A reflection on snap judgments, closed minds, and why the best stories make you uncomfortable before they make you wise.
We all form opinions faster than we think. A name. A headscarf. An accent. A faith. A gender. A job title. Within seconds, we have decided what someone is — and more dangerously, what they are not.
This is not a failing of character. It is a feature of the human brain. We are wired to categorize, to sort, to assign meaning before we have evidence. It kept our ancestors alive on the savanna. It keeps us functioning in a world of overwhelming information. But it also keeps us imprisoned in conclusions we reached before the conversation began.
Prejudice is not hatred. Hatred requires effort. Prejudice is quieter than that. It is the quiet closing of a door you did not realize was open. It is the moment you decide you already know enough.
My writings embody, challenge, encourage this human nature.
The Mystery of the Matriarchs series is built on a proposition that many readers may resist before they understand it: that the foundational legends of civilization — the ones we all grew up with, the flood, the giants, the birth of monotheism — were transmitted not only by the patriarchs we credit, but by mothers whispering to daughters in secret. And that those whispers were systematically erased.
Some readers encounter that proposition, and the doors of their minds close. Too feminist. Too revisionist. Too speculative. They have categorized the idea before they have lived inside it. They abandon the book at the point of discomfort — which is precisely the point where the book begins to do its truest work.
Others stay. Not because they agree, but because they are willing to hold an unfamiliar idea without crushing it. They let the story breathe. And somewhere around the third or fourth chapter, they notice something unsettling: the book has been quietly rearranging their assumptions without asking permission.
This is deliberate. I do not write polemics. I do not argue a thesis. I enact it—the reader lives it.
In The Matriarch Matrix, readers meet Alexander Murometz — a Russian oligarch who is crude, manipulative, threatening, and obsessed with power. Every reader forms the same instant judgment: villain. The brain categorizes him and moves on. But the story does not move on. It keeps returning to Alexander, showing moments of unexpected tenderness, flashes of genuine sacrifice, layers of pain beneath the bluster. By the end, the reader who stayed discovers that the man they dismissed in chapter three is one of the most complex figures in the narrative — and that their rush to judgment mirrored exactly the kind of prejudice the book is examining.
In The Matriarch Messiah, the mechanism goes deeper. Zara Khatum is a Kurdish Muslim woman. Peter Gollinger is a quiet American editor. Rachel Capsali is an Israeli Torah historian. Every reader arrives with assumptions about what these identities mean, what these people want, who is right and who is wrong. The story places them in conflict — and then, methodically, dissolves the categories the reader imposed. The Muslim woman is not who you assumed. The Israeli woman is not who you assumed. The quiet American is not who you assumed. The menacing Russian oligarch is not who you assumed. And the reader, if they are honest, must confront the fact that their assumptions came not from the text but from themselves.
This is uncomfortable. It is meant to be.
The readers who leave early — and some do — tend to leave at the moment of maximum discomfort. They leave when a character they liked does something they cannot forgive. They leave when the narrative refuses to confirm the judgment they already made. They leave when the story asks them to hold two contradictory ideas simultaneously and does not tell them which one is correct.
I understand this. We all prefer the story that confirms what we already believe. The story that sorts characters into heroes and villains by page ten and never revisits those assignments. The story where the Muslim woman is either a victim or a terrorist, never both, never neither. The story where the Russian oligarch is evil, full stop, end of discussion.
But that is not the world. And it is not my fiction. For tolerance, for peace will come when we have the courage to look into the beyond – what’s beyond our initial reactions and safety mechanisms.
The richness of any story — of any life — lives in the space between the first impression and the final understanding. The reader who abandons a book because a character confused them has chosen comfort over growth. The reader who stays, who tolerates the confusion, who lets the narrative challenge their pre-defined categories — that reader discovers something no summary or review can convey. They discover that the prejudice being examined in the story was operating inside them all along.
In The Matriarch Mission, the forthcoming prequel to the series, this mechanism operates at its most intimate. Oksana Mangupli narrates her own life in first person, present tense. The reader lives inside her consciousness for twenty-one chapters. They feel what she feels. They judge who she judges. They love who she loves.
And then the story asks them to reconsider every judgment they shared with her.
The husband she despised? The lover she adored? The monster who terrified her? The grand duchess she revered? Every character the reader categorized in the first half of the book is revealed, in the second half, to be more than the label they were assigned.
This is not a twist. It is not a trick. It is the lived experience of what happens when you refuse to let your first impression be your last.
Tolerance is not a political position. It is a cognitive discipline. It is the willingness to say: “I do not yet know enough to form a conclusion.” It is the willingness to sit with discomfort, to hold the door open a moment longer, to let the unfamiliar become familiar before you decide what it means.
The readers who find the deepest rewards in these books are not the ones who agree with every proposition. They are the ones who stayed when they were uncomfortable. They tolerated the ambiguity. They let the story finish its sentence before they interrupted.
And when they reached the end — when the final answer arrived, when “That is love” landed in their chest rather than their head — they understood something that no amount of argument could have taught them. They understood it because they felt it. Because the story did not tell them what to think. It showed them what they had been thinking all along and asked if that was truly enough.
