Don Juan in Helsinki
Book One of the Mirrorland Quartet
He is Donho Likkanen, an ex-pat Finnish Don Juan and the world's leading designer of erotic plumbing fixtures. She is Hope Muntz, an American grad student half his age. After a chance meeting on a plane bound from New York City to Helsinki—they begin the interwoven accounts of a fantastically comic love story told as twin 'His and Her' blogs. His is the memoir of, among other things, his history of "bonking" 2,999 women. Hers is a travelogue of her bizarre journey through Finland in search of the ancient deities of the national Finnish epic, the Kalevala, material which she plans to use in her Ph.D. dissertation.
"It's magical, in that there are many types of magic in the story - mythology to present-day parlor tricks to ghosts and living shadows. But it's also magical because of the hold it has on you as you follow these two bizarrely different people's blogs. I laughed aloud many times and loved the interplay of history with the present." —Jules Ford.