of women in that time. I found this book, as all of them in the series, engaging and enticing. I recommend it highly and I think anyone who reads it will read the rest in the series. PS The covers are fantastic! Five stars About the author: Carol Hedges is the successful UK writer of 11 books for teenagers/Young Adults. Her novel Jigsaw was long-listed for the Carnegie Medal. She is currently well into her series of Victorian Crime Fiction novels, set in 1860s London and published under her own imprint: Little G Books. Pride and Pestilence is the eleventh in this series. In the past, she taught at secondary school. Currently retired, she tutors A and GCSE English. She lives in Hertfordshire, England, and is married with a grown-up daughter. You can find her on Twitter (X): @carolJhedges Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/carol.hedges.779 And her blog: http://carolhedges.blogspot.com/ 1 0

I was very surprised and chuffed to see a wonderful review for Death at the Asylum posted by Judith Barrow, a fellow blogger. Judith is an author herself of eight books. The focus of her writing is family dynamics, which she treats with great insight and sensitivity. You can find her at https://judithbarrowblog.com. I hope you will visit her blog and check out her books, which are all great reads. Here is her review: Although this is the fifth book in the series it’s also a stand-alone story and is an excellent cozy mystery. The book begins with a brief summary which sets the scene easily and introduces the reader to the backdrop of the sequence. N.A Granger’s story is interwoven and layered with intriguing subplots that flow seamlessly and keep the reader fascinated. Themes of deception and suspense sit alongside themes of family communication and workday differences, all adding to the depth of the story. The chapters alternate between the points of view of Rhe, nurse who works part-time in the police department, and Sam, her husband who is Chief of Police. Both are well-rounded and believable characters (something I expected as their characteristics and dialogue must have developed and grown over the series). This adds to the consistency of the story and is something I admired in this author’s style of writing.  But these two characters don’t carry the plot on their own and the minor characters in the close knit community of Pequod are also extremely credible.   The descriptions of the setting, the coastal town of Pequod give a brilliant sense of place and leaves the reader in no doubt of the area the characters live and move around in. This is my first visit back to this series for quite a while and I had forgotten how much I remembered of this series. I will certainly revisit and catch up on the exploits of Rhe and Sam.   For any reader who enjoys cosy mysteries as much as I do, I highly recommend Death at the Asylum. Death at the  Asylum: Rhe Brewster Mystery Series, Book 5 (The Rhe Brewster Mysteries 13) is available at: Amazon. co.uk: https://tinyurl.com/5ewpcayx Amazon.com: https://tinyurl.com/3vfdt3r6 Thank you, Judith! 0 0

An ill-advised thermonuclear war has resulted in a direct effect on the sun, destabilizing it irreparably. Recognizing that Earth will eventually end as a home to humanity, a manned mission is sent to find a plant that humans can colonize. Told from the view point of the commander of the mission and captain of the Universal Solar Spaceship Primus, David Davis describes the ship, the first spaceship to be powered by star light, to be sent to Kepler-186f, called Nova. This planet is 10.5 times bigger than Earth but with similar gravity and within its star’s habitable zone. All of this is detailed in his first log entries. There are eleven crew members and AI to run the ship while they are in hypersleep, along with lots and lots of embryos which should grow into super children. The members of the crew are chosen carefully to have no families. Half are veterans of space travel and for half, this is their first mission. They spend a two month isolation period with each other to determine if they are compatible and if they can accept a mission from which they will not return nor hear from Earth again. The author describes each of the crew member’s strengths and how the jobs they were trained for overlap. There is only one about whom the captain admits to having some doubts, Osa Williams, the life specialist who is in charge of the hypersleep pods and the embryos. The mission begins successfully, but only makes it halfway before Osa awakens, hundreds of years from the ship’s destination, due to something that was her fault. She rouses Captain Davis, who soon realizes there is something terribly wrong and that she is being deceptive about where they are on the journey, resulting in an ensuing twisted game of cat and mouse. Davis has to fight not only for his own life, but for those of the crew and the embryos, and indeed for humanity, as Osa descends into madness. I loved the plot line of this novel and also the thoughtful consideration of various topics: Would the crew survive the centuries-long voyage with a ship and equipment never before tested? If they did, what would be the effects on them of the journey? How successful would they be at populating Nova and developing it into an Earth-like planet? However, the set-up to the mission is a series of long and detailed log entries, including minutia about the ship and crew and thoughts of Davis about the future of humanity. This lasts until chapter 9, when the real action begins. From there forward, the point of view is shared between Osa and Davis, and the rest of the story is laced with tension, and tragedy. The ending is practical and interesting, and I leave readers to discover what happens. My feeling about the book are mixed – loved the concept and enjoyed the science (fiction) of the ship and the mission, but it took a long time to get out of Davis’s head and into the action. The author writes well, and the details of the ship and the mission are well-wrought. They eventually pull the reader into the story, build the tension and do justice to the ending. But I am left wondering if so much detail is necessary, especially about the crew, since there are truly only two characters. Nevertheless, the author impressed me with their first full-length outing and look forward to the next book. I think readers into serious sci-fi will like this book. About the author (from Goodreads): Martin H. Altis, nicknamed ‘The Human Resource’ by their friends due to their penchant for pulling random facts out of thin air, they wrote their first short story when they were young, scribbling away with a stubby pencil and a dollar store spiral-bound notebook. Ever since then, they’ve been hooked. M.H. writes to express themself, their thoughts, ideas, and emotions. They also have a deep interest in how fiction connects to reality and how character arcs mirror our own lives. M.H. Altis has written several books, from 250,000-word epics to 50,000-word dashes. With a growing and unreleased catalog, they decided it was finally time to share their creations with the world. With curiosities and creations ranging from medieval times to outer space, alternate universes to the one we inhabit, and everything in between, readers will be sure to find something to enjoy. 0 0

I’ve been missing from my blog for a while due to writing (imagine that!). But Teagan Geneviene gifted me with a review of my book The Last Pilgrim by D. L. Finn today, so I decided to share it. With a promise of more posts to come! Thank you, Teagan, and especially Denise!! “The Last Pilgrim” is an amazingly detailed and well-written story focused on Mary Allerton Cushman’s life. Four-year-old Mary and her family were on the Mayflower, wanting to start a new life with the freedom to practice their religion. They squeezed together below deck with many other families, enduring limited food, water, and no hygiene. The boat faced various obstacles, such as sickness and scurvy, but upon reaching land and finding a suitable place, the survivors had to hastily construct a shelter for the cold winter. They were a hardy group who not only pulled together to accomplish their survival, but I found it captivating how they pieced together a group of people with a dream of a better life into a functioning society. What caught my attention was the strong women with limited voice or rights. They were equal in the colony’s success as the men and, at times, surpassed them. Some medical treatments and punishments given to lawbreakers made me cringe. Mary’s daily life and the surrounding people were as fascinating as the politics and religion. Although a long read, I didn’t even notice because I was so drawn in. I can highly recommend this historical fiction! P.S. I am often asked about the cover. It is an oil painting by an artist Mary Smith from an idea that I had. I have the painting on the wall in my office. “ 0 0

I always look forward to Jan Sikes’ books. She has such a gentle and heart-warming way of telling a story that the reader feels that all’s right with the world when they’re done reading. Layken Marin returns home to his family’s farm in Missouri after serving in the Army during WW II. Both his parents died while he was away but he had promised his father he would make the farm prosperous again. What he finds is a house in disrepair, fields baked by the sun, and a foreclosure notice on the door. Layken appeals to the banker, a thoroughly odious character, who refuses to give him the time needed to rebuild, plant and harvest a crop. Instead, he offers him a two-year extension on the loan if Layken will marry his daughter, Sarah Beth. The banker is a widower and wants to remarry, but his fiancée wants Sarah gone. Faced with two awful choices, Laykin decides to marry Sarah Beth. And Sarah Beth changes his life. Carefully treading around each other, they first discover their mutual tolerance for hard work and then each sees in the other their exceptional qualities. Tolerance begets affection. Together they begin to rebuild the farm, adding other members to their family: Uncle Seymour, a black man who had tended Sarah’s father’s land for years and who was fired after Sarah Beth left; Tad, a young boy living in the woods as a runaway from his father’s abuse; a barn cat and a pregnant stray dog.     Where the neighbors first regard Sarah with distrust, they come to help whenever help is needed and Sarah comes to realize that in the country, your neighbors are your support. And hers and Laykin’s are kind and thoughtful. This is the story of the growing love between the unlikely couple set against a hard scrabble farm with seemingly endless setbacks to a successful harvest. But as always with the author, the story is told in such a warm and gentle way that the reader knows Laykin and Sarah Beth will survive. The farm and its occupants are drawn in a compelling way and the story is a testament to hard work, determination, love, acceptance, and the strength of community. I highly recommend this book. Readers will love the experience of it. Five starts About the author: Jan Sikes has been an avid reader all her life, but oddly enough she had no ambition to be a writer. But she wound up in mid-life with a story that begged to be told. Through fictitious characters, the tale came to life in not one, but four books. Then she released music CDs of original music matching the time period of each book, and finally a book of poetry and art. The story ideas keep coming, and she has no plan to turn off the creative fountain. She loves all things metaphysical and often includes those aspects in my stories. She is a member of the Author’s Marketing Guild, The Writer’s League of Texas, Story Empire, and the Paranormal Writer’s Guild. I am an avid fan of Texas music and grandmother of five. She resides in North Texas. You can reach her at https://jansikes.com/blog https://www.facebook.com/AuthorJanSikesBooks 2 0

Another humorous or not-so humorous memory of growing up in Plymouth. My mother, in addition to being just plain smart about lots of things, was also very handy. She had painted all the rooms in the house, replaced panes of glass, and could do a rewiring job if necessary. She could hook rugs and her cooking was exceptional. The one thing she’d never mastered was sewing. Memmere (her mother) was a whiz with the needle and made her grandchildren’s clothes for years, which is probably why Mom had never bothered to learn. One summer, she got it in her head to make me a bathing suit. I think she figured a bathing suit would be an easy sewing project on which to start. It was a cotton knit affair, which she made because I’d grown up and out rather quickly in the past year, and my old suits had become dangerously revealing. What Mom didn’t know, but what I knew acutely, is that with the development of breasts, I’d become hideously self-conscious. One of the things I could do well was swim fast. While I knew the technique of all the stokes, thanks to endless hours of swim lessons, I had an advantage being taller and stronger than all my teammates on the Eel River Beach Club team. I could power my way to the end of the pool faster than anyone in my age group. At one particular swim meet with another club, I lined up at the deep end of the pool for the start of a freestyle race, proudly sporting the newly constructed two piece bathing suit. Many of the kids at the pool wore two piece suits at that time, even for meets, but what I realized, as I stepped to the line, was the suit had not been tested for its swim-worthiness, let alone its ability to stay in place during a racing dive. At the sound of the gun, I hit the water in a flat, extended position (in those days you did not do an extended dolphin kick underwater, which might have saved me) and began to swim mightily, only to discover that I had nothing around my chest. But something was indeed wrapped around my waist. I continued to swim for a few strokes, then stopped in the middle of the course and pulled my top up, while all the spectators looked on. Instant, grinding mortification. I never wore that bathing suit again. My mom, who had been at the swim meet, never said a word. As I grew older and swam more seriously, the beauty of a one piece suit became clear, and to this day I’m a firm believer in the value of having your suit in one piece. Another memory morsel: some Olympic training coaches visited our team once and talked to me and another teammate – a tiny pixie with blonde hair for whom the water just seemed to part – about whether we’d be interested in a serious training camp. I can’t remember what happened after that; they may have talked to our parents, who nixed the idea. But it’s nice to think about, all these decades later. 0 0

I never really thought about middle names until I recently learned that having a middle name dates back to ancient Rome. Many Romans had three names: A praenomen was a personal name, or what we call first names today; a nomen, which was a family name, and lives where middle names currently sit; and the cognomen, which identified what branch of family you were from. Women had only two names while slaves had one. At some point, this custom died out, lasting centuries. I wanted to know more and discovered that having middle names as we know them today started in Italy just as it was entering the Renaissance. The practice first became common among the elites—among whom it was common by the late 1400s—and then spread to other social classes. The following century it spread to the countryside. The majority of these early middle names in Italy were those of saints, with the idea what that those saints would protect the children who bore their names. It was exceedingly rare to have middle names in Great Britain and the United States before 1800, and after this time it was done to honor a second relative or a matriarchal lineage. John Quincy Adams was the first American President to have a middle name. But why did middle names become popular? One thought is that middle names allow people to shift their identities. Pablo Picasso, for example, was baptized with a string of more than a dozen names and although he wasn’t known by all of them, he did test out different combinations: initially signing paintings as P. Ruiz, then trying P. Ruiz Picasso before sticking with Picasso. However, I think it’s more likely that middle names serve much the same purposes they always have: they’re a way to keep family names going and thus preserve relationships. The family is the most important thing that gets referenced in middle names, and it makes sense for it to be about lineage and inheritance.” One of the surprising reasons I found for a child to be given a surname as a middle name was when the parents weren’t married. If a child had the same surname as his/her mother, and a middle name that looked like a surname, there’s a very good chance that the child’s middle name was the biological father’s surname. In some cases, the middle name of an illegitimate child may be the only clue, other than DNA, to the father’s identity. Another reason for parents to use a surname as a middle name was to pay tribute to the mother, and therefore to her parents, family and ancestry, by using her maiden name. This became especially fashionable in the second half of the 19th century. My middle name honors my mother, Audrey, and I have another middle name, which I don’t use – Jeanne, my Confirmation name Many women use maiden names as a middle name or a hyphenated last name. I never did, preferring to keep my mother’s name. Many women scientists/authors prefer to keep their maiden name if they have published under that name before marriage. Finally, some of us who live in the South give middle names to our children so they will know when they are in trouble. My son and daughter both knew they faced my wrath if I called, “Patrick Ethan, get your butt here” or “Cameron Elizabeth, what have you done?” So, there you have it! The answer to a most pressing question! 2 0