Terra Domina

HISTORICAL FICTION:  Michelle Augustine has been many things in her life – content child, grieving sister, prostitute, wife, outlaw, murderess - and that's only the start. Her life was cursed the day her brother was murdered, and she never managed to escape it, no matter how hard she tried. Set at the end of the 19th century in Australia, this is an epic tale of a dark lifelong journey.  No matter the role she plays, Michelle is never far from the shadow of her beginnings, nor from the sinister old man somehow connected to her and the disappearance of her twin brother when they were children.

Readers expecting a romance will be shocked by the brutal imagery of Davine's beautiful but dark prose.  Vivid and unflinching, the reader is spared nothing.  The author mercilessly strips his characters and their actions of all artifice as they take their places in the narrative.  “Terra Domina” is also written in third-person present tense, which may seem unwieldy to some.  The challenge of this narrative form is that the author must describe events to the reader as they happen.  This uneasy balance of beauty and brutality is made abundantly clear in the first few pages, which sets the tone for the rest of the novel. Certain aspects of Michelle's story are disturbing - mainly, the imagery of graphic violence and death that is inherent to the tale.  Michelle Augustine is a difficult protagonist; some of her actions are terrible and hard for the reader to accept.  Characters who once seemed sympathetic don't manage to stay that way. This is a novel for a very specific audience:  fans of dark literary fiction, fantasy, dystopian worlds and horror would be best suited for this work.  

Tammy Grant