Customer Reviews

Apricot Brandy

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Lynn Cesar begins by lulling her readers with sweet bleakness: a roving young woman, orphaned by suicide and maternal tragedy, returns to her rural home in search of closure. Then she makes the mistake of guzzling her abusive dad's magical homemade booze (the book's title), and compounds the blunder by checking her basement for pods (the old fashioned kind, not i). Soon she's flailing in a Mayan hell, where plants and homicidal corpses riot.
Imagine corrupt cops conspiring with onyx-eyed Mayan gods and dead fathers... and a witch. Stay far away from the sheriffs, the medical examiner and the ex-cons.
Lynn Cesar is a top-drawer spell-caster of rural and Central American horror and hypnoguery. You'll never again pass complacently by a greenhouse or nursery -- to say nothing of measuring radon under your floorboards -- once you've read A.B. I couldn't put it down!
By Dan Temianka, author of "The Jack Vance Lexicon"

There is a breed of fantasy that rises above and beyond the mundane, that breaks through the often tired repetativeness speckling the bookstore. At times, these brilliantly poignant reeds are lost in the mucky ebb of so many stories. By chance this book was given to me by a friend, and from the moment I opened the first page, I couldnt put it down. Apricot Brandy has a style that is both pure and haunting, it is beautifully written and wrought with inexplicable emotion. Lynn Cesar has earned a high place on my bedstand bookshelf for as long as she keeps writing.

This book was written in an interesting style with great descriptions of Karen Fox's return to the house of her childhood after the death of her father. As she wanders around the house, visiting her father's fruit trees from which he made his famous apricot brandy, she finds herself being drawn into a strange evil. When her lover Susan arrives to visit the evil gets more teeth and things start getting harder for Karen. Interspersed with this story is that of two other local people, the sheriff and the medical examiner, who are trying to bring back to life an ancient god, Xibalba. As Karen tries to come to terms with her difficult past in her father's house, samples his homemade brew and finds herself allied with an ex-con, a Guatemalan witch and and army of ghosts, the story moves on in unexpected directions.

Cesar's writing is beautifully crafted and the characters and situations are definitely different from the norm. However I found this book extremely difficult to get into, I didn't find myself that interested in what would happen next, and I found it hard to relate to any of the characters. It took me a considerable while to read as I couldn't really engage with it and for that reason I have awarded it only two stars. It's a very different sort of fantasy which will appeal to some readers but it's not an easy read.

Originally published for Curled Up With A Good Book © Helen Hancox 2008

Decades have passed since Karen Fox returned to her family's farm; twenty years since she walked out on the man who was supposed to protect her, but instead sexually assaulted her. Now her father is dead having blown away his face with a self inflicted shotgun blast; Karen has come home to make special arrangements for the land and her father's cremation.

She is unaware that her father was the High Priest for the Green God Xibalba and his acolytes drop his corpse into a fissure beneath the morgue. Her sire joins his Master and confers power on Acting Assistant Sheriff Carver, who prefers to rule above ground unlike Karen's father whose preference in the underworld. From the moment she stepped onto the farm Karen sensed something was wrong. While looking at her father's body, Karen feels something close around her wrist followed by seeing a dress she wore as a child that was destroyed years ago yet is in pristine perfect condition complete with a still moist blood spot.. Quetzal a Mayan witch who knows that Xibalba is near; she plans to fight the evil God along with the ghosts that will accompany her. However, she also knows she must protect Karen from the malevolent Green God who has plans for the daughter of his loyalist worshipper.

APRICOT BRANDY is an exciting combination horror and dark urban fantasy that takes readers to the edge of sanity and leaves then there wondering if this time evil will triumph. Karen may be innocent, but she is the catalyst (thanks to her DNA) that sets things in motion although she is the polar opposite of her cruel father. She reaches inside herself with determination to defy him and his God while the Mayan witch rallies his ghostly horde and the townsfolk. Readers will find Lynn Cesar's work magically entertaining.

Harriet Klausner