Marco & Noelle - A Hispanic American Odyssey is a romantic novel in a historical setting, from Spain to the New World, wherein Sal and Ursula chronicle the adventures of Marco and Noelle and their lifelong friends, students in the Spanish Royal Guard, as they sail to Mexico and settle in Alta California. In 1800, they usher the new centennial in a Spanish galleon transporting young ladies awaited by Spanish criollos in New Spain. Aboard ship two romances flourish; one a forbidden liaison; the second the liaison between a Gypsy and an Hidalgo. They live through the Mexican revolution for independence, the political intrigue and fall of the Spanish Viceroy. They witness the emergence of the Mexican republic and the loss of half of its territory to the United States. They become the last of the Californios as they take their place in the new American society into the middle of the 19th Century.
Through it all, Marco, a Spanish nobleman, and Noelle, a French aristocrat, Carlos and Marella, his Gypsy bride, Eduardo and Isabella, his forbidden love, their children and circle of friends, face violence, revolution, sword duels, hand to hand combat, intrigue, betrayal, discrimination and the challenges of an immoral society exploiting the African and the Native American through the institutions of slavery and peonage servitude, engaged in genocide and ethnic cleansing. Marco is a Free Mason and a product of the Age of Enlightenment. He is influenced by the Literati and by his mentors, his uncle Albert from England, Don Esteban, his father's best friend, and his new friend in the New World, Lorenzo de Zavala. He is an admirer of Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson and Frederick Douglass, the emancipated slave. He forges a strategic business and family alliance with a prominent Jewish family in New York. Together they amass a fortune which enables them to promote the brotherhood of man and combat discrimination, bigotry and the social exploitation, abuse, and mistreatment of minorities - the evil forces of the age.
Inspired by the author's Osio-Morphy family history, Marco & Noelle is first and foremost a commitment to a democratic society that promotes freedom and justice for all and atones for its past peccadillos in its path to a 'more perfect Union' narrated as a love story that embraces the brotherhood of man.
