Title: Saints in the Shadows (The Madame Budska Series) Published: May 26, 2014
Pages: 210
Format: eBook
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Set between New Orleans, Manhattan, the dream state, and memory, SAINTS IN THE SHADOWS begins with Maud Strand sleepwalking from her apartment in Manhattan to the Chinatown police station in February in her bare feet and pajamas. She's had prophetic dreams since she was a child and now they've started again in Manhattan.
Maud Strand, a New Orleans to New York transplant, is mourning the loss of the her father in a car accident. Maud has a secret from that day, a secret buried so deep in her psyche that she can't even remember it, but it's running her life. She's drifting in New York when she meets Lina Sandor aka Madame Budska a physicist turned psychic-to-the-elite. Madame Budska's clients are a billionaire hedge fund manager, a political kingmaker, a TV celebrity, and a crazy Princeton professor. Is she a "real" psychic or a charlatan? Actually, she's a bit of both, and she's also very kind.
After a few months' acquaintance, Lina asks Maud to take over the Madame Budska business while Lina goes off for what she calls "the big reveal." She trains Maud to "listen until you hear", "look until you see." It's the acts of listening and watching, and the dreams she has from those experiences, that help Maud unlock her mind and remember the secret that has kept her adrift in grief.
Rating:
This story takes place between New York where Maud lives and her dreams of what she sees. Maud has a gift that she doesn’t know about really she just has had dreams for as long as she can remember. That is until she moves to New York on her own. She is getting away from the memories of New Orleans and her father’s passing. When Maud ends up meeting Lina who is her next door neighbor and a psychic she literally doesn’t believe it.
But Lina shows her how to read people, and that is how you can have them tell you things without you truly knowing anything. Which I thought was pretty cool. With Lina showing Maud these things, she also seems to teach her how to open her mind and use the gift she has to help those around her and to also help herself. She has never gotten over the death of her father or his missing trumpet something that is a reminder of her father, and she gets an answer to where it is she just has to unblock what is in her mind.
Maud is a simple character not one that would really stand out in a crowd, Lina is one that I can remember more. I did enjoy how Lina who goes with the name Madame Budska when telling readings is very straight forward in teaching Maud. The characters that Maud encounters on behalf of Lina had their own personalities and kind of made you weary of them in the story. But Maud learns that who they seem to be portraying on the outside is not who they truly are in the inside.
Overall a decent read, one that if there was a book two I would probably pick it up to read. It is not an overall exciting book, but one that you could pick up to pass the time.
Alana Cash is a multiple, international award-winning author, teacher, and filmmaker. She was profiled on the PBS series “A Writer’s Exchange” which was translated into 8 languages. Her documentaries on women in the sciences have been distributed worldwide and aired on public television in Austria, Switzerland, and Germany. Driven by adventure, Alana had traveled alone in war-torn Serbia, slept in a former KGB building in Prague, explored underwater caves, and worn a bulletproof vest on ride-along in an NYPD patrol car.
Get in touch with Alana on Facebook and also “Like” the Madame Budska fan page.
