Sisters of the Wind

Diana Kemp-Jones

3/8/2000

Review by S. Joan Popek

Sisters of the Wind was my first experience with a fully interactive book on CD. What fun!

Diana's collection of fifteen science fiction stories would have kept me reading even without the music, powerful graphics and QuickTime movie with the author speaking to me at the end, but the experience was truly remarkable.

Her stories each feature a female as the central character and celebrate women without being about women or for only female readers as I have seen in so many other "female heroine" stories. This book is for anyone who likes futuristic, semi-hard science fiction. From the first story, "Black Widow" in which a remarkable young woman teaches her older brother a valuable lesson about tolerance, to the final one, "Swan Song," where we see a woman torn away from her family to fight a deadly, sentient virus by hunting and eliminating the human carriers simply because she is one of the few immune humans left on earth, we are taken on a perilous journey through the galaxy and beyond the future.

Diana's characters are believable, and her description is graphic. This author is one to watch in the genre. Her flair for telling a good story and her classic Hitchcockian endings leave us guessing and wanting more. For the science fiction short story addict, this is a "don't miss" book.

by Ann M. Beardsley

Want to get lost in a fantasy world? Diane Kemp-Jones gives you more than a dozen opportunities to do so, and to be glad you did. The heroines in Sisters of the Wind range from ordinary women who do amazing things, to amazing women who do ordinary things and make us see them in a new light. Each one leaves you wanting more.

A nerdy sister who's more than she seems, an artist intrigued by white lights in the fog, a newspaper reporter who intends to get the story of a lifetime--even if she can never tell anyone about it; any reader is bound to find someone to identify with. Passive women, ambitious women, beautiful women, almost all of them know their minds and are willing to stand up for what they believe. You'll have to ration yourself to just one story a day because the worlds created by the author are believable enough that it's hard to bring yourself back to this one.

If you love strong women, fantasy worlds, and a bit of escapism, this is the short story collection for you.

The author creates such believable alternative worlds that it almost makes you believe she was a soul that travels the universe and is just passing time on this planet to see how ready we are to accept other intelligent beings. Filled with such tiny details as to make each world more realistic than our own planet at times, the author could easily turn each short story into a novel and still leave us wanting more.

Note From Jandys: The above two reviews were forwarded to me. The first one can also be found at Diana Kemp-Jones' website. The second can be found at Scribe's World, a site for readers and writers.