Shirin Dubbin Guest Post

Many Voices

It’s surprising how many people confuse schizophrenia with multiple personality disorder. The first makes it difficult for a person to tell the difference between what’s real and what’s unreal—commonly categorized by hearing voices. The second has caused a lot of argument as to whether it’s real or not, but is the development of several distinct personalities in one body.

Oddly enough, in their most basic definitions, either could describe authors. We hear voices and tend to become any range of distinct creatures both realistic and mythic in service of our stories. Not only that but “voice’ is the key to our finding our places on the literary landscape.

It took me a little while to figure out what voice is. I’m the kid who asked my mom if I could be more than one thing. Pinpointing a single style, a singular means of storytelling seemed such an odd thing to me. Like choosing one part of myself to give greater importance over the rest. How could my fantasy self override my romance side? Could my literary voice be more important than my genre one? Why did I have to choose comics over screenplays?

You, like my mother, probably know the truth. I didn’t have to choose. I only had to look to Neil Gaiman, who writes comics, children’s books, epic novels, teleplays, screenplays (and, sidebar, draws a mean sketch). They all contain his slightly fractured whimsically dark voice, but he hits a plethora of delightful notes.

Or I could turn to Steven Moffat, a television powerhouse, who writes shows as disparate as Coupling (comedy) and Jekyll (occult), Sherlock (mystery) and Doctor Who (science fiction), yet excels at them all. Sometimes I gape at the genius of Moffat episodes like Blink or A Study In Pink. How about you?

Then there’s one of my favorite people to ever walk this earth, Leslie Esdaile Banks aka Alexis Grant aka L.A. Banks. This woman had an imagination that filled the width and breadth of the universe. She wrote romances and suspense and women’s fiction and paranormal, and she did it all with a voice so distinct we didn’t need to see her name to know who was speaking.

I guess that’s what voice is. Despite the fact some might mistake it for crazy, it’s the freedom to flagrantly fly your freak flag, or be pedantically highbrow, salaciously lowbrow, ridiculous, brilliant, sappy or odd—as long as it’s authentically you. 

Chaos Tryst by Shirin Dubbin

A magical retelling of Goldilocks and the three bears. This is a novella, which for me I enjoy as short reads, but don't read them all that often because I like to really dive into a book and get lost in it for hours. But novellas also have their place, they are quicker reads, I think for those of us who don't have the time to immerse ourselves for hours in a longer book.

I would like to mention that the concept for this book is unique. The imagination alone required to take a simple fairytale and create a complex world to retell this story is quite remarkable. I would like to take time to acknowledge that.

Ari and Maks are the two main characters of this story. Ari is the modern representation of Goldilocks and Maks is one of the three bears. Ari is a retriever, who essentially just retrievers stolen property to their rightful owner and she is bound by a magical code. Ari meets Maks when she goes to retrieve something from Maks' home that she believes to be stolen, and that her magic shows to be stolen. However, the item in question has been in Maks' family since it's creation, which mean the two of them need to iron out who the rightful owner really is, which is how this story start off.

While this book is generally speaking a cute story, and truly unique it does have it's flaws. The story moves quickly (always a good thing), but at some point it starts to become confusing, and not in a good way.

In a lot of ways the story starts to begin feeling forced about half way through. As if the first half was a steady build up of events, and then the author realized it was a novella and not a book and just started through events together that would allow for the completion of the story.

The romance itself, that is a huge primary part of the novella, feel forced. The characters do not feel organic together, and they do not really feel like they have a lot of chemistry. I'm not really sure what element is missing between the two characters or how to go about fixing this issue, but it just doesn't feel right and feels forced.

Overall, the book is so-so. If you are looking for a quick read this might be a book for you, or if you are a person who likes the retelling of the stories you heard of as a child then maybe this is for you. Other than that I don't know of many people who are going to think this novella is a favorite.