Review: The Amelia Temple Series by Vivian Moira Valentine

Titles: Beneath Strange Lights and Against Fearful Lies

Series: Amelia Temple: Books One and Two

Author: Vivian Moira Valentine

Publisher: Self-Published

Length: 269 and 334 Pages

Category: Cosmic Horror, New Adult, Historical

Rating: 5 Stars

At a Glance: If you love your cosmic horror with a heaping side of intelligence, sympathetic heroines, evil-doers and alien creatures, plus an enigma so vast only Amelia Temple can contain it, Vivian Moira Valentine has conceived the perfect series for you.

Reviewed By: Lisa

Blurbs: Beneath Strange Lights: Amelia Temple always knew she was different. Other. But that never stopped her from wanting more—especially her freedom.

The Bureau of Extranormal Investigations, the shadowy government agency that has controlled her since birth, is finally allowing Amelia a pass to explore the small surrounding town where she is housed. It’s 1954, and she quickly makes friends and begins to learn the rules of this strange society. Apparently, race matters. And girls aren’t supposed to date girls. Yet the government looks the other way when it comes to locking kids up from birth and performing experiments on them because they have extra powers—kids like Amelia.

Amelia and her new friends soon discover a conspiracy of so-called scientists running a bizarre experiment that threatens to unleash something terrible on her adopted hometown. As they begin to investigate, it becomes clear they must somehow stop the experiment before people die. But to do so, Amelia is forced to rely on what makes her different and decide just how human she wants to be.

Against Fearful Lies: Amelia Temple’s world has changed. As a test subject to a shady government entity, it is 1954 and she has finally been given limited freedom to move around after being kept captive and studied since birth.

That freedom came with a price, however. She now has friends, people she cares about. People who care about her. She has a girlfriend, but she manages to hide that fact, knowing how society would respond.

And she has enemies, those who want to study her, dissect her, see what she is. Amelia is not sure what they will find.

Something strange is going on at the hospital where her friend Ralph is being kept. And not a normal kind of strange, either. The kind of strange that means Ralph is no longer himself, the nurses at the hospital are keeping secrets, and somehow memories are stolen.

In trying to save her friends, and herself, Amelia must not only deal with the creature now living inside her, but she must learn more about who she is and what, exactly, she is capable of. Because one thing has become clear: it’s not just her and her friends’ lives at stake… there are worlds within worlds and a universe of extranormal activity that just might depend on her.

Review: If you love your cosmic horror with a heaping side of intelligence, sympathetic heroines, evil-doers and alien creatures, plus an enigma so vast only Amelia Temple can contain it, Vivian Moira Valentine has conceived the perfect series for you.

Amelia has total recall, meaning she remembers her own birth and the dark stranger who ripped her from her mother’s arms, which subsequently landed her in a dormitory (read: cell) at the Bureau of Extranormal Investigations, a covert operation designed—specifically, it would seem—to solve the question of what Amelia is. And what is “out there”. Not who but what, and this is the crux of Amelia’s objectification as a thing rather than a human. That is, until she makes strides to fight back against her dehumanization.

Amelia was tortured and abused, very much to the detriment of the agents who underestimated her. She was assigned male by the Bureau, a mistake which she corrects with poise and self-confidence. And that’s where her new handler, Agent Walsh, figures into Amelia’s growth. Agent Walsh is not her hero, though; he is a man in 1954, and subscribes to and enjoys all the white male privilege and bigotry that entails. He doesn’t deserve kudos for treating her humanely, but he is Amelia’s tool, even if inadvertently, to win the limited freedom she yearns for to discover the world outside of her confines. Even if/when it means acknowledging a part of herself she is hesitant to face.

Despite a curfew and boundaries, Amelia is given permission to leave the Bureau. Her journey into a society of which she is entirely naive comes with friendships and an unexpected romance through which she learns some unsavory truths about prejudice and judgement and ignorance. Gloria (a young Black woman) and Luci (the young woman with whom Amelia falls in love) are steadfast and loyal and are so much more than accomplices on Amelia’s journey into the unknown and unfathomable. Gloria and Luci are the brains and bravery and drivers and inspiration behind Amelia and her quest. This may be Amelia’s series, but both Gloria and Luci are integral contributors in what ultimately becomes a cosmic clash through time and space.

As Luci so eloquently encapsulates things, this is “a conspiracy of men and monsters and magic.” There is more here than heaven and earth and dreams and philosophy. It is an infinite dreamscape captured and corralled by the author into a story that knows no universal boundaries, only the reader’s ability to stretch our own imaginations and embrace the incomprehensible. When Against Fearful Lies comes to its conclusion—not its end, because Amelia has not yet met her full potential—the energy with which she promises vengeance to all those who would try to stop her made me want to raise a kindred fist. Bravo to Vivian Moira Valentine for encapsulating the female urge to topple the status quo, and all who uphold it, in such wonderful characters.