Review: Dreams and Imagination meet reality
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 09 11, 2012
This is an well written story about a young woman who falls in love, follows her heart, and suffers unforeseen consequences. It is told in the first person by its protagonist, Angela, and much of it reads like a journal or memoir. As a journal it stands up well to scrutiny, for it is rich in descriptions of external detail, color, and significance as well as thoughts, conflicted emotions, and concerns of its author. Angela is a thirtyish English Lit teacher, well educated, traveled and seemingly sophisticated, who tends to see the world through the looking glass of an imagination based on literature, myth, and popular culture. Although she expresses skepticism about the magical, she is open-minded enough to solicit the advice of fortune tellers and, when one touches a nerve, she reacts.The plot is simple. Girl meets boy, Marriage in Greece, and Honeymoon in Venice. An Afterword adds a final act. Act one is uneventful and fun: Angela falls for an exotic Greek named Stavros instead of the safer candidates available. Stavros is a handsome, sexy guy with all the attributes of a romance novel heartthrob. To this reader it seemed that Angela imagined Stavros to possess attributes he never demonstrated. Love can trump logic and common sense, even with someone as sophisticated as Angela. This is an old idea, an important one. Act two is the biggie. Angela and Stavros travel to Greece for their wedding. There Angela meets her fiancée's family, which is dominated by Giorgius, the father. Giorgius orchestrates a series of events that seem intended to make Angela miserable and ruin her wedding. By American standards, Giorgius would be regarded as a bully, if not a serial mental abuser, self-centered and inconsiderate. He's controlling, exhibits ill temper, insults Angela's family, shows favoritism, and disrespects at will. The list goes on, but you get the point. No one stands up to him. Angela, a guest, cannot. Stavros, her presumed protector, is passive. Act three is a happy honeymoon in a beautiful Italian city, a welcome contrast to the time in Greece. It reads much like a travelogue. The story could end there, but the author added an Afterword, which tells what happened in later years. I won't comment on it except to say it changed my view of what came before.Though novels may be influenced by actual events, they are invented stories. Journals and memoirs are subjective versions of true things. This story could have been composed during the events described or afterward, perhaps as part of an attempt to reconstruct and understand what went right and wrong, as therapy. The author is an English teacher and so is the protagonist. The book is filled with details and sounds autobiographical; the Afterword admits as much. If so, it must have been difficult to write; more credit to the author for putting it before the world.A few qualms. The novel is overflowing with references to literature, myth, TV shows, and popular culture. A reader who notices these references is sometimes distracted from the story. I noticed; nuff said. The author has a gift for description, and unfailingly tells the shape, color, and details of every significant person, place, and object. Sometimes less is more.