Adina Pelle
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Title: Ghost Words and Other Echoes
Genre: Literary Fiction/Short Story
Pages: 210

Synopsis:

A collection of short stories...memoirs, morality tales, and parables. Ultimately uplifting and fascinating tales of life, love, sex and family.

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Ghost Words and Other Echoes...
by Adina Pelle
Curva Peligrosa Press, 2009, US
Literary Fiction/Short Story Collection, 210 pages
Hardcover, $19.95
ISBN: 978-0-9754-3146-7
Review by Ruth Cox

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A ghostly image of the grandmother of author Adina Pelle escorts us from the front cover of Ghost Words and Other Echoes to the back, amid reverberations of life drawn upon every page between the covers. Pelle's collection of short stories reads more like a novel, the storyline occasionally intercepted by ghosts of the past whispering words unto the reader.

Each story in the collection is connected to the previous tale and joined together with the next tale. We set out on our imaginative journey with Pelle's one and only "First Story," which is described by the author as her "most-loved story" and "begins with a frail, dark-haired girl dreaming of magical earrings and ends with sunbeams exploding on a glass shelf in a crowded city filled with busy people who have no time for silly stories."

We'll meet Matilda and Saul in "Don't Mind the Naked Man on the Couch," of which there are numerous Chapters paced throughout the collection, each with its own literary lesson to share with those readers who dare to embrace the words of wisdom and beware the words of the ghosts. According to Pelle, the only true protection from the ghastly damage of a nighttime attack of ghost words is that of sleeping with a teddy bear. Further explanation of these whisperers of the dark is found in the book's title story, "Ghost Words." (Of course.)

Love, tears, sex, and laughter are woven into the fabric of each fictional selection, each story its own offering of Pelle's poetic prose. In "Prisoner," nothingness seems real to the character thrown into a cell with room for nothing but thought and haunts of the past. "Ellie Tsar" spends a lifetime in a hospital psychiatric ward caring for, as she says, "the patients who disturbed the patterns of her thinking." And Pelle's "Guardian Angel" loses her grip on her wee daughter's hand and must watch "as her little girl perished in a mortar shell's hellfire." And the author asks, "What motivates people to survive grim strikes of misfortune and tragedy?"

Witches, gypsies, a mutt, and a mailman -- what could these have in common? All have had their portrait painted in the colors of the ink of Pelle's palette.

Adina Pelle is a true artist; one who crafts her collecion of short stories with sometimes subtle narrative, but always with superb imagery. The author uses a natural and sensitive style of subtle shades in broad strokes to beckon the reader into unleashing the mystery of the narrative voice, allowing it to resound in a procession of riddles to be solved.

Plan to settle in for an evening in your favorite reading room. Make yourself comfortable. Permit Ghost Words and Other Echoes to lull you in to Adina Pelle's painting of a dreamscape.

Oh ... Don't forget to grab your favorite childhood teddy bear.

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This review is written and ©Ruth Cox.

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