Citadel

by Jack Remick

Citadel is a much needed, unforgiving and unapologetic evisceration of the idea of female inferiority we have so primitively accepted today and throughout history. The novel is an honest, sometimes savage look at the relationship between men and women, and what the world could be like if women were in control.

Genres: Contemporary, Womens Fiction, Fiction

378 pages, Paperback

Published October 1, 2017

About the author

Novelist, poet.
Author of--
Valley Boy, Second Edition
No Century for Apologies: Short listed for the Hoffer Grand Prize 2023
Citadel, the novel
Blood
The California Quartet:
The Deification--Book One
Valley Boy--Book Two (first Edition)
The Book of Changes--Book Three
Trio of Lost Souls--Book Four
Gabriela and The Widow (Winner "Best Women's Fiction" Orangeberry Virtual Book Expo; Montaigne Medal Finalist; Book of the Year Award Finalist)
co-author of The Weekend Novelist Writes a Mystery (with Robert J. Ray)
Satori-poems by Jack Remick
Doubles in a Game of Chance--a novel about a bureaucratic nightmare and a lost protagonist on a thankless quest.
Man Alone--The Dark Book
Songs of Sadness Joy and Despair for the Anthropocene--a pen in one hand, a razor in the other (Long poems and Josie Delgado)

Reviews

[Nicole Disney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Citadel is a much needed, unforgiving and unapologetic evisceration of the idea of female inferiority we have so primitively accepted today and throughout history. Remick shows tremendous skill in the way he attacks such a heated and complicated subject. He never shies away from the atrocious acts of violence against women, but neither does he lose the magic of his whirlwind storytelling in favor of lecture. Citadel is an honest, sometimes savage look at the relationship between men and women, and what the world could be like if women were in control.

Trisha de Tours is an editor at Pinnacle Books and has been directed by her boss to find a bestseller. When she finds out the new resident in her condos, Daiva Izokaitis, has a manuscript called Citadel, she agrees to read it. Trisha soon finds out Daiva is a literary rebel, refusing to adhere to the fundamentals of writing and later refusing to participate in the editing process, yet she has created a revolutionary novel that overcomes Trisha so completely we see her drown in the story, and reemerging a different woman.

When we first meet Trisha, she enjoys a world of literature, good wine, and a steady stream of men she refers to as “beach meat”. She treats men as objects, running them through her criteria, sometimes taking them home for sex, and then sending them away. She is casual and dismissive, but beneath this is a fear one of these men might become violent or even kill her one day. Trisha becomes the embodiment of the unease women conceal throughout their lives, the way women behave as if it is a given men will not hurt them when in fact this assumption is often a bluff. Remick shows us the tragedy of how the prevalence of rape and violence poisons our entire culture when he says, “All men, rapists or not, benefit from the fear all women live with.”

When Trisha reads Citadel, she sees that Daiva has named this delicate state of being. She calls it the Niche. Remick creates many terms that are so relevant they could become a part of our everyday vocabulary without even a stutter. In this quote we see Trisha explain the Niche to her therapist: “Western women are in the Niche, Rose. We’re pretty little madonnas living in a pretty little Niche. We have a tiny window of freedom. It’s barely two hundred years wide and we think it will go on forever but it won’t. It’s eating me alive. You’re educated. You have a career. You have clients. You’re independent. You control your money. You own property. You vote. You’re free. Two hundred years ago, you couldn’t have any of that. That’s the Niche.” In this passage, we see Trisha not only realize how fortunate she is to live in the time and place she does, but more importantly, the fragility of the Niche. It is this realization that begins to unravel Trisha and send her deeper and deeper into Citadel until she is having conversations with its characters and until she is ultimately, terrified to publish the book at all, certain introducing the idea of women in control of everything will trigger the destruction of everything she knows.

Trisha is further haunted by Daiva’s insistence that the facts of Citadel are based in real, modern science. The Y chromosome is dying, and men are no longer necessary to continue society. Daiva sees the desperation of female discrimination through the objective lens of a scientist. Daiva speaks with terms like Residual Evolutionary Response. This refers to behaviors that have become part of our instinct, despite them no longer serving a purpose in our world. The Y chromosome is a casualty of Residual Evolutionary Response. Males go through the world relying on strength, mass, and violence, but these traits are no longer assets. Being comprised almost entirely of those traits, men themselves are no longer assets. Men seal their own ruination when they refuse to adapt, for reasons seen in this quote: “Men have no reason to change, they own the world and your body. Women for centuries have soft-pedaled their wants just to stay alive. One word – NO – changes everything in human evolution.” This is the heart of the struggle. Men refuse to change because they believe they are operating from a place of ultimate power, but women need but say no, together, to change everything.

As the characteristics that put men in control lose value, women gain strength, and there you find male hatred toward women. Daiva puts the struggle in simple terms here: “Competition between men and women grew intense as women became more competent at doing what man alone was supposed to do. Hence the repression of the intelligent and able woman by totally devaluing her position in the system of technology and progress. As soon as a field opened up to woman, it ceased to be of interest to man. In much the same way that the Y chromosome lost all but twenty-seven of its genes, men lost all ability except the abilities to kill, to copulate, and to make war.” Here we see that men find it inherently weak to be female. Once a woman can complete the same task, that task becomes feminine and weak, but this attitude has left men with little to do other than create war and chaos, which has less and less of a place in an awakened world, leaving men with no place at all.

Remick takes no shortcuts in this novel. He does not excuse or soften the reality of rape culture, but even though he has the opportunity to do so, he also does not simplify the issue of how to handle it. After a long history of horrific abuse, women have the capability to control the genome, to eliminate men entirely. It is a simple answer. After the brutality we see from men, it even seems like the obvious answer, but Remick does not reduce this story to an all-female utopia. The women of this story, ever compassionate and wise, contemplate many different answers. They agonize over whether they will still be human if they eliminate men. Remick gives his female characters what their male counterparts lacked, the capacity to make decisions from a place of far-sighted morality, not immediate self-interest.

Remick also shows a deep reverence for language both in the rhythm and precision of his prose, and in his content. He draws the connection between language and the way it can manipulate culture in this passage: “The phenomenon of semantic overloading that characterized Old Society language produced such obviously incomprehensible phrases as ‘protective reaction strike,’ ‘peacetime army,’ ‘cold war’ and ‘planned obsolescence.’ The result of these ambiguities was a total loss of credibility, a disenchantment with language and a consequent degeneration of language into what we call visible thingism.” Remick continues to play with language as he points out that the word “lesbian” is not the female equivalent of the word “gay”, and introduces the term “post-lesbian”. This concept will put your mind through several rounds of acrobatics, and it becomes the foundation upon which the concepts of family, love, desire, and what it means to be human will be drawn into question.

Remick goes on to further honor the importance of the craft of writing by showing the details of Trisha’s editing process as she tries to pick Citadel apart, and instead finds it analyzing her. In writing a book within a book, Remick has created a literary fractal that holds up no matter how far in or out you look. When you look at these passages, you see Remick not only honoring the usually ignored role of editor, you also see the parallels between writer and God, character and human. Trisha writes to Daiva, “You create a world and then you let it go before it is ready and it creeps out as a half-formed creature gasping for breath then dying in the silence and agony. I can’t let that happen to this novel.” Trisha despairs about Daiva’s refusal to participate in the editing process, resistant to taking her place, but unwilling to abandon the story.

We stay with Trisha as she continues to analyze the writer. “The creator who sets you in motion, gives you a name⎯or not⎯then thrusts you out into the unfinished, unknowable, unreal world. What character ever had any hope of a future? In this I see the editor as savior.” In this passage, Trisha goes so far as to evoke the comparison herself, labeling the editor savior. The writer creates a universe, a world with rules and people and feelings, and then leaves it half-formed. This is the relationship we know with God. We have been formed out of the ether, provided an abundant and astounding universe, but we’ve been abandoned to never hear another word from our creator, to blindly stumble and fall through this world. The editor, or savior, must come down and tend to these forgotten creations, and guide them to their full formation. Finally, in the following passage, we see the anger that arises from such abandonment. “Writers are not just idiot children, they are careless narcissists unfit even to own a pencil, a pen, a computer, egoists who give no thought to all the chaos and anguish, all the pain and perversion they bring into the world.”

This is an important interaction between story, character, and editor, because this is where we can see the literary fractal at its largest scope. Remick does not simply write the Citadel book; he writes a book about the book. In doing this, we are able to see the book within the book, the effect the fictional book has on its creators, the effect of those characters on us, the effect the book has on the fictional modern world, and finally, are left to ponder the effect it could have on our world. These are only some of the many levels and angles you could choose to view this story through, and the beautiful way it is divided allows the mind to process the enormity of these truths in manageable pieces.

This is an important novel that is exceptionally written. This kind of dissection of today’s culture is not just called for, but begged for. Citadel will hit you so hard you’re slapped right off the page, but it will follow you.

[Pamela · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ursula Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness gave us, “The King was pregnant,” to define an alternate society. Jack Remick’s Citadel gives us, “Jahil is pregnant,” to define his brave imminent world. Jahil is a woman impregnated by cells from another woman, rendering men unnecessary. Scientist Daiva Izokaitas impregnates Jahil in her lab. The scientist writes a novel to explain what this event means. Seattle writer of seventeen novels and collections of poetry, Jack Remick turns a new direction with this science fiction novel. Unlike many of his prior novels, stories of boys and men, of boys becoming men, Citadel is a society’s story, a specie’s story, a thought experiment on “divergent evolution”—men and women evolving on separate tracks. “Divergent evolution” is also the premise of the book within the book, Daiva’s novel. Her novel is also called Citadel.

Daiva gives her manuscript to Trisha De Tours, an editor at Pinnacle Publishing. (Like all the names referring to citadels?) Much of the action of Remick’s novel is Trisha editing Daiva’s manuscript. Remick has written a book about reading, writing, and editing—creation, gestation, thought. From Daiva hearing, “A novel isn’t a book until it has an ISBN,” until her book comes out near the end, Remick walks the reader through her manuscript, seen from the point of view of its editor. The book within the book depicts a “post-lesbian” future in which women live in protective citadels and question the necessity of men. Since her version of parthenogenesis—in her lab and in her fictional story—renders men obsolete for reproductive purposes, Daiva’s manuscript comes loaded with giant philosophical questions: What is human? What is gender? What is desire? Shall we further change the evolutionary course of the planet and eliminate men all together? Her delivery includes gruesome violence between the genders as they sort these questions. One scene even carries a trigger warning. There might be others. The violence threshold is high, as if Daiva/Remick deliberately provoke, in the manner of Anthony Burgess. Peopled with archetypal characters, (the glands, the hunters, the technicians, the daughters), Daiva’s Citadel tastes of fantasy despite her frequent pronouncements of its truthfulness. When Trisha wants information about Daiva’s science and the terms she chooses to describe the males in her manuscript—Exo, Gland, Mutant, etc., Daiva expounds.

Citadel investigates Remick’s share of giant questions about genetics and evolution. Daiva’s big questions are his own, of course. (Of course, because the nesting of stories does create a layering of degrees of fictionality. Yes, all the characters are to the same degree invented, but Remick creates two worlds within his book, asking readers to believe both are truth, but hinting first one, then the other, is the more real.) I took interest in secondary questions, such as, have birth control and abortion changed us behaviorally/chemically/ biologically? Remick also makes some statements. Science matters to society. Gender politics are in flux. Women don’t need men. “Truth is brutal,” as Trisha tells Daiva. Because of the book within the book, Remick gets to ask a double set of questions, and make a double set of statements.

In Babel Tower, A.S. Byatt plunks within her novel her mayhem-maker’s entire novel, in a sweep. In Citadel, Jack Remick parcels Daiva’s novel into small segments, delivered as Trisha reads them. Trisha seems to read out of sequence so that the story within the story resembles a puzzle that the reader may try to put together, to sequence—reminding me of sequencing genes. Rather than following the path of an individual, Daiva introduces a new set of characters in almost every scene of Citadel. Her novel develops an iconic feel perhaps to boost her message that her story belongs to all women.

The book and the book within the book coil around each other. Remick plants scenes in dreams, repeats images, has “real” life imitating art, has the stories curl around on themselves, helix-style. Trisha says, “I was as deep into Citadel as I could be — I, the editor, had become a character in the novel that, as I changed it, changed me. I saw how everything was possible. There was a river of words running over me.” Reading alters brain chemistry, says Remick. All his female characters who read Citadel undergo radical change. Through heavy editing and entering the story herself, Trisha changes Daiva’s story, in return. Citadel shows the action of reading and writing, the creative process within the creative process, as in an injection of genetic material from the female into a female, inventing literary parthenogenesis—the editor alters the story; the scientist alters the genes; the story alters the writer and the reader. Daiva’s novel becomes the scientific and sociological reality for the women who read it. Its story describes them. The power of the author is distributed through the reading such that Citadel becomes “a manifesto for the salvation of the human race,” and a prophecy for the Citadel story-line and characters.

Citadel belongs to a group of women. Remick tells his story through four first-person women: Trisha and Daiva, Trisha’s psychologist Rose Katz, Pinnacle publisher Clara Kreisler; and through the book within the book, notes made by Trisha as she edits, Daiva’s replies, texts and emails between them, and through a mysterious coda to Daiva’s manuscript. Meanwhile, Clara’s brother works to adapt Citadel as a movie. The last 30 pages were my favorite. After Pinnacle publishes Daiva’s Citadel, the contemporary story slips from its reading-editing pacing into a break-neck plot. All four narrators reappear—a couple have held silent for much of the novel. Remick’s two worlds blend. “Citadel,” the movie, links the two as it is part documentary, part journalism, and part scripted. Citadel’s structure spirals to an ending located in Daiva’s novelistic world, suggesting it is the true one, the least fictional. Remick enjoys inventing worlds, inventing meaning. Where Citadel ends marks the new time of Daiva’s described future. Citadel is a societal origin story, the code.

[Dennis Must · Rating 5 out of 5]

“… a virtuosic achievement, one that can be read on several levels, like any important and visionary work of literary fiction.”

Jack Remick’s dystopian Citadel is the most complex of his novels I’ve read. This sui generis book-within-a-book is also the most far-reaching cerebrally in that it transcends the traditional literary narrative’s boundaries by compelling the reader to recast their view of themselves as sentient human beings. Remick simply calls into question our grasp of desire, “that residual evolutionary response,” and how it governs our lives, especially between genders. He transcends the challenge by effecting a substantive shift in one’s perception. What thoughtful woman, for instance, upon finishing the novel will hence forward not recall that she is “a daughter of the Citadel… born carrying the disease of desire”?

Citadel strips us of our pretenses related to sex and desire through the artifice of literature, thus making it so potent. We are lured into protagonist’s Trisha de Tours’s editing process and gradual self-discovery. We see ourselves reflected in her struggles with the Diava Izokaitis’s “divergent evolution” manuscript and its disquieting foreshadowing. A scientific tract on parthenogenesis might enable a shift of one’s reason. But Citadel attacks the very center of the reader’s being in a manner that effectively renders him powerless to dismiss its premise. “Who are we?” it asks. And then sets about revealing the answer to each of us.

Throughout Citadel Remick casts off the narrative restraints and exploits the subject at hand with a lyrical intensity that intermittently caused me to pause and savor the language:

“Writing is dangerous because words are only an intermediate step between writer and reader where feeling detaches from each word with the harsh cruelty of a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis. The pain, the tragedy of existence, the theater of desire, all live under the words that are never anything but a wild guess at the river of emotion that lives in each cell, that feeds on desire and hungers for being. The magic is not in changing words, but in spreading language over the residue of desire.”

Midpoint in the novel while editing and absorbing the import of Daiva’s manuscript, Trisha’s anguish is palpable: “I have transcended sex and so find myself carrying a past in my body that sickens me—the thought of senseless, crippled, half-destroyed creatures swimming to my womb leaves me in a state of morbid rejection of who and what I used to be.” The questions raised here are so primally deep-seated that the writer and the reader become one in this section. The carapace separating the creator and observer has been ripped away. Here is where the pulse of Citadel is laid bare. How does one resolve the confrontation?

Yet in a relatively short space we move onto the equally layered and sagacious ethnography of the Exo-Culture which provokes and delights the intellect in a manner Trisha’s questions do not:“In conclusion, it appears that the language of the Exo cultures is in every sense moribund. With rare exceptions the language as spoken is essentially composed of transformed Old Society profanity; it is full of antiquated oaths which represent submerged concepts, predicated historically upon a di-sexual society, but which are no longer extant.” How can one not see a reflection of themselves, their species, being stripped of pretense in the shorn-of-emotion and scientific analysis of the Exo social structure but as a humorous and caustic indictment of our present culture.

Citadel summons the reader at various junctures to marry such cogent leaps of inquiry, each lending themselves to an informed review. I view the novel as a virtuosic achievement, one that can be read on several levels, like any important and visionary work of literary fiction.

Dennis Must
author of Brother Carnival; Hush Now Don’t Explain

[Julene · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Citadel" by Jack Remick is an unusual book for a man to write, but Jack alone has the stomach and the skill to write such a book. I know Jack because we are both in the writing community in Seattle. I read his book "Blood" and went to hear him read from "Citadel" when it first came out. This book tracks the long war between the sexes. One classic quote that captures what the book is about: "...men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women know men will murder them if they step out of place."

This book delves into the male chromosome Y, which according to the science in the book, is in a process of extinction. The character Daiva Izokatis, a scientist, wrote the book within the book.

Daiva meets Trisha, an editor who's family runs a press, on the beach. When Trisha learns about the book she realizes it could be the blockbuster her mother is looking for. Her and her family bring the book to publication and the process is well under way to make it into a film by the end of the book. Trisha goes to a hotel in the desert to edit the book. The book has magical realism, or surreal moments. Trisha enters the novel becoming a character and witnesses the massive destruction outside the Citadel, where the women have moved. The author describes her book as a post lesbian world.

The cool part about an editor editing a book within a book is that she gives the author feedback on her writing as she makes changes. So we get a mini tutorial. Jack Remick taught English at the University of Washington, after retiring he wrote and published many books, this one is a major feat.

What makes the book hard to read is the use of different fonts. No matter the reason for this, the font of handwritten feedback sections made it hard to read, it was very light on the page. For this reason I give it a four and not a five. The book stirs my early feminist years. And Jack has done his homework: One scientist quoted is Lynn Margulis who is well know and has done innovative work. Also quoted is the male anthropologist Irven DeVore, "males are a breeding experiment run by females." I looked him up and found reference to this quote in Wikipedia. There are many interesting threads of science and sex within this packed book for any reader to unpack.

Some of the chapters are hard to read because the men are so brutal to the women; consider this is a trigger warning.

[Becky · Rating 4 out of 5]

Citadel is a novel within a novel, both with the same name. The interior Citadel is a historical diary of a speculative future where women have taken control of their safety. This history is revealed bit by bit through present-day characters, primarily women, who write, edit and read the novel, and are profoundly changed by it.

Trisha is an editor working on Citadel, written by Daiva. Daiva is a geneticist who has created a world in which women reject normalized misogyny and choose control of their own lives and reproduction. Scientific reports and character entries in Diava’s speculative novel unfold as a believable, unique and dangerous reality.

Through Trisha’s editorial comments and proposed changes to the novel Citadel, Jack Remick teaches the reader how a good writer develops characters (i.e.; note to Diava on page 123 and 192), and how inconsistencies cause confusion (page 134 and 153). Through these informational “sidebars” of Trisha’s, Remick asks the deeper and necessary questions the reader needs to know to better understand Citadel’s science, philosophy, and evolved morality.

Citadel bears witness to women “caught in the niche” between life and death (page 286), with no control over themselves. The historical entries of the various characters in Diava’s novel are often grisly, poignant or sadly familiar, and always exciting and unpredictable. The present-day characters reading Citadel relate to the experiences of the historical figures they are reading about. The world Citadel creates is anchored by reason and rules, and sacrifice for safety and survival.

Reading Citadel reminded me that inside my older self is a younger, more idealistic and less compromising woman. Euphemisms such as Violence Against Women distance men from their cruelty, torture and murder of women, as if the perpetrators of the violence are a mystery, or women’s violence against each other is the problem. Jack Remick’s novel, Citadel, is an exercise in exploring the trajectory women might take to live in a safe world.

[Stephanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Trisha deTours is a book editor for women's erotic fiction at Pinnacle Books. Her personal life often reflects the books she edits as Trisha hunts for men on the beach and discards them after sex. When scientist, Daiva Izokaitis moves into Trisha's complex, Trisha finds a new friend and discovers that she has written a manuscript. The manuscript doesn't exactly fit in with with Pinnacle's normal works, but might be exactly what they are looking for. As Trisha dives into Daiva's book, Citadel described as a post-lesbian, scientific look at our future, Trisha becomes immersed in the characters and story so much that she begins to mix reality and fiction to become one of the characters herself. As Citadel blends more into real life, Trisha and Daiva are helping to create the future of Citadel.

Citadel is a very different and surprising work. Using the technique of a book within a book, we see the editing process as well as the effect that a book can have on the reader. When Trisha began to read Daiva's manuscript, I think I was just as confused and intrigued as Trisha. The manuscript is difficult to read at first, however, like Trisha, I could see parts of myself and other women I know in the characters. The writing is very in your face, not hiding any of the issues that women in every culture may deal with on a daily basis. There is also a good amount of science involved in the novel as Daiva is works with genetics and bases her book on current research such as creating life without the Y chromosome. With this addition of science, a lot of important questions arise such as: What is human? What is desire? Can we ever live together peacefully? For me, the most interesting part of the story is that Citadel begins to become reality as more people read Daiva's book. Overall, a unique and important story that will connect with many readers.

This book was received for free in return for an honest review.

[Susan Whiting Kemp · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m giving this book such a high mark for three reasons. First, its sheer audacity. It really doesn’t hold back. Each chapter holds a new and horrifying view of our world and its possible future. The book is hard-hitting and very uncomfortable at times, but the book never stops, and it shows how the future could be if we don’t change our present. Reading this novel reminds me how little it takes for the world to transform. The second reason is that there is enormous creativity in Citadel, with concepts presented in a way that I’ve never seen before. Who knows what the future holds, but this is a version that most people wouldn’t see coming. There can’t be any other books like this out there. The third reason is that Jack Remick is a good writer, with many gems throughout the book. This quote doesn’t really epitomize the book but is by one of my favorite characters, Bett, and made me smile: “I tend bar at the Desert Rose, the last stop on the road to Emptyholesville. Ain’t nothin’ I ain’t heard, ain’t nothin’ I ain’t seen, some shit I ain’t done, but there’s still time.” And then there’s this, more in the feel of novel: “Camille shifted in her chair. I expected to see insects flit off her, dust to scatter. She was a ghost. Unearthly. A mind so sharp it cut ruthless and deep and remorseless. Truth.”

[Arleen Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jack Remick is a novelist and poet whose extensive body of work demonstrates his masterful creativity and talent. Still, his latest novel, Citadel, takes this work to new level. Citadel is a complex novel within a novel that will mark each reader and what each takes from the read will be uniquely personal.

Citadel is a mind-bending feminist exploration of male and female interactions and a call for women globally to say no to continued manipulation, abuse and control by men. A science-based novel, it questions what the world would look like with women in control and what it means to be human in a world where men are no longer necessary for procreation.

One of numerous aspects about Remick’s new novel that stand out is his treatment of the relationships between author and editor and between editor and manuscript. As Trisha edits Daiva’s manuscript, she enters the story and becomes a character in the work she is editing. Remick works these shifts between the inner and outer stories seamlessly, leading readers to question where one ends and the other begins just as he asks us to consider a world where women have absolute choice over all aspects of their reality.

[Momma Says: To Read or Not to Read · Rating 5 out of 5]

To say that Citadel is a little out of my wheelhouse would be a fair assumption. Even so, this wonderfully written and often shocking tale hooked me from the very first line and didn't let go. The story starts with Trisha and quickly becomes two books in one as she begins to edit Daiva's book, Citadel. The transitions between Trisha's life and parts of Citadel are almost fluid, which is some feat. I've seen the technique before, but what could be distraction just isn't with this book. All the parts come together perfectly to create a completely thought provoking story as the author takes a what if question and stretches it to its absolute limit. Citadel is masterfully creative, complex, and kept me turning pages into the wee hours. I admit that I wasn't quite sure what to expect when I started this one, but Mr. Remick completely wowed me with his thoroughly compelling story.

[Gina Stamper · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow, this novel really blew me away. From the characterization, to the words the author used and writing in general, to the setting. I think that every moving part to this novel really came together and made it unforgettable.
This is just an overall well balanced novel. The pacing and flow are spot on and I was thoroughly engaged throughout.

This is a novel that while you think would be very cut and dry is actually not. I was surprised in several spots and the writing was superbly done.

[R.K. Emery · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow, what did I just read? This one was something different than anything I have read lately. It caught me by surprise, in a great way! I really like when a story can catch me off guard and make me love it even though I didn't know I needed to read it.

Don't go into this one with expectations, because it isn't a cookie cutter book. There are so many intricate twists and caveats to this story. The writing was complex yet easy to follow at the same time, if that even makes sense. I loved it!

[Ever Leigh · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was something so different that what I was expected but I was very pleasantly surprised. It is a theme that will throw some readers but I loved the fantastical what if what it was written. Perfect for this day and age and the Author does a great job compelling his readers to his characters.