The Raven’s Tale
by Lisa Harris

Description

“In The Raven’s Tale, Lisa Harris eloquently weaves the tale of an extraordinary woman’s spiritual awakening. The novel’s landscapes include medieval Europe and a modern-day fishing village where the heroine seeks a new life with the help of a mysterious guardian angel and a wise, often amusing, shape-shifting black bird. Alive with fantasy and adventure, this is an original, beguiling story.”  (Edward Hower, author of The New Life Hotel and A Garden of Dreams.)  The Raven’s Tale is book three in Harris’ “The Quest Trilogy,”  following “Geechee Girls and Allegheny Dreams.  Excerpts from the novel have been published in the following venues: The Penmen, Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester, NH; Facets, Butler County Community College, Butler, PA; and The Anemone Sidecar.

Comments:

“If you could slip through a seemingly impenetrable universe to experience an unknown past, would you? And then, could you come back to create a future for yourself with a new-found love? Manette believes she can. Follow her on this journey from Boston to Newfoundland and beyond, through wrinkles in time and space, where atoms collide, past and present blur, ravens guide, and angels teach that sacred space is where you are—here, now—and all things are possible.” (M. Ren, former editor McGraw-Hill)

“A Lisa Harris story—long or short—is like the moon. There is the brilliant surface at once apparent: rusty porch nails, summer’s swelter, relation and complication, the first gasp and ecstatic shriek of a newborn, slick with raw epiphany, whacked with a hand full of bone. But there is at the same time a shadowed side—sensed in a flurry of wing-beats, a soft voice counting—a dimension never seen but with implications everywhere. From the opening lines of The Raven’s Tale, the reader plunges forward, led by the hand of a philosopher, poet, martyr, historian, physicist, wood-witch, bard . . . Here is moonlight so bright it sets the grass ablaze, yet the flames themselves are ice, drawing up mantles of silver mist and rain. Harris weaves threads of nature, myth, love, life, and death into a tapestry whose full pattern, once seen, will make us ache and weep and long for more.” (“A Lisa Harris story—long or short—is like the moon. There is the brilliant surface at once apparent: rusty porch nails, summer’s swelter, relation and complication, the first gasp and ecstatic shriek of a newborn, slick with raw epiphany, whacked with a hand full of bone. But there is at the same time a shadowed side—sensed in a flurry of wing-beats, a soft voice counting—a dimension never seen but with implications everywhere. From the opening lines of The Raven’s Tale, the reader plunges forward, led by the hand of a philosopher, poet, martyr, historian, physicist, wood-witch, bard . . . Here is moonlight so bright it sets the grass ablaze, yet the flames themselves are ice, drawing up mantles of silver mist and rain. Harris weaves threads of nature, myth, love, life, and death into a tapestry whose full pattern, once seen, will make us ache and weep and long for more.”)

“Lisa Harris’ The Raven’s Tale, is an allegory informing us that human nature is unchanging. It is why we continue to read Shakespeare, the ultimate psychologist, to understand the “why” in our behavior. Harris’ characters smell of “fire and flesh” and all have “tasted the salt of sadness”. Indeed, with the guidance of mythical characters, Manette and Jacob travel time and worlds seeking the separate dreams of their pasts and redemption for a combined future. Harris weaves a story of lives stitched together with the lies that we all tell ourselves to prop up the narratives we need to survive. Oh, that we all had a Hugin Munin to save us from ourselves by forgiving ourselves.” (Gwen Davis-Feldman, Author of  Scattered Grace Selected Poems and Essays • At Home in Exile • Cuffy Simpson’s Unthinkable Choice)