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Writer challenges the boundaries between fact and fiction in an allegory.
Writer and researcher Heather Vallance combines her creative skills with an academic eye to draw her readers into a disturbingly provocative vision of womanhood by blurring the boundaries between myth and history. She demands that women sit back and ask themselves, - Who are we? – What are we?
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May 23, 2006 (FPRC) -- The story within The Dawn Torch is simple enough. Anna, an ancestor, composes a message in which she explains how a descendent can inherit a unique heirloom. But, because the descendent is unnamed, and the boundaries of truth and identity blurred, every woman could be that heiress.
The milieu within which The Dawn Torch exists is intuitively plausible. Ancestral protection is an ancient African theme which suggests that we are all guarded by the dead in our family lines. These passed over souls are known as Watchers.
The Watchers are most active during periods of uncertainty and contemporary women live in uncertain times. They are intimately aware of how vulnerable they are as women. The Watchers reach out and embrace them, luring them into the text and offering a solution, a patch to apply to their vulnerability. It is a solution which chills even the most daring soul.
The Dawn Torch leaves only two choices, with tomorrow as hostage. If a reader chooses one way, she has no tomorrow. If she chooses the other, she needs to draw on a courage most of us do not possess.
The length and the storyline in The Dawn Torch are deceptively simple. As with Henry James' Turn of the Screw, readers are lulled into believing that they can put down the book, turn out the light and sleep easy. The residue of The Dawn Torch doesn't work that way.
Title: The Dawn Torch
Author: Heather Vallance
Description: Runs to just over 5 000 words and is packaged as a copy of a 19th century manuscript.
ISBN 0-9780960-1-0
Price: US$7.50
URL: www.emindpublications.com/thedawntorch
Contact: heather@emindpublications.com
Send an email to Heather Vallance of eMind Publications
+19026752899 Canada
Keywords:
sacred feminine, womens fiction, womens issues
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