Everlasting Sky

Read this book for a spectacular story. Read it to experience a historical era actively envisioned. Give this book to those who argue that the contemporary world is the apex of culture. This book details the little known days of the China's most glorious 7th Century Tang Dynasty. Give this book to girls and women who need a push into empowerment or a nudge out of self-loathing funk. In much contemporary fiction, characters control their lives, act by act enveloped in a personal world. In historical fiction, the main character's life is usually determined by broad, continent-wide, time-sweeping forces beyond an individual's control. For the reader, the thrill of reading historical fiction is to encounter an individual swimming in the global flow of human history. The individual can react, withdraw, but the larger history has its way ultimately. So it is with Wyn Berry's heroine in Everlasting Sky. She cannot control her life in the face of customs and circumstances. However, as she grows in years, experience, and wisdom, she does learn to react, to anticipate to save herself, to foster family, and finally to rule as the First Empress of China in spite of relentless historical pulses. Along with the tale's large events and intrigues, Author Berry gives us intimate knowledge of the heroine, as a girl, young woman in love, confidant to the Emperor, wife, mother, and finally Empress. Sprightly, optimistic, sensual, the narration is dedicated to the plot's unfolding. Scenes are vivid whether they take place on the grand spaces of the Gobi Desert or the private rooms of the Empress. Themes (artistic creativity, motherhood, marriage, power, loyalties)are fully realized, each given its dramatic due. For instance, romance can be true, ennobling, and ecstatic, but also tragic.

Whew! Talk about the next Peter Jackson film! This book has epic scenery, profound beauty, blood and gore, murder, sex, intelligence, extreme joy, intense suspense, horror, original polo, and vast visual detail to experience in the royal court of ancient China. Should be a classic! I've bought three copies for myself and friends.

EVERLASTING SKY by Kajira Wyn Berry is a marvelous and exciting historical novel - adventurous, exotic and sexy! It is the remarkable story of an actual person, a beautiful young woman who is sent as tribute, from a village in what is now Tajikistan, to the court of the emperor of China to be one of his concubines. Following an epic journey, and surviving court intrigue, she ends up becoming the first empress of seventh century China! This book is a stunning work of the imagination based on years of first rate scholarship. Berry's evocation of her heroine's bravery, intelligence and growth through a life of challenges is psychologically and emotionally acute, and a great read.

What a joy to read a historical novel that is not only a riveting page-turner, but also persuades you that this was what seventh-century China was really like. The emotional journey of Talima from her native highlands in western Asia to the brilliant court of the T'ang emperors, where she eventually becomes empress, is the luminous thread that unifies the book. Descriptions of what the characters wore, tasted, felt, smelled and saw are woven into the story so you feel as though you're right there with them. Kajira Wyn Berry has mastered her subject, from the life story of the silkworm to what the well-dressed courtesan wore to what the emperor had for breakfast. If you doubt the authenticity of the history and cultural background, consult the copious notes, bibliography and glossary. And marvel at the fact that this highly cultured, sophisticated, advanced civilization that Berry introduces us to was flourishing while Europe was sunk in the Dark Ages.

I bought this book at the release celebration. It is fast paced, intricate, lush and inspiring. Trying times created a woman equal to the task. The story of the first Empress takes the reader from the life of an unspoiled mountain cowgirl, who could hold her own on a polo field (which is what was she was at 16) to the hidden, secret, never-what-it-seems-to-be grandure of the Emperor's Court. Break-neck action is woven with serene moments of beauty. Never a dull moment. What an amazing movie this would make! Kira Knightly would be perfect.