About Me
- Satima Flavell
- Perth, Western Australia, Australia
- I am based in Perth, Western Australia. You might enjoy my books - The Dagger of Dresnia, the first book of the Talismans Trilogy, is available at all good online book shops as is Book two, The Cloak of Challiver. Book three, The Seer of Syland, is in preparation. I trained in piano and singing at the NSW Conservatorium of Music. I also trained in dance (Scully-Borovansky, WAAPA) and drama (NIDA). Since 1987 I have been writing reviews of performances in all genres for a variety of publications, including Music Maker, ArtsWest, Dance Australia, The Australian and others. Now semi-retired, I still write occasionally for the ArtsHub website.
My books
The first two books of my trilogy, The Talismans, (The Dagger of Dresnia, and book two, The Cloak of Challiver) are available in e-book format from Smashwords, Amazon and other online sellers. Book three of the trilogy, The Seer of Syland, is in preparation.I also have a short story, 'La Belle Dame', in print - see Mythic Resonance below - as well as well as a few poems in various places.
The best way to contact me is via Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/satimaflavell
Buy The Talismans
The first two books of The Talismans trilogy were published by Satalyte Publications, which, sadly, has gone out of business. However, The Dagger of Dresnia and The Cloak of Challiver are available as ebooks on the usual book-selling websites, and book three, The Seer of Syland, is in preparation.
The easiest way to contact me is via Facebook.
The Dagger of Dresnia
The Cloak of Challiver, Book two of The Talismans
Mythic Resonance
Mythic Resonance is an excellent anthology that includes my short story 'La Belle Dame', together with great stories from Alan Baxter, Donna Maree Hanson, Sue Burstynski, Nike Sulway and nine more fantastic authors! Just $US3.99 from Amazon.
Got a Kindle? Check out Mythic Resonance.
Follow me on Twitter
Share a link on Twitter
For Readers, Writers & Editors
- A dilemma about characters
- Adelaide Writers Week, 2009
- Adjectives, commas and confusion
- An artist's conflict
- An editor's role
- Authorial voice, passive writing and the passive voice
- Common misuses: common expressions
- Common misuses: confusing words
- Common misuses: pronouns - subject and object
- Conversations with a character
- Critiquing Groups
- Does length matter?
- Dont sweat the small stuff: formatting
- Free help for writers
- How much magic is too much?
- Know your characters via astrology
- Like to be an editor?
- Modern Writing Techniques
- My best reads of 2007
- My best reads of 2008
- My favourite dead authors
- My favourite modern authors
- My influential authors
- Planning and Flimmering
- Planning vs Flimmering again
- Psychological Spec-Fic
- Readers' pet hates
- Reading, 2009
- Reality check: so you want to be a writer?
- Sensory detail is important!
- Speculative Fiction - what is it?
- Spelling reform?
- Substantive or linking verbs
- The creative cycle
- The promiscuous artist
- The revenge of omni rampant
- The value of "how-to" lists for writers
- Write a decent synopsis
- Write a review worth reading
- Writers block 1
- Writers block 2
- Writers block 3
- Writers need editors!
- Writers, Depression and Addiction
- Writing in dialect, accent or register
- Writing it Right: notes for apprentice authors
Interviews with authors
My Blog List
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Favourite Sites
- Alan Baxter
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- Bren McDibble
- Celestine Lyons
- Guy Gavriel Kay
- Hal Spacejock (Simon Haynes)
- Inventing Reality
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- Joel Fagin
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Blog Archive
Places I've lived: Manchester, UK
Places I've lived: Gippsland, Australia
Places I've lived: Geelong, Australia
Places I've lived: Tamworth, NSW
Places I've Lived - Sydney
Places I've lived: Auckland, NZ
Places I've Lived: Mount Gambier
Places I've lived: Adelaide, SA
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Places I've lived: Barre, MA, USA
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Sunday 13 October 2013
Book Review: Wind Follower by Carole McDonnell
Sunday, October 13, 2013 |
Posted by
Satima Flavell
Wind Follower by Carole McDonnell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This review first appeared in the now-defunct webzine, The Specusphere, in October 2009.
Wind Follower is Carole McDonnell's first novel, but prior to publishing this book, she was already established as a reviewer and essayist. She has also written poetry and devotional pieces, mainly for Christian journals. Her Christian faith has also informed her speculative fiction work, and this is very apparent in Wind Follower.
The story is an adventure-romance, set in a richly imagined world. Boy (Loic) meets girl (Satha), boy loses girl, boy goes to ends of earth to find girl, and finds his own true purpose en route. The setting is a kind of alternate Africa, or perhaps it stands for any country ripe for colonialism. McDonnell has analogously incorporated all the earth's races into her continent, representing them by the very dark Theseni; the lighter coloured Ibeni, the slant-eyed, yet sometimes red-headed Doreni and threatening all of them, the invading Angleni.
The Juno imprint is noted for its strong female lead characters, and Satha, the heroine of Wind Follower, carries the role well. She has to deal with more perils than Pauline, more trials than Job: in fact at one point she is so obviously an avatar of Hagar, Abraham's concubine, that we are looking for someone to play the role of Isaac. But although the book has a curiously Old Testament feel to it, the parallels are not distinct: McDonnell's references gently investigate possibilities and move on, as we follow the journeys of Loic and Satha through alternating first person chapters.
Mc Donnell is a fine writer, and Wind Follower leads us to expect even better things from her in the future. The story is burdened, however, by a certain falling down between two stools – or actually in the middle of a circle of stools. We have a classic epic journey, involving a romance and a coming-of-age story; an equally classic captivity scenario, in which the enslaved person survives through her own fortitude and resilience, and a rather self-consciously overlaid effort to show that faith conquers all. At the end, we learn that the Tribes never succeeded in uniting against the Angleni and remained the underdogs, yet they rejoice that the Angleni brought their own true religion, encapsulated in the Lost Book, back to them.
And here's the problem. What readership is Wind Follower aimed at? Many Christians, black and white, are likely to balk at a theology that is very like that of Christianity, yet does not follow it nearly closely enough for the tastes of fundamentalists. On the other hand, many fantasy readers of whatever ancestry will reject the book's overtly Christian allegory, and some black readers who are not Christians may be dismayed at the oblique suggestion, normally propagated only by the conquerors, that as long as invasion brings True Religion it is acceptable. Yet still other readers, not all of them Christian, will feel uncomfortable at the idea of spreading a what is supposed to be a religion of peace through invasion and, the conquered people having accepted that religion's tenets, ignoring them in order to rebel against the invaders. Like the Old Testament, Wind Follower abounds in mixed messages, and this is why it falls in the middle of those hypothetical stools.
Yet there is probably a niche market for books like this one, and it is, I would venture, among Christians who are not fundamentalists and who are willing to consider that perhaps parables can be spoken in the language of fantasy as well as that of religion. A tall order, perhaps, but I hope McDonnell finds this readership. An author who can produce a work such as Wind Follower deserves to have an extensive circulation.
McDonnell can be found on Facebook and at http://www.darkparables.blogspot.com. Her work will not be easy to find in Australia: however, Wind Follower can be found for sale at online shops.
View all my Goodreads reviews
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This review first appeared in the now-defunct webzine, The Specusphere, in October 2009.
Wind Follower is Carole McDonnell's first novel, but prior to publishing this book, she was already established as a reviewer and essayist. She has also written poetry and devotional pieces, mainly for Christian journals. Her Christian faith has also informed her speculative fiction work, and this is very apparent in Wind Follower.
The story is an adventure-romance, set in a richly imagined world. Boy (Loic) meets girl (Satha), boy loses girl, boy goes to ends of earth to find girl, and finds his own true purpose en route. The setting is a kind of alternate Africa, or perhaps it stands for any country ripe for colonialism. McDonnell has analogously incorporated all the earth's races into her continent, representing them by the very dark Theseni; the lighter coloured Ibeni, the slant-eyed, yet sometimes red-headed Doreni and threatening all of them, the invading Angleni.
The Juno imprint is noted for its strong female lead characters, and Satha, the heroine of Wind Follower, carries the role well. She has to deal with more perils than Pauline, more trials than Job: in fact at one point she is so obviously an avatar of Hagar, Abraham's concubine, that we are looking for someone to play the role of Isaac. But although the book has a curiously Old Testament feel to it, the parallels are not distinct: McDonnell's references gently investigate possibilities and move on, as we follow the journeys of Loic and Satha through alternating first person chapters.
Mc Donnell is a fine writer, and Wind Follower leads us to expect even better things from her in the future. The story is burdened, however, by a certain falling down between two stools – or actually in the middle of a circle of stools. We have a classic epic journey, involving a romance and a coming-of-age story; an equally classic captivity scenario, in which the enslaved person survives through her own fortitude and resilience, and a rather self-consciously overlaid effort to show that faith conquers all. At the end, we learn that the Tribes never succeeded in uniting against the Angleni and remained the underdogs, yet they rejoice that the Angleni brought their own true religion, encapsulated in the Lost Book, back to them.
And here's the problem. What readership is Wind Follower aimed at? Many Christians, black and white, are likely to balk at a theology that is very like that of Christianity, yet does not follow it nearly closely enough for the tastes of fundamentalists. On the other hand, many fantasy readers of whatever ancestry will reject the book's overtly Christian allegory, and some black readers who are not Christians may be dismayed at the oblique suggestion, normally propagated only by the conquerors, that as long as invasion brings True Religion it is acceptable. Yet still other readers, not all of them Christian, will feel uncomfortable at the idea of spreading a what is supposed to be a religion of peace through invasion and, the conquered people having accepted that religion's tenets, ignoring them in order to rebel against the invaders. Like the Old Testament, Wind Follower abounds in mixed messages, and this is why it falls in the middle of those hypothetical stools.
Yet there is probably a niche market for books like this one, and it is, I would venture, among Christians who are not fundamentalists and who are willing to consider that perhaps parables can be spoken in the language of fantasy as well as that of religion. A tall order, perhaps, but I hope McDonnell finds this readership. An author who can produce a work such as Wind Follower deserves to have an extensive circulation.
McDonnell can be found on Facebook and at http://www.darkparables.blogspot.com. Her work will not be easy to find in Australia: however, Wind Follower can be found for sale at online shops.
View all my Goodreads reviews
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3 comments:
Thanks so much, Satima
I think most Christian minorities or Christian First World peoples -- Christian aborigine, Christian African, Christian Native American-- would understnd Wind Follower. That's what I wanted to show -- the conflicted dark-skinned believer who truly believes the religion brought by the white man. This is not really a niche book though, although to whites it might be. Most Christians are non-white. Most Christians have had to deal with the fact that white missionaries and imperialistic governments destroyed their ancestors. But white fantasy writers and white christian writers have not concerned themselves with our stories from our POV. Instead we get stuff like avatar, shown from the conqueror's pov.
It's a pleasure, Carole! I was worried when The Specusphere went down that people looking for reviews of books that weren't covered by the big guys would be short-changed, so I'm gradually re-publishing the ones I wrote, here and on Goodreads.