Sunday 6 November 2022

another review for the Christmas Maze

The Christmas Maze by Danny Fahey – a Review by David Collis

 

Why do we seek to be good, to make the world a better place? Why do we seek to be ethical – to be altruistic, and even heroic? Danny Fahey’s The Christmas Maze: Where Hope is Found gives a narrative meditation on the place of hope in childhood, and what becomes of it.

 

The central character to Fahey’s story, the young boy Matthew, takes on a burden of guilt seemingly too heavy for any shoulders. Tricked by a man in a van promising a puppy, Matthew inadvertently allows his sister to be kidnapped – subject to horrifying fates that are only magnified by their lack of confirmation. It’s left to the imagination. This guilt resonates in Matthew, an existential hunger to make amends for what he allowed to happen to his sister. He must find and solve the Christmas Maze to rescue his sister.

 

As an author, Fahey draws upon archetypal narrative elements and sequences. Matthew embarks upon a journey to find his sister. Along the way he overcomes a series of ethical challenges. Like a quantum particle resolving into a particular state, Matthew creates his personality as he navigates a series of ethical challenges. He is guided by an unflinching grasp of courage, determination and compassion. Like hobbits, pilgrims, and heroes of a thousand stories, Matthew’s search shows him coming into being as an ethical person.

 

The blurry reality of this story, moving between psychological and external realities, meditates on the power of virtue in the face of adult badness. The world is dead if it is controlled by the powerful, but children can interrupt power if they will it. The world can be refreshed through courage, determination and compassion which are more powerful than power. Echoing the ethos of Hayao Miyazaki’s transformative child characters, Fahey’s hero Matthew, a child, is able to transform reality in a way that no adult can. Psychological resolution unfolds alongside this transformation of reality.

 

Notwithstanding its heavy themes of kidnapping and implied pedophilia and murder, The Christmas Maze is a book for children. In the best fairy tale traditions, Fahey does not treat child readers with kid gloves. Rather, he trusts child readers to cope with brutal realities – of searing regrets, overwhelming guilt, and an all-consuming search to make amends. Child readers will recognise the author of The Christmas Maze as a storyteller who looks them in the eye and speaks candidly to them as real people. By not shying away from dark themes, Fahey believes in children, believing they can become adults capable of seeing the world in all its light and shade.

 

The Christmas Maze is also a story for adults. It reminds us that the child lays down the reality that the adult inhabits – where childhood decisions establish character and set the framework for adulthood. The child is the parent to the adult. And the adult must, if they are to remain spiritually alive, remember the child whose decisions defined them. Through the story of The Christmas Maze. Adult readers must ask: in the face of alluring cynicism, do they believe that courage, determination and compassion are more powerful than power?

 


Saturday 5 November 2022

The Christmas Maze

 

The Christmas Maze: Where Hope is Found

By Danny Fahey

Description

As a little boy, Matthew watched as the stranger drove away in the Valiant, with his sister sitting in the passenger seat on their way to get them a puppy. As the Valiant turned the wrong corner, Matthew realised there was no puppy-his sister had been kidnapped. Now Matthew must find and save her. To do that he must solve the Christmas Maze because if you solved the Christmas Maze then all that you wished for would come true. All he wished for was for his sister to be safe and at home.

Of course, finding The Christmas Maze would be the hardest thing he had ever done...

Solving the Maze harder still...

About the Author

Danny Fahey works at Trinity College/University of Melbourne where he is the Associate Dean, Teaching & Learning, Pathways School. Danny has over 20 years’ experience working in education as a Drama teacher and theatre-in education performer. Danny is happily married with 2 grown-up children and a cat named Lenny. He has had three previous novels published by now defunct publishers. Danny is also a published poet who enjoys reading and writing, has acted in a film or two, spends his spare time managing (just) his small backyard food forest and promises himself one day he will return to occasionally painting up a mess. He is an okay cook but not a particularly good driver of motor vehicles.

Categories

Novel; middle grade; young teen; Christmas; historical

Readership

Middle Grade (Young Teen)

Contents

24 chapters and an epilogue.

Release Details

World-Wide: 30 November 2022

Published by IFWG Publishing Australia (AU/NZ/UK) and IFWG Publishing International (North America/Canada) 264 pp

229mm x 152mm Australian/International English
US Paperback:
ISBN: 978-1-922856-20-3
RRP: US$17.99, CND$20.99
AU/NZ/UK Paperback:
ISBN: 978-1-922556-99-8
RRP: AU$29.95, NZ$31.99 UK£13.99
eBook formats (Kindle/EPUB/iBook/Kobo/NOOK)
RRP: US$5.99, AU$5.99, NZ$5.99, UK£5.99
Please refer to Publisher for other prices and ISBN codes

All inquires about this book, our terms of trade, or publishing with us:
SQ Mag Pty Ltd
trading as IFWG Publishing Australia, IFWG Publishing Intl, & IPI Comics Melbourne, Australia

Email: ifwg@ifwgpublishing.com
Tel.: +61 4 2173 9061
Website:
http://www.ifwgaustralia.com ABN: 50 614 249 795

Distributors

UK/Europe: Gazelle Book Services https://gazellebookservices.co.uk US/Canada: IPG https://www.ipgbook.com
Australia/New Zealand: Novella Distributors (NZ Novella via Wheelers) https://bookstores.novelladistribution.com .au

Wednesday 2 November 2022

2nd review of The Christmas Maze

 

This story takes you on a mystical journey with Matthew a young boy whose little sister was abducted while playing with Matthew in the front yard of their home. Matthew blames himself and is desperate to find Lucy and bring her safely home.

He remembers his parents reading him a story about the Christmas Maze where anything no matter how terrible can be reversed and resolved. Matthew sets off on his journey to find the Maze and so find Lucy and bring her safely home.

 

This is a beautifully written story that keeps you emotionally involved on every step of the journey.

A thoroughly satisfying and enjoyable read and one I highly recommend.

 

by Mary Clark

First review of my new novel The Christmas Maze

Redemption and recovery in Danny Fahey’s The Christmas Maze

There are few things more magical for a child than the fantasy and mythology of Christmas. This is the idea at the heart of a novel that combines the dissonant suburban world of Australia in the mid-twentieth century with the received mythology of European Christmastime.

Despite the magical themes and lush, festive folklore, Fahey’s novel begins with two disturbing scenes of childhood separation and angst that set the main character, Matthew, on his journey to make everything right again. The only way he can restore the safety of his family life is through the Christmas Maze – the place where all children can be redeemed for their misdeeds, and become whole again.

On his quest, Matthew encounters characters who embody literary archetypes, and who weave his story into a bigger, timeless narrative. Fahey weaves rich mythology and folklore into his tale, and his own creations are seamlessly interwoven with those that are already well-established. Matthew becomes a character who, through his ordinariness, becomes resilient, empathic and determined, learning how his own experiences are informed by others who went before him.

The story twists and turns through dreamscapes and scenes that destabilise the reader’s assumptions in ways that are sometimes delightful and sometimes confronting – all pushing towards the goal of the Maze. This push is underpinned by a sense of loss that threatens to tip into tragedy, and some scenes in the novel are almost unbearably sad – relieved in part by Fahey’s characteristic humour — pushing the reader on towards the sense that joy is waiting at the end of the quest.

Fahey’s balance of the tragic with the joyous is skillful, and as a writer he walks a line as precarious as that of his hero’s own circus tightrope. The story is as informed by his own understanding of long-established storytelling traditions as it is by Fahey’s own vivid and fantastical originality. As readers we are hooked into Matthew’s story by his own attempts to grapple with the situation in which he finds himself, and thus the choices that face him in his attempt to reclaim wholeness. Fahey explores Matthew’s angst with depth and complexity.

A story like this promises much in terms of restoration and the subversion of our expectations, and delivers both. For persisting through the difficulty of the quest and the discomfort of its origins, the reader is well-recompensed with an ending that is as joyous as it is unexpected.

This novel explores all the uncertainty and joy of childhood, delivering a Christmas journey that is – as the season demands – restorative.

 

by Dr. Miriam Nicholls.

Monday 12 April 2021

New Publisher

 https://ifwgaustralia.com/2021/04/13/new-acquisition-the-christmas-maze-by-danny-fahey/

Monday 29 March 2021

Sometimes, mother:

 

Mother sometimes
and the fault lies in the formation, cliffs
and troughs spring out of connections formed
in plates rather than seamlessly. Ruptures occur
a face can feel as if it is floundering in sand
breathing in such cases resembles drowning
a hand waving but the signal signals to siblings
run, back out the backdoor, revisit friends
once more, feed yourselves, dress yourselves
for heaven’s sake, save yourselves.

Mother sometimes
what I wish for, which must always remain
separate from what is wished for me,
radiates outwards, silence can be a tool
to suppress hurt, I learnt that lesson
a long time ago; words emitted are not butterflies
free to cavort and land where they desire, words
are barbs hungry to grip and snare – your eyes
have always been twin pools
I hated seeing my reflection within.

Mother sometimes
I catch a certain look that draws upon you
I hear the curtain rings clink
see the light diminish, know your thoughts
have returned to the realm before
in that barefoot paddock where wounds
are formed by circumstances never understood
like having a brother who died
and so took pride of place in a manner
you never could.

Dinosaurs:

 

What goes between
is trapped by pockets
of air, themselves trapped by flakes of snow
that alter under pressure, become ice
a captured story that contains
that day’s actions, a hand
light upon soft skin
around the nape of neck, bare
foot taps another foot’s toes and nails
in time with a current song, bodies push
and weave into spaces that yield
and return, words too
become ensnared, buried
in time, squeezed into tales
barely remembered, then comes
a time in light, an action triggers
the memory, sunshine releases air
after a century
of being compressed, thirty
or more years ago now, laughter, hair
blown by a breeze from a time
before climate
became the talking point
a time
before children walked the earth.