The Parallax Field by M Maloney

About the Book:

Some places remember what we cannot.

Glass artist Ethan Finn has spent years hiding from grief, guilt, and the impossible expectations of his father—a beloved local hero who died trying to rescue fishermen during a violent storm. After his father’s death, Ethan creates a series of life-sized glass sculptures and installs them on the isolated cliff above Gray Harbor. The locals call them the Watchers.

Then the impossible begins.

Visitors report seeing lost loved ones beside the sculptures. Others relive forgotten moments with startling clarity. At first, the town dismisses the visions as rumor or mass hysteria. But as more people experience them, Gray Harbor is overwhelmed by tourists seeking answers the Watchers might reveal.

Claire Bennett, a geophysicist investigating strange seismic activity beneath the coast, searches for a natural explanation. The geology offers tantalizing clues: fault pressure, quartz deposits, electromagnetic fields, and a phenomenon that appears to connect the physical world with human perception. But no scientific theory can explain what the Watchers reveal—or why they respond so powerfully to Ethan’s grief, anger, and longing.

As the town divides between fear and fascination, Trent Mitchell files a complaint with the Coastal Commission, forcing Ethan to remove the sculptures. Yet the deeper Ethan and Claire investigate, the more the Watchers seem connected to Ethan’s emotions—and to the devastating secret his father carried for decades.

With storms gathering over the Pacific, seismic activity building erratically, and the community turning against him, Ethan faces an impossible choice: dismantle the sculptures and lose the only path to the truth, or complete his project and risk the lives and sanity of everyone he loves.

Blending magical realism with psychological suspense, The Parallax Field explores memory, perception, forgiveness, and the invisible distances between those we love.

My Review:

Maloney challenges us to think of the possibility of a deeper reality we can experience but perhaps cannot explain in scientific terms. It might be a sense, a weight or something similar we cannot scientifically explain. It may be a mystery at the edge of science.

How much of what we experience and how we understand our experiences depend upon where we are standing? If we had been some place else, would we have seen everything differently? That is the reality of parallax, seeing reality from a different position.

Maloney explores these kinds of issues in this novel. There is a good dose of science included, such as electromagnetic fluctuations and coherence fields. But Maloney extends the influence of them beyond scientific understanding by having human emotions amplify their effect.

This is a good novel for those who like science fiction and thinking about how the physical world and human relationships intersect. It is a fun adventure at the edge of our understanding of reality.

My rating: 4/5 stars.

You can read my review of the first book in this series, The Tuning Chamber.

About the Author:

M. Maloney grew up reading every Ray Bradbury story she could get her hands on. She wrote her first sci-fi story in elementary school and devoured science fiction novels and short stories like they were Belgian chocolates. She estimates that she's read more than a thousand sci-fi and fantasy stories. Her brain is constantly sizzling with timey-wimey plot concepts, what-if scenarios involving impossible science, and researching cutting-edge scientific breakthroughs to help her come up with insanely weird, original, and creative stories. She thinks she has a killer sense of humor, but that seems to be highly subjective, she's been told. Her aim is to entertain her readers and make them think ... even if they don't really want to.

Independently published, 286 pages.

I received a complimentary digital copy of this book through BookSirens. My comments are an independent review.

(My star ratings: 5-An exceptional book, 4-Better than average, relevant and liked by me, 3-It is average, 2-It is below average and not liked by me, 1-It is practically unreadable.)