“Messages from the Void”: A Review of Sharon Heath’s The Mysterious Composition of Tears, The Further Adventures of Fleur, Book 1

(Deltrona, FL: Thomas-Jacob Publishing, 2022). ISBN: 978-1-950750-46-7

Five years ago this month, I was introduced to a literary character that I have come to truly love. It is a familial, fatherly love, as I have enthusiastically expressed in my reviews for the each of the books in the Fleur Trilogy: The History of My Body (2016), Tizita (2017), and Return of the Butterfly (2018).

Fleur Robins is the offspring of an ultra-conservative US Senator from Pennsylvania and an alcoholic mother who gave birth to Fleur when she was a teenager. In the past, I have likened Fleur to Holden Caulfield in JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Sheila Tubman in Judy Blume’s Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great.

But much has changed for Fleur. In the intervening years since Return of the Butterfly, she has become a wife and mother. Her Nobel Prize–winning work (she is a genius with considerable quirks) in Complexity and Chaos Theory in the midst of the increasing chaos on Earth has led her literally out of this world.

In the story-time decade she’s been absent, humanity has been convulsing with the consequences of climate change, COVID-19, and grappling with the double-edged sword of technology. Animals and trees are in such danger and anguish that they communicate with an increasing number of people (but remember: those who are spiritually in tune have communicated with Earth’s flora and fauna since time immemorial).

The beauty of the Fleur books is that family, friends, and colleagues have always been the center of her world. Heath, from the start, has woven an ethnically and socially diverse tapestry of characters. Food and fellowship are often scenic centerpieces, and the diversity of experiences and opinions (sometimes traumatic; often strong), are edgy and provocative. I don’t always like her characters, which seems to be the point, because they don’t always like one another—or themselves.

At the core of The Mysterious Composition of Tears (a character working on their thesis explains this composition in detail) is the tension between the macro and micro that most parents who are also committed professionals eventually, inevitably face. Is the pursuit of money, accolades, and answers in one’s career worth the time away from family? What is the damage done? This question is one with which I repeatedly grappled. My daughter harbored deep anger for many months after I chose to accept a scholarship to a leadership retreat rather than vacation with our family for her sixteenth birthday.

So you can imagine how Fleur’s two children, Callay and Wolf, must feel after she chose to try to save the planet rather than be there for them in their youth.

Another fascinating aspect of the Fleur books is that she talks to us from the future and not the present. Therefore, she is undergoing continued self-reflection and a certain amount of processing as she relates her at-times heartbreaking and often embarrassing experiences.

In The Mysterious Composition of Tears, Fleur communicates with us (the publisher helpfully chose a different typeface for those sections) from the edge of a Black Hole, where she is in community and communion with some of the greatest scientific and philosophical minds of the twentieth century.

There are also expressions of Light and Dark, in the form of two mysterious higher intelligences, which give this fourth installment an almost biblical feel. It is, however, based in physics and is therefore more secular than religious, the same as its trio of predecessors.

Fifteen years ago, I would have said that The Mysterious Composition of Tears has supernatural and paranormal elements, but I am now experienced enough to know that it is all just the natural and the normal. It is all about attunement. About energy, vibration, and frequency—the very triad Nikola Tesla told us was the key to unlocking the Universe.

I mentioned COVID-19. We are going to be seeing a great deal of storytelling in the next few years that draws on the pandemic and its complex ramifications, although this is one of the first novels I have read to do so. Heath’s personal feelings about masks, the shots, and the larger politics of the lockdown come through strongly, which is inevitable and appropriate. After all, we have all been indelibly changed by the past two-plus years of struggle, heartbreak, and controversy, and storytellers use what they know.

I want to mention some central themes, beyond family and saving ourselves from the planetary damage we have done (or for most of us, allowed our government and the corporations that run it to do because of how we vote and how engaged we are with various socioeconomic and geopolitical issues). All of my book review titles for these four books contain the word “Void,” which is Fleur’s driving obsession. It is within the Void that alchemy occurs. It is a place of infinite possibility where innumerable wave probabilities emerge and collapse depending on where we are placing our Intention and our Focus.

The sticky complication that is Love is another prevalent theme. Sexual relations, engagements and marriages, and the children of close families dating one another are all in play in this series. Amidst the by-the-book and fabricated physics and some of the other Big Ideas there is always this relatable hook on which to hang our own experiences (another instance of the macro and micro in convergence).

I don’t think I am breaking any ground by postulating that things are only going to get worse in America and the world in the next twenty-six months. I just bought groceries and put some gas in the car. Those in power can spin or deny to their mortgaged hearts’ content, but Inflation and Corporate Oligarchy price gouging are real. People are unquestionably hurting. Mentally, physically, professionally… more and more of the population are speaking about despair. And I am not just talking about the stereotype of the basement-dwelling, VR-engaging millennial. Impressively accomplished Gen Xers are finding it difficult to find a reason to get out of bed and get about their day. And the Baby Boomers… their loss and loneliness postpandemic is palpable and heartbreaking.

Heath includes all of these generations (and their conflicting foibles and foci) in The Mysterious Composition of Tears—their complex interactions hurtling through our hearts and minds like fractals in a Universe-sized hologram of Truth.

In closing, I state with considerable certainty that Sharon Heath has, through her fiction and through Fleur, produced a record of the challenges of our times that is unparalleled among modern fiction writers, making these four books (and, I selfishly hope, the two more to come) an utterly essential read.