An excellent and very helpful review for Dragon Shaman (Book One): Taming the Blowing Wind

I was very pleased to receive a review from an author whose work that I respect greatly (I highly recommend The Last Sunset by Bob Atkins, by the way). I would like to share his review with you. It can be found at:
Amazon
Goodreads

When he first showed me his review, I couldn't help but to blush. It made me very happy to know that the book and series is starting to find its market.

From the outset Dragon Shaman : Taming The Blowing Wind, by Teresa Garcia, plants one foot firmly and confidently in the realms of the spirit world. But this is no preachy evangelical sermon, or airy fairy new age nonsense, this is the spirit world of the Native Americans. As I read on, I was reminded that this spiritual perception of nature, and the world at large, is shared by many other cultures in many other parts of the world. 

Our heroine, the wonderfully named, BlowingWind MountainChild, is the daughter of an Irish mother and an Apache father. Although her father is killed while she is still a child she continues to follow the spirit path of her Apache heritage. Later she is devastated by the death of her lover, to the point that her soul is fractured into the separate components that make up a human psyche. 

She travels to Japan on a spiritual quest, where she encounters the Japanese equivalent of the Native American spirit world. 

Personally, I would have preferred to remain in America and learn much more about the wonderful and mysterious native culture there, but I had the feeling we were retracing the steps taken by the author at some point in her life. 

There was just enough of the Irish mother's spiritual heritage to remind me, personally, that this way of looking at nature: where mountains and lakes and rivers are inhabited by entities that may be malevolent, benevolent, or simply indifferent to man, was also shared by the Gaels of my own country. I live in an area where we are surrounded by the echoes of this long forgotten spirit world. Stone circles, mysterious mounds, tombs, carvings, even - dare I say it - an entity which was believed to inhabit Loch Ness. 

A book like this is so rooted in the beat and pulse of nature, the descriptions of the natural world so rich and vivid, that only someone with the eye of a poetess, and the heart of a naturalist, would be able to do the story justice. 

Passages such as the following are typical:
The stars blazed overhead like diamonds in a rich field of blackened velvet while the pines whispered among themselves in their quiet groaning language that only they spoke. 

Word painting of this quality is a joy to read, and I was genuinely disappointed when I reached the end of the book. Fortunately for me, and for anyone else who discovers this wonderfully talented writer, this is the first in a series. I look forward therefore to spending more time looking at the world through the pen of Teresa Garcia.

Isn't that a beautiful review? He tells me both what he enjoyed, and what he didn't like/would like to have more of. Those sort of reviews help a lot for an author, as then the author (in this case, me) can see where they can grow. Good reviews are the author's friend, and can help shape the way later volumes of a series present things (in this case, I see that more of the Native American culture/cultures is desired... which will indeed be coming in more).

If you'd like to get a copy of the book yourself, you can find it several places.
Amazon [Kindle]
Amazon Print edition is forthcoming (waiting on a re-cover by Victoria Davis)
Barnes & Noble [Nook]
Barnes & Noble [Nook, first edition illustrated]
Barnes & Noble Print edition is coming (waiting on re-cover by Victoria Davis)
Smashwords [several electronic formats]
Lulu [Print, first edition]

Audio edition for Book One is still waiting for a narrator, the same for Book Two and auditions are still open