June 9: Free Offer on Snakes: A Novel
In a week I will have pdf copies of newly soon-to-be republished Snakes (Leaping Goat Press, June 2014) and I am looking for people to read and then, if you like it, review the novel for Amazon (if you don’t, e-mail me instead!) Click on the link below, and on Monday, June 9, I will send you a pdf copy, or, if you prefer, I will have a few Advanced Review Copies. please use the link to e-mail your name and address.
Snakes is transformative story about love, farming, and myth’s place in it all. Weaver Angela struggles with life’s necessary everyday betrayals moving from Midwestern farm life to northern California, finding “new ground to stand on” through the bedrock of snake lore.
What is being said about Snakes:
It’s rare to find fiction that combines such alive characters with imagery that is so poetic.
—Adam Frey, Writer and Arts Administrator
Patricia Damery’s protagonist in Snakes speaks in a compelling, fresh, and immediate voice. From the first page, I was taken in by the powerful, precise language and cinematic action. The woman weaves snake stories and lore together with the threads of her life, forming a tapestry layered with knowledge of love, pain, joy, passion, and loss. Her feminine initiation, embedded in the rhythms of farming, engages her identity as daughter, wife, and mother, and delves into layers of the soul.
—Virginia Beane Rutter, Jungian analyst, author of Woman Changing Woman, Celebrating Girls, Embracing Persephone
Perhaps it is the skill required by the high craft of weaving that allows Damery to write multi-metaphorically, or the sheer simplicity of her storytelling. The straightforward language and structure can support the artistry of numerous images, which interlock and reinforce each other in a way I’ve not often seen.
So what is Snakes about? It is about the Risks we take, both major and minor, that coalesce over time to define our lives. It is about the Fear of the little things and Fear of the big things, and at the end of the day, the month, the season, and our lives, finding out that it was a shorter distance to Love than we thought. It’s about Mistakes and Regrets, and how necessary they both are to a life well and fully lived. It’s about the Earth and the Sea; the Individual and the Familial; Respect and Trust; Youth and Age. But most of all, Snakes is about finding one’s place in the Universe and how that journey is formed.
—New Mystics, Joey Madia, author of Jester-Knight, Amazon review