Corvus Rising: Book One

By Mary C. Simmons

Some people hear birds. Father Alfredo Manzi understands them.
For forty years, the Jesuit priest and ornithology professor has hidden the truth about himself - that he speaks Patua', the ancient language shared between corvids and a nearly vanished lineage of humans the Church once called heretics. He thought he was the only one. He thought he was broken.
Then a blue-eyed crow on an uninhabited island in the middle of a great American river tells him otherwise.
Wilder Island - Cade a-l'jadia to its crow families - is home to the last stronghold of blue-eyed corvids, descendants of birds who sheltered the Patua' during their persecution centuries ago. It is also, Manzi discovers, the hermitage of a 19th-century Jesuit brother who carved a strange medallion from island wood before dying alone among the birds he loved.
The same medallion now hangs around the neck of Jade Matthews - a painter haunted by crows in her dreams and a mother she never knew.
When a developer files to seize the island under eminent domain, Manzi must do the one thing he has spent his life avoiding: step into the open. As he builds a coalition of humans to defend Cade a-l'jadia, the Great Corvid Council takes matters into their own wings - gathering birds of every feather from across the continent to protect their ancestral home.
But the island's greatest threat may not be the developer. It may be the secret the medallion carries - and what happens when the Patua' are finally seen.
Corvus Rising is Book One of The Patua' Heresy - a science-grounded eco-fantasy series told in part from the point of view of crows.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0991224515
• ISBN13: 9780991224517
• Release Date: January 2014
• Publisher: Mary C Simmons
• Length: 378 Pages
• Weight: 1.22 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.0"