The Prophetess By Barbara Woods

Editorial Review:Feminist spirituality gets its own Celestine Prophecies, and the Vatican gets bashed, in Wood's new novel (after Virgins of Paradise, 1993). In December 1999, archeologist Catherine Alexander discovers in the Sinai desert six papyrus scrolls written in ancient Greek by a female leader of the early Christian church. The scrolls' reference to a Seventh Scroll, in which the secret to eternal life is supposedly revealed, convinces Alexander that her findings could revolutionize Christianity and undermine what she sees as the male-oriented authority of the Church. Determined to prevent suppression of the controversial writings, Alexander smuggles them back to California, where she is pursued by the Vatican, the Egyptian and U.S. governments, the media and Miles Havers, a ruthless computer software mogul who collects religious artifacts. When the handsome Father Michael Garibaldi saves Alexander from an assassin's bullet, and joins in her dangerous mission to find the ancient epistle, a romance blossoms, underscoring both parties' religious dilemmas. The action, bolstered by a clever if trendy use of the Internet, comes fast; but so does the preaching, which will alienate some readers with its anti-Church stance (if the scrolls predate St. Paul's writings, "the entire authority-base of the Catholic Church and the papacy would be blown out of the water!") and others with its undiscriminating theology ("As you believe, so shall it be"). Still others, however, will relish Wood's passionate New Age message, as well its Redfield-inspired packaging. 

Daughter of the Sun by Barbara Wood

Daughter of the Sun is a superb book full of adventure and emotions, let me tell you! It's about a girl named Hoshi'tiwa. She is the beautiful daughter of a corn grower and a famous potterer. She awaits the day for her to get married to the villages famous story teller apprentice, but dreadfully the day never came. Hoshi'tiwa is captured by Dark lord. The powerful and most dangerous ruler of the the city. her endeavor was not made in vain. Her role as a heroine was well established. she changed the Dark Lord to a love besotted foul, who was sweet from the beginning, but his attitude from a previous lost love has made him careless of the people he rule, so his underlings take responsibility to rule. However, once Hoshi'tiwa and the Dark Lord become lovers; everyone is out to destroy them; those closest to them, because they want to keep the darkness in the city alive. All I have to say is that this book is mesmerizing  and one of the most MAJESTIC books I've had ever read!!!! The SADDEST part is the Surprise. Which will have you crying till the next morning!!! This book written by Barbara Woods again contains magic to the tenth degree and it will have you holding your breath hoping that the 2 characters will make it through.

Below is an excerpt from the 1st Chapter! Enjoy!!
Chapter 1 The runner sprinted down the paved road, his heart pounding with fear. Although his feet were bleeding, he dared not stop. He looked back. His eyes widened in terror. He stumbled, fought for balance, and pushed on. He had to warn the clan. A Dark Lord was coming.

Ahoté could not help his forbidden thoughts. There sat beautiful Hoshi’tiwa, just a hundred paces from where he stood at the Memory Wall, radiant in the sunshine as she spun cotton ribbons for her bridal costume. She looked so happy in front of her small adobe house shaded by cottonwood trees, with the fresh stream trickling nearby. All she had been able to talk about was the coming wedding day. But all Ahoté could think about was the wedding night. His father pinched him. Under the elder’s tutelage, eighteen-year-old Ahoté was reciting the clan history, using the pictographs painted on the wall as a guide. Each symbol represented a major event in the past. And as there were too many events recorded on the Memory Wall—symbolized by spirals, animals, people, lightning strikes—for the clan to remember, it was the job of one man, He Who Links People. This was the sacred calling to which young Ahoté was apprenticed and upon which he must concentrate. But his mind was wandering. His father scowled. Takei did not understand the boy’s lovesick state. When Takei had wed, years ago, a girl chosen by his parents, he had done his duty, begetting many children on her. He had never wasted his time in moony-eyed daydreaming and sexual fantasies. Sex was for creating children, not for idle amusement. If Takei had ever taken pleasure in the intimate act, he could not recall it. He glowered at his son. Lovesickness was exactly that—a sickness, and Ahoté’s mind was so infected with it, he could not concentrate on his recitations. If only the wedding day could be brought forward, Takei thought, tomorrow perhaps, so the boy could flush the lust out of his system. But the shamans had cast the fortunes of all involved and had declared that the soonest good-luck day was yet three months away! Takei experienced a ripple of fear. Lust and love seduced a man’s mind from his holy works. Was the boy in danger of weakening before the wedding, risking a spiritual pollution that would profane his sacred task? A dour, unhappy man who believed the gods had singled him out for a life of bad luck, Takei wished now he had not given in to Ahoté’s pleas to marry Hoshi’tiwa, wished he had had a matchmaker find a girl in another settlement, one not as pretty and clever as Sihu’mana’s daughter. Takei’s only hope was that this was just a phase, a matter of Ahoté wanting something he couldn’t have. Some men were like that, hungering for the out-of-reach, like desiring a married woman. Hoshi’tiwa was forbidden to Ahoté right now, and that fired the blood. But once he could have the girl anytime he wanted, day or night, the fever would leave him. Or so Takei prayed. As Ahoté’s hungry gaze strayed again to the lovely Hoshi’tiwa sitting in the sunshine, her poppy-red tunic a bright warm beacon, his boy’s body stirring with a man’s desires as he thought of his coming nights as a husband, another sharp pinch on his arm brought him back to the lesson, and he recited: “And then the people knew the Spring of Abundant Hunting, when elk came down from the plateau to offer themselves as food.” The symbol painted on the wall was an elk with arrows in its body. The last symbol on the wall was a circle with six lines trailing it, marking the sighting of a comet streaking the sky the summer before. No new symbols had been added since because nothing of significance had taken place. As he recited for his father, Ahoté wondered what new symbol would be added next, continuing the clan’s long history.
Far down the highway, which cut through the vast plain and between plateaus, the runner fell, his right knee cracking in pain. As he struggled to his feet, he felt in the paving stones of the wide highway the vibrations of the thundering feet of the advancing army. He swallowed in terror, tasted blood and salt on his tongue. The cannibals were coming.
Hoshi’tiwa looked over at handsome Ahoté at the Memory Wall, his sinewy body gleaming in the sun as he wore only a loincloth, and her heart swelled with love and hope. Life was good. Spring flowers bloomed everywhere. The nearby stream ran with cool fresh water and fish. The clan was healthy and prosperous. And Hoshi’tiwa, seventeen years old, was looking forward to her wedding day. She sat in the sunshine at the base of the cliff, spinning cotton for her bridal costume. She sat cross-legged as she twirled a wooden spindle up and down her thigh, deftly plucking clean fibers from a basket filled with carded cotton and adding them to the growing thread that would be dyed and woven into a ribbon for her hair. All around her the clan was going about the daily business of living: the farmers planting corn, women tending cook fires and watching the children, and the potters creating the rain jars for which her clan was most famous. As she spun her cotton, Hoshi’tiwa did not know that on the other side of the world, a strange race of people had named this cycle of the sun the Year of Our Lord, 1150. She was unaware that they rode on the backs of beasts, something her own people did not do, and used a tool called a wheel to transport goods. Hoshi’tiwa knew nothing of cathedrals and gunpowder, popes and Crusades, nor did she know that those strange people gave names to their canyons and rivers and hills. Hoshi’tiwa’s settlement had no name. Nor did the nearby stream, nor the mountains that watched over them. Many years in the future, another race would come to this place and apply names to everything they saw and walked upon. Two hundred miles to the southeast of where Hoshi’tiwa felt warm sun on her arms, a town would be established and called Albuquerque. The area surrounding it for 120,000 square miles would be known as New Mexico. The young bride did not know that centuries hence, strangers would roam the land to the north of her settlement and call it Colorado. There was only one place, far away in the southeast, that she knew by name, Center Place, so called because it was the hub of trade and communication for her people, and an important religious center. Even so, centuries hence, the name of Center Place would be changed to Chaco Canyon, and men and women known as anthropologists would stand in the ruins at Chaco Canyon and speculate and argue and debate and theorize over what they called the Abandonment. They would wonder, those people in the far future, why Hoshi’tiwa and her people, whom the anthropologists would incorrectly call Anasazi, had vanished so suddenly and without a trace. Hoshi’tiwa was ignorant of the fact that she would one day be part of an ancient mystery. Had she known, she would argue that there was nothing mysterious about her life. Her clan had lived at the foot of this escarpment for generations, and in all those centuries, little had changed. Hoshi’tiwa was a simple corn grower’s daughter who counted her blessings, secure in the knowledge that tomorrow would be the same as yesterday. Her thoughts broke like a bubble when she saw Ahoté, while his father’s back was turned, gesture to her. It was their private signal. She knew what it meant: At the first opportunity, he wanted to be alone with her. She nodded in secret response. And her heart began to race.
The runner fell again, stamping his blood into the road’s sandstone surface, his knees scraped and bleeding, his bones screaming in pain. He could save himself, he knew, by running to the left, off the highway and down a narrow ravine that would shield him from the approaching army. But the people in the settlement were his kin. They were relying on him as the lookout to warn them in times of danger. Other families—entire settlements—were now completely gone because they did not have lookouts to warn them when the Jaguars came. If he died at the end of his run, at least his family would survive. And so he pushed on.
Hoshi’tiwa’s mother paused in her labor at the grinding stone, where she was turning corn into flour, and squinted up at the sky. The world looked right, but it didn’t feel right. She glanced around. There was young Maya, sitting in the shade of a cottonwood tree, breast-feeding her great-grandfather. Though her baby wailed in its basket on her back, it would have to wait until the elder was fed. The old man had long since lost his teeth, and now he was having difficulty swallowing gruel. Therefore, after the age-old custom of keeping the precious elders alive—for they alone had memories of what went before—his great-granddaughter nourished him with her own milk. From the mudbrick dwelling next door came screams through the gaping doorway. Hoshi’tiwa’s mother could see, in the darkness, her friend Lakshi, on her knees, her arms over her head with her wrists tied to a rope suspended from the ceiling. Kneeling in front of Lakshi and behind her, two midwives coaxed the babe into the world. All things normal, nothing out of the ordinary. Yet something was wrong. The air was too still, sounds too muted, sunlight too golden. Was this the day, Sihu’mana wondered, the day she had dreamed about in troubled sleep long ago? Had it come at last? Or was it just a mother’s nervousness before a wedding? Her thoughts were interrupted by a sudden cry. At the western terminus of the canyon, where the adobe houses ended and a dense forest of cottonwoods began, a cluster of boulders stood upon ground that had been declared sacred generations prior. Here the sun-watcher priest marked the cycles of the sun as it journeyed back and fo.