seven-times

When I started my “Cheap Reads” series, I expected I would be posting a number of entries. I never expected it to be limited to just two for all this time! Fortunately, I’ve found another inexpensive novel that is highly worthy of mention.

In recent weeks I became aware of a small-press-published novel that looked very interesting by one of my Facebook friends, Sara M. Harvey. It is called Seven Times a Woman, and is a tempestuous romance set in ancient Japan involving a kitsune woman named Rei-Rei, the god Inari, and a dragon Rei-Rei has to “tame”.

I’ve developed a fondness for stories about kitsune lately, and when I found the e-book was only 99 cents on Smashwords, DRM-free, I decided to buy two digital copies—one for myself and one for a friend who was also fond of kitsune. (Smashwords has a really great and sensible licensing feature for its e-books: if you want to send a copy to a friend, it lets you pay for that copy you’re sending right up front. Great way to legitimize e-book sharing, as well as make it easy for the author to get paid for the between-friends sharing you would probably be doing anyway.)

I was a bit wary of buying a 99-cent book, given the perception that “you get what you pay for”, but after reading it, for the first time ever I found myself wanting to go back to Smashwords and pay for several more “copies” of the book, because I enjoyed it so much that I think 99 cents is far too little to pay for such a thing!

(I should apologize to Ms. Harvey and her publisher for the little bit of censorship I did on the cover image I’m posting with this story. It’s a really beautiful painting, perfectly in keeping with the nature of the story, but there are just some things I don’t think I can get away with showing on a blog meant to be read by all ages. For that matter, I find it interesting that the publisher could get away with putting it on the front of a book that’s going to be listed in all-ages stores such as Amazon, but it’s gorgeous enough that I’m certainly not going to complain.)

The story follows Rei-Rei across her seven reincarnations as human girls or women, during which time she meets and marries the dragon Sha Tano (also in human guise), and meets him again and again through subsequent lives. Following after Sha Tano is his darker twin, Kage, who poses a danger and a mystery that Rei-Rei must solve to complete the task she has been given.

In a way, the novel is more a collection of stories—the stories of each separate life of Rei-Rei, including her birth and upbringing—than a single tale. Indeed, each of the stories works well enough by itself that I could easily see them being published separately in magazines as novellas. The stories are woven together by common elements, and each builds on what came before to invoke the mystery of Rei-Rei’s lives and how she can complete her task and return to the arms of Inari. The overall story becomes more compelling with every one of Rei-Rei’s lives, and by the end I was quite unable to put it down.

All that I know about Japanese history and culture I’ve picked up from anime, manga, and a bit of Wikipedia and book-reading, so I’m by no means an expert, but the book appeared to me from what I do know to be very well-researched, with all the mythological figures depicted completely in keeping with their traditional images and descriptions.

1 COMMENT

  1. The best cheap read that has come to me in the last year is the New Zealand family saga by Shayne Parkinson, the first of which is Sentence of Marriage and followed by 3 others. The first e-book is free and the others are $2.99. This is a fascinating, well-written and meticulously edited series. It seems to be available from every major e-book vendor: Amazon (where I got it), Smashwords, Kobo and Barnes & Noble.

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