Child of a Rainless Year

Middle-aged Mira Fenn knows she has an uncomfortably exotic past. As a small girl, she lived in a ornate old house in tiny Las Vegas, New Mexico, tended by oddly silent servant women and ruled by her coldly flamboyant mother Colette. When Mira was nine, Colette went on one of her unexplained trips, only this time she never returned.

Placed with foster parents, Mira was raised in Ohio, normal save for her passion for color. On gaining adulthood, she learned that she still owned the New Mexico house. She also learned that, as a condition of being allowed to adopt her, Mira's foster parents had agreed to change their name, move to another state, and never ask why.

Years later, going through family papers after the deaths of her elderly foster parents, Mira finds documents that pique her curiosity about her vanished mother and the reasons behind her strange childhood and adoption.

Travelling back to New Mexico, she finds the house is and isn't as she remembers it. Inside, it's much the same. Outside, it's been painted in innumerable colors. As Mira continues to investigate her mother's life, events take stranger and stranger turns. The silent women reappear. Even as Mira begins to suspect the power to which she may be heir, the house itself appears to be waking up...

Shot through with magic and the atmosphere of the Southwest, this singular fantasy novel has all the storytelling vigor of Jane Lindskold's very popular Firekeeper series.

A stand-alone contemporary fantasy from the popular author of Through Wolfs Eyes and its sequels

Art teacher Mira Fenn's life was curiously lacking in color until the day she learned of a mysterious inheritance from her birthmother--a long-abandoned house in New Mexico. Dim childhood memories begin to brighten in Mira's mind--her colorfully exotic mother, the curiously silent women who were her mother's servants.

Returning to New Mexico, Mira discovers that the house is a faded thing, looked after by the charismatic Domingo Navidad. But when Mira dreams of her childhood home, it is a riot of color--and she and Domingo soon set to work to bring her dreams to life.

Color brings more than just an old house back to life. The bright paint Mira applies to wood and plaster seems to reach into her soul, to awaken powers trapped in a decades-long slumber. The silent women reappear, carrying with them a great secret. Convinced her mother is still alive, Mira searches for her, journeying through a sea of light and color to a time and place far from her own.

Who and what she finds there will alter her world forever.

Jane Lindskold lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her Wolf novels include Through Wolfs Eyes; Wolfs Head, Wolfs Heart; The Dragon of Despair; and Wolf Captured. Her other novels include The Buried Pyramid, Changer, and, with the late Roger Zelazny, Lord Demon and Donnerjack.