| Book URL / Read URL |
http://www.amazon.com/Love-Spells-Novella-Linda-Casebeer-ebook/dp/B00IODT92A/ref=sr_1_9?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1394481278&sr=1-9&keywords=love+spells http://serealities.com/love-spells-episodes/ |
| Book Tagline |
A Novella women\'s fiction serial |
| Book Synopsis |
Angelique grew up as In this novella, a ward of the court with one parent abandoning her and the other an alcoholic, ill-equipped to raise a child. The story begins as Angelique turns eighteen and is released from the institution and the court system that have dictated everything about her life for years. She knows how to shoot a gun and like the girl with the dragon tattoo, she wants to get even with the people who put here there. For the first time in her life, she can choose where she lives. She has set up accounts on Facebook and dating sites and ten men have invited her leaving foster care plans to move in with them, even one of her Internet boyfriends.
Almost 18, Angelique knows that in “three days the system wouldn’t want her anymore. Which was fine with her.” Angelique can’t wait for freedom—even though she has never met any lacks a job, birth certificate and high school diploma. A pretty blue-eyed redhead, Angelique figures one of them the three potential boyfriends she’s lined up on Internet dating sites (but hasn’t met) will give her a place to live. “She had been locked up long enough, and nobody was going to tell her what to do anymore. She would be telling them.” Though the reader at this point may be filled with dread on Angelique’s behalf, nothing too horrible happens as she seeks out one Internet boyfriend, then another, in person. isolated, remote locations. Being abandoned in a Florida motel by a marijuana grower and then picked up by a sex trafficker isn’t so bad: “[S]he still felt stupid about that. But it had been a place to stay for a while, even a place with a swimming pool. She had liked lying out in the sun.” She’s happy, not dismayed, to discover she’s pregnant. In her debut novella, Casebeer employs a minimalist, pared-down style reminiscent of writers like Raymond Carver, the kind that powerfully leaves things unsaid. After a girl commits suicide in Angelique’s group home, “Nobody wanted to go back to the cottage, but there was nowhere else to go.” Casebeer shows a nuanced understanding of the forces that get and keep a girl like Angelique in her situation: the troubled families, the difficulties with anger and impulse control, the overwhelming need for love. And Angelique is never just a beautiful young green-eyed redhead that men victim (her hero is Lisbeth Salander). The novella is unfinished by design, a choice not all readers will always find attractive, and she knows what she wants. Unfortunately for her story, men will always find her attractive and she will always be looking for true love.
She feels empowered by walking out the door of the institution and leaves without a job, a photo ID, a social security card, a bank account, or any idea of what the men she has flirted with online are really like. She first makes her way to the house of her childhood friend, Ashley, the fourth generation in a family of psychics where her mother casts love spells in exchange for donations and wants Ashley to join the family business. Ashley is a teenage mother with other ideas. After spending a few days with Ashley and hooking up with Ashley’s neighbor, she finds the first of the men she has encountered online and moves in with him and his buddy in an abandoned lake cottage. She falls in love with Andrew but feels betrayed when she discovers that Andrew and his buddy are out for a good time, but he doesn’t intend to marry her.
Angry at the people who had controlled her life, and angry at Andrew and his buddy for what she sees as betrayal, she goes back online. Hoping for an immediate response, she lets three men know where she is and that she can be picked up that afternoon at the beach along the lake. The first one to arrive is Chuck who has promised her a trip to Disney World as he delivers product he has grown to customers in Florida. By the time she arrives in Florida she has fallen in love with Chuck who disappears during a transaction, leaving his truck and Angelique at the Days Inn in Orlando. After several days, she is forced to leave the hotel. She wants to stay in Florida to wait for him. She asks Ashley’s mother Louise to cast a love spell to bring Chuck back. She discovers she is pregnant. She is 99% but not 100% sure Chuck is the father. She vows to continue to wait for him, and goes to stay with Ashley’s crazy cousin Cynthia, also a spell caster, who lives near Orlando.
Angelique’s satisfying. Angelique’s story continues in serial form each every week with as an online serial, the author explains, inviting readers voting “to vote on what happens next in the story on the website serialities.com. Angelique’s life.”
Spare and intriguing but unresolved. |