Joey Madia, New Mystics Reviews

  (Deltona, FL: Thomas-Jacob Publishing, LLC, 2025), ISBN-13: 978-1-950750-58-0 For the past eight years, I have been inspired, challenged, and moved by the novels of Jungian analyst Sharon Heath. In February 2017, I was introduced to her most fascinating, provocative character, the neurodivergent, brilliant physicist Fleur Robins, who reminds me so much of my daughter, who was 18 at the time and who turned 26 today. Fleur has now appeared in four books, all of which I have read and reviewed, and I am looking forward to her further (cosmic) adventures. I have also read and reviewed a stand-alone novel from 2019 called Chasing Eve . In many ways, the clusters of characters (a mix of blood and chosen family) in Heath’s beautifully rendered, emotionally and socially complex novels, are akin to those in the films of Wes Anderson— Royal Tennenbaums most prevalently, especially in terms of invisible threads . As I have mentioned in previous reviews, there is such a broad spectrum ...

(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, 2019), ISBN-13:   978-1-950750-28-3 I have to say up front: I am a big fan of Sharon Heath’s writing—especially her characters, such as the brilliant but troubled eponymous lead in the Fleur trilogy (also published by Thomas-Jacob). Heath, a certified Jungian analyst, “writes fiction and non-fiction exploring the inter-play of science and spirit, politics and pop culture.” Creating at the intersection of perceived dichotomies such as these is very Jungian, alchemical, shamanic, and above all, necessary. Some books provide an escape hatch away from the mounting troubles of a world in crisis. And there are plenty of reasons to seek escape. This past week, another pair of factors—economics and health—ramped up their interplay with the increase in Coronavirus cases and wild gyrations in the Stock Market. (The fact that we talk about economics and health as closely linked because of greedy pharmaceutical and insurance companies and a ...

(Deltona, FL: Thomas-Jacob Publishing, LLC, 2018), ISBN-13:   978-0-997951783 Before you read another word of this review, be sure you’ve done one of the following two things (or, if you are feeling generous, both): 1.      Read the previous two books in this series 2.      Read my reviews of the first two books in the series Now we can proceed. There is an ancient Chinese curse that says, “May you live in interesting times.” Are we cursed? It certainly seems so. The world is, if not IN chaos, on the brink of it. The United States finds itself at a level of Us and Them and Othering that is probably the greatest since the sixties—and there is every reason to believe that this state of things has been carefully engineered. The past two times I’ve left my writing room to go have dinner with friends, the conversation devolved into line demarcating and political posturing. Even when I politely asked that we talk about something else, ...

(Deltona, FL: Thomas-Jacob Publishing, LLC, 2017), ISBN-13:   978-0-9979517-2-1 Four months ago I was introduced to Fleur Robins, with whom I fell instantly in love. Not romantically, understand, but as a father who wants to protect a curious and brilliant, although socially and emotionally challenged, young woman from the darkness in the world, while wanting her to bathe immersively and unabashedly in the light of it as well. Perhaps it is the recent event of my only daughter’s eighteenth birthday, and her starting her senior year of high school as I write this. Perhaps it is the dancing whirl of contradictions that are her chosen isolation and digital world-traveling, her emotional and social strengths and weaknesses, her brilliance and naïveté and her own journey into the darkness and re-entrance into the light that make me invest so heavily in Fleur’s adventures. This is to take nothing away from Sharon Heath, who writes with a power and honesty that draws me in and ma...