Lily’s Odyssey
ISBN-13: 978-0984098453
All Things That Matter Press
Carol Smallwood
Lily’s Odyssey unfolds in three parts with the inevitability, impact, and resolution of a Greek play. The dialogue rings true, the concrete conveyed along with moods and half-tones to paint Midwestern middle class flawed characters with poignancy. The psychological detective novel explores the once largely unacknowledged: it is not only soldiers who get post-traumantic stress disorder and child abuse whether it is overt or covert incest is a time bomb. From daughter to grandmother, Lily’s voyage is told with lyricism, humor, and irony using a poet’s voice to distill contemporary American women’s changing role in religion, marriage, and family.
Carol Smallwood has appeared in English Journal, The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine, The Writer’s Chronicle, The Detroit News. Short listed for the Eric Hoffer Award for Best New Writing in 2009, a National Federation of State Poetry Societies Award Winner, she’s included in Who’s Who in America, and Contemporary Authors. Writing and Publishing: The Librarian’s Handbook, is one of her recent American Library Association books. Contemporary American Women: Our Defining Passages, co-edited, is her 22nd book.
From the Preface:
Weight of Silence, and Nicolet’s Daughter were considered as novel titles but it remained Lily’s Odyssey. Odysseus, the epic hero from Greek mythology in The Odyssey, helped by the gods with his band of men, maneuvers the Scylla and Charybdis passage as one of his many adventures in ancient times. Lily, from the Midwest, named by a gardener mother she doesn’t remember, struggles with a subconscious she fears will destroy her. Her narrow passage is between reality and disassociation, her time the latter 20th and early 21st Centuries. Her odyssey without help from the gods, reflects a passage through linear labyrinths women interpret as round. Lily’s fragmentation is echoed in the writing style.
Excerpts:
That evening after we saw Dr. Schackmann, Cal said, “You must realize that building my practice takes all my energy, and accept that as reality.” He was mixing his martini before dinner on the glass-topped mahogany sideboard. As he spoke, I studied the sideboard’s inlaid rosewood and ebony squares, again thinking he was a good surgeon, widely respected, and it must have been my fault that I wasn’t a good wife.
I got a coaster and placed it on the sideboard. He frowned and turned it so the pheasant on the coaster squarely faced him. “You don’t even know why you’re so dissatisfied,” he said, and laughed. “How can you not even know that?”
At the luncheon, I made as many trips as I dared to the restroom without causing people to wonder if something was wrong with me. Inside the unheated cement block room, my long deep breaths came out like smoke signals when I opened and shut my mouth to relieve my clenched jaw, shake my head in disbelief. Each time I went in, I saw cracks in the ceiling that I hadn’t seen before. Some natural light came through a small casement window dotted with snow, and I recalled making dots of snow on windows into fairy tale pictures when a child.
When people had complained about the cold rest rooms to Father Couillard, who was the priest before Father Mulcahy, he’d say, “Enjoy the cold while you can, my friends. Where many of you are headed, it will be plenty hot.”
Comments:
Smallwood is a watcher. Her eyes are unblinking. And her ears can detect the mercurial ticks of a heart. As a storyteller, she’s as sure as any Preakness jockey. She knows when words need to clip-clop up to the gate, when to bide, and when to unfetter them, to let the truth loose. Truth thunders in Lily’s Odyssey.
-Katie McKy, author of Pumpkin Town, Houghton Mifflin, and Wolf Camp, Tanglewood Press.
Smallwood is an incredibly gifted author with a broad range of experience. She demonstrates commitment to conscience in her work through Michigan Feminist Studies, The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine, and Best New Writing 2009.
-Sandra Potter, CEO & Founder, Dreamcatchers for Abused Children, http://www.dreamcatchersforabusedchildren.com; co-author, Unnecessary Roughness: Till Death Do Us Part; The Child Abuse Survivor Project.
literary novel
http://www.amazon.com/Lilys-Odyssey-Carol-Smallwood/dp/0984098453/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1271336237&sr=1-1
http://allthingsthatmatterpress.com
www.linkedin.com/in/carolsmallwood
Lily’s Odyssey
ISBN-13: 978-0984098453
All Things That Matter Press
Carol Smallwood
About the Book:
Lily’s Odyssey unfolds in three parts with the inevitability, impact, and resolution of a Greek play. The dialogue rings true, the concrete conveyed along with moods and half-tones to paint Midwestern middle class flawed characters with poignancy. The psychological detective novel explores the once largely unacknowledged: it is not only soldiers who get post-traumantic stress disorder and child abuse whether it is overt or covert incest is a time bomb. From daughter to grandmother, Lily’s voyage is told with lyricism, humor, and irony using a poet’s voice to distill contemporary American women’s changing role in religion, marriage, and family.
About the Author:
Carol Smallwood has appeared in English Journal, The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine, The Writer’s Chronicle, The Detroit News. Short listed for the Eric Hoffer Award for Best New Writing in 2009, a National Federation of State Poetry Societies Award Winner, she’s included in Who’s Who in America, and Contemporary Authors. Writing and Publishing: The Librarian’s Handbook, is one of her recent American Library Association books. Contemporary American Women: Our Defining Passages, co-edited, is her 22nd book.
From the Preface:
Weight of Silence, and Nicolet’s Daughter were considered as novel titles but it remained Lily’s Odyssey. Odysseus, the epic hero from Greek mythology in The Odyssey, helped by the gods with his band of men, maneuvers the Scylla and Charybdis passage as one of his many adventures in ancient times. Lily, from the Midwest, named by a gardener mother she doesn’t remember, struggles with a subconscious she fears will destroy her. Her narrow passage is between reality and disassociation, her time the latter 20th and early 21st Centuries. Her odyssey without help from the gods, reflects a passage through linear labyrinths women interpret as round. Lily’s fragmentation is echoed in the writing style.
Excerpts:
That evening after we saw Dr. Schackmann, Cal said, “You must realize that building my practice takes all my energy, and accept that as reality.” He was mixing his martini before dinner on the glass-topped mahogany sideboard. As he spoke, I studied the sideboard’s inlaid rosewood and ebony squares, again thinking he was a good surgeon, widely respected, and it must have been my fault that I wasn’t a good wife.
I got a coaster and placed it on the sideboard. He frowned and turned it so the pheasant on the coaster squarely faced him. “You don’t even know why you’re so dissatisfied,” he said, and laughed. “How can you not even know that?”
At the luncheon, I made as many trips as I dared to the restroom without causing people to wonder if something was wrong with me. Inside the unheated cement block room, my long deep breaths came out like smoke signals when I opened and shut my mouth to relieve my clenched jaw, shake my head in disbelief. Each time I went in, I saw cracks in the ceiling that I hadn’t seen before. Some natural light came through a small casement window dotted with snow, and I recalled making dots of snow on windows into fairy tale pictures when a child.
When people had complained about the cold rest rooms to Father Couillard, who was the priest before Father Mulcahy, he’d say, “Enjoy the cold while you can, my friends. Where many of you are headed, it will be plenty hot.”
Comments:
Smallwood is a watcher. Her eyes are unblinking. And her ears can detect the mercurial ticks of a heart. As a storyteller, she’s as sure as any Preakness jockey. She knows when words need to clip-clop up to the gate, when to bide, and when to unfetter them, to let the truth loose. Truth thunders in Lily’s Odyssey.
-Katie McKy, author of Pumpkin Town, Houghton Mifflin, and Wolf Camp, Tanglewood Press.
Smallwood is an incredibly gifted author with a broad range of experience. She demonstrates commitment to conscience in her work through Michigan Feminist Studies, The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine, and Best New Writing 2009.
-Sandra Potter, CEO & Founder, Dreamcatchers for Abused Children, http://www.dreamcatchersforabusedchildren.com; co-author, Unnecessary Roughness: Till Death Do Us Part; The Child Abuse Survivor Project.
literary novel
http://www.amazon.com/Lilys-Odyssey-Carol-Smallwood/dp/0984098453/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1271336237&sr=1-1
http://allthingsthatmatterpress.com
www.linkedin.com/in/carolsmallwood
About the Book
A NASA Space Shuttle plummets to Earth. A team of eight rescue workers plunges into a treacherous Texan wilderness to recover the wreckage, and become entwined in a cosmic conspiracy. An uncouth disembodied head enslaves an elderly rancher and uses his cellar as the war room of its campaign against God, a noir-style slickster with a buxom blonde wife and a taste for margaritas, rockets down from the suburbs of Heaven on a comet to do battle with metaphysical evils. “Shooting Angels” races from the jungles of Texas, to the dark corners of undiscovered space, to the innermost reaches of the human mind, to the smoggy streets of Central Heaven, where people are free to give in to their most detestable urges. The novel asks its characters to confront their ordering theories of the universe, and raises questions of how we are to envision divinity in a technological age.
About the Author
Nick Sansone is a current student in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He grew up in Champaign, IL, and attended Sarah Lawrence College as a student of economics and Russian language. His short fiction has appeared in several small journals, including Pear Noir!, Pank, and Ignavia. Nick has two years’ professional experience as a wildland firefighter and trail services employee through the AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps. In 2003, he served on a NASA search and rescue team after the destruction of the Space Shuttle Columbia.
Review
Shooting Angels is one of those books that pulls you in and keeps you there. The characters range from the relatable (crew members) to the sublime (Mr & Mrs God, of course) to the extreme (Pimp Daddy), yet each one feels completely real. The plot at first glance might seem like something you’d read from a Crichton or King-type author, but it goes so far above and beyond that. It’s a quick read, at a bit under 200 pages, and the prose is beautifully executed. You can’t go wrong with this book. Five stars, all the way. I hope to read more from Mr. Sansone in the future.
–Megan M. Angelini
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About the Book
In New Orleans following Katrina all bets are of; all masks dissolved. “Don’t forget the sham in shaman,” Jacob Laguerre lies to his new apprentice, Alex Hampton. When Alex, a twenty-eight year-old anthropology professor goes on field-study to post-Katrina New Orleans, he enters a chaotic and altered landscape where he’s psychologically, physically and spiritually challenged by the sarcastic mentoring of the mulatto, Laguerre, a current day voudou shaman.
Both Laquerre’s and Alex’s psyches struggle through stages of transition and rebirth as their lives are enmeshed with a group of quirky fringe-dwellers, as colorful and eccentric as the New Orleans itself. Lily Hampton, a sculptor, torn between her love for both men; Mavis, an artist who spent nights in her attic, but survived the floods; Perry Laguerre, Jacob’s hermaphroditic twin, and Bad Jacqui, lesbian owner of a French Quarter bar: are pulled together to form the cynical but ultimately idealistic team who vow to stay in post-Katrina New Orleans.
They all follow a taut path between madness and redemption in the no man’s land of Refrigerator Town as they assist in the aftermath and healing of both the city and those who remain.
About the Author
Gail Gray, a transplant from Lowell, Mass, now lives in Greenville, SC, USA. She is the owner of Shadow Archer Press which publishes edgy chapbooks and Fissure magazine. In the past Gail has worked in psychological/psychiatric practice, managed an art gallery, worked as a barrister, delivered phone books, flown hot air balloons, and was a professional astrological counselor. Her artwork has been shown in galleries and art festivals throughout the southeast. Her short stories have been published in Morpheus Tales, Sinister Tales, Exquisite Corpse, moonShine Review, The Foliate Oak, Pear Noir!, Dark Gothic Resurrected, Metazen, and Cover of Darkness 2009 anthology. She is the author of two collections of shorts stories, Dark Voices and Memories and Monsters. She is close to finishing the sequel to Shaman Circus… Shaman in Exile and is working on a third novel, Fireworks – Interference Equation.
REVIEW: A Tribute to New Orleans Spirit
Plot-wise, Gray’s book is unique and believably unbelievable (am I making sense here?). The setting is New Orleans, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The characters are desperate and emotionally fragile, and yet their culture is so incredibly strong that they are never hopeless or weak. What I’m trying to say here is that the book’s plot is out there, filled with magic and voodoo, otherworldly things, and yet it’s centered on spiritual questions, questions that seem a commonality in the characters’ minds. Perhaps in the readers’(?) — Jen Knox; Musical Chairs
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RAMBLING ROUND Inside & Outside at the Same Time
by Anthony Buccino
Paperback: $15.00 Ships in 3–5 business days
Anchored in New Jersey, Buccino pays tribute to the unique Garden State Parkway toll road, but you don’t have to be from NJ to enjoy this collection.
The best of Buccino’s humor and homage to living life every day with tongue firmly in cheek. When he writes seriously, his stories infuse a nice warm feeling. Buccino’s been called “New Jersey’s Garrison Keillor, or something like that.” His is the plain and simple view of the world around him.
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