The Matriarch Mission follows a Krymchak girl caught between duty, forbidden love, political violence, and mystical inheritance as she uncovers an ancient feminine power shaping history. What were some sources that informed this novels development?

The world-building in The Matriarch Mission is a result of meticulous, multi-lingual research and sourcing. The resulting historical backdrop is anchored by numerous source documents and the historical facts validated by three LLM engines.

The Romanov exiles primary sources:

• Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich: Supreme Commander of the Russian Army (NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies) by Paul Robinson
• The Flight Of The Romanovs: A Family Saga by John Curtis Perry
• Shavel’skii, Vospominaniia, vol. 2 Chapter XII. The Volunteer Army (translated from Russian title)

Barchenko expeditions and Cheka link primary sources:

• Most online resources are recycled “kook” posts. Most records about him and his expeditions were confiscated by NKVD during the Great Purge and held as USSR state secrets.
  • However, the following article may have direct references from Barchenko’s grandson having been allowed to read some pages of the case against his grandfather.
    • Prof. Alexander Barchenko(1881-1938): biography / Александр Барченко: факты биографии (Academia.edu/31167541)
• An English accounting of Barchenko’s activity is found in this book:
  • Znamenski, Andrei. Red Shambhala: Magic, Prophecy, and Geopolitics in the Heart of Asia – Chapter 3
• In regards to the Kola expeditions, the Sami legends, the artifacts of an ancient civilization, there are many, many online references. That said, the best is a Russian source which is now blocked:
  • https://rgdn.info/en/seydozero._sledy_drevney_civilizacii

The Kyrmchaks

• Given how few Krymchaks lived in 1920 and how only a small percent survived the Holocaust, there only a few resources about these people. Here’s two of the germane summaries:

• https://jewishvirtuallibrary.org/krimchaks
• https://encyclopedia.yivo.org/article/91

The rural Crimean world

• Inspired by the novel And Quiet Flows the Don (Russian: Тихий Дон) by Soviet-Russian author and Nobel Prize winner Mikhail Sholokhov
• Visualizations inspired by the 1957 Russian film version by director Sergei Gerasimov

Oksana’s voice is emotional, anxious, funny, and deeply self-questioning. How did you develop her first-person perspective?​

Readers of The Matriarch Messiah may remember Rachel Capsali first-person narrative in chapter 8 – dry wit and tactile mind wrestling with her inherited destiny. Inspite of editors’ advice, I wrote this one chapter in first-person so the reader would have deeper bonding with the emotional and cultural dilemma faced by Rachel.

Oksana is Rachel’ great great-grandmother. The first-person vista in The Matriarch Mission was expanded into a whole book. Rachel got her dry wit and tactile mind and her inherited destiny from Oksana.

More important, I chose the first-person point of view specifically to help reader learn about the mythologies, the lore of the Mystery of the Matriarch series through the eyes of a thirteen year old girl. As she struggles to understand, ultimately masters different elements, and overcomes life’s challenges, the reader learns along with her.

And as a coming-of-age character, she is inherently a unreliable narrator, albeit quite funny at times. This narrator style allows for many of the unexpected twists and turns in the novel.

Love in the novel extends beyond romance into motherhood, family duty, sacrifice, and feminine inheritance. What did you most want readers to understand about love through Oksana’s journey?​

Modern romance is on the wane. Multiple sources say that formal relationships are on the wane. So what is love in the mid-2020’s? Situationships across GenZ in many countries. Love becomes situations and friendships in the modern world.

But what is love to Oksana’s world? And is it now an archaic notion. For she starts with the notion that love is a romantic. About finding the right life partner. But what she learns is that love transcends the feelings in a committed relationship. By the book’s end, Oksana understands that love is about the sacrifices one makes for one’s self, one’s family, one’s most important relationships.

Is that lesson still valid today and beyond? I believe it is. Love is what you do for yourself and others. Love includes what you do for your faith. Love today is more and more about love of self first. Less about love of others. One hopes that Oksana’s journey, her self-awareness growth leads readers to rediscover the great meanings of love.

Since this book serves as an origin story for the larger Mystery of Matriarchs series, what can readers expect from the series after Oksana’s personal reckoning?​

The Matriarch Mission sets up the notion there’s a masculine legend and a hidden feminine legend. A concept that parallels what has happened in history as the feminine side of history often is erased or hidden. That idea plays out across the entire series.

The patriarchal legend of Murometz forms the driving force in The Matriarch Matrix. The matriarchal legend of Zara Khatum and Oksana’s great great-granddaughter Rachel forms the polar opposite driving force in The Matriarch Messiah.

What connects all books in the series is the spherical nature of time and logic in this series. Linear time — the way we are trained to think from point A to point B — is only one dimension of what time actually is. Oksana encounters this idea in her very first meeting with Asherah. The series reveals, book by book, that the women carrying the matriarchal legend are not moving through history sequentially. Hence the multiple plotlines across history in the next two books. These main female characters are part of something that bends back on itself in ways that will only become fully visible in the final books.

To that theme, the Matriarch Mission epilogue establishes that Oksana has two daughters whose diverging destinies will drive the fourth and fifth books in directions readers won’t expect. What begins as a hidden feminine legend becomes something far larger — a reckoning with what history chose to bury and what refuses to stay buried.

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