Becoming Belladonna

At fifty, Belladonna Blackbriar thought she knew exactly who she was.

A horticulture professor at a Tucson community college. A divorced mother. A grandmother of two. A woman moving quietly through perimenopause and the strange new geography of her own body, who had accepted that her best years were behind her — and that the rest of her life would be small, careful, and her own.

She was wrong about all of it.

On a Friday morning at three-thirty-one, on a balcony of the Grand Floridian, Bell finally hears the voice she has been ignoring her entire life. I am Belladonna. And in the small dry register she will come to know as her permanent weather, she understands — for the first time — that she has never been the woman she thought she was.

Three thousand feet beneath the eastern slope of the Appalachian mountains, a civilization has been waiting for her. A people who are not quite human. A line that descends from a king who abdicated his throne for love three centuries ago. A man who has been preparing to receive her for one hundred and fifty-seven years, four months, and twenty-eight days.

A working chord, in her chest, that has — in operational fact — been ringing for her since April.

She is fifty. She is exhausted. She is exactly who they have been waiting for.

A slow-burn romantasy for women who are tired of being told their stories are over.

Becoming Belladonna is the first book in a planned trilogy following Bell as she descends into an ancient civilization beneath the Appalachians, claims a throne three centuries empty, and falls slowly — across the long careful working interval of one impossible summer — into a love she had stopped allowing herself to imagine. A romantasy of fated love, found family, and a mature heroine who discovers, at fifty, that her life has only just begun.

Inside this book you will find:

• A fifty-year-old heroine navigating divorce, hot flashes, and the awakening of a self she has never met
• A slow-burn romance with sensual but closed-door intimate scenes
• An underground civilization with three thousand years of patient ethical philosophy
• A family — daughter, grandchildren, ex-husband — held together across two worlds
• A working chord, in the chest, that resolves only when the bond does
• The small specific working register of a woman becoming, in operational fact, herself
• For readers of mature, character-driven romantasy who have been waiting for a heroine who looks like the women they actually know.

Becoming Belladonna — Book One of a planned trilogy. The working interval ahead is waiting.