Books from Garden Home

Click on the book title you want to read in the right column.  This will open the chapter list for you.

Then click on the chapter and it will also open.

I hope you enjoy whatever book you choose to read. ^_^

Inspiration for stories come from different things.  An author once said that she was inspired by places.  I found that very interesting.  She said she would see a place and then the people and the story would form in her mind around that place.  This story was kind of like that for me.

Mackenzie has been married for a long time but it hasn’t been a happy marriage for her or for George.  Still, she’s unprepared for the turn it suddenly takes….

For this story, I reached back into my past and wrote about life as a young, single woman living in Berkeley, California in the early 1970′s.  It was a fun journey that caused me to think about things I haven’t thought about in years.

Mandy has moved to the Bay Area from southern California.  She is a young woman without a family to lean on but she has an inner strength that takes her into a new life in a new place.  She soon enters a period in her life, however, that has more than a few pitfalls….

I go through life with story lines going on in my head.  Sometimes I’ll share part of a story with my daughter, Christy, and she’ll ask me months later what happens next.  I tell her that if I knew what happened next, I’d be able to write the story. ^_^

In Sweet Home, I brought two story lines together and created one book. It was kind of fun and I hope that you will enjoy reading it.

. . . .Megan has made a BIG mistake.  She realizes that now.  But woulda, shoulda, coulda isn’t going to help her much.  It is what it is.  Lying in the dark, she plans her escape, fearful she’ll get caught before she can get away . . . .

This was a fun book to write.  Mattie, the main character, is full of surprises and the situations she gets into are sometimes awkward but usually funny, too.  I found myself laughing out loud as I wrote it.  My daughters read the book as I completed each chapter and they said it was an enjoyable book to read.  I hope that you will think so too.

The story begins with Mattie reaching a crossroads in her teaching career.  She doesn’t know if she should hang on for the security the job provides or chuck it to the winds and do something new…

I wrote the first seven chapters of this book in the fall of 2005.  I picked it up again early in 2009 and re-read the first chapters in preparation for writing the rest of the story.  I was amazed at how much more believable the story was now than it had been in 2005.  Our government was now in crisis, with banks failing, the housing market tanking, the stock market falling, and people being laid off by the thousands.

Maggie lives with her husband and daughter on the outskirts of town.  The national news becomes disturbing but even that is put on the back burner when their lives are suddenly affected by one thing…

This book is a reflection of my experience with churches.  There are good people in churches and occasionally you come across an extraordinary pastor.  But there are other people in the church, too, and issues arise that are difficult to handle.

In this story, Mavene is struggling to survive catastrophic loss.  Then a strong Scottish voice reaches into her darkness and brings her back to the light….

This book is the one closest to my heart. I grew up in an unhappy home and from the age of 14 on, I considered running away a lot, especially at night before I fell asleep.

We lived out in the sticks, about an hour away from Los Angeles. I knew LA would be my destination if I went, but I was afraid of ending up on the street and in a worse situation.

My grandfather died when I was 16 and he left me his ’54 Ford. I loved that car. After that, thoughts of running away intensified because I now had a car I could sleep in, if I needed to.

But, in the end, I could never bring myself to actually leave. Fear held me back. I wrote Bootstraps as a way of answering the question, “Could I have made it on my own?”

This is my first book and I began writing it just after we had weathered The Great Recession of the 1980′s.  It had been a tough time for us financially, especially since Mark could not find steady work for two years.  Those experiences are reflected in New Beginnings.

The story begins with Miriam and her three children heading out in their VW bus to a new life.  But their new life turns out to be something entirely different from what they had planned….