This
novel is a compelling read from page one. A story about Knowland
Weaver, a brilliant and passionate man who is well traveled,
multi-faceted, and deeply in love with Maia. But when she ends
their affair, Weaver's world ignites
into sweeping motion and every chapter unspools feelings of hope
and uncertainty.
In his mire of alcoholic pain, Weaver brings about an adventure
of intellectual insights and creative relationships which alter
his life forever.
Haslam has an acute sensitivity for bringing to life events from
across the centuries, threading stories within a story and always
leaving the reader wanting more. His book is a powerful, well written,
fluid, picturesque, arousing to the psyche, romantic, and true-to-life,
ceremonious event.
- Eve
St. Claire, Author
REVIEWS
Small Press Bookwatch
Volume 5, Number 6 |
June 2006 |
Shadow Realities
Herb Haslam
Windspur Press
$15.00
Shadow Realities by Herb Haslam is a compelling novel of Knowland
Weaver, the brilliant and passionate love of Maia, and the devastating
effects of their love affairs disclosure. Intricately revealing of
this highly engaging and intimate tale of Knowland's spiritual and
psychological struggles as his world quickly falls down around him,
Shadow Realities carries its readers through an ever-thickening plot
as the journal of the sixteenth-century explorer, Cabeza de Vaca
mysteriously interrelates with the story line. Shadow Realities is
very highly recommended as an entertaining, original and superbly
crafted story of love, courage, despair, passion, and ultimate insight.
__________________________________________________________
A note from the reviewer:
This review also appears in the Thomson-Gale interactive CD-ROM
Series “Book Review Index” (published four times yearly
for academic, corporate, and public library systems) as well as book
review databases such as Lexus-Nexus and Goliath, and will be posted
for three years at our website www.midwestbookreview.com
Assuming your book is listed with Amazon.com,
I’ve also
instructed our webmaster to post the review there as well.
I look forward to your next title!
Sincerely,
James A. Cox
Editor-in-Chief
Herb Haslam’s “Shadow
Realities”
Time
and space collide and burn in Herb Haslam’s “Shadow
Realities.” Those who fear change in this provocative
novel seem doomed to paw through the ashes like hungry wild horses
seeking food under the snow. Adventurers of the spirit, however,
can emerge from the collision and walk a new path without the need
for familiar illusions of who and when and where we are.
Knowland Weaver is an
unsettling protagonist, a no-land wanderer through his own searching
mind, grounded only by the shards of a broken romance and the
healing of a wounded polo pony. He
seeks the ultimate connection among human beings, a language which,
like his horses and most of Nature, would require no words; it
can, if the system is designed right, be universally understood,
even beyond the Earth plane. His focus is electromagnetic
fields, the secret of connection; his path is that of the artist,
intuitive, knowing no boundaries, threatening the status quo as
he explores parallel existence and the needless isolation of human
beings from each other and from the infinity of worlds about them.
Ostensibly, the book is the gathering of information
for Knowland’s biography; the chapters reflect the shards not
only of the romance but also of a sometimes short-circuited mind. Passages
from his journal interlace with passages from the 16th century
journal of explorer Cabeza de Vaca, present and past meeting and
then separating as if Time itself were breathing. The space-time
rhythm parallels the waves of tourists on the San Antonio Riverwalk
that is Knowland’s
primary physical base – and which once lay in the
path of de Vaca’s journey. Knowland’s passion
for Oneness, a spiritual quest, runs afoul of humanness, which
perceives only separation. He seeks to find the balance through
the arts, advocating their renaissance as a way of consciously
accessing our common soul and achieving communities that are fields
of energy.
One might say that “Shadow Realities” is not
for the fainthearted. More likely, the book is for the faint
of heart who seek courage to continue evolving when all about them
are hurtling backwards into oblivion. Knowland’s struggle
to let go of the conventional society of his time, to let go of
hurt and betrayal occasioned by others, and to open himself to
the possibility of a more positive evolution, allows the reader
to let go as well and dream along with him.
Who
knows? As Knowland says, the process might take thousands
of years, or humanity could find a “wormhole” in an
instant that catapults it to its ultimate connection.
- Wendy
E. Shepard, playwright
December
12, 2005
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