Blessings of the Storm

Blessings of the Storm
Stella and Audra Price
Mardi Gras Publishing LLC
ISBN: 0-9787262-2-7
Fiction, Erotica, Contemporary, Fantasy
Reviewed by Dave Thompson

Nora has inherited a Rhode Island antique store but she has also inherited a genie, who emerges from an old Persian rug, to grant her every wish. Her EVERY wish, although it takes her a while to work that one out.
Blessings of the Storm is an enjoyable novella, marred by an atrocious disregard for punctuation- when you need to reread a passage three times, before realizing that it’s lacking the period between two separate sentences, you know you’re in trouble. Especially when the story itself is otherwise so visual and visceral that any interruption whatsoever is one annoyance too many.
Both Nora and Sinclair (as the genie is somewhat improbably named), come to vivid life across the 45 pages as does the decision that Nora needs to make, as the tale sails languidly towards its conclusion, and the third of her wishes creeps up on her. Cunningly, however, the authors ensure that the reader has no better idea than Nora what that wish will be, and no more sense of its consequences than Sinclair.
Similarly, Sinclair’s willing deployment of his sexuality (and Nora’s greedy acceptance of it) is very well portrayed, all the more so since it utterly lacks the self-consciousness that often mars such passages in works that aren’t aimed exclusively towards the erotic market. Indeed, one might even wonder idly what the Prices might conjure up, were they to specifically set out in that direction because, in Sinclair, they have certainly created the vehicle to take them there. He has 750 years of largely untold back story, after all even if he did spend most of them rolled up in a carpet!