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Summary and Reviews of The Giuliana Legacy by Alexis Masters

The Giuliana Legacy by Alexis Masters

The Giuliana Legacy

by Alexis Masters
  • Critics' Consensus (6):
  • Readers' Rating (1):
  • Paperback:
  • Sep 2000, 500 pages
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About This Book

Book Summary

A dramatic journey into the age-old Mysteries of Love, one woman and her awakening to her soul's special gifts - an awakening that leads her on a quest to save her ancestors' ancient spiritual tradition.

2001 winner of the Visionary Award for Fiction awarded by COVR.

A dramatic journey into the age-old Mysteries of Love, The Giuliana Legacy is the story of one woman, Julia Giardani, and her awakening to her soul's special gifts - an awakening that leads her on a quest to save her ancestors' ancient spiritual tradition from extinction and kindles her passion to aid humanity in its timeless search for love and redemption.

Readers will delight in this sweeping, inspirational saga. Its sensitivity, epic scope and timeless truths render The Giuliana Legacy a true tale of the millennium - one which will fascinate readers and resonate in their hearts and souls for many years to come.

The Giuliana Legacy traces Julia's discovery of the frayed threads of a tapestry of mystical and healing traditions - threads only she can reweave. To recapture and reweave them into a pattern relevant to her world, Julia must travel from her native California to the distant island of Cyprus, her legacy's primal source, then on to the rustic hills of Tuscany, where she finds and revitalizes the abandoned family farm, discovering also its Sacred Gardens - the magical realm of the Giardani Goddess. There, among the ghosts and legends of her Etruscan ancestors, Julia's true inheritance unfolds, allowing her already burgeoning psychic gifts to flourish.

Bound to Julia's destiny and odyssey are three others: Andrei Anatolin, the Russian expatriate, gifted telepath, wandering savant and would-be monk, whose love for Julia draws him relentlessly to her and her cause; Madame Racine, the eternally elegant Parisienne and legendary player in the quest for world peace, whose loyalty to Julia's family compels her to risk her life's work; Gregor Danilenko, the sinister ex-KGB general who will stop at nothing to destroy Julia so that he can possess the priceless Giardani heirloom he believes will grant him immortality.

Julia knows she must find the heirloom before Danilenko, for only then will she hold the key to The Giuliana Legacy and be ready to truly serve as the Giardano Heiress, the healer and guide who helps others discover and devote themselves to abiding Divine Love. But first, she must surrender to and survive her ineluctable destiny: a deadly confrontation in which she must offer her life in order to uphold the eternal power of Love that her family has always served.

PROLOGUE
WEST-CENTRAL ITALY
SPRING EQUINOX, 465 B.C.E.

LADY stood alone in an emerald glade high above Etruria's gentle hills. She held the year's first roses in honor of the peace-loving Goddess she'd been pledged to serve since birth.

Invaders were close. Already across the valley, long lines of warriors now snaked up the slopes of her own Sacred Mountain. Her younger brother hid near the edge of the woods, his mind calling out: Wanassa . . .

Wanassa,the age-old ritual title from which Lady's name derived. She lifted her face above the fragile cloud of roses, turned toward the call, prickly stems biting her short, sturdy arms. The breeze whipped loose strands of coppery curls against her cheeks as she scanned the woods, searching, then meeting the boy's gaze, asking her silent question: The Sacred Kestos?

The boy's response: Buried. Safe. But the people . . . scared.

She frowned, bit down hard on her chapped, lower lip. Lead them far from here. Hurry! Don't return...

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!
A Guide to The Giuliana Legacy
We hope your discussions of the questions provided here will deepen your understanding of Julia's inheritance, the five-thousand-year-old Giuliana Legacy, and to further illucidate the novel's timeless truths and visionary characters.
  1. What are the similarities between the first images of setting in the prologue and the first chapter of The Giuliana Legacy?

  2. How are the specifics of the settings important? What is the significance of the similarities? Where else in the novel do these specific images reappear?

  3. Setting, time, and place are important elements in any novel. Visionary fiction expands the parameters of time and space to include, for instance, multiple lifetimes and electromagnetic ley ...
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Reviews

Media Reviews

InnerSelf Magazine
I love a good story that keeps me up nights, not wanting to put the book down! This novel did that for me. I kept wanting to read more and more of this tale that weaves between centuries, countries, and ancient religion and old-goddess traditions and spirituality... The story carries us for over 450 pages and 2500 years or more, yet when I put the book down I wanted even more.

Magical Blend
The Giuliana Legacy begins with the death of Julia Giardani's father, an event which ignites her realization that she must carry on the three thousand-year-old legacy that has passed down through the women in her family--a legacy of powerful witches. Author Alexis Masters transfers her vivid imaginations into written words beautifully, and I was entranced with her detailed descriptions of places, people, and events. She carried me along through the colorful, and sometimes suspenseful, history of a family with deep roots in a magical religion. This novel is sure to appeal to individuals who enjoy ancient Goddess lore and history.

Napra Review
In the epic style of Marion Zimmer Bradley's classic The Mists of Avalon and Starhawk's The Fifth Sacred Thing, Master's dramatic tale fields and intriguing cast of characters, with the evocative settings of Tuscany, Cyprus, and the ancient Mediterranean as its backdrop. In a compelling journey into the past to save her ancestor's spiritual traditions from extinction, Julia Giardani discovers the flowering of her own psychic abilities, and a wealth of other magical aids at her disposal, as well. A tender love story is woven through Julia's search for spiritual ancestry and survival, igniting renewed passion behind her family's ancient pledge to serve the power of Love. A priestess of Aphrodite, Julia becomes not only a character of erotic love, but also a messenger of eternal soul love, or agape, inspiring each of us to claim Giuliana's legacy as our own.

SageWoman
The Guiliana Legacy is an example of a newly-named literary genre visionary fiction. This is fiction with spiritual themes and content. . . We can read Gimbutas and Stone and other splendid nonfiction works and collect facts about the civilizations of the Goddess. Or we can read visionary fiction and both learn and feel how it might have been to live in Her civilizations. And perhaps it is learning to feel the religion of the Goddess in our hearts that is the truest learning.

VisionaryFiction.com
The Guiliana Legacy is at once a triumphant tale of spiritual unfoldment, a mystery novel, and a love story. All of these attributes are wound together expertly by Alexis Masters in the first of a trilogy... In all, a good story, well told, which transcends the same Goddess genre that it celebrates.

Publishers Weekly
Although the plot flows predictably throughout Julia's pilgrimage to Italy, fantasy readers will enjoy Masters' imaginative evocation of a spiritual lineage.

Author Blurb Beth Hedva, Ph.D., transpersonal therapist and clinical parapsychologist, author of Journey from Betrayal to Trust
The best novel I've read in a long time -- compelling, inspiring, a delight to read--The Giuliana Legacy also accurately describes many psychic abilities and puts into words what we feel during a psychic or spiritual opening. With enchanting, graceful prose, Alexis Masters both invites and ignites the reader's own latent psychic and spiritual gifts to unfold as Julia, the Giardani Heiress, claims her birthright and reawakens to deep soul-memories of the ancient Goddess and Her Mysteries of Love.

Reader Reviews

Elena

Way of the rose
Read this book 20 years ago and have returned to it again and again. It's pure magic.

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Read-Alikes

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  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
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  • and much more!
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