Review on Natalia Lazarus, My Love Affair: Thorns & Roses
Central Park South Publishing, ISBN: 978-1-7363134-9-7
164 pages, Hardback, Selected Picasso Prints, and Image Credits (pgs. 158-164)

It will be a remarkable Valentine’s Day this February, perhaps we will be together or perhaps we will be alone…. wherever you may be, run, jump, drive, click but get a hold of the Natalia Lazarus’s personal Ode to an Unforgettable Romance entitled My Love Affair: Thorns & Roses.

This book is both witness to the power of love and poetry to evoke the universal within our memories and an onslaught of images, promises, kisses that stage the wildness of youth, the wonder of eros, and the journey from Princess to Queen framed with selected Pablo Picasso prints to accentuate the drama and the dangers.

From its inviting cover, front and back, this Central Park South Publishing hardback, draws the potential reader in from its creamy, smooth paper, and serious, yet playful design. The producer, voice, and career focus begins with a story, set in frames from prints to acts. After resisting, but trusting this authoress and enchantress, the text, context, and crafted tome will deliver on your chance to take flight whether in rapture for the night, in love for the weekend, or wrestling and perhaps panting at this most important rendezvous each time you steal a moment to nibble on this love story like a rose blossom and rage its course before your eyes.

Should you, dear reader, relax and embrace the structure, passion, rhythm, and craft within made to seduce you, you will go on personal adventure… not only embracing of the poet-author-producers international love life, but savoring the use of time, light, scene, and color to lead you to its unexpected denouement.

Produced by a large professional team to highlight the voice and artistry of the author, Natalia acts her part in encouraging you through its intimacy make your own leap into life.

The poems, structure and design are unique as are its sets, actors, and beats. And as Aristotle would have it, the playwright as maker, uses language that becomes a ticket for you as audience to access to your imagination and despite deceit. As a triple threat and a generous storyteller, Natalia, like Rod McKuen, vaunts her lyricism while pairing each scene and poem in alignment rightfully spare and universal to Aphrodite, Psyche, Ariadne, and Athena.

Stealing us away to enchanted places found in a tango between time, something, something, and nothing, see ourselves in her, the word pictures, against a vision of Picasso, his women, and places and the warning of the fate of Dora Maar. Natalia becomes our muse and the acknowledgements of her creative team and personal fans have conspired this Valentine’s Day to deliver not just the fob of a story of a love affair and its devastating impact, but the architecture to stealing for us during Covid the time to breathe intimately with ʺan unforgettable moment in time. ʺ

The scene, the font, the space for you to join her in and out of Camelot moves the reader to experience, travel, feel-dwell-see-emote and rise with the power of risking it all for love and deal with what comes of hurtling through space and place to be fulfilled. In the ups and downs of the fragments left and remembered for us, you will walk the streets of Montmartre then be awash in the waves and white sands of Malibu. All the while, the poet is leading you by her thread to see the Minotaur and find her way to her way back to claim her future and her Queendom through seizing her prize within the heroine’s journey commanding she recoup her will to live.

You will be led through the caves of eros, the heartbeat, and the pounding wine red sea, and return from your musing with your senses refreshed and confronted with this lover’s stunningly modern epilogue. This book evokes the stereotypes of the holiday and its Saint and warns us that Love can promise a gateway to glory and a parallel grand fall from grace.

This book reflects the life and development, it of a burgeoning artist to a world class lover who invites us
to revel in the wonder of this passage of her life.

As a fragment dug from hidden places, she who tells the story, and will not defile what she has wrought-rather she reveals artfully the price paid and the results. This freedom seldom claimed in the feminine voice and, only in the deepest archeology, reveals all that passed in such a way and memorably that we are delighted to be shaken, stirred, and lightly frosted witnessing it all.

As if the hand that grasped this classic wine glass that must be sipped, weighted in your hand, is somehow the gift of being fraught with the power of the lotus eaters and you, the book, the words, the vision will be caught stunning you in surprise with why Ms. Lazarus is being true to the event, her telling last name, and the love eternal that she wants you to share and the toast the way it is to be feted.

The playwright, producer, storyteller, and poet, fall away, as she shares the road less taken, the catch released, and awakening of an artist as a young woman rising phoenix like from the ashes with its healing, but piercing call. ’I will rise, and I will flourish’…this is no Dora Maar…and she has come back to rise again, her namesake, and as in an ancient Greek play, where we all know the story, but we rise again with its telling and its power. New generations of women, artists, lovers, we, the readers will want to return to this magnificent tale again and again for renewal.

Priced to be a gift that lasts, as a book, well-bound to be read over and over by you, family and friend, Natalia Lazarus, will grab your heart, mind and spirit and lead you through an unforgettable moment of time that you will never regret visiting, witnessing, or emotionally reclaiming- the precious reward of once having loved deeply, retained the joy by being present. You may laugh, cry or try to warn her from your dream within a dream sitting in your seat and as a wave washes away the players footprints in the sand, your compassion will anchor your seizing what is precious, universal, and sacred and knowing as players on a stage must, in this book, in each reading, there will be a perfect time to experience and then to joyfully and even tearfully, let it all go. This is highly recommended.

Bo Lebo – Book Reviewer