Hannah Blue Heron's many readers will be delighted with The Virgin, her first novel. Living in prehistoric times (c. 3200 BCE), the Temple Virgins serve the Goddess, Inanna, by bringing men from the local villages into union with Her in ecstasy. Their village of Al-Rah is threatened by the teachings of the rough men from the North, the Kurgans, who denigrate women and are beginning to destroy the temples of the Goddesses, replacing them with temples to their fierce Gods.
At only twelve sun journeys of age, Ashannah is commanded by the village Oracle to lead the women of Al-Rah over the Great Mountain, which they have never attempted to climb beyond the lowest foothills. Ashannah is filled with fear and confusion. How would she know the way?
Unpredictable appearances of Inanna to Ashannah help them begin their journey. Common sense and great determination get them through danger, loss and near starvation. They finally get over the mountain and down into the beautiful valley, only to find that there is already a village of men inhabiting it. The surprising ending, is, in some some ways, no ending at all.

Hannah Blue Heron's story of her childhood begins with the imagined thoughts of the infant in her mother's womb. Even though she is born with painfully twisted feet and a severe allergy to milk, Anna Georgette becomes a happy, busy child.
She, her railroader father, her amazingly understanding mother and her much older sister moved twelve times in as many years, but with her violin, her beloved bike, Cap'n Henry and her devotion to the Girl Scouts, Georgette was always busy organizing circuses, puppet shows, a sports club and a "kid's" newspaper. However, The future Hannah Blue Heron developed into a deeply caring person for the concerns of others. Her own pains, coming first with her father's retirement as the family "learned to be poor," and later, with the realization that high school boys disdained girls who were five feet ten inches tall. Blue Heron's detailed and straight forward manner of telling her story, makes her like a Depression-era Laura Ingalls Wilder.
Here is a childhood, that produced a professional violinist, a nun for seventeen years, a hippie, a member of the women's back-to-the-land movement, and a proud lesbian/feminist/Buddhist writer.