{"id":5019,"date":"2010-02-24T17:19:28","date_gmt":"2010-02-24T22:19:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/mojo\/?p=2464"},"modified":"2025-07-30T17:18:12","modified_gmt":"2025-07-30T22:18:12","slug":"the-mysterious-ways-of-the-universe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/blog\/the-mysterious-ways-of-the-universe\/","title":{"rendered":"The mysterious ways of the universe"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m in the middle of writing Magdalene<\/strong><\/em><\/span>, book 3 in my series.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

If you\u2019re passingly familiar with Christian myth,1<\/a><\/sup> it should be quite clear where I\u2019m going with this.<\/p>\n

But let me tell you a little about my main characters.<\/p>\n

\nMitch Hollander<\/strong>, PhD, metallurgical engineering; founder and CEO of Hollander Steelworks, headquartered in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He is also a widowed Mormon bishop who served half an 18-month mission2<\/a><\/sup> in Paris, France. He likes fast cars and ZZ Top.
\n 
\nCassie St. James<\/strong>, MBA; Vice President-Restructuring Division, Blackwood Securities. In a previous life, she was a high-dollar hooker<\/a>. She is divorced, lives in Manhattan\u2019s Upper East Side, has four adult children (all of whom live with her), engages in strategic revenge, and possesses a latent penchant for silliness.\n<\/div>\n

So I was on the search for a special little gift that Mitch could give Cassie that meant something but was not expensive. After all, what do you give a woman who can buy anything she wants?<\/p>\n

Naturally, I turned to books because I have a vested interest in people buying books (product placement!). I decided that Mitch might have a special book that he may have acquired on his mission and is probably in French. Naturally, I googled, and then headed over to Wikipedia where I stumbled upon a list of French novels. I doggedly worked my way through them one by one, read the synopses, then picked one based on a vague similarity of the plot to Cassie\u2019s past.<\/p>\n

I wrote it into my book as if I\u2019d read the thing (but hadn\u2019t), then decided I probably should read it. And it freaked me out. Big time.<\/p>\n

The book? Ang\u00e9lique, the Marquise of Angels<\/em><\/a> by Anne & Serge Golon, first published in 1958.<\/p>\n

Unbeknownst to me, this was a huge hit in Europe and apparently a big hit here. I\u2019d never heard of it, never stumbled across it in the intellectual drunkenness of my youth (that actually amazes me).<\/p>\n

The book is heroine-centric, so it\u2019s all about Ang\u00e9lique. The parallel I found between Ang\u00e9lique and Cassie was that they both had arranged marriages. The similarity stopped there.<\/p>\n

Ang\u00e9lique didn\u2019t know her contracted husband, feared him at first, then grew to love him.<\/p>\n

Cassie knew the man she was to marry, adored him from afar and was eager to marry him, and then quickly realized that her marriage was a sham.<\/p>\n

Cassie is familiar with the story via film, so she has no problem making this parallel and had, in fact, written a paper on it during her undergrad years.<\/p>\n

What doesn\u2019t show up in the plot summary is a description of the hero\u2019s \u201cunusual way of life.\u201d Joffray (the hero) is described as \u201cscientist, musician, philosopher.\u201d I didn\u2019t think much of it. Mitch is a scientist with his own lab, true, but he\u2019s also a CEO and I\u2019ve always thought of him in those terms. He\u2019s not a musician. He\u2019s not a philosopher. At heart, he\u2019s a blue-collar steel worker who loves steel enough to reinvent himself and the industry; steel is his life\u2019s work.<\/p>\n

Turns out that Joffray\u2019s science is metallurgy. That was freaky.<\/p>\n

Turns out that Joffray is hung out to dry, religiously speaking, for reasons that have nothing to do with religion and everything to do with power, politics, and money. That was even freakier.<\/p>\n

As I got deeper and deeper into the book, I felt like I\u2019d entered the Twilight Zone<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Then I got to the end. Ang\u00e9lique plunges out into the cold night, penniless and powerless, to exact revenge. That is so Cassie. I nearly expired from the freakiness the universe had perpetrated upon my person.<\/p>\n

I couldn\u2019t have picked a better novel if I\u2019d written it myself.<\/p>\n

______________________________<\/p>\n

1<\/a>.<\/span>  Yes, I know Mary Magdalene wasn\u2019t a prostitute.<\/p>\n

2<\/a>.<\/span>  In the mid-1980s, missions were, in fact, only 18 months long for men.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m in the middle of writing Magdalene, book 3 in my series. If you\u2019re passingly familiar with Christian myth,1 it should be quite clear where I\u2019m going with this. But let me tell you a little about my main characters. Mitch Hollander, PhD, metallurgical engineering; founder and CEO of Hollander Steelworks, headquartered in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[531,87,108,94,95,318],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5019","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-2","category-money","category-politics","category-religion","category-sex","category-tales-of-dunham"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5019"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5019"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5019\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16755,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5019\/revisions\/16755"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}