The Handmaid's Tale: Limiting Beliefs

In The Handmaid's Tale by Margret Atwood the main character is definitely held back by limiting beliefs. Growing up, she had a fairly normal life. She went to school, made friends, got married and had a little girl, but when the war started, everything changed. Now, she is living as a handmaid; women who are considered to only be useful for breeding. The things that are keeping her from breaking out of her new ordinary world are others beleifs that they have brainwashed her into thinking are true. She reminisces about her life with her husband and daughter, but she is too afraid to look for them.

If I could talk to her, I would tell her something that she already knows deep in her heart; that her life doesn't have to be the way it is, and she has the power to change it.

Darklight: The Hero Archetype

Darklight by Lesley Livingston is the sequel to the book Wondrous Strange. In Darklight, Kelley is forced to make an alliance with Mabh, her mother and the fairy queen of the autumn court, when an angry leprechaun comes seeking revenge.

In Wondrous Strange, Kelley left her ordinary world, discovered a new identity, and sacrificed half of her royal faerie inheritance in order to save the man she loved. In Darklight Kelley continues to play the part of the hero. She still acts like a seventeen-year-old girl, but she spends her free time rushing off to save her faerie friends from danger.

"Her clover charm clenched tight in one hand, Kelley called up a fistful of magick in the other and turned back to face the next attack . . . she whipped a ball of crackling purple sparks at the exposed flank of a glaistig. Then she parried a running strike from Jenii Greenteeth, spinning back around in time to see Sonny dispatch another of the horrific Green Maidens with deadly grace and efficiency." (Lesley Livingston Darklight 280, 281)