"An electrifying romance within a twisted B horror story"
Joyous is a biographer writing under the pen name Audrey.
Joyous' life has been horrendous. Her parents should never
have been parents, leaving her in the care of nannies and
schools so that they wouldn't be bothered with their
defective child. To build on that hurt, her boyfriend left
her after her miscarriage of a child that Joyous only
realized that she really wanted after it was gone. She can
no longer stomach winter or Christmas, so she flees half
way across the world to a remote island near Fiji. At her new tropical paradise, she meets Ambrose. Ambrose
was a great American writer who mysteriously disappeared in
1914, yet he is on the island, alive and seemingly young.
Her vacation takes an even more odd turn when she must put
her life in Ambrose's hands because the island is under
attack by zombies and ghouls. Ambrose has his hands full,
dealing with killing the army of zombies and ghouls,
keeping Joyous' heart beating, and guarding his own heart
from the love that is taking root. This book started out a little weird, with about 15 pages
of rambling thoughts from Joyous, without a bit of
dialogue. She finally makes it to the island and it gets
weirder when she meets Ambrose. He apparently is hot, but
he has a few features that are not normal, such as
extremely pale skin and black eyes, but Joyous takes all
that in stride. Then he tells her his name, one that she
recognizes as a man who disappeared in 1914, and she takes
that statement with humor. However, she quickly realizes
that he really is Ambrose and that he was kind of a zombie
and now he is also a werewolf. Me? I would have been
hysterical and probably would have tried to swim to the
main island, but not Joyous. She hung right in there after
being chased by a zombie and learning what Ambrose is.
Joyous is an overly brave woman with a debilitating heart
defect, but that doesn't stop her from giving her all, or
from giving Ambrose a run for his money. Ambrose has been
alone for so long, and I think that he had given up on the
thought of love or companionship, and then Joyous blasts
into his life. Needless to say, Divine Fantasy is unlike any other
book that I have ever read. In the beginning of the book, I
even almost laid it down because I wasn't sure if I could
handle the rambling thoughts of Joyous. However, there was
just enough of an element of intrigue there that I found I
couldn't put the book down at all and ended up reading the
whole book in one sitting. Melanie Jackson writes Divine Fantasy from witty
Joyous' point of view. This turned out to be a fun and
humorous point of view. Despite the long-thought processes
that sometimes took up over a page, this was still an
action-packed and uniquely fun and interesting book to
read. I have to say that I am happy to have read the book.
Reviewed by Melissa Conatser
Posted July 17, 2009
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Ambrose Bierce, great American writer and lycanthrope has been living in exile on an island in Figi hoping to avoid the attention of the evil Saint Germain. His decade of peaceful living is disturbed by the arrival of a biographer, Joyous Jones, and then a horde of zombies. Trapped on an island as the zombie horde closes in, help arrives from an unexpected quarter; the Wildside fey.
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