Lydia Kramer says, "I once asked my dad if he believed in magic, and he said he believed in possibilities.... Call it a miracle, call it magic, call it whatever you want, but I was looking right at it." Her foster brother, Weylyn Grey, is the focus of Lydia's sight during this statement. Orphaned as a small boy, raised by wolves and the center of myriad unexplained events in nature, Weylyn is a marvelous mystery. Beasts of Extraordinary Circumstance pieces together his curious existence through tales from those who experience this unexplained phenomenon.
The various narrators of Ruth Emmie Lang's debut tell Weylyn's life story through their interactions with him. Friends, family and colleagues each relate an amazing anecdote about a man who appears unremarkable on the outside, but in reality is anything but common. Living with wolves, stopping a hurricane, growing trees overnight, even producing energy from fireflies, Weylyn's existence defies logic, even to himself. But Weylyn doesn't want fame or attention; he simply wants the love of his life. As his character comes to light through the astonishing encounters with nature, his mystery intensifies and the magic entangles readers in his narrative.
Ruth Emmie Lang's debut glitters with the glow of fireflies, explodes with the force of fantastically strange events and warms with the love of a man who has so much possibility contained within him it overflows in miraculous ways. Skeptics who shun magic on page one of Beasts of Extraordinary Circumstance will be converts by the end. --Jen Forbus, freelancer