So many of us women, like me, spend so much or the bulk of our lives caregiving our families and communities, that I think romance story comes to hold a special promise. 

My own Black West mother, born in 1930 in Salt Lake City , journeyed at 17 with her high school diploma & secretarial school certificate to New York City then to San Francisco where she built a family, a career, and a life of volunteer service and  world travel, once visiting Rwanda to climb up to the gorillas she loved.

My adult life holds less glamour, but perhaps her journey led me to work with 3+K business & non-profit leaders who so generously shared with me their career  & life journeys - hardships and successes.  

Seeing how each of them, like my mother, carved their unique paths beyond expectations & limitations of gender, race, class, or family - showed me the power of an American dream - beyond serving security, wealth, health, the fated past or fateful present - but one of adventure, of future, of finding one's unique impact to humanity or destiny - and the former strangers who end up taking you there. A dream which though perhaps faded, distrusted, and increasingly limited, is not quite forgotten.

In this 1st novel of American Mandala trilogy, Jeanne Cadot, from New Orleans, travels the same courage-requiring, labyrinthine path to her own American Dream, magically avoiding, unlike all her ancestresses, the fateful traps of the bullies, emperors, and conmen - or does she...