The Furies

This is the story of a family called the Furies. They are a normal human family except for a genetic mutation which causes the women to experience extremely long life spans but not so the men. Additionally, the men are sterile. Both genders are characterized with red hair and green eyes which, through the ages, has cause some communities throughout the world to persecute them as witches. Therefore, they have to hide from the real world and keep their secrets at all costs. Since their men are sterile, the women have to become pregnant through artificial insemination or venture out of their hidden enclaves into the real world and mate with a human, then leave him behind and return to bear the child. This sets the stage for the story line. One such woman, Ariel Fury, who appears to be about 25 years old or so, meets John Rogers in a bar and soon seduces him. But in the process, in barges a group of armed men and shoots up the place. Ariel and John escape with injuries. The rest of the book describes a civil war, of sorts, among the Fury family that John Rogers gets caught up in. By the way, Ariel is much older than the 25 years or so she seems to be. In fact, as an adult, she gave important intelligence information to George Washington - yes, THAT George Washington - during the Revolution and her Grand Mother was born during the reign of Octavian Caesar. The men in the Fury family want a protein that the women are developing that may lengthen their life spans as well that the women are withholding. Hence the war. Mark Alpert states that the inspiration for him to write this novel came from his middle school son's term paper which dealt with the persecution of witches in Europe and America. And this novel sort of feels like simply a fleshing out of that basic story, except the persecutors are mostly disgruntled family males instead of townspeople. I really like Mark Alpert but I felt this was not one of his better novels. Some of the plot seemed a little plodding. Still, all-in-all, a fun read.