Published By: Word Hermit Press, 1 March, 2014
Official Author Websites: Site | Twitter | Facebook | Pin(terest) Boards
Converse via: #ToLiveForeverTour | #ToLiveForeverBook
#MeriwetherLewis | #NatchezTraceWalk444miles
Available Formats: Paperback & E-Book
Page Count: 305
Acquired By: As soon as I saw this particular tour come through my Inbox from Historical Fiction Virtual Book Tours, I elected to request to be a tour stop on the “To Live Forever” virtual book tour. The premise of the book was awe-inspiring and I could not pass up this opportunity to read a book which shattered conventional genre orientations! I was given two spots on the tour, a book review & an Author Interview of which I was grateful! I received a complimentary copy of the book direct from the author Andra Wakins in exchange for an honest review. I did not receive compensation for my opinions or thoughts shared herein.
Inspired to Read:
Whilst reading the virtual tour information for “To Live Forever: An Afterlife Journey of Meriwether Lewis” my initial reaction was thus: I love everything about this particular story, from the historical impact to the paranormal implications! There is suspense but there is also the human desire for legacy! A wicked chance to read a book that I cannot quite put my finger on which genre it belongs in! I love finding genre-benders and this one for sure has all the lovely ingredients of a historical novel interspersed with time slip, paranormal tendencies and psychological suspense! As a reader, who dances through genres and whose blood is stirred by the evoking narratives of inventive writers who dare to give a reader a new dimension of a reading experience — I will always champion the rebels with a cause, such as Ms. Wakins! Who boldly refuses to give up on their stories and forge their own path towards publication!
Book Synopsis:
Is remembrance immortality?
Nobody wants to be forgotten, least of all the famous.
Meriwether Lewis lived a memorable life. He and William Clark were the first white men to reach the Pacific in their failed attempt to discover a Northwest Passage. Much celebrated upon their return, Lewis was appointed governor of the vast Upper Louisiana Territory and began preparing his eagerly-anticipated journals for publication. But his re-entry into society proved as challenging as his journey. Battling financial and psychological demons and faced with mounting pressure from Washington, Lewis set out on a pivotal trip to the nation’s capital in September 1809. His mission: to publish his journals and salvage his political career. He never made it. He died in a roadside inn on the Natchez Trace in Tennessee from one gunshot to the head and another to the abdomen.
Was it suicide or murder? His mysterious death tainted his legacy and his fame quickly faded. Merry’s own memory of his death is fuzzy at best. All he knows is he’s fallen into Nowhere, where his only shot at redemption lies in the fate of rescuing another. An ill-suited “guardian angel,” Merry comes to in the same New Orleans bar after twelve straight failures. Now, with one drink and a two-dollar bill he is sent on his last assignment, his final shot at escape from the purgatory in which he’s been dwelling for almost 200 years. Merry still believes he can reverse his forgotten fortunes.
Nine-year-old Emmaline Cagney is the daughter of French Quarter madam and a Dixieland bass player. When her mother wins custody in a bitter divorce, Emmaline carves out her childhood among the ladies of Bourbon Street. Bounced between innocence and immorality, she struggles to find her safe haven, even while her mother makes her open her dress and serve tea to grown men.
It isn’t until Emmaline finds the strange cards hidden in her mother’s desk that she realizes why these men are visiting: her mother has offered to sell her to the highest bidder. To escape a life of prostitution, she slips away during a police raid on her mother’s bordello, desperate to find her father in Nashville.
Merry’s fateful two-dollar bill leads him to Emmaline as she is being chased by the winner of her mother’s sick card game: The Judge. A dangerous Nowhere Man convinced that Emmaline is the reincarnation of his long dead wife, Judge Wilkinson is determined to possess her, to tease out his wife’s spirit and marry her when she is ready. That Emmaline is now guarded by Meriwether Lewis, his bitter rival in life, further stokes his obsessive rage.
To elude the Judge, Em and Merry navigate the Mississippi River to Natchez. They set off on an adventure along the storied Natchez Trace, where they meet Cajun bird watchers, Elvis-crooning Siamese twins, War of 1812 re-enactors, Spanish wild boar hunters and ancient mound dwellers. Are these people their allies? Or pawns of the perverted, powerful Judge?
After a bloody confrontation with the Judge at Lewis’s grave, Merry and Em limp into Nashville and discover her father at the Parthenon. Just as Merry wrestles with the specter of success in his mission to deliver Em, The Judge intercedes with renewed determination to win Emmaline, waging a final battle for her soul. Merry vanquishes the Judge and earns his redemption. As his spirit fuses with the body of Em’s living father, Merry discovers that immortality lives within the salvation of another, not the remembrance of the multitude.
{: Author Biography :}
Hey. I’m Andra Watkins. I’m a native of Tennessee, but I’m lucky to call Charleston, South Carolina, home for 23 years. I’m the author of ‘To Live Forever: An Afterlife Journey of Meriwether Lewis’, coming March 1, 2014. It’s a mishmash of historical fiction, paranormal fiction and suspense that follows Meriwether Lewis (of Lewis & Clark fame) after his mysterious death on the Natchez Trace in 1809.
I like:
- hiking
- eating (A lot; Italian food is my favorite.)
- traveling (I never met a destination I didn’t like.)
- reading (My favorite book is The Count of Monte Cristo.)
- coffee (the caffeinated version) and COFFEE (sex)
- performing (theater, singing, public speaking, playing piano)
- time with my friends
- Sirius XM Chill
- yoga (No, I can’t stand on my head.)
- writing in bed
- candlelight
I don’t like:
- getting up in the morning
- cilantro (It is the devil weed.)
- surprises (For me or for anyone else.)
- house cleaning
- cooking
Meriwether Lewis | Enters stage right just past the grave:
Watkins has a gift for eluding to the story as its foreshadowed to unfold by giving her readers a nib and a tasting of where her characters are going to lead both the writer and the unsuspecting reader who bemuseful of curiosity picks up the book to engage in the mystery. She cleverly allows the three main protagonists to make a causal, unfiltered entrance whilst giving the reader a nibbling of suspense about the purported dimensional expanse in which they live. One of the reasons I was attracted to reading this particular story is the level of interest in the unknown. For as many near-death experiences there are of those who return back to earth as they stepped out of the light to come back to their earthly lives; there are a multitude of examples of what ‘lies beyond the veil’.
The Meriwether who steps into the forefront of this particular story is a nearly-jaded (here I refer to ‘nearly’ as a piece of his spirit half-hinges himself to a hope he no longer feels possible) downtrodden Meriwether who has lost the will to see the point in his existence. After attempting task after task to sort out where he is and how to exit the in-between world he’s tethered too, you gain the sense he is walking the path between madness and fugue.
Unbeknownst to Meriwether, I do believe is his fatherly nature and tendencies towards children. I think he was plumb aghast at how well he fared whilst in the company of Miss Emmaline. A natural bourne role model for young people, giving them something to chew on by appreciating their worth at their age of youth. He treats her with respect and talks to her straight, allowing her to process what she needs to hear. He listens and he’s attentive and that is one of the best bits to seeing Meriwether in this way. Emmaline humbles his weathered and jaded heart.
My Review of To Live Forever: An Afterlife Journey of Meriwether Lewis:
The opening bits of To Live Forever surely by George tug quite a heap at your heart-strings! Emmaline is a young girl, all of nine years when her mother strategically out favoured her father in the judge’s eyes for sole custody. The very words sole custody etch out a shuddering straight to the core of a little girl’s soul! Dragged away from the one parent who loved her beyond selfish desires and needs, Emmaline is forced to grasp a hold of the whisperments of her father’s memory until the day could arrive where she could change her stars and reunite with him permanently.
Caught up in the darkest of night behaviours, Emmaline is fated of having a mother whose only intentions towards her daughter are to earn her keep out of her. I cringed reading the passages of where only Aunt Bertie could save Emmaline’s life from being snuffed out from love completely! A measure of a man’s humanity is oft laid bare by his actions towards his children. If Emmaline’s mother had to stand trial on grounds of character choices and humanity she would no sooner see the daylight again than a bat caught in the nettles of a sewer tunnel! Young Emmaline is gifted by a singular grace of affecting herself to the light within the days she has never quite been free to live within. Her inner spirit hugs her close to the truths of life and its her raw courage which solidifies her ability to reach out to Meriwether in a darkened alley.
Words ooze out of Wakin’s narrative as sweet as a honeycomb to a tending worker bee. She has a way of conveying imagery, both hauntingly dangerous and tragically poignant with the flick of her pen and a dribble of her ink. All of which fuses into a new tangible version of Southern Gothic intermixed with historical fiction purveying the notion that our past is entwined to our present as much as our future. Time is temporal and To Live Forever is a living thesis towards that end. The novel breathes and extends its own narrator around the interjections of the characters on its flattened stage.
Emmaline and Meriwether’s sojourn trek into the wilds of the Natchez Trace held me reflective of their plight. Not merely to reach Nashville, in order to seek out Emmaline’s father but of the greater disadvantages against them. Of Meriwether never truly seeing himself for the man he was but rather the disillusioned sigh of a lost legacy. Emmaline was still young enough to grow and find in maturity a strong path towards individual freedom. Each of them were tied to a future bent against them by situations out of their control. Striving to forge a better path to walk, they found reassurance in each other knowing that any journey worth taking is sometimes lessened in adversity when shared.
The natural world is the backdrop of To Live Forever, fraught with an indecisive urge to complicate their expedition by presenting new challenges neither of them had yet experienced. For Meriwether he’s being given the chance at redemption, and towards living a half-life of what his life could have been had he lived past his time of death. In Emmaline, I see an urchin of an innocent girl stalwart and strong in her internal hope to carry her through the aching tides of her adolescence. Her courage runs deeper than her confidence due to a few kind souls who crossed her path for the good.
The story is interwoven as a refractive mirror of the Natchez Trace itself. The harder you believe any blight of adversity is in your life to conquer and overcome, the more your spirit will start to believe your too fragile to try anything. The Trace is a test of wills as much as it’s a test of inner fortitude to re-strengthen our shield against unwanted storms and periods of stress which arise out of nowhere. Life can ebb and flow, bobbing us along until we’re ready to see what our eyes blinded us towards revealing. All of our passageways lead us further towards where our feet are meant to land, but what if we hold ourselves back from the greatest revelations of all? Simply because we’re not willing to alight where we’re lead to go? The Trace is unique in that it withholds its past like a tightly woven tapestry. Each piece of its innate soul is stitched inside the weathered path where feet and souls mingled into the mist. There lessons linger and their spirits shudder to grieve.
There is an ever-knowing pool of truth and hope awaiting us around each bend and turn. The people we feel we are ‘randomly’ encountering are the kind of teachers and advisers we might never expect would be important to our growth. Listen with compassion. Be kind to strangers who might one day become a cherished friend. Grow through friendship and rise each day realising the beauty of the hour. Our lives are leading us through the light and back inside it.
On Illustrations | Reflective fragments of text:
A delight for someone who appreciates illustration, art, and design as much as I do will appreciate the cover-art splashing out an array of the internal illustrations peppered throughout the novel itself! They arrive rather unexpectedly as you travel through the chapters. A bit of a sketch here, and an elusive sketch over here, attempting to give you another fragmented piece of the whole. I like the old-school approach to the sketches themselves and if I had thought to ask ahead of time, I would have asked Ms. Wakins about their origins whilst I was still composing my Interview which posts on Thursday! The vivid detail in carbon textured visuals is a treat for me, as I always felt one place most novels lose a bit of creative edge is from withholding illustrators from illuminating their novels with art.
There is a geometric shift in book production where stock imagery has morphed away the originality of most cover designs to where its hard to distinguish at times who was the forerunner and who took up the lead from the one who followed next. I miss the uniqueness of book cover art as only a few Indie publishers still strive towards giving us a peek of a view of the internal world inside the stories whilst gracing their covers with conversational stirring projections! I am blessed to host blog tours with the few I am referencing in this paragraph!
Not all book covers yield to this opinion, but you have to admit, how oft do you wander around a bookshoppe and feel as though you’re staring into the sameness of what was already released!? As though if you were to stack a heap of books end to end with each other, they would look like twins rather than fraternal cousins four times removed!? The differences in design and the elements in which covers resonate with us boil down to typography, colour, elemental ornamentation, and a cheeky clever way of cluing the audience in on a ‘slice’ of what they will find revealed by the ending chapters fall close. And, this dear hearts is where Ms. Wakins outshines the lot!
I loved the clever surprise in who “Mister Jack’ was in reality! This nature-loving girl felt all giddy inside when she connected the dots, which nearly occurred half a step ahead of Emmaline!
A note of gratitude on behalf of the author, Ms. Wakins:
I classified this novel several different ways to Sunday under “topics, genres, and subjects” because it fits quite easily into quite a few distinctive areas of literature! For me, its occupying the ethereal space between psychological suspense intermingled with Southern Gothic, with a pinch of Horror-lite (I blame the Judge!)! Horror-lite for me implies that there are bits and bobbles of ‘horror’ thrown in for good measure but not overtly so as to be disturbing or distracting. Once your reading a novel by Ms. Wakins your lulling in the water of the Mississippi, fully aware of where you are but caught up in her stream of lucid dream-state story-telling where you barely notice the darker points around the fringes of the story because your caught up in the adventure of the central plot surrounding Meriwether Lewis!
I earmarked ‘vulgarity in literature’ as a way to reference the lovely gift Wakins wrote into her début novel; with one singular foul-mouthed character she championed every inch of what I have been lamenting about myself for quite a while now on Jorie Loves A Story! That there are far better ways to express yourself and that sometimes, even though you walk a line in life yourself, you cannot always help but encounter a few people who might push your buttons towards one extreme or the other. It’s how you find the balance and how you learn to embrace the ruts in the road which will define your characters in the long run.
Virtual Road Map for “To Live Forever Tour”
Be sure to scope out upcoming tours I will be hosting with:
on my Bookish Events page!
{: Natchez Trace Walk :}
An extra special surprise for readers:
{SOURCES: Cover art of “To Live Forever: An Afterlife Journey of Meriwether Lewis”, book synopsis, author photograph of Andra Wakins, author biography, the Natchez Trace map & Natchez Trace Walk Infomation and the tour host badge were all provided by Historical Fiction Virtual Book Tours and used with permission. Blog Tour badge provided by Parajunkee to give book bloggers definition on their blogs. The video by Andra Watkins had either URL share links or coding which made it possible to embed this media portal to this post, and I thank them for the opportunity to share more about this novel and the author who penned it.}
Copyright © Jorie Loves A Story, 2014.
Comments via Twitter:
@JLovesAStory @HFVBT Thanks for starting my April with the awesome review of #ToLiveForeverbook!!
— andrawatkins (@andrawatkins) April 1, 2014
I big puffy heart love this review of @andrawatkins & #ToLiveForeverBook from @JLovesAStory. http://t.co/YCZbVHqhvy #histfic #paranormalfic
— Rowe Copeland (@RoweCopeland) April 1, 2014
If this review by @JLovesAStory doesn’t convince you to buy @andrawatkins #ToLiveForeverBook, well, read it again. http://t.co/YCZbVHqhvy
— Rowe Copeland (@RoweCopeland) April 1, 2014
@JLovesAStory it was awesome!! #toliveforever
“Words ooze out of Watkin’s narrative as sweet as a honeycomb to a tending worker bee” @andrawatkins http://t.co/Xo4CRLLJLa
— Amy Bruno (@HFVBT) April 2, 2014
@JLovesAStory it was awesome!! #toliveforever
— Leigh Anne Wills (@wills_leigh) April 2, 2014
@JLovesAStory I hope I get to meet you sometime! Anyone who makes Andra laugh is special in my book!!
— Leigh Anne Wills (@wills_leigh) April 3, 2014
Author Biography:
She left her Creole home an innocent of youth, jettisoning herself into a life in France which would test the strength of her inner resolve. Where she would have to eradicate her natural being of self into a transformed Parisian woman of elegance, whose strength would yield to power. She took on the challenge as an understudy would in a theatrical play. Learning through being bold in her choices of dress, style, mannerisms, and speech. Each nuisance she could alter of her previous life, she would discard straight-away in preference for discovering a better fit for high society.
