9/18: Author Event – Isabela’s Way: Research, Travel, and Fiber Arts Threading a Path to a New Novel

9/18: Author Event – Isabela’s Way: Research, Travel, and Fiber Arts Threading a Path to a New Novel

Award-winning author Barbara Stark-Nemon will introduce her third novel, Isabela’s Way, in conversation with Dr. Jonathan Trobe.  Learn about the research and travel that informed the writing of this coming-of-age tale set in 17th-century Portugal, Spain, France, and Germany. Learn how embroidery was used to signal safety and danger along a network of safe houses for refugees escaping the Inquisition, and how history is filled with women using fiber arts to communicate in troubled times. Then find out what it’s like to have an encore career as an author.

About the Book

For fans of Ruta Sepetys’s Salt to the Sea, this coming-of-age tale of one fourteen-year-old girl’s escape from early-seventeenth-century Portugal’s Inquisition, achieved with the help of a clandestine band of allies, will thrill and inspire.

In early-seventeenth-century Portugal, Spain, France, and Germany, dangers are plentiful—especially for those of Jewish heritage. Non-Catholics have been expelled from Spain, and the Inquisition has come to Portugal to impose its prohibitions. Fourteen-year-old Isabela, an obedient “New Christian” with a talent for needlework, believes she has nothing to fear from the Inquisition. But when a mysterious woman arrives with a message from Isabela’s traveling father, the girl must leave her home and embroider her way along the clandestine network of sanctuaries created to conduct Conversos, or secret Jews, to safety.

A host of supporters and spirit guides, as well as one special young man, assist Isabela as she escapes the Inquisitors and makes her way across countries and cultures. As she travels, she learns of the danger and importance of her work, with its coded symbols, and is shocked to discover her family’s true origins.

In this enthralling coming-of-age tale of resistance, love, and danger, Isabela employs her talent and fierce determination to find her way despite the powerful forces that buffet her at every turn.