How does she wish to present herself? What worries her, what occupies her mind? During the course of the correspondence Maresi grows and changes quite a lot, while in the first novel she’s the same throughout, as it’s written looking back at a major event that took place.

We get to see new sides of Maresi, as she shows her fears and insecurities to some recipients and not to others. In the letters, too, the tone varies: she writes of different things and in different ways when she’s writing to Sister O, her teacher and guardian of the Crone’s secrets, and when she’s writing to her friend Jai or her friend Ennike, now the servant of the Maiden and keeper of knowledge about the female body and love. The text Maresi wrote in the first novel was intended for the Abbey archives and was written by her with that in mind, so the tone is somewhat different to the one she uses in the last novel, when she writes letters to her friends and teachers. There are no answers from the Abbey in the book. MARESI RED MANTLE is written in epistolary form, as Maresi writes letters back to the Abbey after returning home to the province of Rovas and her tiny native village. The tone and intent in each story is different. They all tell their own stories of how they came to be in an evil man’s harem, and about their eventual escape.

NAONDEL, the second novel, is actually a prequel set hundreds of years before the events in MARESI and written from the perspective of several first-person narrators. MARESI is written from the perspective of a young girl chronicling one spring in her life at an all-female Abbey. I have written a trilogy that is very un-trilogyesque in style and execution.

Maresi book