I found myself transported into the lives of characters deeply entwined in ways I hadn't expected. It was full of unexpected turns, enlightenments all the while growth and changes in the main characters kept me interested. After reading, The Unthinkable Shoes, I look around and question my own depth of existence and the ties to the past and present that may be.
It was absolutely fascinating. The depth of information and backstory covered serves to really bring the works of art alive in a manner rarely seen outside of a classroom setting. Even if you do not like paranormal romance, the book is worth the cost for this section alone.
Author Veronica Knox is an exceptionally talented writer who has a way with words to die for. This woman's work stands high above that of most modern-day writers.
She has a magical fluency with words that is simply mind-boggling.
Second Lisa is an adventure in sensuality of the soul. The premise is intriguing, compelling, complex, and amazingly simple. The spirit of dead Lisabetta, sister of Leonardo da Vinci, has missed her chance at heaven because she waits for Leonardo to join her in death. Once the gate to Beyond closes against her, her spirit is trapped in the portrait that da Vinci had painted of her.
If meditation is time travel, then I have been there with Leonardo and Sandro and Lisa. I brushed against their cloaks of country-rough sackcloth or city-thick velvet trimmed in fur, and run my fingers over the heavy embroidered stuff of their Sunday best. I’ve worn a wedding gown of stiff pearl-encrusted silk.
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Ghosts, time-travel, a dozen impossible riddles, and a curse of snow Twelve-year-old twins, Kit (a keen boy-scientist) and Bash (a girl with a natural ‘green thumb’ and a flair for elaborate words) are excited to be moving from a noisy city to Bede Hall, their eccentric grandmother’s crumbling stately home, set in the sleepy English countryside. With all that’s gone horribly wrong for a year, moving to a grand old mansion seems a solution that promises an adventure of endless exploration and freedom. Bash can create the garden of her dreams and Kit has an abandoned space to set up his own laboratory. Instead, they stumble upon a portal to the future with three disturbing secrets, begin to untangle the supernatural history of Bede – a village as bizarre as their grandmother’s magic snow globe, and meet some unexpected life-forms who appear to be as haunted as the ghost of Bede Hall – a hapless young girl trapped in the attic’s ‘wintry room’. In order to save the planet, the twins must navigate a maze of time portals to unravel an age-old mystery. The answers lie in Ancient Egypt, but only time will surrender its hidden knowledge, and according to their grandmother’s old hourglass, time is running out. Holding the world in one’s hands is a big responsibility.
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A boy loses his shoes between heaven and the deep blue sea Finn Cleary is an excited five-year-old passenger heading for a new life on Titanic’s maiden voyage. But fate not only denies him his New York destination, it also separates him from the girl he was destined to marry. Finn has tough shoes to fill, trying to compete with his older brother, but his death delivers a tougher quest. Bad timing and old jealousies threaten to trap his spirit in a permanent half-life and crush a star-crossed romance forever. To recover the threads of his lost future, Finn must heal an old score and honor his mother’s strict orders to look after the only new pair of shoes he’s ever owned or she’ll skin him alive. But a promise, made in haste complicates his next incarnation. Finding Finn’s lost shoes may be young love’s only chance to stay together. An extraordinary love story of reincarnation and sacrifice.
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‘PEARL by PEARL’ – the past-life memories of a renaissance woman. A woman savant must experience her next life as a time-traveler to recover the missing paintings of Leonardo da Vinci and reunite with her lost love. Delphi Sharpe’s flashbacks of fifteenth-century Florence had been as real as the harsh institutions where she grew up, diagnosed as an autistic savant. After being liberated by a ruthless art collector, due to her psychic ability to speak with paintings, she lived in two worlds: an alternate reality where renaissance paintings communicated with her through mental telepathy, and the real world where she worked authenticating and restoring paintings. When Delphi meets her next life, time-traveler Cherry White, after an untimely near-death experience, she’s been ‘nearly’ dead for fifty-two years. Now, Delphi exists between worlds, forced to watch the life she should have had unfold, including her romance with a young man she met in a five-hundred year-old painting. Reincarnated, reinvented, and unfinished, two ‘art-whisperers’ must struggle against their conflicting goals to mine the distant past for sentient paintings willing to divulge their secrets to discover their shared lost identity and answer the question, will it take two lives to make one woman? ‘Pearl by Pearl’ is the conclusion of ‘The Indigo Pearl,’ a story of a thousand secrets locked in the amber of history, beyond artificial intelligence and beyond evolution itself which takes an autistic savant child, an insignificant orphan, on an extraordinary journey of reincarnation and time-travel.
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‘THE INDIGO PEARL’- once upon a time, a child shines. A woman savant must experience her next life as a time-traveler to recover the missing paintings of Leonardo da Vinci and reunite with her lost love. Delphi Sharpe, orphaned at birth and diagnosed as an autistic savant, has the psychic ability to speak with paintings. At the age of fourteen, fated to live out her days in an institution, her uncanny gift catches the attention of a ruthless art collector who liberates her. Housed in luxury, the teenage Delphi continues to grow up in two worlds: an alternate reality where renaissance paintings communicate through mental telepathy, and the real world where she works authenticating and restoring paintings. Isolated and misunderstood, Delphi retreats further into her eccentricities and falls in love with a young man she meets in a five-hundred-year-old portrait. Fifty years after a freak accident she reincarnates as a time-traveler. Now she must battle herself to reunite with her lover. ‘The Indigo Pearl’ is volume one (of two) – a story of a thousand secrets locked in the amber of history, beyond artificial intelligence and beyond evolution itself which takes an autistic savant child from an insignificant orphan through an extraordinary journey of reincarnation and time-travel. The story concludes in ‘Pearl by Pearl,’ the continuing afterlife, past-life, and future life of two women with the same memories rivaling for the ghostly lover they now share.
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When Emily Carr was a teenager several untoward events caused her to reject the romantic loves of her life, but one suitor in particular, pursued her to the end of her days. Much conjecture surrounds Emily’s obscure references to lost love, paternal betrayal, and her emotional maladies diagnosed as hysteria, that she implanted in her books as well as her letters and diaries. Sixty-seven years after Emily’s death, an historic mystery man continues to hover over her memoirs … like a ghost. * Emily Carr was an eccentric spinster – a feisty, independent artist. Sixty-seven years after her death, she wants s chance to reunite with Martyn, the love of her life, a man she described as compelling, yet impossible to accept as a husband. Martyn romantically pursued Emily for forty-six years after being smitten with her on the sea voyage which took her to Ucluelet, British Columbia, in 1899 when she was a bewildered twenty-seven years-old. Their serendipitous meeting rekindled Emily’s passionate nature, but also inflamed the instability between her desires and fears, and Martyn was caught in am ongoing dance of acceptance and rejection. In 2012, Scottie Watson, a freelance historian , recently moved to Victoria, is confronted by Emily’s ghost and pressed into her service, but as Emily gains strength from Scottie’s life force, Scottie weakens. Scottie’s passionate relationship with Jon Locke, a marine biologist with a penchant for paranormal investigation, is jeopardized. A lost love-letter from Martyn must be located in order to latch onto the energy signature which connects him with Emily. The key is in the hands of Regina, a deceased nun, one of the ‘Poor Clares’, a sister in St. Ann’s priory, who met and befriended Emily when she lay mortally ill, in 1945.
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Sixty-four year-old art history professor, Linton Ross-Howard’s, retirement allows her time to mull over her romantic past – the loves that failed to show and the ones that got away without leaving footprints. But one suppressed memory returns to offer a surprising new lease on romance she could never have imagined. When Sandro Botticelli’s 1475 painting, The Adoration of the Magi acts as both portal to the past and a fountain of youth, Linton embarks on a journey of sublime intimacy in this updated version of a feminine Dante in search of her star-crossed beloved.
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Lisabetta’s time for rescue is running out as the year end approaches, and problems threaten to destroy the work in progress. Veronica’s past catches up and both women have to struggle against the odds of every feeling significant.
Book three chronicles the success of Leonardo and Lisabetta during their travels to Rome and Milan, and the creation of two similar portraits, one of the young Lisa Giocondo, wife of a prominent silk merchant; and the other of Lisabetta, the iconic ‘Mona Lisa’ in the Louvre, Paris, France. The final book in the trilogy culminates in the suspicious circumstances of Lisabetta’s death, and the aged-Leonardo’s final years in Amboise, France, at the age of sixty-seven.
Lisabetta clashes with Piero, as Leonardo’s financial troubles escalate. She sees Leonardo through more life changes, but the anonymity that once served her backfires when she is completely forgotten after Leonardo’s death.
Lisabetta’s identity as the ‘Mona Lisa’ and her dedicated years supporting an obsessed artist, evaporate in the historic record, other than an obscure mention in a census and some lost notebooks of Leonardo’s.
The true identities of Veronica, Jupiter, and Lisabetta are revealed in a bizarre discovery of reincarnation, inherited challenges, family genetics, and parallel lives. Connecting events, comeuppances, and the eventual resolution the love triangle results in a showdown of emotional truths which may leave Lisabetta trapped in the ‘Mona Lisa’ for another five-hundred years.
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Lisabetta, invisible to all but Jupiter, must convince Veronica of her existence through the eyes of her son. Veronica resists the voice of Lisabetta she can hear, thinking she’s losing her mind. When the two women make contact, Lisabetta dictates her life history to Veronica in the hopes that the work may inspire academic recognition for her years as Leonardo’s care-giver. Since Leonardo presents many overlapping symptoms of high-functioning autism, Lisabetta is able to relate to Jupiter and his expanded levels of vision and intellect.
Book two chronicles Lisabetta’s and Leonardo’s middle years of painting and traveling in the course of following commissions and oftentimes escaping debt, as well as Leonardo’s troubles with devastating accusations of social disgrace and heresy.
It also provides insight to the modern day protagonist’s story, as new incidents seem to parallel the past in uncanny ways. Characters from both centuries appear, mirroring similar life challenges, triggering emotional responses from both women, and an emerging rivalry for the affections of the same man threaten to disrupt the ‘Lisa project,’ and further alienate them from their friendship and goals.
Lisabetta’s talent and penchant for business expands as she grows into womanhood. She learns the art trade and tends to Leonardo, already an eccentric and erratic artist at eighteen. As an painter in her own right, and being socially ignored as an insignificant woman in a patriarchal society, she is now both agent and manager of Leonardo’s own studio. However, being an ‘invisible’ member of the artist’s guild and her low-profile in the busy ‘art factory’ studios, makes her better-placed to hear the dealings within the art community that enable her to propel her brother to fame.
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Book one chronicles the childhood of Leonardo and Lisabetta, to the early years when they open their own art studio. The inseparable siblings are born of Caterina, another ‘invisible’ woman erased from the historical record.
A daughter of the notary class, Caterina, is reduced to peasant status after she and her lover, the young lawyer Piero da Vinci, produce their first lovechild out of wedlock, Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo is six years old when Lisabetta is born and the two bond instantly, not knowing they are full brother and sister within a household of their half-siblings.
Leonardo carries his father’s name as he remains the only heir to the da Vinci clan, and another forbidden tryst conceives Lisabetta, Caterina’s and Piero’s second child to be brought up on a subsistence farm to protect Piero’s reputation. Leonardo is kept at a distance and Lisabetta is estranged from her biological father, adopted under the auspices of a contrived peasant marriage. The Buti’s crude cottage is the setting for two childhoods that promise lives of poverty and obscurity.
Leonardo, having the advantage of an acknowledged link to a prestigious family, is sent to Florence to learn a trade, but even with some degree of privilege he is illegitimate, and thus the rules of the notary guild declares him ineligible from becoming a lawyer in the da Vinci’s family business.
Leonardo becomes the star prodigy apprentice of the master, Andrea Verrocchio, and trains his sister on visits to the Buti homestead until the twelve-year-old Lisabetta is ready to be his junior assistant.
In the present century, the restless spirit of Lisabetta remains trapped in her famous portrait. She enlists a single-parent mother, Veronica Lyons, and Jupiter, her autistic six-year-old son, visiting the Louvre, to restore her identity. In exchange, Lisabetta vows to help the boy and his mother find their own place in a society that has rejected them. Through an ingenious plan, the spirit of Lisabetta is able to leave the Louvre with them and return to their home in North America.
