Piper, Once and Again

by Caroline E Zani

Overview

Longing for something just beyond her grasp... A successful equine insurance agent living in 21st century Massachusetts, Piper struggles with relationships, patience, scents, and living in 19th century France. Follow Piper on a journey. . . through time, unconditional love, unbearable loss, unbelievable discovery, and a question of forgiveness, as she instinctively learns to see, smell, and feel the messages all around her. Only through tragedy does she begin to learn the lesson she needs to help her uncover the truth - the reason she is Piper, once and again.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781942545118
Publisher:	Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing
Publication date:	07/11/2016
Pages:	266
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.60(d)

Editorial Reviews

04/25/2016
Zani’s romantic debut novel about reincarnation shows promise that goes unfulfilled. Piper suffers from what she calls scent-aches, moments consisting of occasional phantom whiffs of lavender or burnt raisins. Random and inexplicable, they hint at a previous incarnation so traumatic that its lessons, loves, and scents have lingered beyond lives. Besides these scent-aches, Piper possesses an uncanny knowledge of horses and an eerily realistic invisible friend she calls Vander. As she grows up, she seeks answers to questions on which she has only the most tenuous grasp. Meanwhile, her marriage is happy but lacks passion. A second story line that takes place in 19th-century rural France follows best friends Piper and Vander, who grow up together and eventually marry. Unfortunately, the present-day story isn’t nearly as compelling as that of her previous incarnation, and the big plot twist is too little, too late. Agent: Devra Jacobs, Dancing Word Group. (July)

Publishers Weekly

2016-04-26
Scent memories, momentary visions, and spiritual entities that travel through time and space mingle in this fictional account of reincarnation. Zani, who defines herself on her website as an "intuitive medium," makes her debut with a mystical, romantic fantasy that breaches the line separating life and death. Moving back and forth between the story of her present-day heroine, Piper, and that of a 19th-century woman named Piper, Zani weaves two intersecting tales. For the first seven years of her life, Piper had an "imaginary" friend, Vander. But he vanished, along with her memory of him. What remains is her curious affinity for the letter V. A precocious child, she grows into an independent young woman who has difficulty forming close relationships. She experiences "scent-aches," not quite a memory but rather the actual hint of an aroma that is triggered by something other than her physical surroundings. Her greatest passion involves her horses, and she has a fierce need for alone time. She is sometimes a rather self-centered, irritating character. As Zani tracks the events in Piper's life, she intersperses chapters revolving around the earlier Piper, a sweet girl who tragically lost her mother when she was still a child and who grew to be a loving, and beloved, daughter, wife, and mother. These visits to the past story slowly reveal to the reader the sources of the smell-aches, clues that remain hidden to present-day Piper for most of the novel. When Zani's chapters switch to the 1800s, her phrasing becomes archaic: "when she was in her twelfth summer, Vander his fourteenth…." The language feels a bit stilted and anachronistic. And although the author's prose is reasonably smooth, her paragraphs frequently are so long that one is tempted to just move on. They would be more forceful if they were broken into two or three bites. While the suspension of disbelief is required to become fully engaged in this narrative about a love that reaches across the great divide, the reward is the guilty pleasure of gradually unraveling the puzzle that defines a raven-haired beauty who struggles with the feeling that she is somehow "different." An unsettling and haunting tale of two heroines that lingers after the telling.

Kirkus Reviews