Achieve Living In Threes Formulated By Judith Tarr Ebook

is one of those projects that needed the freedom of small press,

Judith Tarr, whose name many of you will recognize, had written the project of her hearther agent read it, loved it, said, "I'm not sure how to market it.
" But sent it out anyway, And after a few ice ages had passed, notes came back from editors that boiled down to: Loved it, but not sure how to market it.


So Judy brought it to the rest of us at Book View Cafe, When I read it, I saw what the Big Six was whinnying about: much of the subject matter was definitely YA, without the familiarthesedays love triangle centered around an angsty iteration of Draco Malfoy.
Instead of a variation on teenagers enduring some form of gladiatorial violence, there is a nasty plague threatening to go pandemic,

The protagonist is an everyday horse girl, texting constantly with friends in the hereandnow, but there is also a historical element.
And a sfnal element,

And a mystery to be solved,

And a fantastic element, in the psychic link across time and space, A fantasy, then But the subject matter was profoundly real: love, death, Friendship. Dreams and duty. And the big questions: paradigm, meaning, identity,

As Judy worked on the book, no longer constrained by trying to fit it into a definitive marketing slot, those disparate elements became its strength.
I read it three times, and though the voice is breezy, at times funny, I teared up all three times,

It starts out the summer Meredith turns sixteen, At last her life seems more or less normalher mom has recovered from lifethreatening illness, her horse Bonnie might be pregnant, Then Mom drops the bomb,

“Seriously” said Cat, “Theyre giving you Egypt for your birthday” When Cat gets excited she gets squeaky,

She was up in bat territory now,

Between that and the arctic air conditioning and the solarflare lighting, the Ice Creamery was a migraine waiting to happen.
Id had a psycho break and ordered a Bama Slammer, which was a double banana split with blackberries, pecans,

peaches, three different sauces, and enough ice cream to feed a thirdworld country.


I already had brain freeze from eating the first few spoonfuls too fast, I picked at the rest while Cat gnawed on her ChocoCone, In between bites she kept squeaking, “Egypt! King Tut! Pyramids! Barging down the Nile!”

“Terrorists,” I said, two solid octaves down from her, “Sandstorms. Mummies. ”

Meredith does not want to be packed up and sent overseas, but the adults have decreed, and it's the part of a kid to obey.
Even if you're sixteen, so no longer a 'kid, ' Meredith is furious, withdraws to write, . . and falls into a vision,

against the wall, a shadow stirred, Wings unfurled, half mist, half solid, Eyes glittered above a drift of fog that might have been a beak, The starwing stroked its halfsubstantial wingtip across Meru's cheek, a touch like ice and smoke, . .

The vision is not Meredith's story, it's a visionvision, of a girl named Meru who, with her best friend, a boy named Yoshi, are determined to be picked for star pilot school, but then Meru gets a message that her mother is missing.
And Meredith falls out of the vision, What to make of that

Events begin to accelerate Egyptward, in spite of Meredith's wishes, and it happens again,

A hawk hung on the pinnacle of heaven,

From the temple far below, it looked like a bird of metal suspended in the sky,

The suns heat was fierce, but Meritre shivered, The choir was so much smaller than it had been a year ago: so many lost, so many voices silenced, Of those whom the plague had left, too many were thin and pale, and their singing barely rippled the air above the courtyard.


They would be strong again, New voices would join the chorus, Pharaoh had promised, swearing that the promise came from the great god Amon himself,

This time the vision is not in the future, but long in the past, . . and the weird thing is, when Meredith gets to Egypt at last, little things begin to look familiar from the vision,

The visions come together to solve a mysterya race against time, only how do you measure it when the three voices are separated by thousands of years There are two climaxes, with Meredith emerging, with profound and painful insight, onto the threshold of adulthood.


I dont cry for humans, I cry for things that are so beautiful I just cant stand it, like Bonnie in front of me, all crusty from rolling in the sand, with a mouthful of halfchewed hay and eyes that knew everything Id ever thought or felt or been.


Impatient Bonnie, who always has to be moving and thinking and doing, stood for a long time while I cried into her mane.
Her warm animal smell filled my nose,


I think this book is so warm, so wise, I'd put it into the hands of a ten year old, yet the adult me was swept up in it with all the old intensity.


It was one of my favorite books of, now with a far better cover,
Meritre is a Temple Singer in the Temple of Amon, four thousand years ago, The recent plague that has killed so many is finally ending, but it's going to take one last victim before it's over.


Meredith is a teenager in our day, planning a summer of riding with her friends and caring for her recently bred mare, when her mother announces that as her sixteenth birthday present, she's going to Egypt to take part in a dig with her archaeologist aunt.


Meru, four thousand years in the future, has, along with her friend Yoshi, qualified for starpilot training, Unfortunately, Meru's mother, who has been chasing down the source of a mysterious plague hitting many planets, has secretly returned homeand died, leaving a package keyed so that only Meru can open it.


These three young women are connected, in some sense the same person, and a little scarab pendant enables them, unexpectedly, to communicate with each other.
Each of them is confronting larger forces than they know, and the connection between them is key to finding the solution,

The girls each live in very different worlds, despite all those worlds being our own Earth, It's not just the technology levels that are different they all live in very different family structures, and different expectations for their behavior and future lives.
Yet they are also very closely connected, and find the connection helps them deal with their individual problems as well as their shared problems.


All three young women, and their friends, are wonderfully portrayed, clear, and complex, and likable, All three worlds feel believable and livedin, The narrator does a great job, and has an excellent voice for these characters,

Highly recommended.

I bought this audiobook, My experience of this book was that I "liked it", but that it really deserved at least four,

The author does an amazing job of creating three very different perspectives, of integrating them into a coherent story, and of ensuring that each perspective is engaging in its own right.
I was particularly drawn to the symmetry and contrasts between the three main characters, especially their relationships with their family, friends, and pets.
There's a lot of rich detail and meaning in this book, as well as significant emotional substance, that I believe would hold up well to rereading and closer scrutiny.


The only problem I had, which was not really the Living in Threes's problem, was that it didn't quite match my own head space.
I knew before I started reading that this book was directed at YA, but I found the experiences of the characters to be very different from my own experiences, and there wasn't any significant humour to provide a hook such as in books by Diana Wynne Jones or JK Rowlings, which I love.


Despite this, however, I am finding the story is sticking with me, and I believe it would resonate strongly with anyone in the young adult category or who experienced serious illness in a parent at a young age.
For them, and for anyone else who thinks they might be drawn to the premise, I highly recommend this book, Enjoyed it a good blending of science fiction and fantasy with som Egyptology thrown A wonderful blend of magic, science fiction, and history.
At first this is a difficult book to become interested in, but it does become more enjoyable after the significance of each character is understood.
It does have the past, present, and future all in one book, Each characters struggle is significant, and it explains who the character is, It is a great read, and a good fictional novel,
Thanks to book view cafe for the copy to read and review it, Really loved this novel, I found it really gripping, a real pageturner!
The story switches between three times and three lives, which each have a separate story, but are also intricately interwoven.
I really liked the way in which the stories become increasingly linked and really become one story over time,
The descriptions of ancient Egypt and the distant future are lovely and very lifelike, The characters are not always worked out as well as they could have been, but the three main characters are worked out nicely and I found it easy to connect to them.
I supported Judith Tarr's Kickstarter project to fund this book and have looked forward to reading it for months, I can see why this book wasn't marketable by agents and needed to be selfpublished: not that that it's criticism of the Living in Threes's quality or story, but the fact that it's completely crossgenre.
It's simultaneously a contemporary YA novel, historical fiction, and farfuture science fiction, I was quite curious as to how those varied settings would weave together, and was very, very, pleased with the result,

In short, this is a book I would have read to death when I wasyearsold and transitioning from my horse obsession to adult historical fiction and fantasy.
This book has EVERYTHING I wanted at that age and could never find in one book,

Tarr is masterful in her writing, She knows her horses. She knows archaeologythe real, tedious thing, not the glorified silliness of Indiana Jones though that's enjoyable in its own way, I loved how she wrote about ancient Egypt in particular, It's so rare to see that used as a backdrop, and again, Tarr made it feel real, not some utopia, I could smell the dust of the place,

I can't help but smile when I think of this book, My inneryearold is pleased at last,
Science fiction/fantasy/real world intersection built out of a moment near the Living in Threes's beginning where the teenage protagonist suddenly sits down and starts writing a science fiction novel that, for a while, we spend more time in than we had in the original story.
Some very wellwritten moments centering around family and grief, . . but also some things that didn't work as well for me, such as the voice of the main protagonist, or the parts of the story set in the future, where the rules weren't entirely clear in a way that robbed the story of tension.
My quest to read more selfpublished books is mostly demonstrating to me that there is often no difference in quality between them and traditionally published books.
In fact, in certain genres, it is much easier to find more ambitious or unusual books, of equal literary quality, in selfpublishing.


I am tempted to say that this middlegrade book is more ambitious than most, but recently middlegrade seems to be getting more ambitious, while YA, overall, is getting less so.


It's divided into three timelines, which bleed into each other from fairly early on, In modern times, American Meredith is sent away from her beloved pregnant Lipizzan horse and her mother, who is recovering from cancer, to accompany her archaelogist aunt on a dig in Egypt.
In ancient Egypt, Meritre, a singer in the temple of Amon, worries about her pregnant mother and the pharoah's daughter, who is sick with a mysterious plague.
And in a cyberpunk future that has cured most diseases, Meru pursues her missing mother into a secret quarantine zone,

This novel reminded me of a childhood favorite, Mary Stolz's Cat in the Mirror, which also contrasted dual timelines, of the same soul reincarnated in ancient Egypt and modern New York.
Tarr's book is more complex and ambitious, The three timelines are not merely compared and contrasted and paralleled, but directly affect each other,

The book starts a little slow, probably due to having to set up three plot lines rather than one, but becomes quite a pageturner by about the onethird mark.
The themes are grief, times changing and times staying the same, the inevitability of death, and the equal inevitability of life going on: reincarnation, and birth, and life itself.


Satisfying and complex, I especially liked the pets of the three girls: a horse, a cat, and a halfinsubstantial alien creature,

Note: The author is a friend, so I'm probably not that objective, .