SYNOPSIS (via Amazon)
'Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from English polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal - an experience that shocks him to his core.
Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She's traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive's bestselling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.
When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the black-skied Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: the exiled son of an aristocrat driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.'
MY THOUGHTS
All I can say is wow! On the surface, this story may seem to be a simple tale, but if you dig deeper, you will discover a rich tale that is filled with so much that you will sit back to think through everything you just read, after shutting that back cover. This sci-fi epic story encompasses as lot as the author takes you through a well thought out and fully realized existence of parallel universes. Her depiction of a future pandemic is eerily familiar and completely relatable as you traverse her imaginative creation. Without giving too much away, I was completely overwhelmed by the realization that I was, through the main character, finding beauty in a world that was on the cusp of dying - a lesson that everyone can learn. It is that moment when you are walking in a city filled with highrises, asphalt and garbage, but somehow a small flower has found its way to grow and thrive through a simple crack in the sidewalk.
The book starts off holding its cards close and not revealing much. By the middle, you feel like you have connected with the story and what you have read at the beginning, but it is the last third - the crescendo of the symphony that the mastery of the story takes place. I enjoyed the way everything connected and detangled in the end. Beautifully story masterfully written.
You can connect with Emily at - http://www.emilymandel.com/
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