The Ever Part of Always--Keely Tucker's First Adventure

A must read!

The Ever Part of Always—Keely Tucker’s First Adventure by Toby K. Davis is a young adult novel that departs from the norm by exploring the inner world of young Keely Rosalie Jackson; a world forged to cope with an emotionally neurotic mother, an absentee father, the loss of her confidante, her grandmother, and a relentless bully who seems to trail Keely around the Appalachian foothills where she spends every moment outside of school. The loss of her grandmother adds a transformational presence to Keely's life, an elderly and fragile horse named Mariah, who for Keely is the reincarnation of her encouraging, supportive and loving grandmother. Toby Davis has an intuitive sense for the inner monologue of a young adolescent learning to overcome trials and tribulations that she inherited by no fault of her own, and for the loneliness and pain Keely experiences but eventually overcomes by asserting herself.
The Ever Part of Always is a story of a young woman's empowerment and coming into her own. The fantasy of her relationships with Mariah, and mythical beast Crea, are so enveloping and inspiring that I felt I was entering a whole new realm myself. An endearing, well-developed read that contends with the realities of the difficult and formative transition from childhood to adulthood and rewards the protagonist and the reader with Keely's triumph. From beginning to end, I found it to be an exciting and great story. A must read.
—Haggai Carmon, International Attorney, Author of 4 Dan Gordon Intelligence Thrillers

The Ever Part of Always—Keely Tucker’s First Adventure is a novel about love and friendship across human generations but also about being open to giving and receiving these from nonhuman creatures. It deploys a tremendously rich and captivating vocabulary to convey beauty and wonder in the nature that surrounds us. On behalf of Keely and her friends, it finds unexpected possibilities for comfort and surprise in clouds and in rainbows and their colors, colors that become tinted rivers and homes to new and friendly, and not so friendly, creatures. The wind is a transmission belt of thought-words and sentiments, crossing great distances and different stages of the human condition. The cosmos, home to the clouds, rainbows, winds, secret caves, and dark pools, always described with great appeal to the imagination, is a constant backdrop to Keely’s adventures.
The book is soaked in imagery and situations—from thought language to wondrous unicorns and dragons—whose lineage draws from the timeless fairy tales of the past. But Keely, a heroine if there ever was one, is hardly a princess. She lives firmly in the twenty-first century, and it is not a pretty setting. Hard times; a difficult, somewhat neurotic mother; a father constantly on the road and never there for her; poor performance at school—a litany of woes befall her, all too familiar to our current age. It is her ability to turn it all off—to tune it out and step into a parallel universe of magical properties that envelop her as she takes on responsibility for her dying unicorn friend and embarks on a quest for a special potion—that makes Keely so appealing to the reader, keen to fully join in her adventures. Her canine friend, Growler, and feline boon companion, Meowcher, are almost surrogates for the kids who will read this book, wishing they could be there to ensure that Crea, the infirm unicorn, finally drinks the magic elixir.
Keely is everything any one of us would like to be. She is resourceful and quick thinking as she contemplates each new set of predicaments. She is focused on her goal to save Crea. She is adaptive as she draws water from clouds and uses dragon scales as stepping stones while descending the steep slopes flanking a magical waterfall. She is fearless in sidestepping dragons and ahead of everyone else in learning how to fly from a unicorn.
The Ever Part of Always is a great book, which will perhaps encourage kids to revise their thinking of what they can do, to convert, in Keely's words, the “im-possible” to the “is-possible.” One starts with imagination, after all, and this may be the book to spark the thought that becomes, as the saying goes, father to the deed.
—Albert A. Thibault, retired senior diplomat,