This ambitious novel follows Callie, a healer and seer, as she moves from childhood to adulthood to old age, healing the sick and wounded. Throughout her life, she struggles to control visions of the future (manifested through dreams and premonitions) and supernatural abilities that channel powers from the Goddess.
Callie’s story begins when she is a child learning the magical art of healing from her grandmother. She is abruptly brought into adulthood at age 18 when William, a wealthy landowner, rapes her. Afterward, she cares for her sick mother and raises the infant conceived during the attack. Despite her hatred for William, she allows him visitation rights with the child.
Three years later, Callie marries Richard, a wood carver, and they have a child together. She then works at raising her two children, attending to her husband’s needs, and using her healing arts for her ailing mother, aging grandmother, and villagers. William resurfaces periodically to cause her pain (such as taking her daughter away without warning or permission). Throughout Callie’s adventures, waking visions and nightly dreams of mud and blood plague her. These horrifying images foreshadow the greatest tragedy of her life. In her old age, however, visions have the opposite effect: offering hope of reuniting with a lost love.
These often-tragic adventures have potential for an interesting novel, but the author’s writing style, which includes frequent and awkward attempts at foreshadowing, interferes with storytelling. Abundant spelling, grammatical, and formatting errors, and missing or misplaced punctuation slow the reading process. For example: “Later, when Richard came to releave [sic] Callie so that she could feed th [sic] babe and rest [sic] he found her sobbing over her mothers [sic[ body.” Readers should also be aware that the book is laced with profanity, vulgarities, and graphic birthing scenes, rape, and sexual encounters.
