Full of Grace: Tuesday’s Child Earns It!

Title: Tuesday’s Child

Author(s): Dale Mayer
Publisher: Valley Publishing
Copyright: 2010
ISBN-13: 978-1-927461-31-0
Format: trade paperback & ebook
Genre: Paranormal/Romance
Part of Series: Book #3 of Psychic Visions
Rating: 4 out of 5 Stars

A Gift I Wouldn’t Want Either

We’ve often heard that psychic “gifts” can be a curse, but Tuesday’s Child takes the cursing part to the extreme. Dale Mayer creates a compelling paranormal/romance novel, where the main character is reclusive psychic Samantha Blair. Sam’s psychic gift isn’t just an audio-visual or emotional connection to the subject; she has a physical connection to murder victims. Sam lives through each ghoulish detail with the victims in real time, including their bleeding. She gains our sympathy in the opening scene while experiencing one of these psychic episodes: “The attack became a frenzy of stabs and slices, snatching all thought away. Her body jerked and arched in a macabre dance. Black spots blurred her vision and still the slaughter continued.” Experiencing these horrific episodes leaves Sam physically depleted, often with wounds that heal at a paranormal rate. We see how frail and vulnerable she is in a wide world that doesn’t accept her strange ability. Where police suspect her involvement if she tells them about the murders and where harassment or rejection is what Sam expects from everyone. Mayer compels us to want to see Sam nurtured with vivid descriptions. We want someone to come to her rescue, to help her, protect her and offer her some repast from the brutality she lives.

Dale Mayer creates the perfect compatibility in the form of Detective Brandt Sutherland. Brandt is researching cold cases he believes are related to a series of murders he’s been investigating. Brandt isn’t the stereotypical hard-nosed cop we’ve come to expect. He is an intelligent and capable member of Law Enforcement, but he is also open-minded. Hints of his previous work with a psychic gives us hope for Brandt working with Sam. There is the added bonus of the patient way he handles his mother when she gets in trouble at the assisted living facility. We feel confident that he can nurture Sam in the same way. So even though Sam doesn’t trust Brandt, we do and we root for their successful union through the period of mistrust that’s bound to occur.

A Plot That Moves With Intelligence

Tuesday’s Child combines a dichotomous plot of both fast-moving murder investigation and the importance of friends and family that keeps us reading to the end. Brandt’s gentle interactions with his mother combine with Sam’s helping dogs at the local vets to create a loving backdrop in which a serial killer strikes at select victims with horrifying violence and blood-letting. The murder has the glee of a naughty child who doesn’t get caught with his hand in the cookie jar. This contrast of gentleness versus violence, love versus hatred continues throughout the novel’s plot and subplot giving us the real-world feel of both the safety and danger around us and reminds us why we fight to keep the world safe. Dale Mayer creates an interesting read blended with a formula romance to produce the perfect book to read on a rainy night or at the beach.

Rapture Trilogy: Not as Enrapturing as Hoped

An Author-Requested Review

Title: Rapture

Author(s): Phillip W. Simpson
Publisher: Arete Publishing
Copyright: 2010
ISBN-10: 148394963X
ISBN-13: 978-1483949635
Format: ebook
Genre: Young Adult Dystopian
Part of Series: Part I of Rapture Trilogy
Rating: 2 1/2 out of 5

Phillip W. Simpson’s young adult novel, Rapture Trilogy, paints a dystopian world after the Biblical Rapture has occurred and the believers have been taken to heaven. Written in third-person, limited point-of-view we follow the teenaged protagonist, Sam, through a demon-infested landscape where the sun is blotted out, the moon is red as blood and ash continually falls from the sky, contaminating exposed water and food. Sam’s goal is to reach Los Angeles from his home in Jacob’s Ladder, Utah. Along the way he battles demon’s, trying to help the unbelievers left behind and fights beside the survivors holed up in caves and old businesses that remain standing after the earthquakes. But Sam is up to the challenge because he’s half-demon, half-human so has superior strength and speed coupled with life-long training in martial arts using the katana (long blade) & wakizashi (short blade). Of course, he has horns, which makes gaining survivors’ trust more difficult. Along the way, Sam befriends Joshua, who agrees to travel with him to Los Angeles, and together they save a girl named Grace from a group of roughen survivors. This unlikely trio makes their way across the brutal, post-Rapture landscape.

Simpson uses alternating chapters to give Sam’s background, which works well in telling us about Hikari and his daughter, Aimi who Sam loves, but slows the action a bit. His descriptions of both the setting and the fight scenes are engaging, but his characters lack depth. For instance, Sam is raised by Hikari, his sensei or teacher/foster-father who is, by all accounts in the novel, perfect. We learn through the flashbacks that Hikari takes Sam in as an infant from a Christian mother who was seduced by a demon. Hikari devotes his life to Sam’s martial arts training and Biblical education. Though Hikari was once a teacher, we have no idea how he supports Sam and Aimi. He seems to always be at home, that is when he’s not at church. How he provides for his family is a complete mystery. Aimi is also portrayed to perfection. She’s an obedient daughter who happily takes on the responsibility of cooking and cleaning for two men. On top of her household chores, Hikari trains Aimi in the martial arts almost as rigorously as he trains Sam, and all the while she maintains academic excellence and superior cheerleading skills. Excelling at everything she does is a bit unrealistic. No wonder Sam loves her, she is perfection incarnate. Neither Aimi nor Sam displays the rebellious nature that occurs in 98% of American teenagers. As an ex-high school teacher, I found that lack a little disturbing. Teenaged rebellion is part of growing up and developing self-identity.

While Phillip W. Simpson’s Rapture Trilogy provides us with a good escapism story, it lacks the depth and breadth of realism to make it worth a second read. Though the main character is the picture of social isolation, he lacks the rebellion, “to liberate himself or herself from childhood dependency on parental approval for always being the "good child." (Carl Pickard, PhD., “Surviving (Your Child’s) Adolescence”, Psychology Today December 6, 2009). Neither does Aimi, the quintessential “good child”. I doubt whether the teen population which Simpson’s targets will identify with either character.