Beginnings, the first part of the series Same Face, Different Place by Helem J. Christmas, is a fictional novel, biographic in nature, that tells, in the third person, the story of the main proragonist, Eleanor, who is a seventeen year-old, whose mother has died, and whose father is a London gangster.
Eleanor’s father gets caught up in a turf war between his boss and an up-and-coming brutal interloper called Dominic Theakston.
Eleanor’s father has go away for a while to escape almost certain death, so leaves his daughter with his boss, who places her with a shady couple, just before he dies or gets killed.
Completely unprotected in the underworld, this is where things start to go seriously wrong for Eleanor. She spends a little while in an East-End brothel, where she too incurs Dominic’s wrath by escaping and helping a male, fellow prisoner to leave with her, which is the beginning of a beautiful but short relationship.
Beginnings is the first part of the saga of Eleanor.
Beginnings has been well, but not perfectly edited, and would benefit from a reread, as would most books. The title is appropriate, but the name of the series is not immediately so. One can only assume that some of the same characters also appear in later volumes. The same goes for the meaning of the cover. The characters are well-drawn and plausible, if some of the language is not. For example, Miss Christmas has several rooms ‘lingering’ behind doors, and two teenage white brothers calling each other ‘bro’ in the Seventies. I don’t remember any Brit, white or black using that term in those days.
I enjoyedBeginnings of the series Same Face, Different Place, by Helen J. Christmas, give it full marks and urge you to read it if you like this type of genre-spanning epic.
Owen Jones, Amazon Best-Selling Author from Barry, Wales, has lived in several countries and travelled in many more. While studying Russian in the USSR in the '70's, he hobnobbed with spies on a regular basis; in Suriname, he got caught up in the 1982 coup; and while a company director, he joined the crew of four as the galley slave to sail from Barry to Gibraltar a home-made concrete yacht, which was almost rammed by a Russian oil tanker and an American aircraft carrier.
“I am a Celt, and we are romantic”, he said when asked about his writing style, “and I firmly believe in reincarnation, Karma and Fate, so, sayings like 'Do unto another...', and 'What goes round comes around' are central to my life and reflected in my work. I write about what I see, or think I see, or dream... and, in the end it is all the same really”. He speaks seven languages and is learning Thai, since he lives in Thailand with his Thai wife of fifteen years.
His first novel, Daddy's Hobby is from the seven-part series 'Behind The Smile: The Story of Lek, a Bar Girl in Pattaya', but his largest collection is 'The Megan Series', twenty-three novelettes on the psychic development of a teenage girl, the subtitle of which, 'A Spirit Guide, A Ghost Tiger and One Scary Mother!' sums them up nicely. He has written fifty novels and novelettes, including: Dead Centre; Andropov's Cuckoo; Fate Twister; The Disallowed (a philosophical comedy); Tiger Lily of Bangkok; and A Night in Annwn (Annwn being the ancient Welsh word for Heaven). Many have been translated into foreign languages and narrated into audio books.
Owen Jones writes stories set in Wales, Spain and Thailand, where he now lives. He is a life-long Spiritualist, and this belief is interwoven, in a very realistic way, into many of his books and storylines. If you like a touch of the 'supernatural', try his books
He sums his life up thus: “Born in the Land of Song, Living in the Land of Smiles”.
