what on earth is that girl up to? surely someone should take her in hand! she's all of 14 years old and off she goes, drinking alcohol on the sly and getting a crush on a motorcycle-riding young hooligan, interfering in her mother's relationships and criticizing the poor woman's boyfriend, investigating an abandoned village and a forbidding ravine, being quite unwelcoming to guests and interlopers, practicing witchcraft, trying to ward off enemies, casting a dark spell with a certain degree of success. she's too precocious for her years and she better watch out!
where on earth did Frances Oliver go to? who knows where she's at and where's she's been! at one point she surely must have lived on a small Greek island in a small village; she surely must be familiar with the lackadaisical-desperate-needy bohemian lifestyle of a woman of a certain age, the new agey nonsense, the lack of roots and the need to keep moving and the secret hope to have a place she could call her own, to take root in. she writes of this woman, and her brilliant daughter, and the woman's lover, and the small Greek island they vacation on, and their whole odd lifestyle as if she's lived it herself, she writes so persuasively, so briskly, so casually of this strange, fascinating, frustrating, fragile little world. indeed she writes so persuasively that a reader could be forgiven for forgetting that this is a novel of sinister manipulation and ambiguous threats, of fear and death and weird, unknowable horror. Frances Oliver painted a bright landscape full of color and chaos, and then to prove what this landscape is truly about, doused it with inky black, life tumbled into an abyss. I read this fascinating story and suddenly felt a driving need to buy all of her books and learn all I could about her. there was little to find. will she even know that she has a new fan? would she even care?
who on earth are these so-called "Children of Epiphany"? they could be anywhere! why do they feed on life, sucking the vitality out of their prey, leaving only husks behind? they look just like you and me, human, with human needs and prey to human emotions and given to all-too-human habits, foibles, and faults. perhaps you know one of these Children, without knowing their true nature. perhaps one is in your life right now, coddling your worst traits, dampening the good in you, exulting in their secret power over you, sucking your life away. well hopefully you have a precocious young witch in your life as well to help you sort it all out. but you probably wouldn't listen to her anyway.
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