Customer Reviews

Falling Upwards

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"Falling Upwards" feels a little like a cross between Alice in Wonderland and Arthurian legends. At 228 pages it's a shorter read than most books in this genre and the romantic element is a fairly minor part of the overall story which focuses very heavily on a quest that our heroine and hero undertake to free him from a geas.

Half way through this book I realised I still didn't have a clue what was going on. Neva Jones, a businesswoman from Mobile, Alabama, meets a strange young man on a business trip to Cardiff in Wales and after that experience nothing is quite the same. She initially thinks she might be going mad, as do some of her family, and eventually she resigns herself to going along with her strangeness and jumps into a pond as she felt an Owl was instructing her. From that point on the story is like Alice in Wonderland as Neva comes across stranger and stranger things (a talking crow, a stag that can speak in her mind, fairies, a princess, giants) along with the man she met in Wales, called March, now looking rather different. The author has a great turn of phrase in places, especially as Neva spends most of the book laughing at her experiences and thinking she's lost the plot. However for the reader it was sometimes hard going as it's never clear what's happening or where the story is going and cryptic comments abound.

There was quite a lot of unexplained information in this book (who were the women flocking around the Welsh man in the pub, for example) and the ending was left suitably vague in terms of the long-term prospects for hero and heroine rather than being nicely tied up. However it was well written and the descriptions of the strange places and people that Neva experienced were interesting. Unfortunately for this reader the impossibility of understanding the plot and the strange romance (more a result of propinquity than anything else) was unsatisfying.

[...].

While on a business trip in Wales, Neva Jones meets an unusual man named March. Back home in America, she re-encounters him and learns that March is a man under a curse, living between the real world and the dream world, repeating a cycle of events in an unbroken chain, and this will continue until the curse is broken. What's more, she is his only hope of breaking free. Neva agrees to help and finds herself in a world where legends come to life and things are always more than they seem to be. She also finds she is now part of the curse and breaking it will win her freedom as well, and she is somehow claimed by a surfer dude who is a sea deity. Undaunted, she is determined to win this challenge, for both their sakes.

** Although the images conveyed by Ms. Sims' words are beautiful and the subtle humor she attempts to inject has charm, there's a lack of coherence to the narrative, making it hard to concentrate on what is happening, or to care about the characters. I hoped for something such as Charles De Lint creates in his pages, but it fell short. **

Amanda Killgore

Neva Jones is in Wales on a business trip when she meets the enigmatic March. From the onset she thought he was different though she is not sure why except that he seems to live in this world and somehow outside this world.

In sweet home Alabama, curious and attracted to March, Neva suffers from hallucinations that frighten her. Still she develops a hypothesis to overcome the limitations of her mind. On the other hand, March believes Neva is the woman who can lift the curse that has left him with one foot in a realm of dreams and one in the mortal plane. As Neva begins to believe that there is more to the universe than the physical plane starting with the metaphysical feelings of falling in love, she struggles with reality vs. illusion as she enters a realm in which her only realism anchor is March.

FALLING UPWARDS is a sort of modernizing of Alice Through the Looking Glass. The story line starts a bit slow and disjointed as Neva and March meet in a Welsh pub, but once she crosses over into a fantasy realm, the story line turns fast-paced and exciting as the heroine ponders whether reality means insanity. Fans who dive into that Alabama pond with Neva will enjoy her quest once she steps out of the water to meet fantasy species, talking animals and of course March.

Harriet Klausner

I tried hard to like this, as I did enjoy Ms. Sims' other book. But the pace of the entire book is slow and disjointed, and it's hard to read... not too complicated, just too confusing. I recommend her other book over this one.