Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Heartstone: Book Ii of the Dolvia Saga
    Unavailable
    Heartstone: Book Ii of the Dolvia Saga
    Unavailable
    Heartstone: Book Ii of the Dolvia Saga
    Ebook499 pages7 hours

    Heartstone: Book Ii of the Dolvia Saga

    By Stella Atrium

    5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    The second installment of Atriums Dolvia Saga is a character-driven sci-fi tale that explores profoundand timelythemes of sexual oppression, environmentalism and cultural intolerance.

    Atriums intricate novel ranges widely in themegender, politics, existential philosophy, mysticism, etc. Set primarily on the planet of Dolviawhere the females of the indigenous, frequently warring tribes of the savannah maintain few rights and are forced to wear burkas the storyline revolves, at least initially, around Dr. Edna Edwina Greensboro, a bush-clinic doctor whose courage, compassion and vision have begun to change some of the insular ways of thinking.

    Getting married to Lt. Mike Shaw, an off -world military man, and keeping two female gualarepsoversized and sentient iguana-esque reptilesincreases her status. But when she witnesses a mixed blood girl being brutally abused, she realizes that shes working against centuries of oppression reinforced by cultural mores, folklore, myth and cruel men dead set on guarding the status quo. After all, the victims are only women.

    The commentary on gender politics benefits from a foreign setting; its an exercise in considering discrimination without finger-pointing. But thats only one aspect of this multifaceted story as Greensboro fights to save lives and educate the tribes people, nefarious individuals and companies seek to profit from the chaos Atriums saga continues with another entertaining and powerful read, reminiscent of Octavia E. Butler and Margaret Atwood.

    An allegorical, emotionally intimate narrative for sci-fi fans, with broad themes that could appeal to a mainstream audience, too.

    Kirkus Reviews

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisheriUniverse
    Release dateMay 24, 2012
    ISBN9781462070459
    Unavailable
    Heartstone: Book Ii of the Dolvia Saga

    Read more from Stella Atrium

    Related to Heartstone

    Related ebooks

    Science Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Summers Of Urchins And Love

      Jul 29, 2019

      Summers Of Urchins And Love
      14 min read

    • Article

      Us Animals: Writing the Natural World Back into the Human

      Apr 25, 2018

      There are so many ways for a nest to fail. So many ways for a sentence to fail. In my years as a field biologist I watched how the natural world dealt with the inevitability of failure—in life, mating, reproduction, predation. Unaware, I began to tra

      6 min read

    • Article

      Have You Seen The Aliens Today?

      Jan 5, 2022

      THE REAL-LIFE X-FILES Three decades ago, when I was young, I undertook the most amazing journey. I had been in Sydney, Australia, and then the Gold Coast to lecture on UFOs, and decided to take the opportunity to embark on a true adventure by plane a

      4 min read

    • Article

      Draw Me

      Jul 5, 2023

      Draw Me
      2 min read

    • Article

      Tuskers

      Jul 1, 2018

      Tuskers
      9 min read

    • Article

      Chaos Theory

      Mar 1, 2021

      Chaos Theory
      12 min read

    • Article

      Widdershins

      Nov 1, 2022

      After Kathleen Graber Her hands are in my mouthwhen my dentist and I discover our common love of bones. Our professions, both of them, are at odds with the fact that, once formed,enamel cannot repair itself. She concerns herself with caramelfor the s

      1 min read

    • Article

      The Plague Legends

      Dec 1, 2021

      The Plague Legends
      12 min read

    • Article

      Becoming Animal

      May 6, 2020

      Becoming Animal
      11 min read

    • Article

      We Are All Of Us Animals

      Sep 1, 2022

      We Are All Of Us Animals
      5 min read

    • Article

      Where There Is No Hospital

      Mar 8, 2022

      Where There Is No Hospital
      15 min read

    • Article

      When Mollusks Fall in Love

      Nov 16, 2017

      Outside of gothic works of fiction set in Transylvania, we rarely read of enduring friendships that have been initiated by a bite. But that is exactly how nature writers Sy Montgomery and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas—the two extraordinary, quirky, and i

      9 min read

    • Article

      Learning To Walk

      Oct 28, 2019

      Learning To Walk
      5 min read

    • Article

      Who Are You Calling Prickly?

      Sep 13, 2023

      Who Are You Calling Prickly?
      6 min read

    • Article

      The Crane Wife

      Jul 16, 2019

      The Crane Wife
      13 min read

    • Article

      Slow Blues

      Sep 1, 2020

      Slow Blues
      17 min read

    • Article

      The Paper Wasp

      Jun 3, 2019

      The Paper Wasp
      13 min read

    • Article

      The Scars We Bare

      Apr 13, 2020

      The Scars We Bare
      11 min read

    • Article

      Books

      Jul 25, 2022

      Books
      6 min read

    • Article

      Reports From Near And Far

      Nov 25, 2021

      susanne paola antonetta MY HOMETOWN of Bellingham, Washington, is a last corner of the continental United States, a final chew of land before the long drink of the Pacific. We’re bound to the west by water, to the east by mountain, and twenty miles t

      17 min read

    • Article

      Cricket League

      Jan 1, 2020

      Ivy Lugbill, age 8 Indianapolis, IN I was so excited! My dad and I were going camping! After we packed all our stuff, my dad said, “Hop in!” I grabbed the paper towel roll binoculars I had been making and jumped into the car. It was a really . . . re

      7 min read

    • Article

      What Remains

      Feb 21, 2019

      What Remains
      18 min read

    Reviews for Heartstone

    5/5

    1 rating2 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      In HeartStone, the second book of her Dolvia Saga, Stella Atrium takes the reader on another exploratory tour of the distant planet. The story resumes about fifteen Earth years after the events narrated in SufferStone. The first book told of the Dolviet struggle to throw off the tyrannical rule of the Company, a sinister Earth corporation of Han Chinese origin. In HeartStone, the Company still lurks on the periphery of the plot and apparently still has designs on the natural resources of Dolvia, but most of the violence is now presented in the form of inter-tribal warfare. Atrium does not idealize the native peoples of her literary creation. Although they appear to live in harmony with their planetary home, they are not at peace with their neighbors. There is a high level of machismo among the male Dolviets and the warrior culture of the dominant tribes seems to have retarded the cultural and political progress of the peoples of the planet as a whole. Dolviet women, in contrast, evidently place a higher value on communal cooperation and making peace with strangers.The first section of HeartStone is narrated by Dr. Edna Edwina Greensboro, a clinic doctor on the savannah and medical researcher. She achieves a position of high esteem with the natives, who refer to her as the "Sheeks Cylom", a term of endearment and high regard. Like the sympathetic Earth women of SufferStone, she is prone to making cultural faux pas through her ignorance of the planet, but she wins the trust and affection of the Dolviets through her dedication as a healer and defender of their rights. They believe the planet has blessed her on a spiritual level. She marries a Consortium officer of the peace-keeping force, (the Consortium being a sort of United Nations of that region of space), Mike Shaw, and their turbulent relationship provides much of the personal drama of the novel.In her concern for "her" Dolviets, Dr. Greensboro reminds one of Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa, in which the Baroness Blixen assumes a sort of maternal responsibility for "her" Kikuyu. The off-worlders of the Dolvia Saga (excluding the Company thugs and some of the Hardhands, such as the brutal Bryant Cartel) usually combine a nobility of purpose in service to those in need with a sense of cultural superiority. The introduction of the intelligent reptiles, the gualareps, from the planet Cicero is one of the more intriguing and entertaining features of HeartStone. For those among us readers who cherish a special bond with our animals, their presence in the story is most charming and touching and the death of Ralph causes the sharpest pang of "HeartStone", or deeply-felt empathy for the suffering of others.The middle section of the novel is narrated by Dr. Henry Beecham, another researcher in epidemiology sent to Dolvia. His clinical observation provides us with another view of Dr. Greensboro and Mike Shaw, a view in which there is less sentimentality and overt emotion and which presents a more critical analysis of their mistakes and cultural blunders than does Dr. Greensboro's account.The last third of the novel is seen through the eyes of Brianna Miller, teenage daughter of Brian Miller, the Earthling ally of the Dolviet war against the Company who died heroically in the battle of the refinery. She finds herself caught between two worlds, that of her Dolviet mother, a world that regards her as "goulep" or outcast as a half-breed, and that of her father the Earthling from Montana. She is a very sensitive child/woman and provides us with powerful insights into the emotional nature of others, especially regarding the tense love affair between Dr. Greensboro and Major Shaw. She has an insatiable curiosity about Earth, her father's world. In SufferStone, the story seems to be set in the distant future, perhaps as distant as the 35th century, with the Dolviets being the descendents of Earth colonists who came through the wormhole so long ago that they have little ancestral memory of the Earth. But there are too many references to familiar items of the Earth culture of our time in HeartStone, such as National Geographic magazine with its yellow-framed covers, Disney World, and the "Blue Angels" for a distant future. We are led to seeing the story as taking place in a much closer future, possibly as close as the 22nd century. Then how do we explain the presence of human beings on Dolvia and Cicero with histories apparently extending far into the past? Perhaps the Dolviets are not descended from Earthlings, perhaps both Dolviets and Earthlings have common ancestors on some other world. We can hope that an answer to this puzzle is revealed in StrikeStone, the next book in this excellent series.
    • 5/5
      I was privileged to be contacted by Ms. Atrium to read her second book to the follow up of her SufferStone series. She takes you on an adventure of a lifetime, literally. I enjoy her writing style and the road I traveled with Ms. Edwina and her cohorts. Ms. Atrium is a gifted writer and her imagination is immense. You won’t regret being a follower of her writing.Ms. Edwina just wants to run her clinic but it never seems to be that she can just do research without someone stepping in and keeping her from it. She begins a bond with Lieutenant Shaw and the romance grows. She befriends a wounded child named Karlyhi who’s own mother leaves him behind when he is wounded. Karlyhi is working for Edwina. Dr. Abercrombie has been profiting on medical supplies and selling them. Edwina is oblivious of his doings. She’s also inherited two female gualareps (love that name) that are attached to her and gifted from Lieutenant Shaw. They are very protective of their master. Come along for the journey to another world and watch as Edna Edwina tries to make a difference for the ones she encounters.