The divide between literature for older children and literature for adults has gotten much smaller than it once was, in the past decade; and the gap between books intended for adults and those intended for teens is smaller still. In the sci-fi/fantasy genre it is perhaps at it’s smallest; with adults devouring the latest Harry Potter,/Twilight/Hunger Games books along with their kids. The Photo Traveler by Arthur J. Gonzalez is a novel that is classified in the YA (young adult) or teen genre. Why? It has a teenage protagonist, certainly (and one who actually acts like a teenager as opposed to many of his counterparts in other books who act 17 going on 45). But if the character were to be written ten years older, the only really notable change would be that he would (hopefully) be a bit more mature and less impulsive. All of the other circumstances could be altered slightly to fit an older hero. What I am getting at here, is that The Photo Traveler is a novel written for teens and about a teen, but it’s one that could just as easily be enjoyed by adults.

Our protagonist, Gavin Hillstone, initially finds himself in a situation that no child should have to face. His parents were killed in a house fire when he was just out of diapers and he has no real memory of them. He was legally adopted by his foster mother, a kind woman, whose murder he witnessed in a convenience story robbery gone wrong. Living with her drunken, abusive husband, Gavin’s only escape from the ugliness in his life is photography. However, one day, Gavin learns that his paternal grandparents are still alive and across the country in Washington DC. If he had living relatives when his parents died, why was he in the foster system? Why would his grandparents willingly put him up for adoption? In search of answers Gavin runs away to DC, where he meets Bud and Estelle, the family he never knew he had. Bud and Estelle claim that that gave Gavin up so that he would be safe until he was old enough to learn the truth about himself and his family. His family is the descendants of a group of explorers who found something enabling them to travel through time and space via images. If a picture is of a real person or place, Gavin can go there by uttering a simple chant. At first he uses this ability the way a teenage boy would use it: recklessly. But he soon learns that others are after the power that the Photo Travelers possess and more besides. As a holder of that power Gavin has tremendous responsibility to use it wisely.

YA novels with boys as narrators are rare, and when they are written (often by women) the boy is sort of a fantasy version of a male teenager. The Photo Traveler’s greatest strength is that Gavin feels like a 17-18 year old male. In other words, there are times when he can be intelligent, charming and endearing, and there are times when you want to throttle him! For example, he shows kindness and generosity during the Great Depression, but when he sees a photo of his friend’s beautiful cousin who died years earlier, he naturally decides to steal some pictures of her so that he can go back in time and start a relationship with her. Surely nothing could go wrong with that plan, right?

Of course things do go wrong, there and elsewhere. Gavin is warned that with time travel he has to be careful of “the butterfly effect”. He can’t influence past events. But he’s not aware of the secrets that exist within his own family. It is these secrets that make his trips to the past more dangerous than he realizes, and make him wonder who, if anyone, he can trust.

If you’re a fan of any genre, there are times when you know where the book is going more or less. That’s true here as well. But there are times that the author throws you curve that leaves your head spinning. For me that happened about ¾ of the way through the book and again in it’s last few pages. I had been enjoying my journey with Gavin until that point, reading the book at a fairly quick pace. However, then something happened. There was a very definite point at which I stopped being able to put it down until I’d finished. Even finishing the book didn’t leave me satisfied, because as I turned the page following a giant cliffhanger I learned that I could keep an eye out for the sequel. Well, now I’ll have to. I’m hooked! Like Gavin, once the reader gets started on a journey he/she will need to see it through to the end.

Fran Laniado hails from New York, NY and may be reached at fl827@hotmail.com. 

Arthur Gonzalez’ Photo Traveler may be purchased here: http://www.amazon.com/The-Photo-Traveler-Series-Volume/dp/0988891646

The Afghan Queen—a Review

For 35 years, I was a teacher. My life revolved around one school, one classroom, a multitude of kids and lessons. It was a good life that allowed me to be creative and watch the eyes of 7^th graders light up with learning. It was a life very successful–within narrow parameters.

However, I’ve always admired people who lived very different lives, who never punched a clock, never stayed in one location, traveled the whole world as their classroom. Such a life fills Paul Meinhardt’s The Afghan Queen: A TrueStory of an American Woman in Afghanistan.

This very interesting book is part travelogue, part memoir, part American Dream success story, part political commentary, and all love story. Paul’s wife, Lela, who passed away in 2000, was a wife and mother, a free spirit, a dreamer, a wanderer. Between 1975 and 1979, with the blessing of her supportive family, her dreams took her fifteen times to Afghanistan, where she also developed into an international diplomat and a very successful business woman.

Working as an art importer in the U.S., Lela was very successful, but also frustrated because her supplier was unreliable. Solution? Go to Afghanistan herself, the springboard for all these trips. Often she went by plane to Kabul, via Frankfurt and Zurich and other European cities where she had established business contacts to buy and display the Afghan art she returned with. Often she had to fly on Arianna Airlines, dubbed “Scarianna” by the passengers.

Sometimes though, she traveled via a hippie caravan of Sannyasins, European members of an Indian sect on their way to Delhi, via Kabul. Along the way, she made contact with local artists, while also serving as house mother and auto mechanic for their vulnerable transport vehicles: “We worked out a system to change flats in under 30-minutes. . . . As driver and mechanic, I’d become quite fond of old-lady-bus.” (p. 194)

An American woman alone in Afghanistan is not the safest of scenarios. However, this charming, adventurous lady learned from her contacts how to negotiate in a foreign culture. The key concept was “baksheesh”—flirting, tipping, bribing, socializing to expedite a deal. Her ace in the hole was off brand levis. She kept several pair on hand to give the guards so they could speed through border checkpoints. And to negotiate properly she became like family to the people she dealt with. Thus one contact would lead her to another to another, all stemming from an original contact who liked her style and virtually adopted her as part of the family.

Her main interest, of course, was the art—the art she could sell. That included a wide variety of metal ware: bronze, copper, silver. Jewelry of turquoise, golden serpentine, Afghan amber, and of course, the beautiful blue of lapis, were among her mainstays. But she loved it all, selling folk musical instruments, wall hangings, prayer beads, textiles, decorative camel harnesses and even opium molds. Her wandering inquisitive spirit took her to dealers everywhere to indulge her interest in native art—and profit.

After all her time in Afghanistan, she knew most everyone, and was even invited to parties at the embassys to schmooze with the ambassadors. From these knowledgeable people, she learned that her adventure would soon be over, that the Soviet Union was taking over Afghanistan. That meant she should have the good sense to get out—which she did.

This book will win no prizes for literature. The writing is clear, but simple, with little attempt at artistic writing. However, if readers would like an interesting book of adventures by an indomitable personality to pull them out of their humdrum lives, then The Afghan Queen is the book.

Bruce Roberts

June, 2013

 Bruce Roberts is a poet and schoolteacher from Hayward, California. He may be reached at brobe60491@sbcglobal.net

Paul Meinhardt’s Afghan Queen was published by New Jersey’s Turn the Page, and may be purchased here: http://www.afghanqueen.net/

Baking Mad

They used to call it a nervous breakdown
but now they have more specific names for each part-

acute stress reaction
major depressive episode
delusions
auditory and visual hallucinations

I had them all

Stephen Fry aptly calls it being infested with a demon-
On television he looks like he’s tamed his well

I wish I could do the same with mine
instead of worrying about how deep the despair will be
this time

Textbook bipolar they told the medical student,
it only took twenty years to diagnose

With a litany of past initials, ADD, OCD, PSTD
I thought I was just lazy
unable to get out of bed for weeks

Turns out the grand dame has been with me all this while
and it scares me to now know she will never leave my side.

Living Hell

It will find you

in every beautiful song
in your most flattering clothes
in the scent of your own perfume

it watches like a specter

feeding off the guilt that has infested you

lurking in your memory
waiting for the subtlest trigger
to spawn its leathery web-

Once in its grasp it will strangle every
drop of sense from your mind
until you succumb willingly to
its excruciating embrace-

Hell comes in small doses
over months and years
making sure you can never quite forget
your transgression.

Faracy Grouse is a poet, screenwriter, mother and European traveler, currently in London completing a MFA program. She may be reached at alumine3@yahoo.com 

Alison Nancye’s Note to Self

Author Alison Nancye

The book is called Note to Self by Alison Nancye, and it tells the fictional story of a 39 year old single woman named Beth, who has been beaten by the world in more ways than one. Finally being fed up with the losers for men in her life, her job, and the chains of her own past, she packs up everything from Sydney, Australia,and moves to Peru and starts a completely new life, in which she learns to embrace the culture, people, and learns to really live again. I feel I can relate to the character of Beth, as that was me BEFORE I got away from my abusive environment, and got the help I needed. I think the one scene I can relate to the most, is her falling down in the middle of a crowded street in downtown Sydney, and NO ONE caring. This book ultimately not only re-affirmed my faith in the Lord, and how He has given me so much healing from my past, but reminded me of how He gave me the courage to step out on faith and attend PBU (Now Cairn University), develop a backbone with not only my own parents, but also other men (the right way), ultimately leading to the day I met Ricky Saddler, my husband. I highly recommend this book for anyone who is in this situation, and wants to spread their wings, whether for the first time, or again.

Alison Nancye’s Note to Self is available here, from New Jersey’s Turn the Page Publishing: http://turnthepagepublishing.com/books/note-to-self/#.UcYtx_nrz7S

Wendy Saddler is a reader, anti-corruption and pro-domestic peace social activist, and an assistant literary publicist from Bensalem, Pennsylvania. She may be reached at blondetrekkie@comcast.net

Devotion

Frances Varian

For Dinah’s Christina Rossetti

There is a difference between kneeling and bowing
that has to do with endurance
You talk to God & swim in shadows

you say I believe

while catching snowflakes on your tongue
You recreate the watery communion for the others

My friend will quench the loneliness of
your mis-representation though she may seem an unlikely savior,
you are not the first stray she’s taken in

You could both slip quietly into the fold,
cover your slender shoulders and smile
You could both pretend that faith was more
dumbluck than educated guess

Yet you walk swiftly through
late November, with London’s ghosts
whispering in your ear, you imagine the snow falling,
all the water drops for your soul and yours alone

You will inherit the earth.
good luck with that

I love women who talk when no one is listening

la divina

Frances Varian

if you break
do it quietly so that no one hears you

no one comes running

be a small tear in a glass vase
cunningly invisible
until it implodes from the weight

of the holding of water and beautiful things

christ, if you break that way
imagine what they’ll say about you

regret the hours passed when you stood
empty and unnoticed

do not announce
do not indicate. She

walks in beauty
a weeping Madonna

and her sorrowful story line lifts her
like a beacon above

the choir of whores she keeps
confidence with

she’s got tunnel vision for the business &
a $75/hour ass to boot

she’s so sad you can’t help
but get hard

every time she walks by

& it’s not the sadness that’s got your hand
down your pants
it’s the way she holds it be-

cause it’s precious and she might
slip that pouting frown mouth over you
and suck the evil out
of your heart

leave you spent and empty and free    of your will

which has always been miserably mediocre    baby

it’s the way she holds herself
up around the hairline fracture down the center

the way muscle and tendon have adhered
to the split stupidly obedient science

she is a martyred saint voodoo priestess miracle
with her faith bunched around her ankles

picture perfect

mainlines God and the Devil on alternate days
Mom     Dad the custody battle

anything to hold
on cause she

knows    she’s gonna break &
she’ll be damned it you get her to howl

everyone I love has this
hard dirty cough like they could
push up the ugly and spit it back   where
it came from

but they are victims of gravity
and swallow back into them
the notion the poison and poor
folks are made for one another

I rock myself to sleep for this
and I rack my brain for the answers

to days that unravel like symptoms
in a Public Health clinic

begging for diagnosis
and no money for the medicine

everyone I love breaks down like a car
on the freeway going 70
break down that fast ain’t pretty,
No

the best mind of my generation
is not the best heart

and the hearts of my best loves
watch their cunts poison pumped
by the

unworthy

over & over & over again

she’s got you all jacked up on
possibility and redemption fucking fantasies

suddenly you know, you’d
kill to be the one

sucking the sweetness

making her 30 pieces of silver noose
and 2 air kisses for the trip

you say
fuck-doll
bim-bo
sing-song

like you’re waiting to hear

thank you

you’ve got your hands
down

your pants

precious

fluid pumped continuously through
the veins of the unworthy in-

to the mouth of the miracle worker
you’d turn on a
dime to break her ask
her for change when you’re done

All of my rosy people with
their candy cancer sticks and charming
refusal to drop dead

quietly

they march on

obedient as science
but far less ordered

the proletariat as phlegm in
the lungs of the master plan

I no longer believe in our salvation
welcome, true dawn of the revolution:

so sad you get hard every time

sacred

lullaby of the miracle worker her
heavenly chorus of

“cum on my face”

before this over you will
forever understand that
your redemption was purchased for

$75 and the sweetest ass this side of the
tracks

All of my people have been instructed
to break quietly    a

small tear in a glass vase
cunningly invisible until they implode
from the weight of the holding

I believe in one holy and apostolic church

Now Go Rebuild The World

                LOVE EXIT

     Spit and the talk was of
     how your debt was lessening.
     The saliva hovering
     over a sleeveless blouse.
     My arms lattice to your growth.
     Kisses that once reminded me of the sea,
     they rolled like waves
     covering the falling away.
     I have a beer coaster with your name on it,
     and glass that has squandered the opaque.

Colin James may be reached at colinrichardjames@yahoo.com