Sacrilege
Barbara Avon
Independently published (October 26, 2020)
Reviewed by Nora B. Peevy
I am in love with this book. If I could marry this book and have its little odd children tell me more stories, I would happily do that. In fact, I want to know more about all the characters in the story. I feel they need to be interrogated for at least twenty-four hours in a news program so I can properly know the pain and depth of their soul. Barbara’s Avon is like savoring the darkest, richest, delectable sins of others and I don’t feel guilty peeking into the haunted boarding house, which you will learn used to be something else, (but I don’t do spoilers. Just know it fits the character and the theme immensely and is so ironic. Only a mad lunatic could laugh. By this point the characters have been driven mad.)
The first thing that hooked me in were all the bits if Cris’ poetry and observations we read about his life. They are beautiful and yet, he is lost and lonely. He runs into an entire cast of lonely characters all looking for something meaningful. The themes of the book are heavy. This is not a vacation novella, unless you’re like me and you relish the macabre year round. This is one to read in a divine black dress with a lace collar and lace sleeves while sipping the most expensive tea you can fine and eating the richest food you love, which for me, if caviar.
Every word in this novella is a pearl to ponder and roll around, to be tasted on your tongue. You run through a variety of emotions; penance; self-love; romantic love; platonic love; familial love; death; forgiveness for yourself; atonement from others who are gone; guilt and all this while living in a haunted boarding house where the ghosts are not active, but are seen by the guests and owners and interact at them when they are most vulnerable and needing the most help. The ghosts appear at times as a caretaker when there is a crisis with one of the characters.
I couldn’t sleep tonight. I knew I needed to finish this beautiful dance of words on the page in one reading. This novella deserved that attention from me. I drank in her words like a fine gin. Her words are simple, but profound, true, honest, illuminating, and signal elements in life will all struggle with because that is what life is, struggling and learning to grow from your struggles to become a better person. Struggling to use your knowledge to help others so they can help pass down that knowledge and it will spread out like a woven spider’s web and they will have babies born with the knowledge who will share that knowledge with their babies and it will be a small atonement for whatever happened. And that is a start. Every action you take has a reaction affecting life. Even my typing this book review will have a reaction on someone’s life.
