Inventing Memory
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A one-of-a-kind novel, like nothing you've ever read, Inventing Memory is a stunning blend of fantasy and reality, exposing the secret links between the mythic, the mundane, and the timeless mysteries of the human heart.
Shula is a slave in fabled Sumer---until Inanna, Queen of Heaven, appears before her. Chosen by the Goddess for reasons she cannot begin to fathom, Shula is freed from bondage and set upon an uncertain path toward a new and mysterious destiny. But the attention of the gods is a dangerous thing, and Shula may have cause to regret the day she first laid eyes on the Holy Inanna.
Wendy Chrenko, former high school misfit, is now an overworked graduate student, researching her dissertation "Remnants of Matriarchy in the Ancient Sumerian Inanna Cycle." Still smarting from the painful wounds of a failed love affair, Wendy is bound and determined to prove that men and women once lived together in perfect equality, even if it means volunteering for a bizarre and dangerous scientific experiment.
Separated by millennia, Shula and Wendy appear to be two very different women, leading completely separate lives.
Or maybe not.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Harris (Accidental Creatures) makes questing for the inner goddess look like child's play in this intriguing but sometimes uneasy mix of SF, romance and feminist fantasy rooted in ancient Sumerian myth. In the first of three "books," a young Semite slave/priestess, Shula, serves the demanding goddess Ananna, but she prefers a rival goddess, the more balanced, dark-winged maiden, Belili-Lit. Book two flashes forward to depict Shula's contemporary teen counterpart, Wendy Chrenko, who also has a mystical encounter with a dark-winged girl, whom she calls Lili. Wendy falls in love with Ray Mackie, an artistic boy from a dysfunctional family, but tensions mount after Ray becomes an identity thief and Wendy discovers feminism in college. The last section shakily integrates the two worlds via a human/computer interface experiment, which Wendy, determined to find proof of a prehistoric matriarchy, undergoes after her dissertation is rejected. Harris complicates the rushed ending with the return of a reformed Ray who attempts to "rescue" Wendy. If the implausible feel-good epilogue leaves some readers scratching their heads, Harris demonstrates that the time for the sexes to search for common ground is always now. FYI: Accidental Creatures won the 1999 Spectrum Award.
