BEAUTIFUL SNARE by Laurie Jameson

BEAUTIFUL SNARE by Laurie Jameson. (2012. Seven Oaks Publishing, Llano Texas.) 320pp.
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BEAUTIFUL SNARE may be a quick, invigorating read set in Celtic Britain, but it is not without the often-overlooked and delicate details that make it real and captivating, not without the earthy myths that envelope the reader in an enduring veil of another time and place. Laurie Jameson’s first novel, ‘Book One in the Spirited Women Series’, the author may be better known to readers of Dry Crik Review as the poet, Laurie Wagner Buyer.

Like the dutiful Ywain, I fell in love with Bekah on her tumultuous quest to save her people and her land from the invading Romans, intrigued by her divine visions from the Goddess of the Otherworld, by the guiding ghosts of the dead, and the pantheistic realm in which this tale is set. A story of love and unrelenting loyalty balanced against a winless war, Bekah relinquishes all for the sake of her people.

With a tasteful amount of ingenious erotic passages, Jameson’s prose style is as polished as her poetry, descriptive paragraphs full of colors and fragrances, with assonance and solid breath beats, the reader floats as if watching the landscape and all its creatures unfold into another world. These vivid descriptions are felt as in a theater. And a movie, this novel could be.

But one cannot ignore the application of this book to our ongoing impacts to Mother Earth, to the failure of male-dominated cultures and religions to sustain her worth. Jameson’s alternative view throughout BEAUTIFUL SNARE is a refreshing, hopeful and exciting place to be captured. Read it. – JCD