Reader Ellen Amland sends this review of Everywhere in Chains:

I kept paging back to the home page on my Kindle to check that the title of James Casper’s book was indeed called Everywhere in Chains. The title suggests a story filled with dark imagery, a violent plot, and more than a bit of suffering. And while the story’s plot does indeed revolve around the suffering of its characters, both hidden and obscure, it does so in way that left me feeling so joyful and full of hope. I cried when the book ended, because the people were so real, so flawed, so sinful, yet so loveable. “Chains” made me want to go Star Island and experience the atmosphere that the author so richly and hauntingly describes. I would love to meet Penelope, the lynch pin of the story, because she is like me, a person who strove to be true to herself, yet while embracing that decision is seen as an outsider, even maladjusted, when she is in fact, the most well adjusted of them all, lonely but not really alone.

She is what it means to be truly human. Casper’s cast of characters that revolve around Penelope are just as rich and comforting. They are like the people you have met in your own life, who, through God’s benevolent hand, have had a profound effect on your view of the world. The kind of people that give you hope even when you are surrounded by vestiges of evil. People who have an innate sense of their own dignity as well as others. To follow Casper’s melancholy yet whimsical journey of a teenage girl as she seeks to discover a past that her mother does not want to discover is time well spent. You feel like you have taken a mini vacation and your spirits will be uplifted for some time to come.

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