Author Roxanne Smolen opens her second book of the Anneliese Thielman trilogy, Prajna, one year later.  Anneliese-Thielman is dressing in her wedding finery for her marriage to Sayer-Kihn, the chiliarch or chieftan of his tribe of Llaird.  She’s also been named and accepted as the Jefe-Naik, the prophetess of change, foretold in their legends.  The wedding ceremony is disrupted by infiltrators from a rival clan of Llaird, and to Anneliese’s dismay the wedding is postponed.

While meditating before her wedding, Anneliese has a vision of a “great city chiseled from a mountainside”, and learns about Prajna, the Llaird city of enlightenment and education, and the fate that befell the city and her people.  A few days later on a cruise in the chaser she and her bodyguard found and repaired, they discovered an abandoned city of stone growing out of a mountain on what was once the shore of a dry riverbed.  Prajna.  

The discovery of the city provides Anneliese with the final piece of her plan to get the Llaird city-dwellers out of Enceinte, the city that is owned by and supports Resort Debauch; the resort that caged and humiliated her for her ex-husband’s gambling debts. She needs housing to see her plan through to help the Llaird help themselves and Prajna can house thousands and is near the Malpais mines, a valuable stone of volcanic origin.  And just maybe Sayer-Kihn will love her again.

Prajna captivated me as totally as Resort Debauch did.  Where Roxanne Smolen in her first book showed the harsh realities of life on this almost uninhabitable planet, in Prajna she shows us the hidden beauty. 

You can read more about her work at her website http://www.roxannesmolen.com/ .  Her books can also be found in both paperback and eBook on both Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url?_encoding=UTF8&search-type=ss&index=books&field-author=Roxanne%20Smolen

http://books.barnesandnoble.com/search/results.aspx?ATH=Roxanne+Smolen

Brenda Cloutier is a reviewer for Romancing the Pubs. She writes historical and contemporary women’s fiction.