My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

We are the unwitting carriers of our parents’ secrets, the ripples made by stones we never saw thrown… We humans are almost entirely made of water, except for the stones of our secrets.

I remember the way the rain seemed to talk to the roof as I fell asleep, and how the fire would snap and tell it to be quiet… I could feel the tendrils of a fragrance tickling the inside of my nose, slipping into the curls of my black hair… I inhaled, and fell into the fragrance like Alice down the rabbit hole.

My father had told me that many things in fairy tales weren’t real, but my problem was I didn’t always know which ones.

Cleopatra the goat rapidly became Cleo, but both names fit. She was still young enough for a nickname, but she had aspirations of grandeur, my father said. She ruled us from the very beginning.

The woman’s pants hugged her so tightly I thought at first she had blue legs…

Looking at her was like gazing into one of those enchanted mirrors and seeing a beautiful, older, far more assured version of myself.

My Review:

Erica Bauermeister is a master storyteller, an expert wordsmith, and an agile weaver of creative and fanciful tales that transport the mind as well as painfully massage the coronary muscle.   I ran the gamut while reading, I was transfixed, intrigued, appalled, frustrated, enraged, despondent, deeply moved, entertained, impatient, brokenhearted, and nearly insane with curiosity; yet through it all, I was also 100% engaged and fully immersed in the tale.

The writing was lushly descriptive, evocatively detailed, insightfully observant, and simply beguiling.   I have a keen sense of smell and was all too easily slotted within Emmeline’s head. I was instantly taken with and understood her assignment of colors, sounds, shapes, and emotions to corresponding scents. Yet I could never have imagined the sense of carefree abandon and adult encouragement to believe in magic and fairy tales during her rustic early childhood on an isolated island, although I would certainly have reveled in that as a child.

The captivating storylines were ingeniously creative, undeniably consuming, and cast with tantalizingly elusive, and uniquely compelling and stunningly clever characters who were a bit unsettling as they appeared peculiarly off center and while most were not dangerous, several were more than a tad beyond slippery. I was reluctant to put this book down for any length of time and continued to ruminate over this consuming story whenever those displeasing tasks otherwise known as daily living rudely interrupted my reading. In sum, Erica Bauermeister has a new fangirl.