TWO CLASSIC MYTHS, GIVEN A FEMINIST SPIN
Eve's Daughter's puts a feminist spin on the classic myth of The Fall, times two. Many creation stories depict a cosmic conflict between good and evil. But what if the conflict was something simpler, an earthly divide between men and women? Would things be any different? Book One, based on the Sumerian tale of the goddess Inanna and her lover Dumuzi, takes us back to the Early Copper Age when a matriarchal, agricultural community encounters patriarchal nomads for the first time. Book Two, set in the 20th century, retells Milton's version of the Adam and Eve story, filling in details of what happened after they were thrown out of that famous garden.
Excerpt
The night before the Sowing Festival, the full moon rose gold and glowing, its light shining like a long torch on the river's calm surface. But when it had risen to almost full height, the moon's face was as dull and red as raw clay...Ana shivered and wrapped her deerskin cloak more tightly around her shoulders. She wasn't cold; the day's warmth was still radiating from the packed dirt beneath her feet. She sat down and waited, awake and troubled, until she saw a sliver of brightness on one side of the moon's face. Every time she looked away and then back again, she saw more light. Perhaps everything would be all right after all.
"Pat Valdata has already proven herself a skillful poet. Now she has done it in fiction, with her latest novel. In Eve's Daughters, a feminist sexy spin on the Sumerian story of Inanna, and the story of Adam and Eve set in modern times, she explores matriarchal societies using a brilliant inventive structure."-Lynda Schor, author of five books of short fiction including Sexual Harassment Rules, and the soon-to-be out novel, DEARTH
"The fall from grace was pinned on Eve in the Bible and in Paradise Lost. With heartbreaking storytelling, Eve's Daughters reminds us of what happens when women are blamed and punished in a patriarchal society. It also examines how peace and hope can be found in matriarchal clans and colonies. A novel I won't soon forget."-Gail Priest, Author of the Annie Crow Knoll trilogy and Eastern Shore Shorts
"Agrarians and hunter-gatherers, and contemporary men and women, meet in these linked novellas of a time we do not know and a time that will be all too familiar to twenty-first-century readers. Eve's Daughters is a hand-loomed cloth stitched to the ubiquitous polyester of the twentieth century. A life for which we have no history, which Valdata so convincingly invents in Book One, Into the Orchard, is haunting; a life in our experience, Déjà Vu, or Book Two, an intricately plotted saga of family and patriarchy, is so recognizable it hurts."-Robbie Clipper Sethi, author of The Bride Wore Red and Fifty-Fifty.
