Breeze by Richard Seltzer
62,613
words
Literary
Fiction, with touches of magic realism, historical fiction, and
time travel
Breeze,
a young woman in present-day
Connecticut, goes
into a medically
inexplicable coma. Her boyfriend, Yannie, a senior at Yale, has to get
her the help
she
needs
to survive,
while trying
to solve the
mystery of this
goddess-like
free spirit who
appeared
out of nowhere
two
months
before and turned his life upsidedown.
His
ex,
Lauren, a
childhood
friend,
gives him the support and advice he
needs, helping him rebuild
his life, while trying
to win
him back. But it
turns out that
this love
triangle wasn't a triangle at all.
Meanwhile,
Breeze wakes up in a different
body in a different
place and time. She is at Troy in the body of Briseis, love-slave
of Achilles, and she needs to adjust
fast, and improvise to fit
in or be taken for a demon. She knows the
story she is now trapped
in, but,
as she discovers, she
can make changes
that
leave the story
intact but change its meaning for
her and
for others. Among the
unexpected
twists,
with
the help of vengeful friends,
she
murders Achilles, who she loves,
but
stages it so
the world
believes he died in combat at the
walls of Troy.
And
despite
that, she
and Achilles
survive and
ride off together to
the east,
where she
will become an Amazon warrior
and
he her stay-at-home husband.
Comparables
--
Asymmetry by
Lisa Halliday -- interlinked
novellas
Life
After Life by Kate Atkinson -- soul migration
The
Time Travelers Wife by Audrey Niffenegger -- time
travel
Author
Bio
--
My
published
works include:
The Name of Hero,
historical novel (Houghton Mifflin)
Ethiopia Through Russian Eyes,
translation from the Russian (Red
Sea Press) "...the most important book on the history of
eastern
Africa to have been published for a century...."
Old Africa
The Lizard of Oz satiric fantasy,
"An intriguing and
very entertaining little novel" Library Journal
The AltaVista Search Revolution,
the first consumer book
about search engines (McGraw-Hill) "indispensable"
Library
Journal, Winner of the Distinguished Technical Communication
Award, the highest
award given by the Society for Technical Communication
Publications.
Web Business Bootcamp (Wiley)
complete
list
at http://seltzerbooks.com/books/seltzer.html
Now
a
publisher of 3000 public domain electronic books, I worked for
DEC, the minicomputer
company, for 19 years, as writer, marketing consultant, and
"Internet
Evangelist." I graduated from Yale, with a major in English,
and earned an
MA from the U. of Mass. at Amherst in Comparative Literature
(French, Russian,
and German). At Yale, I had creative writing courses with
Robert Penn Warren
and Joseph Heller.
My web site seltzerbooks.com gets 50,000-75,000
hits/months.