A PARENTHESES OF TIME - Novel
Overview: After a brief romance with the world’s richest man goes awry, MARTA, an international, Latina artist gets catapulted into a Parentheses of Time against her will. It’s the year 2049 and the night before her fortieth birthday when her lover, ZEKE, a sociopathic billionaire gives her with the first Parenthesis shot, an expensive duo of injections made from her DNA and spun with sophisticated AI technology, which slows down the body to a nearly imperceptible crawl while still keeping the person alive. The only way to reawaken her is with the second injection, which he takes with him. Marta is newly pregnant with his child, suspended in time, and sequestered in one of his many estates worldwide. No one knows where she’s located since he has hired a Proxie to populate her social media presence and impersonate her voice. This work of Upmarket fiction complete at 82,000 words contains elements of speculative fiction and magical realism. Told through five books, offering five perspectives from the women who collaborate to save Marta and the seventeen other women he has done this to. It’s a female-empowered, retelling of the fairy tales of Bluebeard’s Castle and Sleeping Beauty wrapped in social commentary as women take back their power from a heartless patriarchy where men have had an inordinate amount of financial power and have been getting away with murder and so much more for decades.
Marta’s two closest friends GABBY (aka Clytemnestra) and PEARL must find her somewhere in the world with her second injection in order to reawaken her before it’s too late and her body withers from dehydration. The question, ‘How far would you go to save your best friend?’ drives the novel as Gabby lures Zeke into a love trap and stabs him with a Parenthesis injection filled with his own DNA before he can make her his next victim. She hides his ‘reawakening’ shot after she discovers seventeen other second injections in similar blue velvet boxes, which she places on his dining room table like hungry mouths eager to tell their story.
After she triggers the alarm on his laptop while looking for their whereabouts, she must run for her life. So begins the race against time to find and free the women and to expose his serial crimes of stealing time from all these women against their will. With the help of Marta’s best childhood friend, Pearl and a handful of other extraordinary women, they manage to outsmart Zeke and discover the information they need without reawakening him and returning him to power. These pregnant women and their future children are legally in line to inherit his massive fortune, which will help them realize their vision for a brighter future that can steer the world away from greed and power to one of compassion and growth. But in order to achieve this, Zeke must remain suspended. The Office of Time Management (aka, the Parenthesis Police) orchestrates the reawakening and re-entry of the captive women while they’re on the hint for Gabby since she too has committed the same crime against him.
My novel unfolds with five books, each one revealing the story and the special talent of the women who join forces to locate Marta and the seventeen other women.
COMPS: The Power by Naomi Alderman with its feminist, speculative flavor that shifts the power dynamic, My Friends by Frederik Bachman with its celebration of art, mosaic of unusual characters, and sense of belonging to something bigger, and the work of Amber Sparks and Kelly Link, especially her collection, White Cat, Black Dog with its speculative fairytales and unexpected endings.