RavenCorax339
The novel, Esther's Descent, is modeled on the ancient Sumerian-Babylonian myth of the Descent of Ishtar (Inanna) and retold in a modern setting from the viewpoint of a young Israeli woman whose soul is divided by her young adult experiences living on either side of the Jordan river. Esther has spent most of her summers living in Jordan with her uncle Amos, who is an archeologist and her spiritual teacher. The rest of the year, she has either lived on an Israeli Kibbutz in the Negev with her mother, or with her father and half-sister Laila in Jerusalem. Now at twenty-two, Esther decides to suddenly break-off her esoteric training with her uncle Amos and return across the Jordan river to confront her sister Laila in Tel Aviv, whom she has not seen for four years. By choosing to undertake this journey, Esther must confront dark, painful, and suppressed memories of her adolescence and undertake a metaphorical and nightmarish journey into the world of black magic and political power that her sister Laila now rules over. The theme of the novel concerns the process of Esther's reconciliation to that dark part of her soul that her sister possesses. The plot is driven by the nightmarish world of dark sexuality that Laila traps her in. The tension is resolved by the reader realizing at the end of the novel that Esther and Laila are, in fact, one and the same person, whose soul has been divided and made whole again under the guidance of her uncle Amos.