Your Body is My Prison

by Oksana Leslie

Overview

Michelle fights to free herself from the alien imprisoned in her body whose sentence is measured in blood.

After surviving a car accident that kills her brother and paralyzes her mother, Michelle has to deal with her stepfather's lust and hatred. Just as she thinks her life cannot get any worse, she discovers an alien living inside of her body as his own personal prison for committing murder on his planet. As if Michelle's paralyzed mother, angry stepfather, and the alien-murderer living inside of her isn't enough; she discovers the only way for him to be free of her body, is to experience pain and death through her dreams as her spirit drifts into a victim. Everything that happens to the victim happens to her body as well. The alien is a healer and can heal her wounds after her nightmares, but does his healing have limits?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781502339706
Publisher:	CreateSpace Publishing
Publication date:	12/10/2014
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.49(d)

About the Author

Oksana Leslie was born in the USSR to the family of a Russian doctor and a Ukrainian musician. This is where her passion for the written word began, a passion she embraces today as an American citizen in her second language, English. She is a published author in Russia. She has a master's degree in Russian language and literature. She has her own blog for Russian immigrants where they can read about life in America at www.oksanaleslie.com.
She is a mother of three boys, a blood donor, and a CEO of a family business, Leslie Painting and Home Renovations, LLC.
As a teenager, Oksana devoured science fiction and dreamed of being a writer. Your Body Is My Prison is her first sci-fi horror novel. The name "Tavy from Cassiopeia" came to her when she was eleven years old, and she began writing the book in 2008. She has rewritten it many times in Russian and in English. Oksana's hobbies are gardening, yoga and Zumba, photography, reading, and blogging. Oksana rarely watches TV and never plays computer games. She also does not like cooking and cleaning, but is an expert in both, because everyone is a body prisoner in a way.

Editorial Reviews

2016-11-23
A teenage girl explores difficult subjects with an alien inhabiting her mind in a new novel from Leslie (How to Survive in International Marriage, 2004). Eighteen-year-old Michelle Redmond lives in Pensacola, Florida, with her stepfather, Fred; her loving mother, Angelica; and her half brother, Austin. Alienated and disaffected, Michelle struggles to connect with her peers and wishes that she could have an encounter with an alien to make her existence less ordinary. This wish may be coming true, as Michelle repeatedly dreams that she's living in an extraterrestrial murderer's body; soon, she even sees reflections of the murderer in mirrors when she's awake. But Michelle's problems increase when she's the driver in a car crash that kills Austin and renders Angelica comatose. Racked by guilt, Michelle tries to move on with Fred, who blames her for the accident. She soon discovers that the alien murderer is a real being named Tavy, who's been forced to live inside her mind after killing his girlfriend in the Cassiopeia Nebula. Nonetheless, he and Michelle become friends as they use Michelle's dreams to explore the nature of justice and suffering as part of an effort to rehabilitate and redeem the alien. All the while, Fred's behavior becomes increasingly unhinged. Leslie's novel admirably engages with big ideas. For example, Tavy is horrified by the institutionalized violence that he sees on Earth, but Michelle forces him to consider whether his own crime is any worse. Fred psychologically torments (and later physically assaults) Michelle, but the author also points out that his dysfunction stems from tragic loss. But although the storyline is highly imaginative, it often feels disorderly. Between Fred's antics, Tavy's criminal past, and Michelle's incorporeal journeys, the author packs a lot of dramatic plot points and heady topics into a short book of fewer than 200 pages. The compressed pacing results in bizarre, jarring moments, such as when Michelle's boyfriend, Steve, too quickly accepts her contention that an alien lives inside her, or when Fred attempts to murder someone with a cat allergy by using hot dogs. A slower pace with more character development might have made such heightened scenes more believable. A strange book that's full of imagination but marred by scattered plotting.

Kirkus Reviews