Joey Madia, New Mystics Reviews

(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 liter...

(Deltona, FL: Thomas-Jacob Publishing, LLC, 2016), ISBN-13:   978-0-9979517-0-7 I am going to be up front here. I love this book, which is in large part due to its main character, Fleur Robins, daughter of an ultra-Conservative US Senator from Pennsylvania and an alcoholic mother who had Fleur as a teenager. Fleur is one of the most delightful, complex, and often contradictory child characters since Holden Caulfield in JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Sheila Tubman in Judy Blume’s Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great —two characters that had a profound impact on my childhood and, subsequently, my life. Perhaps it is my own growing fascination with Complexity and Chaos Theory, but I have been noticing a recent trend in storytelling—be it novels, television, or (to a lesser extent) film—that comes into play with Sharon Heath’s approach. It began with the male anti-hero in television shows like The Leftovers and Walking Dead , who is flawed, isolated, and oftentimes just pla...