Hello everyone! As you may already know, a New Zealand based book publishing company called Odyssey Books reached out to me recently to help them celebrate their 10 year anniversary! It was such an honor! Learn more about Odyssey Books here. The publishing book company celebrated by putting a collection of books on sale for the month of July (welcome to the first day of August)! If you check their website now you might even be able to catch the end of the sale! In return for writing a blog post for the company about their anniversary sale, I was given one of their new releases of my choosing free of charge! In this post, I will be writing a review of the book I was given. Now the company did not ask for this review, and I am probably a little late with it, but I decided I wanted to do a review anyway. I am not a book blogger, so this post is a little different from my usual posts, but I thought it might be fun to share my thoughts on the book Odyssey Books gave me. This is also my way of thanking the company for collaborating with me. Without any further ado, let’s dive in to the book review!
The book I was given from Odyssey Books publishing company was The Dark Poet by Kathryn Gossow. Here is the description of the book from Odyssey Books’ website:
“Some people are so broken they can only cut us. With poetic dexterity, Aurealis Award finalist Kathryn Gossow interweaves eight short stories of longing and alienation featuring outcasts and the misunderstood. From a homeless storyteller to a gardening soothsayer, to a copy editor who owns a pair of stubborn chickens, readers will come face to face with the humanity of people easily judged by a rigid society. At the heart of these stories is the Dark Poet, a charismatic and broken man leaving a trail of debris as he drifts in and out of people’s lives.”
What I found most interesting about The Dark Poet is its focus on interconnectivity. As stated in the description, The Dark Poet is a collection of interconnected short stories, and in each story there is a common denominator: a character known as the “Dark Poet”. Each story is like a piece of a puzzle, creating a full picture of the “Dark Poet”. In fact, the title of one of the short stories in the book is “The Puzzle Ring”. The author did such a wonderful job weaving all of these independent stories together, creating a beautiful cohesive flow.
Each story in The Dark Poet is also like a piece of a chain. Whatever happens to one part of a chain affects the rest of the chain, and this is the way the events of each of the short stories are connected. There is an age old question that asks “If a tree fell in a forest and no one was there to hear it, does it make a sound?”, and this book seems to answer it. Some of the actions of the characters, particularly the “Dark Poet”, cause a chain of events to occur. All of the characters are affected, some more than others.
The Dark Poet reminded me that we all make an impact on someone else. Just like in the book, anything we do causes a chain of events to happen. Whether we choose to spread positivity or negativity is entirely up to us. All in all, I found The Dark Poet an intriguing book, and would definitely recommend it.
Life with Charli 