The Crystal Quest

About the Book

Having taken the literary world by storm with "Rather a Ruby," her astonishing saga of the Canadian prairies, Edna Porczeny-Dalrymple returns with her second novel, "The Crystal Quest." In this stunning change of pace, Ms. Porczeny-Dalrymple focuses her nearly infallible social spotlight on the privileged denizens of Southern California’s show-business elite and the trendsetters who strive to keep themselves forever in the public eye.

Aquaria, the hottest celebrity astrologer in human memory—as determined by people with an attention span of twenty seconds—is about to unleash Operation Cosmos on an unsuspecting world. Conrad, Aquaria’s new lover, not long ago a destitute, homeless drifter named Howard Bentley, finds himself suddenly immersed in Aquaria’s surreal millieu. He finds himself dealing with untold wealth, concupiscent movie stars, a new career as Beverly Hills’ first holistic chiropractic astrologist, and the eerie realization that many of the people he runs into are, or at least were, dead.

“To me,” says fellow Xlibris author Dennis Havens, “the defining moments of modern fiction can be counted on the fingers of one hand.  There’s that moment in "The Sun Also Rises" when the reader who has been paying attention realizes how ineffably cruel Jake Barnes’ war wound is. There’s the sense of “being there” in the most elemental way that permeates the pages of Steinbeck’s masterpiece, "The Grapes of Wrath." One cannot forget Holden Caulfield, immortalized in the confusion of his youth in Salinger’s incomparable "The Catcher in the Rye." And surely Thomas Gifford, in his amazing middle section of "Praetorian," embodied everything that being young and living through life’s first great adventure entails as no one ever has before. Now, to that exalted company, we can add, with absolute confidence, Edna Porczeny-Dalrymple.”

"The Crystal Quest" moves at a dizzying pace. It is compact and elegant, like a handmade Italian sports car or a Fabergé egg. Most of all, it confirms what we learned from "Rather a Ruby": Edna Porczeny-Dalrymple has a handle on human behavior that is rivaled by few and equaled by none.

About the Author

Edna Porczeny-Dalrymple was born seventy-four years ago in Moose Hat, Saskatchewan while her father, Ferenc Porczeny, a Budapest-born archaeology professor at the University of Flin Flon in Manitoba, was on a dig. Edna’s mother, Euphonia Dalrymple, was a Scottish-Canadian from a military family of many generations’ standing. Edna attended, and was graduated from, King Edward VIII High School in Moose Hat, where her intellectual gifts won her a full scholarship to Toronto’s prestigious Royal College of Beauty and Hair Design. She took a two-year sabbatical in 1940, to give aid and comfort to Canadian servicemen returning from World War II. One of them, Herschel Hendershot, became her first of five husbands, all of whom died prematurely of what medical authorities termed “acute chronic postcoital fatigue.” Between bouts of grief, Ms. Porczeny-Dalrymple earned a degree in English Literature from Juan Peron University in Sin Vegüenza, Argentina, where she lived while recovering from the loss of her fifth husband, Sir Pauncefoot Foxglove, Great Britain’s ambassador to Greenland. She took up poetry at that time, first seeing print with her brief bit of whimsy, the oft-quoted poem “Lars.” It is reproduced immediately below. Lars grew figs in North Kadota; Ev’ry year he met his quota. Then, in Nineteen-Sixty-Two, Lars’s figs just never grew. Now he’s a dustman in Toronto. Ms. Porczeny-Dalrymple lives in an imposing home on the windward shore of Lake Winnipegosis in Manitoba with her German shepherd Helmut, a 28-year-old from Stuttgart.