In this stunning change of pace, Ms, PorczenyDalrymple focuses her nearly infallible social spotlight on the privileged denizens of Southern California's showbusiness elite and the trendsetters who strive to keep themselves forever in the public eye.
Aquaria, the hottest celebrity astrologer in human memoryas determined by people with an attention span of twenty secondsis about to unleash Operation Cosmos on an unsuspecting world.
Conrad, Aquaria's new lover, not long ago a destitute, homeless drifter named Howard Bentley, finds himself suddenly immersed in Aquaria's surreal millieu, He finds himself dealing with untold wealth, concupiscent movie, a new career as Beverly Hills' first holistic chiropractic astrologist, and the eerie realization that many of the people he runs into are, or at least were, dead.
"To me," says fellow Xlibris author Dennis Havens, "the defining moments of modern fiction can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
There's that moment in The Sun Also Rises when the reader who has been paying attention realizes how ineffably cruel Jake Barnes' war wound is.
There's the sense of "being there" in the most elemental way that permeates the pages of Steinbeck's masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath, One cannot forget Holden Caulfield, immortalized in the confusion of his youth in Salinger's incomparable The Catcher in the Rye, And surely Thomas Gifford, in his amazing middle section of Praetorian, embodied everything that being young and living through life's first great adventure entails as no one ever has before.
Now, to that exalted company, we can add, with absolute confidence, Edna PorczenyDalrymple, "
The Crystal Quest moves at a dizzying pace, It is compact and elegant, like a handmade Italian sports car or a Fabergé egg, Most of all, it confirms what we learned from Rather a Ruby: Edna PorczenyDalrymple has a handle on human behavior that is rivaled by few and
equaled by none.