The Past is Present

Sharon Sterling’s most recent novel, Perfect, set on Florida’s Emerald Coast, is an engaging confabulation of Southern Gothic, with a dash of The Handmaid’s Tale, and seems a natural successor in the world of novelist Ira Levin of Rosemary’s Baby.

Perfect’s prologue is set in 1978: Flight attendant Holly Wallace returns from a run to South America. Steps briskly through the Tallahassee airport. Drives home to Oak Bayou, top down, wind in her hair, eagerly anticipating her reunion with daughter Laura. Almost forgotten now is the oppressive gold pendant with the single word “Perfect” dangling between her breasts.

Perhaps somewhere deep down, she senses this homecoming will be her last, but she could not know that the mystery of her sudden death would gradually obsess and forever change her granddaughter’s understanding of the human heart.

Two generations later, granddaughter Sage Stevens’ father dies before she turns 5. Her mother Laura has joined the military to survive. Sage is living with Bertha, a puritanical aunt full of dire admonitions, including sour reflections on the opposite sex, leading Sage to make her way through life with a perennial chip on her shoulder. Her study of taekwondo and application to a police academy reflect Sage’s grim commitment to becoming a “strong woman.”

As the curtains part, Sage is moving out of her childhood home. Her mom is hospitalized after falling off a cliff, and that morning, Wayne, Sage’s wannabe boyfriend, has appeared before she’s out from under the covers and is importuning her to let him get into bed with her.

“We’re as acquainted as we’re going to get!” Sage snaps. “You came to help me move furniture, remember? A simple job for you. A favor for me. Not a lovers’ retreat!”

Later, Sage is in the attic sorting through memorabilia and discovers a picture of grandmother Holly at 20, wearing the “Perfect” gold necklace. The picture calls out to Sage, and she falls into a fugue state wherein she sees herself as Holly and hears a man’s voice describing her as nubile and “ready for reproduction.”

While visiting her mother in the hospital, Sage asks about the necklace in the picture and learns that a violent car crash had thrown Holly out of her convertible and the pendant was never found.

Sage develops a sudden interest in genealogy and is oblivious to the possibilities of revealing her genome to the world. She has her DNA analyzed, afterward telling her mother with pride, “It said I’m one in a thousand! Longevity and no markers for the majority of deadly diseases!”

Thus, Sage Stevens naively reveals to the world the nearly perfect facets of her physiology. 

Meanwhile, perhaps to make a point about her independence from Wayne, Sage immerses herself, on one hand, in a hook-up with Taylor, a member of her taekwondo class, and on the other, a creepy platonic dalliance with Otto Warner, a German-Argentinian businessman whom she thinks she has met purely by chance. He sends her pink roses and takes her to dinner.

Sage’s burgeoning suspicion that her grandmother was murdered leads her and those around her into a world of human trafficking: murder, dark, subterranean baby farms where kidnapped women are kept pregnant; and human chop-shops where organs are harvested until the “donor” withers away.

Perfect seems to pick up where The Boys from Brazil leaves off. Two generations later, the descendants of Nazi fugitives cling to master-race theory and additionally have been corrupted by the forces of entrepreneurialism.

But for Sage Stevens and the persistent, stalwart Wayne, the book unfolds like the archetypal stories in which the result of the heroine’s spiritual seeking is a return to where she started and at long last, self-discovery.

About the Author

Photo Courtesy of sharonsterling.net

Author Sharon Sterling currently lives in Arizona. Her award-winning Arizona Thriller Trilogy is a jewel for genre aficionados, especially those with a penchant for the Southwest, but Sterling’s talent at sussing out Southern manners and ways is gracefully restrained. Her choice of the Emerald Coast as a set for Perfect is spot on. And, hallelujah! She don’t hoke it up!