BooksChatter: ☀ Song of the Oceanides

Thank you for joining us on the Virtual Book Tour for Song of the Oceanides, a Young Adult Fantasy by J.G. Źymbalist (13 January 2016, J.G. Źymbalist, 766 pages).

Don't miss our guest post by author J.G. Źymbalist: Balancing Life and Writing

PREVIEW: Check out the book's synopsis and excerpt below. Read up to the the first chapter of the third section (i.e. the first seven chapters) with Amazon Look Inside.

Song of the Oceanides is FREE on Kindle Unlimited, Kindle Owner's Lending Library and Kindle MatchBook, and it is currently on sale for only .99!

Author J.G. Źymbalist will be awarding a $50 Amazon/BN gift card to a randomly drawn winner via Rafflecopter during the tour.

Please do take part: comment on our post and follow the tour where you will be able to read other excerpts (☀), interviews (ℚ), reviews (✍) and guest blog posts (✉).

Synopsis | Teaser | Guest Post: Balancing Life and Writing | About the Author | Giveaway & Tour Stops

Synopsis

Song of the Oceanides is a highly-experimental triple narrative transgenre fantasy that combines elements of historical fiction, YA, myth and fairy tale, science fiction, paranormal romance, and more. For ages 10-110.

J.G. Źymbalist's début is a quirky but poignant coming-of-age tale about children, Martians, freaky Martian hummingbird moths, and alluring sea nymphs.

The first thread relates the suspenseful tale of a Martian girl, Emmylou, stranded in Maine where she is relentlessly pursued by the Pinkerton Detective Agency's Extraterrestrial-Enigma Service. The second thread concerns her favorite Earthling comic-book artist, Giacomo Venable, and all his misadventures and failed romances.

The final thread deals with a tragic young lad, Rory Slocum, who, like Emmylou, loves Giacomo's comic books and sees them as a refuge from the sea nymphs or Oceanides incessantly taunting and tormenting him.

As much as anything, the triple narrative serves to show how art may bring together disparate pariahs and misfits--and give them a fulcrum for friendship and sense of communal belonging in a cruel world.

Teaser: Excerpt

from

I
Chapter Three

Dyce’s Head, Maine.
31 August.

     Rory Slocum had only just returned home from Putnam’s General Store and Newsagent when he noticed the girl standing in the heart of the garden. She seemed to be lost in the music of the wind chimes dangling from Mother’s lilac tree. Still, despite the girl’s seeming innocence, somehow he just knew that she must be one of the Oceanides who had been taunting him all summer long.
     She must have heard his footsteps in the salty afternoon breeze because she turned to look upon him. What a comely girl too.
     A bit of jam and then some! He stopped in his tracks and studied her classical features.
     She had plum-black hair, eyes of sea green, bold chiseled planes to her face, fine hallowed cheeks, and a sharp jaw line. How could she be anything but an Oceanide?
     Slowly he advanced as far as the fog cannon where he paused a second time. Perhaps he would do something so as to entertain her, and once she realized how amusing he could be, she would tell the others to leave him be. He walked over to the lilac tree. “Look what I’ve got here!” With that he held up his copy of Sir Pilgarlic Guthrie’s Phantasy Retrospectacle.
     She must have resented the whole notion that a boy like Rory would even think to approach someone like her. Grimacing, she called to another girl who had just walked up through the gale-torn bluffs. The two of them spoke in a tongue resembling the Byzantine Greek in which the drunken churchwarden sometimes delivered his public addresses.
     As giddy as ever, Rory advanced a few more steps. “You know what they call this sort of picture book, do you? Down at Putnam’s, they tell me it’d be un comique pittoresque. Just like the newsagents sell down there in Paris.” Now he pointed to the picture on the dust jacket—the Oceanides’ long flowing hair and the mint-cream linen gowns reaching down to their ankles. Afterward he pointed at the girls themselves standing there in their own creamy-white gowns. “Sir Pilgarlic Guthrie, he’s the bettermost! Everything bang up to the elephant and—”
     “Have you any idea how odd you are?” the first Oceanide asked. “And you’ll be beginning your fifth year in school next fall, isn’t that right? They’ll tear you apart, a beanpea like you.”

Song of the Oceanides
On Sale for ONLY .99!

About the Author

J.G. Źymbalist began writing Song of the Oceanides as a child when his family summered in Castine, Maine where they rented out Robert Lowell’s house.

The author returned to the piece while working for the Martha’s Vineyard Historical Society, May-September, 2005. He completed the full draft in Ellsworth, Maine later that year.

He wrote the original draft of his other experimental work,Hymn to the Night, while night clerking at a series of Palestinian youth hostels in the Old City of Jerusalem, 1996-1999.

He lives in Ohio.

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