Goddess Disclosing

Kelly L. Green is a freelance writer living in Ajax, Ontario.

This slim novel ambitiously attempts to lead the reader into the
possibilities of access—access to an emotionally disturbed mind,
access to personal history that transcends lifetimes, access to
profound, mystical, secret truths. Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite
succeed in making these places accessible to us.

Marshall’s unnamed heroine’s narrative leads us backward through
her life (lives) as an American actress, English wife, Chinese
concubine, and abused mixed-race African child. Her psychic identities
are so multitudinous that they defy categorization or description. The
reader is drawn into her story through hints and clues that offer the
promise of some type of resolution if one will only keep going.

But the goddess of the title and of the book’s first half is
irretrievably lost as Marshall bogs down in the reality of a lost young
girl with no anchor in the world. In short, one is left with no goddess,
nor even a symbolic everywoman. In the final pages, which describe the
woman’s return to her childhood African home, her physical and mental
breakdown, and her final hospital-life-support existence, Marshall
forces on the reader a comparison between dying goddess-woman and dying
planet earth. In the end, nothing much is disclosed.