If your vacation plans have been scrubbed, there’s still a way for you to escape to another world for the rest of the summer. In the Miramonde Series, a trilogy, author Amy Maroney takes her readers to Spain at the turn of the 16thcentury, a world of castles and knights, mountain-dwelling Basque shepherds, and the merchants who built the cities of southern France.
Miramonde de Oto is born in a castle, but rather than allow her unwanted infant girl to die, Mira’s mother has her spirited off to grow up in a convent, the Abbey of Belarac. Abbess Béatrice sees to Mira’s education and protection, but Mira also spends time every summer with the mountain people, where Elena (the woman responsible for saving Mira’s life), teaches her the ways of the natural world. There Mira meets Artaud de Luz, a childhood friend who becomes the love of her life.
A master painter who spends time in the convent recovering from an injury incurred on the Camino de Santiago teaches Mira to paint in the Flemish style, a skill Abbess Béatrice intends Mira to use for illuminating manuscripts. Instead, Mira forgoes taking her vows as a novice and heads out into the world to become an itinerant portrait painter.
A parallel story, set five centuries later, features Zari Durrell, an art historian on the trail of a little-known artist, Cornelia van der Zee. Zari is the Nancy Drew of this art history-mystery, armed with her magnifying glass and headlamp. It’s fascinating to read about art restoration techniques that determine the age and origin of paintings, including x-rays to look for underpainting, chemical analysis of pigments, and even the type of wood used for frames. Along the trail to Cornelia takes a detour to Mira.
The wise woman in Zari’s life is her New Age mother. And the man in her life is, like Artaud, a woodworker. (There’s another connection between them, which you can try to puzzle out as you read the books.) While Mira has to contend with bandits, unscrupulous competitors, and murderous noblemen, the villains in Zari’s world are her fellow academics whose careers depend on identifying new works by respected artists, even if they are women. They ruthlessly discount every discovery Zari makes that might make Mira known to the modern world.
In her author’s notes, Maroney mentions artists who influenced Mira’s story. The character of Cornelia van der Zee is based on Catarina van Hemessen, a Flemish portrait artist who was taught by her artist father and who followed her patron, Queen Mary of Hungary, to live for some years in 16th c. Spain. Like the 11th century nun Claricia, Mira includes a whimsical self-portrait in a psalm book. And like Judith Leyster (and so many other women artists), Mira’s paintings are subject to misattribution. Mira, an amalgam of women artists, possesses the audacity of even the great Artemisia Gentileschi, who famously proclaimed, “My illustrious lordship, I’ll show you what a woman can do.”
Whether you’re looking for vacation reading or not, the Miramonde Trilogy will allow you—like Miramonde’s name—to see the world, from Spain to Oxford to Amsterdam, with side trips to northern California and Oregon. But don’t take my word for it. Go right now to amymaroney.com and claim your free novella, The Promise, a prequel to the series which introduces three main characters and will leave you wanting more.
Fortunately, there is much more. Maroney’s epic, multi-generational saga succeeds in Zari’s mission: “To break five hundred years of silence, once and for all.” To which I would add another Zari quote: “There are more like her, waiting to be discovered.”