After twelve years trapped in the throat of a serpent, a girl escapes. She returns to her village naked with a monstrous snakeskin trailing behind her. One decision at a time, she reclaims her life. Each character she encounters by land and sea—brute, healer, orphan, mystic, lover—reflects an unhealed aspect of herself and plots her recovery through symbolic milestones. Serpent’s Wake is intended for adults and young adults exploring how, once fractured, we may mend.
It snarls and hisses at categorization, but will etch itself onto the minds and souls of anyone discerning enough to lose themselves
in its embrace.
– J.M. Donellan, Killing Adonis
A mythic voyage full of wry humor and shy romance that recalls the fantasies of Ursula K. Le Guin.
– Guy Salvidge, The Kingdom of Four Rivers
The best fiction I’ve read since Keri Hulme’s Booker Prize winner, The Bone People.
– Russell Darnley, Order of Australia Medalist
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd) –
L. E. Daniels—let’s call her Lauren Elise—has written a coming-of-age novel that is also about recovery from trauma. She has absorbed that seamless combination of the fantastic with the mundane that makes magical realism go. For instance, the girl who is the main character—neither she nor anyone else is given a name in the book—stubbornly resists any repetition of a trapper’s assertion that on the night of her escape, she “commanded” a pack of wolves. “No one commands wolves,” she says. “I don’t know why people keep saying that.” And while it is true that the wolves made their own decisions, the reader knows that communication was going on during that freezing night, when wolves and girl risked their lives for each other.
Yet this combination of the fantastic, the closely-observed very real, and the lyrical reminds me more of Woolf than of Garcia Marquez. We stay with the girl’s consciousness as Daniels works fiercely at capturing the “myriad impressions…an incessant shower of innumerable atoms” that Woolf said form the lives she thought a novelist’s duty to record.
This delightful book is not one in which naming names is important. Being believed, however, is important, and it works as a touchstone enabling us to know immediately the characters around the girl who can be trusted…because they believe her. Eventually everyone must believe her.
– Michael Cohen, Amazon
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd) –
A tale that weaves around your heart in your darkest times…and points to the greatest lesson of all—that in suffering lies freedom.
– Erin L. Cash, Former Queensland Police Detective
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd) –
It snarls and hisses at categorization, but will etch itself onto the minds and souls of anyone discerning enough to lose themselves
in its embrace.
– J.M. Donellan, Killing Adonis
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd) –
A mythic voyage full of wry humor and shy romance that recalls the fantasies of Ursula K. Le Guin.
– Guy Salvidge, The Kingdom of Four Rivers
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd) –
The best fiction I’ve read since Keri Hulme’s Booker Prize winner, The Bone People.
– Russell Darnley, Order of Australia Medalist
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd) –
I would recommend this book for heroic girls and boys (who may not yet know they are hero/heroines who have been ‘bitten’ by life circumstances beyond their control); parents of lost children; students of life; trauma counsellors and psychologists, refugees, asylum seekers and aliens.
– Bridget McKern
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd) –
What a wonderful story! It’s a revelation to read a novel that combines meticulously crafted prose with a serious emotional heft.
Serpent’s Wake is so many things at once, it resists classification. On the surface it reads as a fable with elements of magic realism. But it’s also a story of trauma and the long road to recovery and healing. The protagonist’s journey will ring true for anyone who has experienced something similar, and the story feels powerful and authentic all the way through. I loved the way the secondary characters, male and female, also grew, learned and healed. A very special book. This goes on my keepers shelf, to be re-read over the years.
– Juliet Marillier, Mother Thorn