Books

This section of the blog is about my published books. Let me get the plug in first – my publishers are Conciliar Press, an Orthodox Christian Press and Orca Book Publishers, and Alexander Press.

See my website for more about the books, how they came to be written, and excerpts and reviews.

The Akathist to St. Mary of Egypt was released in January 2011, a prayer service/prose poem to one of Orthodoxy’s most beloved and important saints.

My latest book is Royal Monastic, released in July of 2008. It’s a young adult biography.

It was Conciliar Press’s top seller for the last half of 2008, a not inconsiderable feat! It sold 3400 copies in its first month of release in Romania!

The life of a princess isn’t all fun-filled travel, magnificent banquets, handsome princes and beautiful clothes. It’s also devotion to duty, sacrifice for your people, and a lot of just plain hard work. And if your country happens to suffer two world wars and a communist akeover in your lifetime, it means danger and suffering, exile and heartache as well.

Princess Ileana of Romania endured all this and more. But her deeply rooted Orthodox faith saw her through it all, and eventually led her in her later years to the peaceful repose of monasticism. But that life included sacrifice and hard work as well, because as Mother Alexandra she was called to build the first English language orthodox women’s monastery in North America – the Orthodox Monastery of the Transfiguration in Ellwood City, Pennsylvania.

Princess Ileana’s story is a thrilling tale of love and loss, danger and rescue, sacrifice and reward. Her inspiring life stands as a beacon of faith and holiness for young women of all times and nations to follow.

Released in April of 2008, Feral, mainstream fiction, was my first secular publication:

She lives in fear – of the two-legs, of the noisy, massive trains that scream in and out of the station, of cats and rats and dogs and the dark of the tunnels. She lives in the subway, where the hard shoes kick her ribs, where shrill voices beat her ears, where she subsists on the garbage of the humans as Candlewax, the lost one, watches.

And my first book which hit the shelves in the summer of 2004 was Keeper of the Light, an historical fiction:

The road to sainthood takes a lifetime to travel . . . Late in the fourth century, Christians are labeled enemies of the Roman Emire – hounded, arrested, tortured, and executed. Macrina and her husband Basil, once-wealthy Christians, flee with their small son to the mountainous forests south of the Black Sea. There, Macrina embarks on a seven-year journey of unexpected tests and trials that will take her through a harsh and hungry wilderness pilgrimage, only to plunge her into poverty and danger on the streets of Neocaesarea. So begins Macrina’s adventure in faith, as she undertakes the process of becoming one of the most influetntial women in sacred history, the mother and grandmother of saints.