Genre: General
Fiction/Women’s Fiction
Description:
“Everyone expected big things from Ariel Thompkins. Wasn’t she the
girl who’d roped her friends into one madcap adventure after another, who’d met
the challenge of losing both parents before turning eighteen, who’d gone on to
graduate summa cum laude from UCLA? So how did this livewire end up delivering
the day’s mail for the U.S. Postal Service, hunkering down each night with her
half-blind cat in front of the TV, ruminating over the width of her thighs? It
looked as though it would take a miracle to get her out of her rut.
Who knew that miracle would come in the form of an acutely candid best
friend and a motley crew of strangers—a homeless drunk once aptly nicknamed “Nosy,”
a lonely old woman seeing catastrophe around every corner, a shy teenager
fleeing sexual abuse, a handsome young transplant from the Midwest with a
passion for acting and for Ariel herself? Not to mention the fossil remains of
a flat-faced crone who just might have been the ancestress of everyone alive
today?
Chasing Eve takes us on a funny, sad, hair-raising adventure
into the underbelly of the City of Angels, where society’s invisible people
make a difference to themselves and to others, and where love sometimes
actually saves the day.”
Author:
“Sharon Heath writes fiction and non-fiction exploring the interplay
of science and spirit, politics and pop culture.”
Find out more about Ms Heath
at her blog.
Appraisal:
Trying to decide what it was that appealed to me about this book I came
to a strange realization. It wasn’t the story. Well, maybe that isn’t fair.
There are a few story threads that together make up this book, a couple related
to the protagonist Ariel’s struggles with different aspects of life and another
about her quest to sneak in and see the fossilized remains of what she imagines
as one of the first people on Earth. A novel has to have a story, and this one
does, and I liked that story. But what appealed to me the most were the
characters. They ranged from rich to poor, from young to old and on to ancient
(literally) in the case of Eve, the fossilized remains already mentioned. In
spite of a wide variety of characters I found each of them got me thinking,
entertained me, and showed me something in the way they viewed the world that I
could learn from or at least better understand others from what they had to
show me. A great book needs both a good story and good characters. Chasing
Eve delivers on both.
FYI:
A small amount of adult language.
Format/Typo
Issues:
No significant issues.
Rating: *****
Five Stars
Reviewed
by: BigAl
Approximate
word count: 100-105,000 words
6 comments:
The character development was wonderful - that's exactly what I loved about it, too. :-)
Thanks for dropping by, Melinda. It was sure an interesting and entertaining crew.
Thank you for the lovely review! I fell in love with these characters and how generously they revealed their stories to me.
I am reading it now, during the dark days of the pandemic. It is real enough to ground me and fictional enough to let me escape. But it isn't bleak (which would be unbearable). I am grateful to Sharon Heath for writing the perfect novel for this moment.
Thanks for writing the book and dropping in, Sharon.
And thank you, Unknown commenter. :)
Dear Unknown commenter, you brought tears to my eyes. Thank you, and may you and those you love stay safe and healthy!
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