To Read & To Write

"The Crystal Workshop: A Journey Into the Healing Power of Crystals" by Azalea Lee (2020) is a deeply informative and gorgeously curated book for those curious - and those who have just begun - to learn how to connect with the mineral world at the level of metaphysical healing. Lee admirably and honestly lays bare the essential structural components that must be harnessed within the practitioner (such as a keen and developed intuition) in order to skillfully work with crystals in a beneficial way. Not only does Lee present her philosophies on the art of crystal healing, she provides straightforward yet lab-like workshop exercises for the reader to determine, on his or her own, if they are ready to continue into a genuine relationship with the crystals in order to, ultimately, reach a pure metaphysical level of understanding them.   Not all will resonate with Lee's approach, but I believe many will (as I did). Because Lee masterfully writes about the crystals holistically ...

There is a possibility that  Daughter from the Dark  by Marina & Sergey Dyachenko (2020) lost some of its stylistic panach because of its translation into English from Russian. If so, it's a big loss for the novel because its structure is so well conceived as a warpy fairy-tale and contemporary fantasy about a young girl-child from another world and the male stranger who, upon once saving her life, acts  in loco parentis.  The child herself, Alyona, cannot fully explain who she is, where she is from, and why she has no where else to go. Grimalsky, a.k.a. DJ Aspirin, her caretaker (though he treats her with less care than he probably should), teeters between awe, respect, and selfless love on one hand, and on the other, hatred, absolute annoyance, and obligation: not a good sign when the person who is supposed to be your father has no idea how to act except passive-aggressively. This mix of the two brings up a very strange Beauty and the Beast tale, where two...