Aunesty Janssen – författare

Priya Chandrasekaran has spent fifteen years keeping two lives carefully separate.There's the woman her coworkers know: sharp, buttoned-up, a Director of Regulatory Affairs who has built an entire career on precision, documentation, and control. And there's the woman her grandmother raised at a kitchen table years before Priya had the words to understand what she was actually being given, something specific to where her grandmother came from, older and stranger than crystals or moon rituals, something Priya was told to let go quiet when her grandmother died, and has kept quiet ever since, even from her own wife.She has never let the two women meet. Not at work. Not at home. Not with anyone, in fifteen years, until the night a circle of mothers gathers in a living room in Wren Hollow, drawn together by their children's shared dreams and a secret one of them, the group's quiet elder, has been carrying alone since long before any of the others were born. For the first time, Priya has to decide whether to let anyone see what she actually knows how to do.Worm Moon: The First Circle is the volume where a loose, uncertain group of women becomes an actual circle. The rules get negotiated in real time: consent, boundaries, what they will and will not do, how much they're willing to let their own children see. A mid-ritual doorbell nearly gives the whole thing away, covered with a laugh and a lie about wine night. And in the middle of all of it, quietly, terrifyingly, Priya finally uses her grandmother's real inheritance out loud in front of other people for the first time in her adult life, and something in the room answers back.What follows is the group's first real working together: candlelight, uncertain hands, self-conscious jokes covering real fear, and one moment of undeniable, frightening, thrilling proof that none of this was ever imagination, that six ordinary women in a circle can, together, make something happen that not one of them could have made alone. For Priya, saying the truth out loud after fifteen years of hiding it is its own kind of magic: dangerous, enormous, and underneath all of it, finally, completely honest.But the same night that gives Priya her breakthrough gives the group's elder something closer to dread. A phrase slips out that nobody taught her, a fragment of a language only her mother's coven ever used, and for one unguarded moment before she smooths her face back into calm, something that looks unmistakably like fear passes across it. The circle is real now. So, quietly, is whatever it's about to wake back up.Worm Moon widens the circle in every direction at once. Naomi's clinical skepticism and Priya's certainty find an uneasy, hard-won respect. Sam's vulnerability in front of the group mirrors something in Priya's own long history of hiding. Bree's crystal shop research turns up a phrase eerily close to something Priya's grandmother used to say, an unsettling reminder that none of this is as contained or as recent as anyone would like to believe. And underneath all of it, a second, smaller mystery starts to take shape: what exactly happened to the group's elder thirty years ago, and why has she spent three decades making sure nobody ever asked.Worm Moon: The First Circle is Book Three of the Moon Moms series, told primarily through Priya, and it closes out Volume One on both a triumph and a warning. It's a story about the specific terror and relief of finally being fully seen, about inheritance and the cost of hiding it, and about what six women owe each other once they've chosen, on purpose, to stop being strangers who happen to share a school pickup line.Wolf Moon, Snow Moon, and Worm Moon are also available together as Moon Moms: The Awakening, Volume One of the complete series. The series continues in Volume Two: Secrets and Shadows, beginning with Pink Moon, What Dee Knows.

Sam Whitfield moved to Wren Hollow three days ago, and she still can't find the box with the crib sheets.New town. New baby. A husband who worries about her more than he says out loud, and worries harder every time she brings up the things she can't quite explain. Sam didn't come to Wren Hollow to make friends fast. She came here to survive the next year of her daughter's life one nap schedule at a time, one long, silent 3 a.m. at a time, in a subdivision so relentlessly optimistic it feels, some days, like a stage set for somebody else's happy ending.Then her daughter starts having a dream. Not an ordinary bad dream. The same dream, night after night, growing more detailed each time: a field at the edge of town, a circle of women standing in it, a house burning down while nobody moves to stop it. Sam tells herself there's a reasonable explanation. New mothers have anxious imaginations. Toddlers absorb strange fragments of the world around them and hand them back distorted. She almost manages to believe it.Then, at pickup one ordinary afternoon, she mentions the dream to another mother, carefully, testing the words out loud for the first time. And the other woman goes very still, because her own son has been describing the exact same field, the exact same circle, the exact same fire, for weeks.What unfolds from there is a slow, unnerving unraveling of everything Sam thought she understood about her new neighborhood. The women at her yoga studio who seem to know each other a little too well. The quiet, composed elder everyone in town respects but nobody actually knows. A PTA committee that suddenly feels like it's circling something none of its members will name out loud. One by one, the women of Wren Hollow start finding each other, drawn together by their children's shared visions and a history none of them have been told, while Sam watches from the outside, a newcomer trying to read a language everyone else seems to already half-know.Sam came to this town wanting, more than anything, to belong somewhere. She is starting to understand that belonging here might mean something far stranger, and far heavier, than she ever bargained for, and that the ground underneath this picture-perfect suburb has been quietly shifting for thirty years, long before her moving truck ever pulled onto Aster Court.This is not a horror story. The danger, when it finally shows itself, is emotional before it is anything else: the vertigo of realizing the people around you have been carrying something you were never told, the ache of wanting connection badly enough to keep reaching for it even when your instincts say to be careful. Wolf Moon is cozy in the way a porch light is cozy on a cold night: warm, welcoming, and only slightly unsettling once you notice what might be standing just outside its reach.Wren Hollow itself becomes its own kind of character here, a town built entirely out of second chances, every house a slightly different roofline over the exact same optimistic beige, the kind of place designed to look like nothing bad could ever happen inside its borders. Sam watches it from the outside for most of the book, an outsider cataloguing a world she doesn't yet have the language for.Wolf Moon: Threshold is Book One of the Moon Moms series, a cozy, character-driven story about isolation, motherhood, and the particular kind of magic that comes from discovering you were never as alone as you felt. Told through Sam's eyes, it's the reader's way into a suburb where tarot decks live in kitchen drawers, moon rituals happen in backyards, and the past has a way of reaching for the people who least expect it.If you love found family, slow-burn supernatural mystery, and stories about the specific loneliness and wonder of early motherhood, Wolf Moon is your way in. The series continues in Book Two: Snow Moon, Coincidence.

Naomi Torres-Reyes has spent her whole career trusting evidence over instinct. It's the only way an ER nurse survives the job, the only way she's survived a divorce, a co-parenting arrangement that still catches her off guard some days, and the particular exhaustion of night shifts stacked against a six-year-old's school schedule. Evidence is safe. Evidence doesn't ask her to believe in anything she can't hold in her hands.So when her son Theo starts describing a dream with the kind of specific, unshakable detail that shouldn't be possible for a child his age, a field, a circle of women, a house on fire, Naomi does what she always does. She looks for the rational explanation. Screen time. Suggestion. Coincidence, the ER nurse's oldest and most reliable friend, the one that has never once let her down.Except the coincidences keep stacking up in a way coincidence isn't supposed to. Another mother's daughter had the exact same dream, the same field, the same fire, matched almost word for word. A quiet, composed neighborhood elder reacts to a single name from the dream like she's been physically struck by it. An old newspaper clipping turns up a fire nobody in town ever talks about, and a cause of death that, officially, was never actually determined. Naomi runs every test she knows how to run, on herself as much as on the mystery: timelines, screen exposure, suggestibility research, anything with a body of evidence behind it that she can hold onto with both hands.It stops working. For the first time in her adult life, the evidence keeps refusing to cooperate with the story she wants it to tell, and Naomi has to sit with the specific vertigo of watching her own carefully built architecture, the whole rational, evidence-based structure she raised herself on top of, groan under a weight it was never designed to hold.Divorced, co-parenting with an ex who senses something's different about her before she's ready to explain it, exhausted in the specific way only night-shift medicine and single motherhood combine to produce, Naomi doesn't have room in her life for something she can't explain away. But the circle of women gathering quietly around her son's dream isn't waiting for room to open up. It's already here, whether Naomi believes in it or not, drawing her in one small, undeniable piece of proof at a time, the one language she's never learned how to argue with.Snow Moon takes place over six quiet, escalating weeks, ordinary Tuesday gatherings that slowly stop feeling optional, a folklore paperback passed around like scripture nobody's quite ready to call scripture. Naomi watches the group take shape around her without anyone ever formally deciding to form it, and watches herself, to her own genuine surprise, start showing up not to disprove anything anymore, but because she has started, despite everything her training tells her, to need to know.This is not a story about a skeptic being proven wrong so much as it is a story about a skeptic learning that some kinds of truth were never going to arrive as data. Naomi's clinical mind, her instinct to triage, to timeline, to hold everything at careful arm's length until it can be verified, doesn't get discarded here. It gets put to a different use, the same sharp attention she brings to a crashing patient turned, slowly and reluctantly, toward the people around her who are trying to tell her something true.Snow Moon: Coincidence is Book Two of the Moon Moms series, told primarily through Naomi, the sharpest skeptic in the group, as she runs out of rational explanations one by one until only the truth is left standing. It's a story about what it costs a person who has built her whole identity on proof to finally admit that some things simply cannot be proven, only witnessed. The series continues in Book Three: Worm Moon, The First Circle.