Donbridge: The Ring of Lazarus

by RD Vincent

Overview

The fabled Town of Donbridge holds the key to a family’s folklore and 200 year history as told by a grandmother to her grandchildren. The first in the series, The Ring of Lazarus, tells the tale of a young girl found dead outside the fabled town. Grief stricken, her mother with lost hope places a powerful silver ring upon her deceased daughter’s finger knowing the family heirloom has given unnatural long life to every woman bearer in the family. Waiting for a miracle, all hope is faded in silence as the rings power seems to be lost. Heartbroken, the girl’s parents bury their child, but with all tales of Donbridge not everything is as it seems.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940152444414
Publisher:	RD Vincent
Publication date:	10/29/2015
Sold by:	Smashwords
Format:	eBook
File size:	368 KB
Age Range:	12 Years

About the Author

RD Vincent is an American author born in the historic village of Goshen, New York, on February 14, 1979. He was raised on a small dairy farm along with his brother and sister and attended Pine Bush Central Schools.

In late 1997, he attended SUNY Potsdam and began his studies as a Music Major. Feeling a bit overwhelmed in the music world, he sought refuge in both the English and Business Econ Departments. By the fall of 1998, he had a rare opportunity to meet New York author and poet Maurice Kenny. Over the next year, Vincent studied with Kenny in his creative writing class. Later that year, inspired by Kenny, he began writing for The Racquette, SUNY Potsdam College’s Newspaper with a small cooking column called “Something to Cook About.” The columns were published once every two weeks and contained a short story which always had the characters cooking or baking. Vincent included the recipes. It was at this moment that the idea for Donbridge came about while collaborating with his Grandmother and Great Aunt who both had a multitude of stories passed along to them from their elders. This project would take Vincent nearly 15 years to storyboard. RD Vincent’s first publication, Donbridge, The Ring of Lazarus, was published July 15th 2015 on Amazon eBooks. This is the first of six novellas in the Donbridge collection.

Editorial Reviews

On a snowy winter night, a woman tells her grandchildren magical stories of the town in which she grew up in Vincent’s (Donbridge: The Lost Princess of Lenape Valley, 2017, etc.) interconnected collection of novellas.

These three long tales, set in the fictional Hudson Valley town of Donbridge, are bound together by a framing device: a woman named Jules, aka “Grandmamma,” tells them to her grandsons, Michael and Jasper. Donbridge was a town laden with mystery and fantastical secrets, with a culture that drew upon that of English settlers and of the Lenape tribe that originated there. Each of Jules’ tales is laden with supernatural goings-on. In the first, The Ring of Lazarus, a young girl named Julianne disappears while walking in the woods, possibly the victim of a creature called the Panderlaub. In The Legend of Tamarack Hill, set many years earlier than the previous story, a girl named Lavinia disappears, and her sister, Sarah, decides to learn magic from an old woman who lives in the woods. Finally, in The Miracles of Midwife Sutton, a child, resurrected from the dead, reacclimates to life with the help of Samuel, the son of the local midwife. Reading this beautiful, haunting book feels very much like being told authentic, whispered folk tales by a beloved older relative. Each one conjures up a lush, vivid world, and the overall style is redolent of American Colonial-era stories and European fairy tales, with a dash of Edgar Allan Poe’s work thrown in for good measure. That said, the stories are rather slow-paced and low on action, which makes it hard to believe that they would have kept the attention of young children, and more chapter breaks would have been useful. But overall, this book delivers a captivating, absorbing read.

An imaginative, eerie book well suited to fans of folklore and magical realism.

From the Publisher