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It is wonderful to be back in Black Water and I thoroughly enjoyed Jean Nicole Rivers’ To The Moon and Back.
MY REVIEW
It is nice to be back in Black Water, or at least I think it is. Ya never know what Jean Nicole Rivers has in store for her characters, but I am always eager to find out. And…Simone is coming home too…home to the house where her entire family had been killed…murdered.
Her husband, Mack, knows her past and doesn’t understand why she feels the need to come back to a place that held such horror for her. The man accused of killing her family is locked up, but that is not the end for her. She wants her house, her memories, her family, back.
Mack has found the perfect business for him to purchase, Watkins Auto. He is a mechanic, so it should be a perfect fit. Simone is pregnant and I am worried about her.
The small town had taken a ghost story mixed with a tragedy and made it an urban legend, questioning how she survived. Is the Sandman true? Can fairy tales be true? If a woman can find her knight in shining armor, why can’t monsters be real?
“You face your fears head on; that’s the only way…”
A sense of impending doom infuses every page. This could go two ways, but I choose my first thought and now I am really curious about Simone and her family. They are in grave danger and I wonder how they will be saved. I am going to have to read straight through, because I have to know.
I felt such a sense of urgency, I wanted to yell at times, telling them NO, don’t do that. HELP HER!
Jean Nicole Rivers just keeps getting better and I loved this fantastic tale. I don’t read enough books by black authors and books with black characters, and I am trying to remedy that, expand my reading horizons.
I voluntarily reviewed a free copy of To The Moon And Back by Jean Nicole Rivers.
SUMMARY
Twenty-three years ago, in the white farmhouse at the end of Maple Road, Simone Parker was the sole survivor of a slaughter that took her entire family, their eyes removed from their skulls. Safe in the knowledge that Marcus Sanden, the man responsible for her family’s butchery is locked away, she is eager to move her husband and two daughters to her picturesque hometown of Black Water. The family home offers financial security and the opportunity to break generational curses, but there is still something unsettling within its walls.
Even as her belly swells with baby number three, Simone is determined to rid her house of the ghostly residue of psychiatric patients her father treated in his home office, including Marcus Sanden. Through the years the gruesome details of her family’s case along with the similarity of Sanden’s name mingled with folk fairytale. Inevitably, Black Water’s younger generation created the now infamous town legend that says they were murdered by The Sandman. Traditionally a benevolent creature, but in Black Water he’s a wolf-like beast with razor-sharp sand to remove the eyes of those who lay awake in the night.
The house is alive with subtle signs of unsettled spirits, but the brutal birth of Simone’s son brings the haunting to an undeniable peak that forces her to question whether it was Sanden that killed her family or something much more sinister. Simone will stop at nothing to protect her children and must again face this evil or lose her family to The Sandman’s eternal sleep.
ABOUT JEAN NICOLE
Jean Nicole (@jeannicole19) is a National Black Book Festival award-winner and author of two psychological horror novels, Black Water Tales: The Unwanted and Black Water Tales: The Secret Keepers. She has also garnered awards for her screenplay, If I Die, from multiple film festivals including the Shivers International Film Festival (Canada).
Currently, she is working through the 3rd installment of her Black Water Tales series on a novel currently titled, To the Moon and Back.
In 2016, she launched the only novel writing software founded and owned by a black woman, Simple Stylus (www.SimplyStylus.com) and she teaches an online beginner writing course titled, Simply Writing: An Aspiring Author’s Guide to Developing A Solid Writing Process and FINALLY Writing Their Novel.
She writes because she loves words, she writes because she loves stories, she writes because she has a story to tell.
Author links: Website / Facebook / Twitter / Goodreads
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