A Trip To The Stars by Nicholas Christopher

A Trip to the Stars will take you to exotic locales while introducing you to its realms of  magic, music, memory and time travel. You will become acquainted with this mesmerizing  story’s fascinating characters and their mysterious talents.  Some of these are characters with whom you will wish could become life-long friends. Other ones you will vehemently desire that they could  feel your wrath. And then there are those characters of whom you will  pray never cross your path. Nicholas Christopher deftly weaves these  threads to create this ensnaring mystical web of a story that crisscrosses the globe, the turbulent 60s and 70s, and the celestial sky.

The story opens with the young Alma and her ten-year-old nephew Loren enjoying an afternoon planetarium show.  The drama starts when they are separated in a post-show tangle of exiting stargazers.  The ensuing plot, enormously complex yet tantalizing, documents the next fifteen years of our protagonists’ separate, but seemingly cosmically-linked adventures.  While under this book’s cosmic spell, you will be both educated and entertained as A Trip to the Stars sends you to the outer rings of love and destiny as this mystery unfolds.

As Alma and Loren narrate alternating chapters of this 499 page opus, they become Mala and Enzo.  Name changes are only two of, what will be many, portents you will encounter on their esoteric journeys. Indeed, Christopher will connect many of his dots  with a colorful variety of such talismans, the majority of them touching on notions of stars and constellations, perhaps as a reminder that subtle, yet influential, energies are at play.

Christopher, an accomplished poet, rendered in Mala and Enzo characters a vulnerability and an openness that propels them into captivating situations throughout their separate lives.  Christopher’s direct and sure-handed prose is made from words so carefully selected and assembled that you may at times be tempted to pause your reading to relish in the fluent lyricism of a recently read poetic phrase.

As you share with Alma and Loren in their struggles toward growth and fulfillment, you will come to care about them deeply, and to hope for them that the biggest and brightest star in the cosmos will light the way to the convergence of their destinies.

This is a novel to be enjoyed again and again as each reading discovers new layers of intricacy and revelations. Warning: If you loan out your copy of A Trip to the Stars, you may never get it back.  I am on my fourth copy of this treasure.