"Excellent" ( )

When Mira Fenn was 9, her self-centered mother disappeared, and she was adopted by a loving childless couple. Mira was always drawn to color, and became an art teacher. Her life was haunted by mysteriousness: her parents changed their names and moved after they adopted her, they were warned never to return to New Mexico, and after they died Mira learned that she was wealthy and owned the house in New Mexico where she iced as a child.

The house is somewhat bizarrely decorated, and the caretaker, Domingo, is repainting it according to his drams of the house. Both Mira and Domingo feel that the house is talking to them. Through a cousin, she discovers that the house is magical, and her mother was somewhat mad, and most horrifying of all, that Mira was not born but rather created as a reflection of her mother's soul.

A rather eerie book; intriguing and unusual mystery, but hard to care much about the characters. ( )

Jane Lindskold deals with liminalities. For me so many things fall in those in between spaces. Lindsold brings the beauty out in all those in between spaces. The woman who is not yet old, but no longer young. The house that is falling apart but not yet condemmed. hte land that is not Santa Fe, but not Albuquerque.

Lindskold writes the characters to make them real, to make them flawed but never ugly. The landscape is beutiful, the house is beautiful. She captures what it means to live in a land where water is part of every decision, and yet is not spoken of. She captures so many things and wraps it all up with a tale that I hold in my heart like those fairy tales I learned as a child. ( )

One-sentence summary: Orphan Mira Fenn returns to her native New Mexico after the death of her foster parents, and discovers the house she has inherited holds dark secrets about her birth mother's disappearance.

Why did you get this book?: Requested it via ILL thinking it was something else.

Did you enjoy the book?: Actually, I did. It was far more entertaining that I expected.

Other thoughts?: I'm not sure if I would recommend it -- kind of interesting but also a bit bland. At times I felt like I was reading a NaNo novel -- there seemed to be lots of filler narrative that wasn't really necessary. ( )

When Mira was nine, her beautiful, mysterious, and eccentric mother Colette vanished. It was some weeks before the house servants, the reticent maids and housekeepers Mira thought of as “the silent women,” realized that Colette was not returning this time and notified the trustees of Mira’s estate. The shy and sheltered young girl was whisked away from her home in a huge and rambling Victorian “painted lady” filled with mirrors in a small town in New Mexico to a more typical suburban home in Ohio to be raised by Stan and Maybelle Fenn while her estate was tended by the mysterious trustees.

It isn’t until many years later, when Mira’s adoptive parents die in a car accident that Mira discovers that she still owns that old Victorian house. Now a middle-aged, unmarried grade school art teacher with a passion for bright color, Mira cannot resist the temptation to return to the town in which she was raised for the first nine years of her life…nor the temptation to try to discover just what happened to her mother Colette all those years ago.

Arriving in the small New Mexico town of Las Vegas, Mira initially finds more mysteries than answers. The house, shut up for so long and uninhabited, is dusty but in otherwise remarkably sound shape. The caretaker, Domingo Navidad, has begun to paint the house’s façade in brilliant colors, stating that the house “wanted it done.” When Mira begins to help with the painting, she begins to “hear” the house’s wishes as well. Mira begins to put the interior of the house to rights and soon discovers that some other agency is helping her clean…the mysterious “silent women” she remembers from her childhood! It is when Mira finds her mother’s hidden stash of beautiful kaleidoscopes and unlocks their strange powers to see into the space between the worlds that she begins to find the answers she seeks.

The mystery of Mira’s life and of her relationship to her mother, to her ancestors, and to her ancestral home unfolds slowly and deliberately, weaving together multiple threads into an inescapable web of vibrant enchantment. ( )