Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07K8RHCK5
Publisher : Turning Leaf Books
Reviewed by LA
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Reading this mysterious book, I kept thinking of those elaborate monkey’s paw knots that my dad, an old naval man, used to make for me. As a child I would hold the huge knot in one hand, like a talisman, and with the other trace the cords round and round, trying to see how the different threads wove in, wove out, getting lost in the mystery of it… This book was like that.
I read a lot of crime books, and there’s a crime story here (that thread at least I managed to untangle by the end, to see how it fitted into the knot – I’d have been unhappy if I hadn’t managed that). And it’s a good crime story – at first it looks like a unitary one, a terrible crime against a female victim – but the mystery of that crime dives rapidly underground burrowing through the story and transforming into a mystery of other crimes, further, wider, money, diamonds, revenge… I liked that. I’d have been satisfied with that, on its own.
But inside the crime story there’s also a magical realist story about a family, transitioning across the generations from a shamanistic, native American past, into the current “scientific” world. Both worlds are presented as equally magical, violent and troubling, and a thread of a story about astrophysics links them. The magical purple light that is invariably a signifier of the violence of the shamanistic world – most shockingly and yet never really interrogated, the murder of a baby – seems to be echoed in the photons of black holes, disclosing terrible secrets about unsolved crimes in modernity. I never did completely untangle those threads, though I tried…
By preference I’m a left brain thinker: I like to take things apart and unpick their logic, and in another book I might have minded more that I couldn’t always do this. But the beautiful illustrations are important here: they speak to the right of your brain, and they bind the narratives together in ways that you understand differently. I’ve never seen pictures used like that in an adult book of fiction. It worked for me.
This isn’t a book you can read in one sitting, but it’s also not a book to pick up and put down in snatched moments between other things. It needs its own time. Maybe it’s a good book to read while you’re locked down or quarantined – some point in your life when you can focus on the interwoven narratives and forget about everything else.
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I undertook this review as part of a Blackthorn’s Book Tour. I purchased the book myself.
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About The Speed of Life
What happens when a brutal crime threatens a mother’s love for her son?
An old Florida family and those in their orbit get caught in a torrent of passion, a deadly legal system, and the mythology of the Everglades, which runs as deep as this story does.
About James Victor Jordan
James Victor Jordan, a descendant of Eastern European shamans, writes fiction to explore justice, multiculturalism, spiritualism, and nature. His short stories have been widely published. He is an attorney holding a JD degree from UCLA and a Master of Professional Writing degree from the University of Southern California. He lives in Santa Monica, California with his best friends: Andrea, his wife and UC, their standard poodle.
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