From the future, a final plea. Out of the past, a last hope.
READER (Daughter of Time, Book 1): A young girl, born to die in freakish disregard. A doomed world, enslaved to forces unseen. A final hope beyond imagining. Become a Reader, because in the end, the most unbelievable step in the adventure - will be your own. Kindle, audiobook, paperback, and hardcover available.
"a gripping science-fiction epic that will propel readers toward wonder."
—Foreword Reviews
REVIEWS (links): San Francisco Book Reviews, Foreword Reviews, Kirkus Reviews, Amazon.com, Publishers Weekly
from the author
READER is the first book of the DAUGHTER OF TIME Trilogy.
When I began this series (then only conceived as a single novel), I wanted to write a "superheroine" book for my (then) middle school-aged daughters--the story of a "girl that saves the universe". Inspired by the starlight over the Aegean, I began to write the novel one summer visiting Greece. By the time I had made much progress on the manuscript (which took a back seat to my first thriller), my daughters were in high school and the tone and maturity of the novel wasn't right for them (as their initial devastating critiques revealed!). I then rewrote it from scratch for older readers. So it has some remainder of the YA flavor of the initial drafts, especially in the beginning, but it quickly turns darker. Books 2 and 3 have left the initial universe of that gestation far behind.
With these books, I was also interested in exploring certain themes and ideas from a variety of science fiction authors and modern cosmology, trying to find my own "mythology" to harmonize some of the disparate conceptions of reality. Ideas of the subjectivity and limitations of human perception and understanding played important roles, as did ideas of causality, time, superstructure, divinity, and infinity.
Finally, I always wanted to write a book that not only "broke the fourth wall", but obliterated it, mocked it, transformed it, and turned it into a house of mirrors for the reader. There has been a decidedly mixed reaction as to how well that worked in READER, but it was a lot of fun in the making.