A Review of and Falling Fly by Skyler White

.5


and Falling, fly by Skyler White is an intellectual playground of paranormal romance and urban fantasy like nothing you've ever read before. It blends elements of mythology, psychology, neuroscience...it's a wild ride full of riddles, love, desire and read between the lines meaning.

I was hooked from page one.

and Falling, fly is a literary roller coater ride in an alternate world where Hell is a steampunk hotel underground in Ireland and vampires are angels of desire, sexual without the ability for intercourse and the truth is spoken in riddles by a serpent. The damned, lost and reborn or in White's words "the damned, cursed and misbegotten" walk among us humans, always feeling different and left out- but can find their place in L'Otel Mathillide.

Blurb:

In a dark and seedy underground of burned-out rock stars and angels-turned- vampires, a revolutionary neuroscientist and a fallen angel must put medicine against mythology in an attempt to erase their tortured pasts...but at what price?

Olivia, vampire and fallen angel of desire, is hopeless...and damned. Since the fall from Eden, she has hungered for love, but fed only on desire. Dominic O'Shaughnessy is a neuroscientist plagued by impossible visions. When his research and her despair collide at L'Otel Mathillide-a subterranean hell of beauty, demons, and dreams-rationalist and angel unite in a clash of desire and damnation that threatens to destroy them both.

In this fractured Hotel of the Damned, Olivia and Dominic discover the only force consistent in their opposing realities is the deep, erotic gravity between them. Bound to each other finally in a knot of interwoven freedoms, Dominic and Olivia-the vision-touched scientist and the earth-bound angel, reborn and undead-encounter the mystery of love and find it is both fall...and flight.

This visual masterpiece has the qualities of a cult favorite, a book that the intellectual will love because of its visual qualities, its deep meanings both hidden between the lines and in the riddles of the words all encased in a story that is is so dynamic. It questions love, desire, myth, heaven and hell...

This book really made my brain work and even after I finished the book I kept questioning what I had read. I like books that do that- that make me think.

Some of my favorite quotes come from the serpent:


from page 226

"Push man into woman and find oneness once more," it whispered. "Lose yourself in another, and find yourself in love."

from page 230

"You get pretty close don't you?" The serpent's sibilant voice whispered in Dominic's mind as much as in his bleeding ear. "Touching heaven and gutter, orgasm-blind seeing self and other? Your recreational re-creating of creation procreates. Sex apes God, and creates life."

"And pushes us into duality again." Dominic whispered.

The whole book is a dark and unique look at desire, love, self worth and the damage that lives inside us all. The things we have to overcome to love, to accept, to be what we were meant to be. Completely intriguing.

I can honestly say this probably isn't a book for everyone.

If you want a simple uncomplicated read that is purely escapism this is not the book for you but if you are interested in an intellectual read that combines PNR and UF in ways you've never expected then you might enjoy this book. You'll have to keep your mind open and be ready to expreience a trippy alternate universe.

I look forward to reading more from Skylar White.

If you'd like to learn more about Skyler please drop by for her interview here at Fang-tastic Books on March 10. Until then you can visit http://www.skylerwhite.com/