Pages

Wednesday, October 31, 2012

A Few Simple Truths



By Ellen Lechter
Fantasy 470 pages
Cover art by Trisha FitzGerald
ISBN 978-1-61309-098-5   $7.50
ISBN 978-1-61309-905-6   $16.95
Blurb:
Deandra Parker’s teens barely need her, her husband is rarely home and she’s bored with her job. Then Deandra discovers she is an Intuit, a descendant of a group of people dating back to early man with extraordinary abilities. As her abilities awaken, so does the voice of a 17th century ancestor that only she can hear. Soon she becomes her ancestor’s scribe and is busier than ever, juggling writing with practicing her new skills while trying to remain a doting wife and mother.

However, the abilities don’t always work as she expects or often at all. And a secret of her husband’s threatens to change their lives in ways she never imagined.

Excerpt:
Lonnie seemed to be talking in circles, leaving Deandra feeling off-kilter. “An heir to what?”

“An heir to certain … abilities,” she said, sipping her tea. “I’ll try to explain with an analogy. Animals, our dogs for instance, are born hardwired with specific instincts. They can communicate without speech, instinctively know how to swim and feel it necessary to hide away particularly tasty morsels of food like bones even if they are raised without other dogs and solely by humans. These instincts or memories are passed down from mum to each pup in the womb.”

“That’s true,” Deandra conceded, baffled as to how any of this applied to her.

“What you may not know is that most human beings were once this way too,” continued Lonnie. “That is, until we began to rely less on inherited memories, on what was passed along in the womb, and more on what we call progress.” Lonnie spat out the last word as if it left a bitter residue on her tongue. “Unlike our dogs, we stopped using many of our special abilities, our inherited memories. For most people, they have since become obsolete.”

“What kind of inherited memories are you talking about?”

“Oh, I’m getting to that,” she said. “What’s important to know is that these memories still exist, at least within a few of us and they are still passed along from one generation to the next. For people like us, it’s less about what we learn in our lifetime than what we are born already knowing.”

“I see.” But she didn’t.

“These memories remain dormant, meaning you have no idea they exist until they are awakened in you,” continued Lonnie. “In fact, most people don’t stumble upon them throughout their entire lives. Which brings me to you.”

Deandra leaned forward, eager to hear how she fit into this strange conversation. “Are you saying I can have them? What are they, exactly?”

“Well, most of them involve doing things that regular people can’t, like moving objects simply by the force of our minds. Simple little neat tricks that come in handy when properly applied. But most of them are merely heightened intuition.”

Heightened intuition? Moving objects with our minds? “Um okay…”

No comments: