Undercover Goddess by Karen Cavalli - Book Tour + Giveaway
Book 1 of the No Boundaries Trilogy
Fantasy
Date Published: July 24
Publisher: Blue Fortune Enterprises LLC, Lavender Press
In 2400 BCE Crete, 18-year-old Mave keeps the old spirituality alive,
primarily through her clay chips and the symbolic images she paints on them,
the original runes. She falls in love with Tear, a semi-divine being born
both male and female, and finds an ally in Inna, a former holy prostitute
kicked out of her communal home. The Gigante from the northern tribes marry
the holy prostitutes then replace the Goddess of the temple with a Sun God
who loves order and lighting bolts. Girls and women, formerly revered
stand-ins for the Goddess and her creator, the cave-dwelling Ssha, either go
underground with their beliefs or find a way to fit in the new culture. As
it turns out the old ways of the Goddess had its flaws, and this creates the
opportunity for the Gigante and their sun God to move in.
primarily through her clay chips and the symbolic images she paints on them,
the original runes. She falls in love with Tear, a semi-divine being born
both male and female, and finds an ally in Inna, a former holy prostitute
kicked out of her communal home. The Gigante from the northern tribes marry
the holy prostitutes then replace the Goddess of the temple with a Sun God
who loves order and lighting bolts. Girls and women, formerly revered
stand-ins for the Goddess and her creator, the cave-dwelling Ssha, either go
underground with their beliefs or find a way to fit in the new culture. As
it turns out the old ways of the Goddess had its flaws, and this creates the
opportunity for the Gigante and their sun God to move in.
Guest Post
What was the most
difficult thing about writing a fantasy novel set in that time period (2400
BCE)?
Karen Cavalli, author
of Undercover Goddess
Keeping my fears at
bay that readers would howl at my rendering of a lost time! How could I stay
true to a people and a period that even scholars debate what life was really
like? I knew we had stone tablets from Sumer (located in what is now southern
Iraq), and I’d read Merlin Stone’s When God Was a Woman. Stone’s work
lit my imagination, and I decided I would focus on evoking the spirit of the
time along with including realistic descriptions of daily life. Then I was able
to let my imagination create the world and the main character, Mave, and depict
the details of daily life when the change from Goddess to God occurred. I
researched a lot to get as close as I could to actual items around that time
period and plants that grew in that region. The Ssha, the gentle, giant reptiles who created the Goddess
to represent their spirituality are totally my invention. They were inspired by
a direct order an other-worldly being gave me once in a dream: “Get to know the
lizard men of revelations; we need more of their kind.” I ran across a quote
recently by Ursula Le Guin that applies here, I think: “Fiction is invention, but it is not
lies. It moves on a different level of reality from either fact-finding or
lying…. Imagination, even in its wildest flights, is not detached from reality:
imagination acknowledges reality, starts from it, and returns to it to enrich
it.” This is from her essay “Making Up Stories” in Words are My Matter, Small Beer Press,
2016.
About the Author
Karen Cavalli, née Lound, writes fiction and non-fiction. Her work
has been published online and in books. Her work has won awards including
Outstanding Secondary Science Book. She is a graduate of Old Dominion
University where she earned a B.A., and The University of Alabama’s
MFA in Creative Writing Program where she studied with Margaret Atwood. She
has worked in technology for over 10 years. She taught a writing course on
the topic of psychological descent at the University of Minnesota and in
North Carolina. Her work in technology has taken her to India and China and
allowed her to work with individuals in Mexico, the United Kingdom,
Australia, New Zealand and the emirate of Dubai. She loves her local Savage
library and volunteers there. She can be contacted at
kcgoodguide@gmail.com
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2 Comments
Thank you for hosting this stop on my blog tour!
ReplyDeleteYou're very welcome! :)
DeletePlease try not to spam posts with the same comments over and over again. Authors like seeing thoughtful comments about their books, not the same old, "I like the cover" or "sounds good" comments. While that is nice, putting some real thought and effort in is appreciated. Thank you.