Bargain With Fate

A pretend engagement, but real feelings It was the ideal way of stopping his family's attempts to marry him off to the first available female. All Michael, Lord Stamford, needed was a respectable female desperate enough to agree to his plan. And then Rosalyn, Lady Jeffreys, called on him to demand the return of her family's estate, which Michael had won in a card game…. Michael was surprised to find that it was almost agreeable to pretend to be the adoring fiance. That was, until he kissed Rosalyn—a real kiss!

Usurper. Lost Heir. Runaway bride. Land on the brink of civil war. All so familiar, until Tortoise -- the Divine Creature who ignores the rules of right and wrong -- challenges his fellow divinities to meddle. Suddenly, children targeted for murder are adopted, swordsmen turn into blacksmiths, and none are reliably who or what they seem. The four Divine Animals are afoot: Tortoise, Dragon, Unicorn, and Phoenix. Hold on tight.Book 2: Bargain With FateIn the second book of the SAGE trilogy, memories, people, and items of power are recovered. The mighty are helpless, the weak are strong, and a little girl clutches creatures of terror to her ragged heart.

The Bargain with Fate follows the story of Veronica Leif, a young female Viking who stops at nothing to defend her family and friends while upholding the creed of a secret society known as Odin's Ravens.Unbeknownst to her, Loki, God of Mischief, has awakened to reap his prize from the bargain he made for the soul of his wife, Sigyn. Facing betrayal, heartbreak, and a God that always gets what he wants, Veronica fights for control as her life is upturned by strange phenomena and existential questions surrounding magic and the beings that wield it. Will she fight for autonomy over her own fate, or will she buckle under the pressure of the Gods and mortals that aim to wield her fate for her?

In the second book of the SAGE trilogy, memories, people, and items of power are recovered. The mighty are helpless, the weak are strong, and a little girl clutches creatures of terror to her ragged heart.

One of literature's greatest gifts is its portrayal of realistically drawn characters--human beings in whom we can recognize motivations and emotions. In Imagined Human Beings, Bernard J. Paris explores the inner conflicts of some of literature's most famous characters, using Karen Horney's psychoanalytic theories to understand the behavior of these characters as we would the behavior of real people. When realistically drawn characters are understood in psychological terms, they tend to escape their roles in the plot and thus subvert the view of them advanced by the author. A Horneyan approach both alerts us to conflicts between plot and characterization, rhetoric and mimesis, and helps us understand the forces in the author's personalty that generate them. The Horneyan model can make sense of thematic inconsistencies by seeing them as the product of the author's inner divisions. Paris uses this approach to explore a wide range of texts, including Antigone, "The Clerk's Tale," The Merchant of Venice, A Doll's House, Hedda Gabler, Great Expectations, Jane Eyre, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Wuthering Heights, Madame Bovary, The Awakening, and The End of the Road.