Amy Wood

Tremendously entertaining fantasy, wonderfully written, and completely engrossing. I bought this book on a Saturday afternoon, and read until going out with friends that evening. Sunday morning I picked it up with breakfast and literally did not stop reading until I finished the book that afternoon.

The characters are complex and believable, the world they inhabit is rich and interesting, and the tale swerves in interesting and unexpected directions without ever seeming random or bizarre. And while we learn a lot about the protagonist (often while he's learning about himself), enough mysteries remain unexplained that I'm eagerly waiting for more.

I'm hard pressed to think of the last time I enjoyed a fantasy novel this much.… (altro)

“To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.” ~Robert Louis Stevenson
This is the quote that you will find at the beginning of the book. The idea of living your life your way, the way you prefer, is appealing, isn’t it?
Life is more complicated today than in the past, less linear. When we were growing up in the 1970’s and 80’s, things were arguably less complicated than they are now. Today we have so many more options from which to choose that we can get lost in the forest, not noticing any of the trees. Amy asks us: Remember 3 TV Stations? (The next day my 11 year old said, incredulous: “Mom, you really only had three TV stations? Like, three?”).
Asking your dad to drive you to the library because you had to look something up? No internet at home back then. Writing a paper about bats for school? You’d look that up in your World Book Encyclopedia. There was also (more or less) one life path. Graduate from high school, go to college, get a good job (from which you would one day retire with a pension), get married (once), buy a house, have a baby...the path was pretty clear back then, wasn't it? Even if we didn't all follow it, or do things in that order, it was clear, familiar. Our parents (probably) followed it and we expected on some level to follow it too. In the past, if you were female and planning your career, you (sort of) had a choice: teacher or nurse. Fast forward to 2011: If you are female today and planning your career, there’s virtually no limit to your choices.
Something may be nagging at you though. Maybe you have had multiple marriages, houses, careers by now. Your head is spinning from the info overload that your brain, unlike your kids’ (who are in their late teens and early twenties) brains, has not been trained during your formative years to process. Forget waiting for things to slow down, though. Amy points out that we live in America; a review of writings from the past show that people in the 1920′s thought that their lives were too fast and too stressful as well).
Amy points out that today we are bombarded all the time with tremendous amounts of information, some useful for us, much of it not. How to navigate through the melee? Use your intuition and ask: “What’s right for me?” or “What’s not right for me?” then pay attention to the responses that you get, whether from thoughts that pop into your head, physical sensations (i.e. stomach aches), or the license plate on the car in front of you during your commute to work (“BREATHE”:)).

One of Amy’s goals in writing the book was to enrich the lives of others in her community. I’d say that she succeeded.
Read more about Amy’s talk at Kennebooks here: kwrites.wordpress.com… (altro)