Venus RisingBy, Celia Kennedy
Akshaya Bertrand is a Professor of Art History at an elite college in New England. The patina of the ivy league campus is the perfect canvas for the exotic beauty from India. It is also an environment that Akshaya can safely navigate. A small world that she has minimized and made manageable.
Dr. Jared Harrison, a journalist who has been based in the Middle East, has accepted a position as a guest lecturer at the college where Akshaya teaches. Arriving just in time to attend a faculty mixer, he catches a glimpse of Akshaya Bertrand. Immediately, he learns from those who have tried and failed, that the beautiful professor, compared to Lakshmi, Venus and Aphrodite, is an enigma, a seductive sculpture behind a wall of glass.
While searching for a way to slip past her armor and into her life, Jared confronts the images and tragedies imprinted on his psyche by those left behind in the war torn world of the Middle East. Akshaya and Jared find themselves drawn to each other, hoping to find compassion, someone they can expose their inner demons to.
Funding from the college provides an opportunity to combine Akshaya's love of art with Jared's resources as a war correspondent. Together, they travel to Afghanistan and India, where both finally face the past that has shaped them and the present that defines them.
Amongst beauty and poverty as well as war and friendship they find the answers to their individual truths.
Twitter: @KennedyCelia
Google+: Celia Kennedy
Reviews: Venus Rising
Carol Osborne: Venus Rising by Celia Kennedy, 5 Star Review
An extremely enjoyable
read, you will instantly be intrigued by the 2 main characters in this novel
and the storyline is an enthralling journey. Be prepared for an interestingly
captivating and very emotional time.
Akshaya is a gorgeous, intelligent, successful, educated goddess like lady who
captivates the attention of every man she comes in contact with. Jared is an
intelligent, successful, educated, handsome, athletic, witty, charming, and
well-traveled man. Individually these characters seem invincible and perfect,
the envy of all those around them. However, under the perfect facade the world
sees, they each have their own personal demons to deal with. Both physical and
emotional scars that they manage to hide from the outside world, but struggle
to come to terms with themselves.
Developing uncontrollable emotions for each other makes things even more
complicated. Can they trust each other enough to share and conquer their demons
and still continue with their success, including a "business" trip
through tumultuous parts of India? You will have to read it to find out!
Enjoy...
Edel Rogers: The best book I've read in a long time! 5 Star Review
Venus Rising is a beautiful
story, beautifully written and clearly very well researched. It's a love story,
but it's much more than that. From the first page on, I was hooked and I didn't
want to stop reading till I got to the end.
The more I read, the more I came to know and care about all the characters, not
just Akshaya and Jared, and I really wanted them to find happiness. I felt
their emotions, and both laughed and cried at times.
Venus Rising is one of those books that makes you want to get to the end
quickly so you can find out what happens, but when you get to the end you wish
there was more to read.
I'm already looking forward to Celia's next book!
About the Author:
Celia Kennedy was born in Wurzburg, Germany on an American Army base. Her parents' penchant for traveling the world, via a Volkswagen Minibus with a Porsche engine, sparked her imagination. Staring out the window, sometimes through fog and rain, at other times at sunny blue skies, she began to make up stories for the places and spaces they passed by. The in-between time, the most fascinating to her.
The imagined world has always fascinated Celia. She has studied Landscape Architecture, Architecture, Interior Design, and pretty much every other subject matter. Like her childhood, it was the ride that was the most entertaining, arrival at a degree, not anywhere as important.
Mark Twain said, "Write what you know." When combining this concept with her unusual life experiences (working at a nuclear submarine base when Chernobyl blew, testing software Bill Gates kept close tabs on, travelling extensively while quite broke, or falling in love with her boyfriend's close friend) thinking of what to write about isn't challenging; there just needs to be more hours in the day.
Celia published Charlotte's Restrained, The Accidental Stalkerin December of 2012 and Venus Rising in August of 2013. Look for Kathleen's Undressed, The Accidental Enigma, a companion novel to Charlotte's Restrained, to be published in November 2014.
Currently she lives in Washington State with the loves of her life.
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