Strata: The Serpent & The Oleander

When a girl loses her parents, she builds herself. When a girl loses herself, she builds a world. The nasty part about any world is that serpents will always sleep in the shadows. The unfortunate part about serpents is that it's not always obvious where they lie. This story takes place nearly 80 years prior to the first entry of the Strata trilogy, and is the telling of how an enormous palace was erected through the efforts of countless women escaping a man's world. A young country bumkin named Senika is forced to leave her home after her parents mysteriously vanish and learns what it means to live in a city, and then a village dominated by women. What could be wrong about collecting people of similar trauma and experience together to one space?