Her muscles ached from too long an effort with no fuel and insufficient water, and her head pounded without mercy. Even the movement of air in and out of her lungs hurt, as if she had inhaled fire. But that pain meant she was breathing, and if she was breathing, she still had to fight.
– Regeneration by Stacey Berg
Echo Hunter 367, the woman who learned how to have faith in something different in Dissension, has returned in Regeneration to learn new lessons and bang her head even harder against her own fears and hopes.
It’s no secret that I love this character. She speaks to me in lots of ways: she’s stubborn, she’s brave, she’s not always doing the smart thing, she finds herself having to be more than she thinks she is. I write about identity and choice, and I look for them in the stories I watch or read. And also fighting and yearning and love, because yes I am a smoodgy romantic too. So it goes. Lovely thing about stories: room for so many things.
Congratulations to Stacey on the publication today of Regeneration. You can read an excerpt here, and I’ll also point you to this post about the book at the Harper Voyager site that considers choice and consequence as the shaper of stories in books and real life. I like big choices in stories, whether “big” means that things explode or that someone puts down her tea without drinking and thus ends a conversation and a relationship and closes a door in her life. I like stories in which people make choices, try hard, give up, stand up, try again. I also like it when they dance.
Full disclosure: I’ve worked with Stacey as an editor on both Dissension and Regeneration, so I am in no way unbiased. Oh well (smile). I love the characters and their story, and I hope you love them too.
Enjoy your day. Dance if you want to. Read something wonderful, whatever that may be for you.