Book Review: The Fire and the Veil, by Sophia Martin

Tortured psychic and high school French teacher Veronica Barry is back! As of just last week, Sophia Martin’s The Fire and the Veil is available on Amazon. A few things have changed since the last book, The River and the Roses. Veronica has a new boyfriend, and no car. Her best friend’s daughter has changed schools, and is now one of Veronica’s students…

But what hasn’t changed is the recurring, internal struggle of a psychic, and the deep empathy Veronica has for those she has visions about. The psychic’s condition is further explored in Fire on the subject of powerlessness. Veronica understandably gets frustrated with the duality of having urgent information, and being unable to disclose it without revealing her second sight. There are situations where it would be so much easier if she could just tell someone straight up what kind of trouble others are in instead of piecing together limited external evidence to justify actions that need to be taken. Save for the very few who know about and accept Veronica’s gift, laying out the facts as she knows them is not an option for Veronica, even when people are in pain.

Veronica’s internal dilemmas and monologues are something I was pleased to see carry over from the first book. I like other things about Fire, too. I like smooth, accessible flow of the narrative. I like Veronica’s dreams. I like the bits of exposure to other cultures (that alone is worth the read). I like the best friend Melanie, who is always available for pancakes and solidarity…

I do not like it when characters “out” other characters without their consent. It lowered my opinion of the one who did the “outing,” but not enough to smash the like-ability of the character altogether. Coming out of the closet was for the closeted person to do, not for anyone else to do for them. I don’t care if nobody ended up with targets on their backs or became an object of scorn because of it. It’s their news to tell.

For those who are liable to have a similar reaction: it’s also worth mentioning that this “outing” is only a small portion of the book, and therefore will only hurt for a minute. It is also a part of the story. Because of this, I can appreciate how it made me feel differently about the certain character. It made them all the more human.

So, if you like being transported to a place where teachers play a lot of hooky without the administration asking about the influx in sub-calls, and if you like a good psychic murder mystery, I advise you to take a look at The Fire and the Veil. To the readers who haven’t read River: don’t worry about getting lost. All the information from the first book that’s needed to get through the second is explained at the beginning of chapter one. It will feel like explaining, but there’s enough show-not-tell to save the recap from being the snoozefest it could have been.

To check out Sophia Martin’s blog, click here.

Book Review: The River and the Roses, by Sophia Martin

It’s true that a good way to make an afternoon disappear – or several afternoons if you’re a slow reader like me – is to download and open up Sophia Martin’s novel The River and the Roses. River features high school French teacher Veronica Barry, who, once she overcomes the denial of the psychic abilities she was born with, has a knack for having visions and conversing with the dead. Her involvement with a homicide investigation kicks off with a terrible dream from which she wakes up holding a freshly murdered woman in a park. Tendrils of subplots weave their way to a conclusion, and Bob’s your uncle, there’s your psychic/ghost murder mystery.

It’s also true that, should you choose to make your afternoon(s) disappear in this way, you will be exposed to an insightful message about self-discovery and sacrificial love. Veronica’s ways of willfully ignoring her second sight come to an end when the daughter of her friend-of-twelve-years, Melanie, does not come home from the Valentine’s Day dance. Veronica reluctantly gives in to Melanie’s forceful pleas to use her gift to locate the lost daughter, Angie. After Veronica’s visions lead to the recovery of Angie from the side of a riverbank in another county, Veronica makes the decision to stay tuned in to her clairvoyance, a choice not unaccompanied with struggle.

As external risks go, Veronica faces the potential scrutiny of looking like she’s crazy, and definite scrutiny of being suspected for a con. What living into her gift also means is inviting situations that can be uncomfortable: giving into seeing the visions of past, present, and future that come to her, opening herself up to seeing ghosts and letting them into her head.

Veronica says that finally accepting her gift and purposefully living into it makes her feel, “stronger, and – uncomplicated.” But, like I said, Veronica does continue to grapple with it, a lot. There is no one event where all the emotional lumps smooth out, leaving her with no qualms about her purpose. The dilemmas and uncertainty on her path to self-discovery are explored in introspective monologues, a characteristic of Martin’s writing that can also be found in her first novel, Broken Ones. These dilemmas about risks and negative connotations can be about as discomforting as the more sensory unpleasantries like being surrounded by ghosts at a funeral home. There are times when Veronica wonders if the second sight has any use at all but is “a nuisance, like an eye twitch or an allergy.” There are occasions when she wishes intensely that she could go back to rejecting prescient dreams. But despite all this, Veronica’s psychic purpose wins, as Martin eloquently articulates: “Spiders of shame still crawled in the back of her mind but they had lost their power.”

Traveling the road less comfortable is not primarily motivated by making spiders powerless. It is recollections of Angie’s rescue from the riverbank, and Melanie’s profound gratitude for her daughter’s saved life that fuel Veronica’s determination to go forward. It is for sacrificial love, not the pursuit of personal wholeness, that Veronica stops anesthetizing her second sight. This not only helps Melanie and Angie, but invites opportunities for Veronica to help ghosts and the living alike, running the gamut of aiding murder investigations to saving pet fish.

So there you are. If you want to curl up with a paranormal whodunnit that not only satisfies a craving for murder mystery brain candy, but also dips into the inner life of someone who loves her friends, The River and the Roses is just the ticket. Although, there is a subplot with a fraudulent ex-boyfriend that begs to be developed. Maybe we’ll get lucky and Martin will publish a separate novella on the thread, like she did with Veronica in Paris. Oh, and if you’re sensitive to ghost imagery, there was a brief, visual description that resulted in me sleeping with the light on. Just a warning.

Buffy Doesn't Get It.

Since the dawn of my summer break about two or three weeks ago, the portion of the day I spend outside my room has been steadily declining as I have found myself indulging in endless Buffy the Vampire Slayer binges (all seven seasons on instant Netflix!). And, however scandalous it is to assert that there is value in this reckless squandering of sunlit hours, it’s been worth it. The more I watch, the more I see why there have been volumes of essays penned on Joss Whedon’s enormously popular and subtly philosophical Buffyverse. I myself may not be a student of philosophy, but nevertheless, many of the Scooby Gang’s adventures have certainly caught the attention of my inner sermon-note-taker.

In the Buffy episode “I Only Have Eyes For You” (season 2, episode 19), Sunnydale High has a poltergeist. The ghost of a student from four decades previous, James, possesses various people to work out an unresolved issue by playing out over and over again the night he shot and killed his teacher and lover, Miss Newman, then turned the gun on himself. Angry and tormented, James does this in pursuit of forgiveness and experiencing a new, happy ending to his tragic story. To which Giles concludes, after thinking all of this out loud, “Forgiveness is impossible.”

“Good,” Buffy says. “He doesn’t deserve it.” Buffy’s harsh reply reminded me of a conversation I had not too long ago, in which a friend of mine railed at length against certain figures in the media who profess to be Christian. My friend refuses to validate these people and call them Christian, because he insists they haven’t “earned” it.

Well, my friend is right about the latter bit: they haven’t “earned” it at all. If salvation was something any of us could earn, then Jesus as we know him, from a basic, mainstream, Pauline Christianity standpoint, died in vain. Jesus died and rose again so that we may have salvation: something we need but cannot achieve on our own strength. Like the apostle Paul writes in Ephesians 2.8 (NIV): “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith – and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift from God.” Or, as Giles explained, “To forgive is an act of compassion, Buffy. It’s not done because people deserve it. It’s done because they need it.”

Giles described James’s situation as a purgatory, but to my untrained eye, with all of James’s unquenchable rage and strife, it really looks more like a hell. If James could get out of his hell by himself, this Buffy episode would not exist, because this cycle James is in wouldn’t have begun in the first place. James is far too lost in his own anger and sadness to forgive himself; he needs the outside help of Miss Newman’s forgiveness to save him. What’s more, James’s hell is in turn making hell for other people when he possesses them, in one case causing the janitor to shoot a faculty member.

So in that context of how James cannot get out of his hell without forgiveness he does not deserve and cannot earn, and how that lack of forgiveness, in extension, hurts others, why is it still hard for Buffy to understand why James should be forgiven? Even after she herself is possessed by James, experiences the whole thing from his eyes, and can, in retrospect, see herself in James, Buffy admits, “A part of me just doesn’t understand why she should forgive him.” Why is this so difficult for Buffy?

As the old saying goes, “To forgive is divine.” Forgiveness requires transcendence. It might mean transcendence from (letting go of) our own, old understandings of justice. Or transcendence from emotional ties to opportunities lost. Transcendence from any way we’ve centered our identity on how we’ve been wronged or done wrong to others...

What do you think? Why is it so hard to forgive? What else might one have to transcend to get there?