ANYWHERE YOU ARE
Constance O'Day-Flannery
Avon Romance
January 1999
ISBN# 0-380-80169-8
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First you're in a plane. You're contemplating
life . . . and your sanity. Next you're free-falling
through space at a 200mph! This is
your first jump. You've been trained
but nothing really prepares you for the very first time. Terror
strikes you and you curl up into a fetal position trying to
deny that you're actually thirteen thousand feet above solid
ground. Suddenly, reality hits and your brain tells you to arch
your back, pull the ripcord and get to the business of landing.
Basically . . . if you don't you're going to die. You can't
do that, though, because, not only are you not ready to leave
the physical world but your brother needs you. But what happens
when you finally land and everything and everyone you know no
longer exists? In Constance O'Day-Flannery's latest story, "Anywhere
You Are", we find out. After a short break from writing,
Constance is now back and better than ever. With twelve titles
under her belt, all of which have been best sellers and ten
of them time travel, "Anywhere You Are" is destined
to join the ranks.
Mairie Callahan quit her job. With her parents
long dead, brother Bryan is all she has left. And he's been
diagnosed with Leukemia! Together they had climbed Machu Pichu
in Peru, scuba dived the Great Barrier Reef in Australia and
kayaked with killer whales in Alaska. They'd even swum with
sharks. And now she was hurling herself out of a plane, all
because she wanted to spend as much time with her brother
as possible "Living", as he'd told her. Hurling
through space, all the training shed received kicks in and
she manages to land safely but something is wrong. Las Vegas
is no where in sight and there's a strange man dressed as
an Indian insisting that she is his 'gift'! If she was going
to get out of the desert, find civilization and find her brother
she was going to have to trust this man. When he takes her
to the Paiute settlement in the hills above what should have
been Las Vegas, Mairie find a peace she's never known before.
Even when she realizes that she's somehow been transported
back to 1877 she discovers a part of herself she'd thought
she'd never find . . . true love. But how does one deal with
the fact that A Navy Seal has been sent into the past to bring
you back, and is willing to kill you, and those around you,
to do it?
He'd been on a 'Vision Quest'. For four days
he'd been alone in the desert with no food and no water searching
within himself for the answers to his questions. Now sitting
on the edge of the highest cliff and looking out across the
desert, Jack Delaney is praying that the Gods will give him
the answers he seeks. When he sees something, someone, falling
from the sky, he knew he'd gotten his answer and races to
the desert floor. What he found, though, was not the answer
he thought the Gods would send him. Instead, he found a woman,
dressed in very strange clothes, who insisted that she'd lost
her brother and had to get back to Las Vegas. She talked of
airplanes and jumping out of them and a car that was to pick
her up. All of these things were strange to Jack and he just
knew that the Gods were playing a cruel joke on him. But he
couldn't leave her in the desert and took her home with him.
She proved herself to be quite sane though, and he found himself
falling in love. And it was that love of her that found him
hurling himself off a cliff, with Mairie strapped to him and
the parachute strapped to his own back, and a crazy man coming
at them with a gun the likes he'd never seen before. Blinding
white light met him as they sped towards the desert floor
and he thought he'd been shot. But when he looks up and sees
a magnificent city looming up he wonders if _he_ is the crazy
one.
"Anywhere You Are" is a cleverly written
and witty story that tells that true love will find each other
no matter where each of the lovers are in the world. It's a
story of unconditional love and one of self-discovery. O'Day-Flannery
uses every sense and emotion to the extreme, from the time that
Mairie jumps from the plane, her heart pumping, and Jack's first
glimpse of the future, his wonder and unabashed awe, to the
final pages. I enjoyed learning about Paiute tradition during
Mairie's time with them and following Jack through his discovery
of a new and future world. It's scary at best to think about
what it would be like to be thrust into a past or future, but
Constance O'Day-Flannery really made the adventure a pleasure
to read. "Anywhere You Are" is a sweet book and a
fast read as you won't want to put it down.
