Praise for Jane Eyre's Sisters

Now Featured in the Patheos Book Club
Jane Eyre's Sisters
How Women Live and Write The Heroine Story
By Jody Gentian Bower

"Jody Gentian Bower's beautifully written treatise on "the wandering heroine" is impeccably voiced within the pages of Jane Eyre's Sisters. Her understanding of how female archetypes change cultural patterns over time is filled with historical references. It is the clearest documentation I've ever encountered on the concept of the aletis. Her skill as an author makes this a pleasurable read. Bower lays bare the ways in which women's fiction still struggles in the face of male-dominated criticism. It lays the groundwork for our next generation of women artists to change the cultural matrix again and again. I think this should be required reading for all MFA students -- men as well as women."

-- Pamela Moore Dionne author of the forthcoming Blue Truth mystery series

"Provocative, informative, and highly entertaining, Jane Eyre's Sisters is a valuable resource for novelists creating strong and believable female characters."

-- Lillian Stewart Carl, author of the Jean Fairbairn/Alasdair Cameron mysteries

"Finally! We who have been seeking the feminine counterpart to the masculine hero story have reason to rejoice. Aletis, the wandering heroine, is an archetypal treasure who's been with us all along, and I am deeply grateful to Jody Gentian Bower, a brilliant new pioneer in the wilderness of the soul, for introducing her in this groundbreaking book."

-- Jean Benedict Raffa, author of The Bridge to Wholeness, Dream Theatres of the Soul, and Healing the Sacred Divide

"This is a book full of those wonderful moments of familiarity that spring upon us when we find a story exactly like something we have experienced in our own lives. When women read Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, for example, we find inspiration in her rebellion against her poverty and femaleness. When her determined sense of self brings her, at last, to a marvelous outcome, we rejoice with her, wondering if we can make it too. Jody Bower's many examples of women who wander 'from place to place searching for love or freedom or answers,' drawn from novels and stories, myths and folk tales, genre fiction and popular culture, women's biography and autobiography, make her book a treasure trove of epiphany and identification. Women, and men who genuinely desire to understand the true shape of women's lives, will find Bower's discernment of the differences between the journey of the male hero as outlined by Joseph Campbell and the heroine's wanderings, drawn from her large sample of readings, as illuminating as they are startling."

-- Annis Pratt, author of Archetypal Patterns in Women's Fiction, Dancing with Goddesses, and The Marshlanders Series

"By integrating her reading in the classics, popular culture and psychology, Jody Bower shows us, in clear and compelling prose, that only when women identify the heroine in themselves as the archetype atletis (wanderer) can they unveil their authenticity and live as they truly are. Bower's work will prove a game changer."

-- Sheila Bender, Founder of WritingItReal.com