Daughters of La Lune

About the Daughters of La Lune series

The women of the La Lune bloodline each carry an inherited gift and an inherited curse: supernatural talent passed down from a legendary sixteenth-century courtesan and witch, alongside a pull toward destructive passion that has shadowed every generation since. M.J. Rose's Daughters of La Lune trilogy follows three of these women across Belle Époque and wartime Paris. The Witch of Painted Sorrows (2015) opens with Sandrine, who flees a failed marriage into 1890s Paris only to find herself possessed by La Lune's own spirit and an escalating, dangerous magic. The Secret Language of Stones (2016) jumps to Sandrine's daughter Opaline during the First World War, whose gift for lithomancy -- reading the energy held in gemstones -- draws her into the collapse of the Romanov dynasty. The Library of Light and Shadow (2017) follows a third La Lune descendant, Delphine, a portrait artist in 1920s Paris whose supernatural "shadow portraits" reveal secrets her sitters never meant to share.

Each novel can stand on its own as a self-contained historical romance with fantasy elements, but together they trace the La Lune inheritance across three generations of French history, blending real events -- the fall of the Romanovs, the Lost Generation's 1920s Paris -- with Rose's invented magic system of scent, stone and shadow that also runs through her Reincarnationist novels.