Turning Leaf Books has joined with Blackthorn Book Tours to launch a fast-paced review tour of The Speed Of Life, An Illustrated Novel by James Victor Jordan.

Some of the most passionate readers in the country have volunteered to participate in  our tour and are in the final stages of reading the novel and writing their reviews!

Come back often and see what the latest reviewer has to say about The Speed Of Life, An Illustrated Novel, now offered at an incredible “Book Tour Special” of only $.99 on Amazon Kindle.

Matthew Arnold Stern, Author of Amiga reviews The Speed Of Life, An Illustrated Novel: 

[image error]Matthew Arnold Stern

“Estella Verus, a successful Federal prosecutor is brutally raped, and her son Andrew is accused of being behind it. What unfolds is a story with a richly developed and fascinating cast of characters, lush imagery, and clashes of beauty and brutality.

The Speed of Life is rooted in James Victor Jordan’s personal experiences as an attorney, tied with evocative depictions of Florida. The real appeal of this book are the sharp contrasts between scenes of luxury and poverty, Seminole shamanism and astrophysics, the beauty of the Florida Everglades and brutality both natural and manmade.

This rich and deep novel is one you’ll want to take slow to savor all the rich imagery, courtroom drama, and fascinating character and relationship studies. The Speed of Life is a brilliantly crafted courtroom drama and a mediation on the universe. This book will stay with you.”

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[image error]My Cov Blogger

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The Speed of Life Book Tour

What happens when a brutal crime threatens a mother’s love for her son?
An old Florida family and those in their orbit get caught in a torrent of passion, a deadly legal system, and the mythology of the Everglades, which runs as deep as this story does.

The Speed of Life explores multiple characters and their relationships. The story of the women, in particular, Hailey, Estella and Betty Mae, intrigued me with their complexities. The first chapter entitled #MeToo contains a harrowing event amongst the idyllic and vivid descriptions.

Alongside the reality of relationships, James Victor Jordan delves into the world of astrophysics and the court of law.

A friendship tested after the discovery of drugs, money laundering, funerals and so much more. There is so much in this debut novel.

I enjoyed the challenging vocabulary scattered throughout; teaching me as well as entertaining me.

James Victor Jordan, a descendant of Eastern European shamans, writes fiction to explore justice, multiculturalism, spiritualism, and nature.

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The Dark Side from the Inside- In the Dark Space

[image error]Monkey Knot Fist

“Reading this mysterious book, I kept thinking of those elaborate monkey’s paw knots that my dad, an old naval man, used to make for me. As a child I would hold the huge knot in one hand, like a talisman, and with the other trace the cords round and round, trying to see how the different threads wove in, wove out, getting lost in the mystery of it… This book was like that.

I read a lot of crime books, and there’s a crime story here (that thread at least I managed to untangle by the end, to see how it fitted into the knot – I’d have been unhappy if I hadn’t managed that).  And it’s a good crime story – at first it looks like a unitary one, a terrible crime against a female victim – but the mystery of that crime dives rapidly underground burrowing through the story and transforming into a mystery of other crimes, further, wider, money, diamonds, revenge…  I liked that.  I’d have been satisfied with that, on its own. 

But inside the crime story there’s also a magical realist story about a family, transitioning across the generations from a shamanistic, native American past, into the current “scientific” world.  Both worlds are presented as equally magical, violent and troubling, and a thread of a story about astrophysics links them.  The magical purple light that is invariably a signifier of the violence of the shamanistic world – most shockingly and yet never really interrogated, the murder of a baby – seems to be echoed in the photons of black holes, disclosing terrible secrets about unsolved crimes in modernity.  I never did completely untangle those threads, though I tried…

By preference I’m a left brain thinker: I like to take things apart and unpick their logic, and in another book I might have minded more that I couldn’t always do this.  But the beautiful illustrations are important here: they speak to the right of your brain, and they bind the narratives together in ways that you understand differently. I’ve never seen pictures used like that in an adult book of fiction. It worked for me.

This isn’t a book you can read in one sitting, but it’s also not a book to pick up and put down in snatched moments between other things.  It needs its own time.  Maybe it’s a good book to read while you’re locked down or quarantined – some point in your life when you can focus on the interwoven narratives and forget about everything else. 

I undertook this review as part of a Blackthorn’s Book Tour. I purchased the book myself.”

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